I was priveleged (along an intimate group of 1000 others) to hear Jack Welch talk about his career at GE. Despite criticisms of his job cutting programmes, he is someone I admire immensely for his intellect, focus on developing people and ability to cut through crap and business jargon to get to the heart of issues fast.
Some of his simple principles from the night are:
Reward the best 20%, get the next 70% to aspire to be the best and let the bottom 10% know that is where they are. His view is the bottom 10% drift off to do other things - where perhaps they will be more successful. This fits in with his view that you should be open and candid with people.
Fight bureaucracy. Keep reducing the number of layers. Jack said it was a big problem when he started in GE and it was still a problem when he left.
Sales people. Their job is to make their customers more productive. If they can do that it will develop stickiness.
If you have an important initiative, put your best person on it. If you choose some person close to retirement who has been floating around the company then your people are not going to believe you are serious about what you are doing.
People are your most important asset. He asked how many HR people have an equal seat at the board table as the Finance Director. Few hands went up. Then he asked if you went to a football team - who would you rather talk to - the finance person or the person picking the team. It's pretty eye opening when you think of it like that isn't it!
PS You can get his new book Winning at Amazon.co.uk. His autobiographical book Jack is probably the best business book about a person I have read. (Not affiliate links)
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