TheFiresideCEO 229made for GE, he says, telling us that the “E” in GE assumes a
whole new meaning in this learning culture that rides out all great
new ideas.
Leadership
Creating, implementing, and harvesting best practices from a boun-
daryless culture built on speed, stretch, and simplification require
leadership. The cornerstone of successful leadership is recognizing
that people matter most in any organization. Welch repeatedly em-
phasizes this characteristic, which is the essence of Work-Out, the
bedroc kof best practices, and the sine qua non of superior man-
agement teams.
Leaders must constantly be on guard. They must take reality
checks and face the results. They must avoid the pervasive tempta-
tion to wish, hope, and temporize. Equally important, leaders must
encourage their troops to do the same. To ignite a mammoth com-
pany like GE with the energy of a small company requires “passion,
hunger, appetite for change, customer focus, and, above all, the
speed to see reality more clearly and to act on it faster.” Doing all
this, Welch concludes, requires leaders to foster a culture in which
everything “comes bac kto people—their ideas, their motivation,
their passion to win.”
Effective leaders share the same values as their troops. GE’s
enormous size and diversity are bound together through common
values. These valves include excellence measured in terms of cus-
tomer satisfaction, acceptance of change as a constant force, candid
communication in all directions, and acceptance of the paradox of
managing such an organization, which is simultaneously a single
entity and a collection of many different businesses.
Driving all GE’s initiatives are what Welch calls a “a unique
brand of 21st century business leader—the GE ‘A’ player.” These are
leaders with “a vision and the ability to articulate that vision to the
team, so vividly and powerfully that it also becomes their vision.”
They embody GE’s “4Es” of leadership—Energy, Energize-ability,
Edge, and Execution. In other words they embody enormous per-
sonal energy, the ability to energize others, “the instinct and the
courage to make tough calls decisively but with fairness and absolute
integrity,” and “the consistent ability to turn vision into results.” The
best A leaders, Welch concludes, are like the best coaches: They
insist on having only A players on the field.