Winning - Jack Welch

Jack Welch gathered in the book "Winning" his experiences, knowledge, techniques and learnings acquired after leading companies recognized worldwide.

Manager of General Electric (GE) for more than 40 years, the author made this company successful against its competitors and collaborated to make it the most valuable company in the world at the time.

Jack knows how to win, so let's find out what he has to say!

About the book "Winning"

"Winning" was written by author Jack Welch with the aim of bringing the reader advice for the most difficult situations we face at work and in life.

In this book, Jack presents examples from his real life, and solutions to many problems we face daily, both personally and professionally.

The content of the book is divided into three parts:

1. A look inside the company, making an analysis from the leadership to the selection;
2. Outside the company, focusing on strategies and competitors;
3. A look at your career and the search for the ideal balance.

About the author Jack Welch

Jack Welch is a living legend and served as CEO of General Eletric (GE) for 21 years.

During that time, he applied his innovative management techniques, which subsequently became known around the world and made GE one of the most admired and successful organizations.

Since 2001, when he retired, he has been a lecturer. In this journey, he has already lectured to more than 250 thousand people.

To whom is this book indicated?

If you want to follow a trajectory similar to that of Jack Welch, that is, a path of leadership and success, then the work "Winning" is for you!

In addition, the content presented in the book is for a very diverse audience, from assembly line employees to senior executives.

Main ideas of the book "Winning"

• Winning companies have a widespread and powerful mission and values;
• Frankness is the main secret of success, it directs the inputs of success;
• Everything and everyone is different, so it is necessary to invest in what brings the greatest financial return;
• During the hiring process, hire employees with the following characteristics: integrity, intelligence, maturity, positive energy, grit, ability to execute, passion, authenticity and perception;
• Be realistic with the events of your life, do not deny the dimension of a problem when it appears.

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Overview: The Basics of Everything

Mission and Values

According to the author Jack Welch in his book "Winning", the first step for those who want to win is to have their mission well defined, it must encompass exactly how you will win the challenge. Having clearly defined the path to be taken, decision making becomes faster and more accurate.

In addition to the mission, another point needs to be well defined, the values. They are the necessary and acceptable behaviors for the established mission to be achieved.

Thus defined, both your mission and values must be able to impact all members of your team. With that, it is necessary to recognize those who are engaged and it is even the case to dismiss those who do not buy the idea.

Frankness

For Jack Welch, frankness is considered the biggest secret to success.

Well, let's explain why it's so important.

In order to achieve success, your company must have great ideas, right? But do you agree that it can't just come from leaders and directors?

It has to come from everyone in the organization. According to the work "Winning":

"Lack of openness blocks smart ideas, slows down quick action and prevents capable people from contributing to their full potential. It is devastating."

Thus, when it is part of our business, it is possible to give people the freedom to say what they really believe, making them contribute to the development of the organization.

The 3 key points that frankness contributes to are:

1. Bring more people to talk, making ideas clearer and richer;
2. Increase speed;
3. Reduce costs.

Great! But how can we achieve frankness?

Jack explains:

"To be frank, it is necessary to praise, reward and talk about it. Above all, it is important to demonstrate it in an exuberant and even exaggerated way."

Keep in mind that consolidating these behaviors is quite profound, making the process difficult and time-consuming.

Differentiation

All human beings are different, so are your employees. Thus, in order to reach the best of your team, it is necessary to be different with them too.

Thus, one of the solutions found by the author was to use the meritocracy system, adhering to the 20-70-10 management model. It consists of every year:

• Reward 20% of employees (those with high performance);
• Keep 70% of employees (those with average performance);
• Dismiss 10% of employees (those with the worst performance).

According to Jack Welch in "Winning", this is not the perfect system, but it is the one that generated the greatest results throughout his journey.

Overview: Your Company

Leadership

When you take a leadership role, your attitudes and behaviors are required to be transformed. After all, success now depends on the growth of others, and you are responsible for bringing it to them.

For you to manage your team, there is no cake recipe. Because each leader has a different way of leading his team, each one has a list of leadership rules that works.

