"If you don't know where you're going, any path will take you there.
Sioux proverb.
Introduction.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Jack Welch became CEO of General Electric. Farsighted and controversial, he recognized the major change efforts that have helped some organizations adapt significantly to shifting conditions, have improved their competitive advantage in their market niche, and have positioned a few for a long term survival and prosperity. .
Because Welch had the intellectual and drive to deal with the competition, he set the tone for the U.S. Industry. GE became highly productive by undertaking a complex reorganization that simplified the company into one with dominant position in its carefully chose businesses. Welch then remade GE into a boundaryless organization that encouraged, and got, participation from employee levels. He extinguished turf wars and the not-invented-here syndrome that stunned employees and companies. .
He inherited a series of obligatory corporate events that he has since transformed into meaningful levels of leadership. These get-together-from the meeting with GE's top 500 executives in Boca Raton, Fla, to the monthly sessions in Croton-on-Hudson, allowed him to set and abruptly change the corporation agenda, to challenge and test the strategies of the people that populate each of GE's dozen divisions, and to make his formidable presence, strategy, and opinions known to all. .
Welch's Inheritance.
Welch first priority was to deal with the increasing bureaucracy for approval of any substantial proposal, that he had experienced as an operating manager. The GE he saw was overgrown, laden with too many layer of management and too many people duplicating work, with too little effective internal communication and coordination, with too many "losers- among its management ranks.