29Leadership Secrets from Jack Welch

Jack Welch, the long-time Chairman and CEO of General Electric,
has been hailed as the greatest business leader of our era
and deservedly so. It was Welch who headed GE from April 1981
to September 2001 and who pioneered some of the most important
business strategies of the past two decades. We now take
these strategies for granted as part of the way American business
is done: restructuring, the emphasis on being number one or
number two, making quality a top priority (through his Six
Sigma initiative), and so on. Moreover, Welch, unlike most other
business leaders, created a tightly woven, carefully scripted business
philosophy that provided brief, crisp guidelines for every
aspect of business.
Welch’s main leadership secrets, spelled out in this book, continue
to resonate throughout the business world. Few other business
leaders have articulated how to achieve maximum performance
with such clarity and forthrightness.