So the author Jack Welch tells you to build your rules and stick to them. During his experiences with GE, he used 8 rules and says that he believed it was the right way to lead in all his contexts. The rules are:

1. Leaders are relentless in improving the team, using all meetings as opportunities to assess, train and reinforce self-confidence;
2. Leaders strive to make people not only understand the vision, but also to experience and breathe it;
3. Leaders put themselves in everyone's shoes, exuding positive energy and optimism;
4. Leaders earn trust with frankness, transparency, and recognizing the merits of others;
5. Leaders have the courage to make unpopular decisions and act on instinct;
6. The leaders question and instigate, by means of a constant curiosity that approaches skepticism, striving for their questions to be answered with action;
7. Leaders inspire risk-taking and constant learning, setting an example;
8. Leaders celebrate.

Staff Selection

In this part, we will understand how to put the right players on the pitch.

Know that friendship and experience are not enough to make you successful. Many other attributes are needed, after all it is an extremely important stage and presents a high degree of difficulty.

The author Jack Welch tells us in his book "Winning" that, in order to get great people in certain roles, he used two strategies:

The first strategy is called "The evidence of the nine":

• Integrity test: people with integrity tell the truth and keep their promises. They take responsibility for their past actions, admit their mistakes and are corrected;
• Intelligence test: the candidate must be endowed with a strong intellectual curiosity, with sufficient knowledge to work in the desired sector;
• Maturity test: the ability to face situations of suffocation, to deal with stress and setbacks and, in the opposite direction, in those wonderful moments of enjoying success with the same dose of pride and humility.

The second strategy is based on the 4-E (and 1-P) model:

1. Energy: they are optimistic and positive people, they have a taste for life and work;
2. Energization: they have the capacity to inspire the team and accept great challenges;
3. Edge: they have the courage to make difficult decisions, even with low resources;
4. Execution: people who finish their tasks effectively and withstand any obstacle on the way;
5. Passion: they are people with great interest in your company and are happy and motivated with the team's achievements and learning in general.

People Management

Now that you have the right players on the field, it's time to manage them in order to get a winning team. With that, the author Jack Welch presents us with some people management practices, which are:

• Raise HR to a position of power and primacy in the organization and ensure that HR personnel have special qualities to help managers build leaders and careers;
• Use rigorous, non-bureaucratic assessment systems that emphasize, above all, personal integrity, with high rigor;
• Create effective mechanisms (money, recognition and training) to motivate and retain staff;
• Facing difficult relationships - with unions, with stars, with decadents and with troublemakers;
• Fight gravity, and instead of treating 70% of the environment as a mass that follows the current, consider them the heart and soul of the organization;
• Draw organization charts as horizontally as possible, with blinding clarity in subordinate relationships and assignment definitions.

Taking advantage of the fact that we are talking about hiring, let's talk about the reverse now, the layoffs. Do you know when to and how to properly resign?

Jack suggests in his book "Winning" that employees who are incompetent, perform poorly and violate company rules should not be part of the team.

The termination announcement should come as no surprise, as you will have already given the employee several feedbacks.

Change

Change is something that creates confusion and some disagreements, but it is essential for your business to be a winner.

To this end, the author Jack Welch says that everyone should understand the real reason for the change. In addition, in order for this process to become simplified, he revealed the 4 practices he uses:

1. Tie all change initiatives to a clear purpose or objective. Change just for the sake of transformation is stupid and irritating;
2. Hire and promote only convinced believers and types willing to change;
3. Eradicate and discard opponents, even if their performance is satisfactory;
4. Keep an eye out for road accidents (seize opportunities and learn from others' failures).

Overview: The Competitors

Strategy

Have you ever stopped to think about what a strategy really is?

Well, author Jack Welch tell us that:

"It means making clear choices about how to compete. You can't be everything for everyone, no matter the size of the business or the depth of your side."

Therefore, it can be understood as a real game, which must be fast and full of life. And for you to be victorious in this game, see the 3 steps covered in the book "Winning" that Jack uses to develop his strategies:

1. Create a great business idea, one that is smart, realistic and has a quick competitive advantage;
2. Selecting the right people for each function, this combination will speed up your idea;
3. Adopt the best practices to execute the idea and adapt them to the current internal and external context of the company.

