Book of the day - Jack: Straight from the gut
As I said in my previous review of other entrepreneur biographies, it doesn’t matter how you were raised. Hard work creates winners. Jack was brought up with tons of love and attention. He doesn’t talk about a childhood struggle, abuse, addiction, or the usual trite tough childhood overcoming that other biographies always reference. What Jack has is hard work and leading a business like it’s his family, while his family supported him throughout his career.
Every promotion he received his family threw a party for him. Example: A promotion he delivered to his executive leadership, his Senior VP of Finance if I remember correctly he called his wife to join him at the local bar in the celebration. What Jack did was meld family values, his family, and his life into his company. With all of the hoopla in the FIRE movement about work should not be your life, if you want to build the number one or number two business on the face of the earth your coworkers are part of your family. You are the leadership and just as a child idolizes his father, your employees will idolize you and expect you treat them with straight forward honesty and matter of fact truth. No politics and no bullshit. That’s Jack Welch.
I’m finding another commonality among highly driven people that write biographies, they get divorced. They grow apart from the person back at home. While they are busy conquering the world, enjoying it, and being completely engrossed in their work world, they are growing apart from home. This is usually a one to three paragraph piece in a biography, but I’m sure it's a much larger part of who they are. A biography of a wife married to one of these highly driven personalities, would be an interesting read if done right.
As the books meat the middle/end of the book gets a bit long in the tooth. Jack talks about the myriad of acquisitions, sales, and promotions he dolled out to his team. After awhile, you get the point and there’s not enough depth to each of the acquisition stories to learn any key takeaways about those particular businesses. It is interesting to learn how wide GE ownership is. From broadcast cable to TV’s to lightbulbs, they’ve done it all.