November 26, 2007

Bangkok Post - Jack Welch was chairman and CEO of General Electric Co (GE) from 1981 to 2001. In November 1999, Fortune magazine named him Manager of the Century. ...

After Mr Welch retired from GE, he went on book tours all over the world. In 150 Q&A sessions, he fielded many questions from thousands of great managers. He and his wife Suzy decided to compile a book to answer all those questions.

Suzy, a former editor of Harvard Business Review, makes this book more interesting. It has three unique features:

- The sources of the questions were great managers worldwide;

- The answers came from the Manager of the Century himself;

- The editor is a keen veteran of business publishing.

Warren Buffet was quoted on the front cover as saying, "No other management book will ever be needed." On the back cover, Bill Gates declared: "A candid and comprehensive look at how to succeed in business for everyone from college graduates to CEOs."

The book is divided into five parts, with four themes: Missions and Values, Candour, Differentiation, and Voice and Dignity.

- Your Company offers five chapters: Leadership, Hiring, People Management, Parting Ways (letting people go), Change, and Crisis Management.

- Your Competition consists of five chapters: Strategy, Budgeting, Organic growth, Mergers & Acquisitions, and Six Sigma.

- Your Career has four chapters: The Right Job, Getting Promoted, Hard Spots, and Work-Life Balance.FTying Up Loose Ends gives the reader a final chapter for random questions.

This book offers lot of practical guidelines in management. Nevertheless, readers must be cautious of two things:

- This book offers no easy formula. There is none.

- The content was practical at GE when Jack was there. This includes the candour principle that took Jack more than a decade to install at GE, a good HR system, a strong pool of management and a well-established management system that has been in place at GE for the past 100 years.

Use your judgment and apply what you see as appropriate.

Today and in the next two columns, I will summarise key learning points from three chapters: Chapter 5, Leadership; Chapter 6, Hiring; and Chapter 7, People Management. You have to read all 20 chapters in the book. It depends on where you are in your career. You can obtain ideas, roadmaps, guidelines and wisdom from the Manager of the Century.

I wish I could have had this book when I was a manager in the corporate world.

Chapter 5, Leadership: Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

Leadership has lots of short-long paradoxes.

There is a common question asked by great managers all over the world: "How can I manage quarterly results and still do what's right for my business five years out?"

Jack answered. "Welcome to the job!"

Anyone can manage for the short term just keep squeezing the lemon. And anyone can manage for the long term just keep dreaming. You were made a leader because someone believed you could squeeze and dream at the same time. They see in you a person with enough insight, experience and rigor to balance the conflicting demands of short- and long-term results.

Leadership means performing balancing acts every day.

Life would be easier if leadership was just a list of simple rules, but paradoxes are inherent to the trade.

Jack offers eight leadership rules, including:

1. Leaders relentlessly upgrade their teams, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and build self-confidence. Evaluate covers to make sure the right people are in the right jobs; support and advance those who are and move out those who are not. Coach means guiding, critiquing and helping people to improve their performance in every way. People development should be a daily event _ not only once a year in a performance review. Think of yourself as a gardener, with a watering can in one hand and a can of fertiliser in the other. Occasionally you have to pull some weeds, but most of the time, you just nurture and tend. Then watch everything bloom.

2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision; they live and breathe it. Your direction has to be so vivid that if you randomly woke one of your employees in the middle of the night and asked him, he could repeat it clearly.

Jack mentions that there were times he talked about the company's direction so many times in one day that he was completely sick of hearing himself. The message is repetition. Communicate to all levels; do not limit yourself only to executives who surround you.

Next week we will learn more about leadership and hiring. After that we will learn more about people management.

Kriengsak Niratpattanasai provides executive coaching in leadership and diversity management under the brand TheCoach. He can be reached at coachkriengsak@yahoo.com. Copies of previous columns are available at www.thaicoach.com.

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