Not just beer and games

For those who thought General Electric’s legendary boss Jack Welch’s life-principle was just working hard and playing hard, with the good woman to keep the home fires burning, a book by him on management principles does come as a bit of a surprise.

Sure, he practised great management all his life (how else do you transform a sleepy bureaucratic giant into a nimble 21st century player?), but to write about it instead of the beer drinking and poker games that he talked of in Jack?

Actually, given that his third wife, Suzy Wetlaufer (now Welch), is a former editor of the Harvard Business Review, perhaps a tome devoted to management principles is not strange.

Welch, his admirers will be happy to know, remains the unreformed 19th century man and continues to think the woman’s place is really in the home—while his second wife Jane gave up her career as a lawyer and even learnt to play golf before she fell out of grace as “the perfect partner” (his quotes, from Jack), his third wife “wrote and rewrote countless drafts, (but) never took a break from being an amazing mother to her four great kids”.

Though he has a chapter on “work-life balance”, where he’s candid enough to say no one would call him an authority on the subject (“For 41 years, my operating principle was work hard, play hard, and spend some time as a father”), he rationalises this in a wonderfully candid manner—“candor” is an important principle Welch talks of often in the book.

At the end of the day, he tells the new generation of touchy-feely management experts, managers are concerned that their employees have a good work-life balance, but only to the extent it makes them more productive!

The more you blend your work and home (calling from the gym to check on the office and from the office to check on the kid), “the more mixed up, distracted, and overwhelmed you feel and act”.

Welch gives examples of successful colleagues who’ve had the guts to say no to a promotion because a child was in school and would have to be uprooted, and who’ve later benefited from it, but the lesson he gives readers is that the sacrifices needed for a perfect work-life balance are usually “you just need to say (no) to smaller stuff”, a plea to join another non-profit board, to coach yet another kid’s sports team.

You may scoff, like I am, but if Neutron Jack’s saying it, it must mean something.

While the book is loaded with management mantras, the central ones are how HR is really the core of any successful management—“From the point of view of the CEO, the director of HR should be at least equal to the CFO”!

Wow, how many companies do you know that do this? The logic is simple, and persuasive, every company knows and looks after its stars, the top 10-20 per cent or so, but since they’re not enough to keep the company going, you need to nurture the next 70 per cent (getting rid of the next 10 per cent is a strong Welch belief, and that’s what got him his “Neutron” tag).

By the way, while you should cherish stars, Welch is firmly of the view that the organisation is what makes the star, so his message is “ideally, the star will be replaced within eight hours.

This sends the message that no single individual is bigger than the company”. He then proceeds to give examples of stars who’ve been replaced by those lower down in the cosmic hierarchy and have shone just as bright.

Don’t wait for the star to leave to start the replacement process, he cautions, because by then it’s too late. Always have one or two in-house candidates in place. Ouch!

There’s some instructive stuff, naturally replete with real life examples, on how mission statements of companies should be taken seriously (don’t give them to some savvy journalist to write up!) as they determine a company’s operating philosophy and future, but the real takeaway is the chapter on “candor”.

Most employees who’re not doing too well, Welch says, know they’re not doing well, so if you’re honest, they’re not taken aback when “let go” (that’s management-speak for firing people).

Frankly, retaining people whom you want to fire but don’t have the guts to do so, doesn’t really help productivity. The same ability to call a spade a spade similarly allows managers to dispassionately view a business and, if need be, move away from it.

Differentiation in pay structures and similar candour, the touchy-feely school will tell you, is unfair and unhealthy. Oh yeah, counters Welch, was getting grades in school mean or being asked to sit on the bench when there were better players around? Two points here.

One, differentiation’s been there since Adam and Eve, or thereabouts. Second, it helped people know what they weren’t good at, and move on (maybe “let go” isn’t hypocritical after all!).

What’s disturbing about this book though, as with all management how-tos and when-tos, of course is that they encourage the reader to have nothing but a tunnel vision.

While telling managers exactly how to conduct their lives every step of the way, not once does Welch exhort them to read—politics, sports, religion, sociology, anything.

How can today’s manager be even remotely successful if he doesn’t have a grip, to cite one set of instances, on the tensions in China, the state of the US economy and a possible global crisis due to this, if he isn’t an avid reader is anybody’s guess.

That’s a serious shortcoming, but if readers are happy enough with how-to-move-along-with-your-cheese manuals, and they are, you can hardly hold Welch responsible.