Customer Reviews
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Motivational, May 8, 2023
This book is filled with Jack's concept of winning. Everyone interested in learning how Jack did it will benefit from this. I appreciated the book but as an entrepreneur I was looking for more specifics of what to do, not just motivational info. One of the best that I recently read with Stop Working by Rohan Hall that teaches specifics on building entrepreneural global businesses. The combination of both books were good. Excellent motivational text from Welch with good enterprise building text from Hall.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Superficial and Incomplete - Much More Could Have Been Done, May 8, 2023
Jack Welch clearly is a legendary business leader; however, a great writer he is not. The book offers a few insights - eg. the power of corporate vision and value, budgeting and rewarding performance in the real (dynamic) world - but his book is not nearly as specific and helpful as Larry Bossidy's (Welch's former #2) "Confronting Reality," and "Execution." Sadly, the book also does not reference how Welch greatly simplified planning and accountability by getting rid of the planners, and instead focusing on fast reaction - a lesson that some firms, government and public education still need to learn.
In addition, Welch does not address the vast changes simplifying much of management in the last few years. The job has become primarily one of reducing costs - especially by shifting work away from Americans. This is accomplished by:
1)Maximizing outsourcing (eg. to Canada - primarily to avoid U.S. healthcare costs; to China and India - primarily to greatly reduce production labor, call-center, and design and programming costs,
2)Maximizing use of illegal immigrants within the U.S. - eg. in the meatpacking, construction, and other food-processing and food-serving areas,
3)Maximizing use of legal temporary immigrants within the U.S. - eg. Indian citizens with H-1B and L1 visas in areas such as electronics design and manufacturing, and computer programming.
4)Maximizing use of aggressive accounting - eg. capitalizing expenses, pre-booking revenues, optimistic assumptions about corporate pension fund growth, creating new entities to "hide" excess debt etc., and taking "special write-offs" wherever possible.
5)Minimizing exposure to risk of major commodity price increases - eg. large-scale futures buying of aviation fuel.
Further American worker head-count reductions are accomplished by implementing new IT systems, process improvements (eg. Six Sigma, cycle-time reductions) and divesting or consolidating companies (mergers and acquisitions), divisions, functions (eg. personnel, IT, procurement), products, components, and suppliers. Cost reductions for those remaining American employees can be achieved by reducing salaries (eg. competitive contracting out "non-core" functions - defined as broadly as possible), infrastructure (eg. work-at-home, "owner-operator" truckers), health-care benefits (through increasing worker contributions) and pensions (eg. via canceling, or switching from "defined benefit" to "defined contribution" plans. And then all the preceding measures are forced through the supply chain by requesting price reductions and/or the "China price."
Finally, leveraging tax reductions, abatements, pension plan takeovers, exemptions from lawsuit liability and various regulations (eg. EPA, OSHA. zoning) and various other "freebies" from government has also become another major modern "management skill" (eg. via threatening or actually moving production and/or headquarters; promising to create new jobs, threatening lawsuits, making large campaign donations) that Welch fails to reference in "Winning."
In summary, "Winning" is somewhat interesting, but mostly superficial and irrelevant. And overall, "winning" is no longer a skill to be proud of, worth multi-million dollar payouts to CEOs, or necessarily good for America.
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
 Nothing like overdosing on self-serve, May 7, 2023
Load up on a hefty dose of the art of self-serve. What a flagrant work of PR from these two pathetic souls. It's the same old tired message Welch always spews, only difference here is he's got a new wife, the disgraced former editor of the Harvard Business Review, eager to spin a repackaged version. The writing style is what you'd expect. Nothing stellar. It is full of infantile pseudo-profundities such as "I think winning is great. Not good great. Because when companies win, people thrive and grow. There are more jobs and more opportunities" and "leaders never score off their own people by stealing an idea and claiming it as their own". If indeed managers need the help of books like this to be good at their job, then it must be time to sing a requiem for common sense.