In short, the strategy consists of finding the idea and creating the complete track, having the best people on your team, having one execution after another and finally, always focusing on continuous improvement.

Organic Growth

Growth is important in any business and at any time, especially when carried out organically.

For this, you will only be successful if you choose the best people and not those who are unoccupied, in addition to being motivated and grabbing this opportunity tooth and nail.

Remember too that you must provide all the necessary resources for growth to occur.

Finally, I leave with you the 3 guidelines presented by author Jack Welch and that contribute to this stage:

1. Spend enough at the beginning and assign the most capable, hungry and passionate people to leadership roles;
2. Exaggerate in the exaltation about the potential and importance of the new enterprise;
3. To err for excess of freedom; do not stay at the foot of the enterprise.

Overview: Your Career

The Right Job

Finding the right job is very satisfying, after all, doing what you like ends up not being a job, but a fun one.

However, according to the book "Winning", to find the ideal job, you will spend a lot of time and effort, as you need to qualify for your role.

Thus, it is necessary to strive and give your best, after all, the better you are, the greater the chance of finding the job you dreamed of.

Get Promoted

For you to be successful, you must want, and want a lot! After all, there is no such thing as "luck", you are the one who creates your opportunities.

See which practices you should start to perform and which ones you should abolish from your routine, so that you reach the desired position, based on the perspective of Jack Welch in his work "Winning":

• Produce sensational results, well beyond expectations, and in every opportunity expand your position beyond the established borders;
• Do not induce your boss to use political capital to boost you;
• Manage your relationships with subordinates with the same care that you manage your relationships with your boss;
• Have positive attitudes and spread them around you;
• Do not allow obstacles to impede your progress;
• Look for and enjoy the contributions of many mentors;
• Be one of the first defenders of the company's main projects and initiatives.

Work-life Balance

One of the most difficult things in today's world is time management and staying focused, isn't it?

In your daily life, there will be thousands of distractions and various time saboteurs.

But you need to know how to allocate your family and work time well, time at work has to be 100% focused on it, and family time has to be 100% focused on family, that is, we have to keep focused in the game we're in right now.

Another point explained by the author Jack Welch in the book "Winning" is having enough capacity to say "no" to everything that doesn't fit your work-life purpose, after all, there are many things that just want to divert you from your objectives and add nothing.

Getting it to achieve all that balance is a time-consuming process and continuous repetition. Finally, remember that this balance must contribute to your happiness.

What do other authors say about it?

In the book "Sonho Grande", Cristiane Correa complements the idea of strategic planning and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a process of continuous improvement to achieve goals.

These ideas were inspired by the visions of the trio of wealthiest entrepreneurs in Brazil. In addition, the trio considers that risks are essential to achieve extraordinary results, they already said that the greatest risk is not taking any risks.

In the book "Managing Tomorrow", the authors Sandro Magaldi and José Salibi Neto suggest that we use two engines of growth. Engine 1 is responsible for day to day and billing, making the company focus on its current operation. Engine 2 is what drives the company to focus on the future.

With this, we intend to align the continuous improvement of engine 1 with the disruptive innovation of engine 2.

Finally, in the bestseller "Good to Great", renowned author Jim Collins also addresses the importance of putting the right people in the right places.

Like Jack Welch, he believes that it is necessary to bring together the skilled people first and only then to formulate the right strategy. In addition, he says the right people are a company's greatest asset.

Okay, but how can I apply this to my life?

At this point, you already have the key insights needed to win. In this journey in search of success, it is essential that you keep your goal clear, with a lot of focus and persistence.

To recap the purposes of Jack Welch, for you to achieve victory, it is necessary that you understand:

• Your mission tells you how you can win, and your values demonstrate what you have to get there;
• Try different jobs until you find the one that most fits with your goals;
• Deliver excellent results, do not be a rock in your boss's shoe;
• Understand that crises can happen. Take the worst problem and try to get the best lesson.

Did you like this summary of the book "Winning"?

We hope that the teachings of author Jack Welch will turn you into a winner. Leave your opinion in the comments, your feedback is very important to us!

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