Jack: Straight from the Gut

This was a fun read. A pretty entertaining story of a 40 year career at GE. Not a lot of management mumbo jumbo. I liked his idea of cutting the lower 10% and regarding the upper 20%. It seems drastic, but effective. Before reading this I didn't realize how HUGE GE was.

Ok, so he was the great paradigm-shifting CEO of GE, but as an autobiography, I found this book lacked authenticity. I did not finish it!

It's an easy read but I found it hard to stomach the whole self loving, vicious business culture he depicts. did he never make a mistake?

Welch, Jack and Byrne, John A.. Jack: Straight from the Gut. Warner Books, New York, 2001. Read this on David Golds' recommendation. It was supposed to inspire me: Jack was an ordinary guy, rose through the ranks at GE, ran the place for 20 years, and by putting common-sense reforms in place made

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it the most admired company in America. What did I learn? I'm afraid not that much. On the one hand, I'm glad to see that my aversion to bureaucracy is shared by one of the most admired business leaders in America. I'm glad to see how he was able to take something like "boundaryless" and bake it in to the corporate culture. (That's something we don't have at Microsoft.) One phrase will stick with me from the book, and this is why David recommended it, I think: I need to "get out of the pile." I've been too lax with my career development. If I want to run Microsoft in 15 years, I need to always strive to get out of the pile.

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Very easy to understand. Great for character building. Very insightful. Good from a Management as a discipline standpoint. I recommend.

Acquired via BookCrossing and read on holiday

Interesting business autobiography of the man who was CEO of GE for the 20 years up to 2001. A lot of interesting detail about the battles for succession at the beginning and end of his reign, and some good stuff about some innovative but slightly scary

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business ideas. Not much personal stuff but that's par for the course with this kind of book.

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This book had very little insight into the author's thought and decision processes and was more of a complete history of General Electric and it's executive team during the reign of Jack Welch. I would not recommend this book for someone that is not intimately familiar with General Electric and its

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major players.

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Although I liked this book, I also found it unsettling.
It is indisputable that Mr. Welch achieved phenomenal success as a businessman.
But throughout the book, I kept wondering "Where is his family?" "What about his faith?"
Mr. Welch and those around him apparently lived and breathed business 24/7

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for most of their lives and achieved what they believe to be "success." While that life certainly doesn't appeal to me, I guess I'm glad that there are people who are willing to work that hard to create products and services that benefit me and others.
On a side note, I had to snicker when Mr. Welch kept emphatically stating his commitment to "integrity." Anyone familiar with how his second marriage ended knows that he has problems in that area.

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