What does astonish this reader is the Welches mind boggling bid at addressing the issues of ethics and integrity in the workplace. Wonders never cease with these two. Their joint shamelessness amazes. Call it what you will, but for all those uninformed - Jack's soulmate of a third wife and co-author, Suzy Wetlaufer is the former editor of the Harvard Business Review who ultimately had no option but to resign her post at the HBR as a direct result of her moral and ethical breaches. This is all public record. Facts are facts. Read Chris Byron's "Testosterone, Inc." or any number of articles available online from the Wall Street Journal to New York Magazine to Vanity Fair. Clearly, Jack and Suzy would rather you not bother with such details. Why waste your time. Jack and Suzy are here to tell you all about integrity and ethics, and what it takes to win. How ridiculous. How desperate.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Difficult Man with Important Lessons to Teach, May 7, 2023
Being one of the true leadership gurus of our time, Welch has probably forgotten more about leadership than most "Great Leaders" out there today ever knew. The material in this book has extremely broad applicability. Whether you're earning an MBA, running a military unit, coaching a little league team or buying a house, there's something here for you.
While no single volume captures the whole breadth of leadership principles--it's a lifetime study--this one is well worth your time and money.
Jack emphasizes value-centered leadership and fostering a spirit of entreprenurialism. Certain of these ideas are more applicable to corporate business than to sales, sports or war. Nonetheless, inasmuch as sales geniuses, super coaches and the most insightful military leaders have managed to apply these principles, they have propelled them from "mere excellence" to True Greatness. If all you do is to glean some of Jack's success formula, you can't go wrong. That's not to say Jack hasn't made his share of business mistakes--the internet could have been his and a lot of GE's people still blame Jack that it wasn't. But any leader knows that we miss 90% of the groundbreaking ideas due to a lack of imagination, while we perpetuate 90% of the truly terrible ideas out of some combination of habit and momentum.
An added bonus is Jack's incredible candor with his audience. He deeply and honestly examines his business and especially his personal mistakes. In this sense he demonstrates another truly great leadership attribute: self-criticism/analysis/evaluation. It is vital that leaders regularly assess themselves and work to do better. Jack is living evidence of this.
This book is also his best-written published work. That's not to say it's well written, but it is certainly more readable than "Jack: Straight from the Gut." It's also more valuable as it's better oriented toward his audience and is much less a stereotypical leader's memoir.
That said, Jack's personal life is again a problem. We certainly shouldn't want to become the next Jack Welch! The trick, as mom saidm was "straining the noodles" when we have to extract the good from the bad. If we can throw out the scalding water of Jack's life-mistakes and benefit from the wisdom of his lessons, we will profit!
My choices for the greatest works on leadership are viewable on my Listmania list "Leadership Classics." You might also want to see "So you'd like to... get an M.B.A." an Amazon guide by David L. Kirk.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 A practical guide to success, May 7, 2023
I have never written a review for Amazon - not because I do not want to but because I do not have any thing original to say as the reviewers have already said enough!
Seeing Jack Welch's "Winning" get any where from one * to 5 *s makes me wonder if people's biases (for or against) Jack, the man makes them give a ranking regardless of the contents of his effort.
As a mid-level executive in a Fortune 500 company, I have often wondered if there was a course or book that distilled the wisdom of what it would take to succeed in the corporate world, it would be so cool. Jack's second book is such a practical thesis that could have easily been titled 'Things one should know to succeed in corporate America that nobody teaches you'. It is a compendium of best practices and ideas. His hiring philisophy (4E + P) and the idea of differentiation (to distinguish between the top performers and the average joes) is explained with remarkable clarity. It is an easy read and cleanly laid out. Each chapter is self contained so there is no pressure to read in sequence. Jack, for the first time seems to acknowledge some mistakes from his professional life that makes the book all the more worthy. I think this is the book to read if you want to succeed quickly in the corporate world - Period.
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Based on 56 reviews.