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14 NEWSWEEK.COM
strategic planning. He was an early
proponent of dismantling bureau-
cracy and creating less hierarchical
workplaces and a later adopter of Jap-
anese-influenced quality processes.
Perhaps the ideas he’s most associ-
ated with, though, involve aggressive
acquisition as a means to growth and
what can best be described as the bru-
tality school of management.
Before Welch, GE was a relatively
staid manufacturing firm. Under
Welch, it became a voracious corpo-
rate acquisitor, gobbling up 600 com-
panies during his tenure. He built the
world’s largest conglomerate during
a time when the stock market hated
conglomerates. GE’s performance was
so strong that they made an excep-
tion. His modus operandi was to buy
a company and gut it of employees,
weak product lines and underutilizedjack welch died on march 1
at the age of 84. He was one of
the most successful men of the 20th
century—a working class Irish kid
who, through enormous talent and
hard work, rose to be one of the most
acclaimed businessmen of all time.
An entire generation of manag-
ers and business leaders studied his
every move, pushed his books up the
bestseller lists, quoted and emulated
him. He succeeded at everything he
touched, except perhaps the one thing
he cared most about—his legacy.
Very few have worked
harder to shape what
future generations
would think of them
than Jack Welch. He
wrote books—three of
them—with immodest titles like Win-
ning lest anyone forget that’s what he
did. He lent his name to a business
school at Sacred Heart University and
later founded the very successful Jack
Welch Management Institute to teach
his approach to leadership. He taught
at MIT. He even married a journalist
covering him, Suzy Wetlaufer. After
carefully and very publicly selecting
Jeff Immelt as his successor, he later
blamed him for the company’s trou-
bles. Welch used those from his inner
circle to make sure that he himself
got full credit for GE’s success.
Welch was born into a working
class Irish-Catholic family in Pea-body, Massachusetts in 1935. After
obtaining his undergraduate degree
in chemical engineering from the
University of Massachusetts Amherst,
he went on to get his masters and doc-
torate from the University of Illinois.
He graduated in 1960 and took a job
with GE, the company he would stay
with throughout his career.
He rose meteorically through the
ranks, becoming GE’s youngest-ever
CEO and chairman in 1981. Over the
next 20 years, according to GE, he
took the company from the tenth
most valuable in the
world to the largest and
most valuable. The com-
pany’s total value rose
from $14 billion to $
billion. The stock price
rose from $1.27 per share to around
$50, growing four times faster than
the market overall.
Welch was lauded as a hero. In
1999, Fortune named him “Manager
of the Century.” He retired in 2001.
Had he had passed right then, he
likely would’ve been sure that he’d
be remembered as one of the greatest
business innovators and leaders of all
time. Instead, he lived long enough
to see much of what he’d done fall
apart and many of his management
theories discredited.
Welch was a tireless innovator,
changing virtually everything he
touched—quality control, leadership,BYSAM HILLMARCH 27, 2020Jack Welch’s
Mixed Legacy
The late, and legendary, GE chief was a master
corporate innovator. Did he go too far?TRANSITION