GE CEO Jack Webb
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John Francis Welch Jr. is one of the leading CEOs in America today. He is a man who inspires both admiration and fear and who has been criticized for a number of problems raised under his watch over various divisions. Since 1981, he has been the CEO of General Electric Company. At that time, he was the youngest man to assume that chairmanship. He immediately set about making the huge conglomerate into a "smaller world," as he put it, so it would be easier to identify winners and losers. He undertook a revolutionary restructuring of the company. He divided the company into three "circles" of activities and said the company should concentrate its resources on these three areas. The three were its core manufacturing businesses; its newer, expanding businesses in services; and its high technology businesses. Most of the enterprises outside these three core areas were divested, for Welch determined that GE should sell off any business in which it was not the leader or the number-two company. By 1986 Welch had eliminated 232 GE product lines, closed 73 plants and facilities, and eliminated nearly 100,000 jobs (Current Biography Yearbook, 1988). An analysis of the Welch era at GE will illuminate aspects of his leadership style. Leadership style has been shown to be a major factor in the effectiveness of the organization, and different leadership styles are sometimes more effective in different situations. DuBrin, Ireland, and Williams note that effective o
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was the overseer of the building of plants in Europe and Japan. One associate in that endeavor states that Welch was virtually a "one-man engineering operation" who always worked to make things move faster. Many have noted how aggressive Welch was as a manager. He also developed a reputation for abrasiveness, but the fact that he was successful was considered more important than any objections to his style. In 1973 he was promoted to vice-president and chief executive of the components and materials group, and in 1977 he was made a senior vice-president in charge of consumer goods and services, a division that he strengthened greatly during his tenure. He poured resources into the company's growing multibillion-dollar financial services unit, the General Electric Credit Corporation, and made it the core of a financial services empire. Welch also moved the company into more innovative business planning.
In 1981, when Welch took over, the company was the nation's tenth largest industrial concern. It had annual sales of $25 billion, or about one percent of the GNP, and earnings of $1.5 billion. Half its sales came from what are called smokestack manufacturing plants producing everything from lightbulbs to locomotives (Curre
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Approximate Word count = 1916
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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