Paul Batura: Jack Welch’s rise to the top began with listening to his mother
The life and times of Jack Welch
Former CEO Jack Welch, who transformed General Electric into a highly profitable multinational conglomerate, dead at 84.
Once upon a time, back when titans of industry were more often lauded and revered than disdained and held in high suspicion, General Electric’s chief executive officer Jack Welch, who died Sunday at the age of 84, was hailed and feted for leading one of the greatest periods of prosperity in corporate history.
Under Welch’s two-decade tenure, G.E. became the most valuable company in the world, seeing its revenues quintuple to $130 billion. At the height of his success, Welch received countless honors and awards, including being named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune Magazine.
Success comes in many forms and is often attributable to many factors, but Welch, an only child and son of a railroad conductor from Peabody, Mass., regularly credited one person with laying the foundation for his lifetime of achievement:
JACK WELCH, FORMER CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF GE, DEAD AT 84
Grace Welch – his mother, a woman he called “the most influential person in my life.”
“Grace Welch taught me the value of competition, just as she taught me the pleasure of winning and the need to take defeat in stride,” the late CEO wrote in his memoir. “If I have any leadership style, a way of getting the best out of people, I owe it to her. Tough and aggressive, warm and generous, she was a great judge of character. She always had opinions of the people she met. She could ‘smell a phony a mile away.’”
If there was one story of his mother that he told time and time again, and that seemed to sum up her blend of warmth with her penchant for bluntness, it was the aftermath of a high school hockey game against an archrival, which Jack’s Salem High team lost in overtime.
Frustrated with the defeat, Jack flung his stick across the ice, retrieved it and headed to the locker room. A few minutes later his mother appeared inside, and in front of all his teammates, laced into him for his poor sportsmanship.
«You punk!» she yelled, getting up to him real close. “If you don’t know how to lose, you’ll never know how to win. If you don’t know this, you shouldn’t be playing.»
Looking back on the embarrassing confrontation, Welch expressed gratitude for his mother’s willingness to be honest with him. She was a woman who didn’t suffer fools lightly.
“The insights she drilled into me never faded,” he recalled. “She always insisted on facing the facts of a situation. One of her favorite expressions was ‘Don’t kid yourself. That’s the way it is.’”
In reorganizing General Electric, Welch was often criticized for his seemingly heartless tactics, decisions that at times appeared void of compassion, letting long-tenured people go, all with the primary goal of maximizing the company’s profitability.
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But according to Welch, making the tough call was the essence of leadership. “Effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information. Little is worse than a manager who can’t cut bait,” he once said.
Grace Welch was also a student of her son – and of human emotion and the important role a parent plays in helping equip a child to face the world and all its challenges.
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“Perhaps the greatest single gift she gave me was self-confidence,” Welch reminisced. “It’s what I’ve looked for and tried to build in every executive who has ever worked with me. Confidence gives you courage and extends your reach. It lets you take greater risks and achieve far more than you ever thought possible. Building self-confidence in others is a huge part of leadership. It comes from providing opportunities and challenges for people to do things they never imagined they could do—rewarding them after each success in every way possible.”
Ironically, Grace’s passing after a third heart-attack in 1965 coincided with Jack’s climb within G.E., which he joined in 1960. Infused and emboldened by the love and legacy left by his mother, Welch began assuming more and more responsibility until his appointment as chief of the company in 1981.
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In a time and season when technology and advances of all kinds have opened the world to any and all willing to pay for education, consultation and experiences large and small, the adventurous corporate journey of Jack Welch reminds us that the key to success is still found in the most basic and humblest of places.
Yes, our lives are the product of the people who cross our paths along life’s journey but none more so than our parents – and especially our mothers, whose hearts know ours better than anyone else on earth.
