Jack Welch

I never met him, but he had an influence on my career in two ways.

One time a client quoted him as saying “we need to recognize reality for what it is, not what you want it to be.” This is a great quote which I use a lot, but the influence came when I did not know who Jack Welch was and when I asked, was told he was the Chairman of General Electric. This was early in the 1980s and until then I did not pay much attention to who the CEOs of the major corporations were. I was embarrassed by not recognizing his name and from then on I started to pay attention to who the influential CEOs were, and it has helped me considerably.

The other “influence” was when I read his first book, Jack: Straight from the Gut. The book contained a wealth of management and leadership information (besides interesting stories), some of which I adopted. One, in particular, was the Six Sigma error reduction program. I knew about Six Sigma for quite a while; I even had a file of news clippings about it. However, reading about the success of GE with it prodded me to want to learn more about it. I went to a local Barnes & Noble store looking for a book on how a service business, i.e. my practice, could adopt it. There were about a dozen books but none specifically about service businesses, but I picked one up and looked at the index and found some references to services businesses. When I turned to the first reference it said that while Six Sigma was targeted to manufacturing operations, the largest business in the world that used Six Sigma was a service business – General Electric Credit Corporation. This was a revelation and I read and read that book until I came up with a Six Sigma project for our accounting firm.

Our Six Sigma program started with collecting every instance of an error, tax return and financial statement review notes, and tax notices. After about three months we reviewed everything we received. The goal was to identify patterns of repetitive errors that we could set up a process or procedure for that would reduce or eliminate the errors. We also wanted to call attention to careless work in general and reduce that. Of course, if a particular staff person made large numbers of continuous errors, that was a separate issue but that wasn’t our goal.

We had immense success with this program. I started to list a few of the changes here, but it got too voluminous so I am not including any here. The point of this blog is that identifying sources of errors and reducing them elevates overall quality, reduces carelessness, improves client services and turnaround time, reduces overtime, makes everyone feel better about what they do and increases profits. Implementing the program was also done at a very low cost. I have since been also able to share my experience with clients.

A minor instance involving Jack Welch was when I wrote a favorable review of his wife’s book 10-10-10: A Fast and Powerful Way to Get Unstuck in Love, at Work, and with Your Family by Suzy Welch, he sent me an email thanking me. It was a tiny connection but made me feel good.

Jack Welch will be remembered for many accomplishments, but his cogent advice in his first book will influence many future managers for a long time. It is still worth reading as well as Suzy’s book mentioned above.

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