In one of his first speeches as CEO in December of 1981, Welch laid the foundation for some of the groundbreaking ideas that he would use to transform GE. He spoke of the slow growth environment, and how the winners would be those companies that sought out high growth industries. He set forth key strategies like number one, number two, and quoted Drucker and his test for evaluating businesses: “If you weren’t already in the business, would you enter it today?” What he refused to do, however, may be as important as what he did do. In that speech, Welch said he had no “grand scheme” for GE that he was going to pull out of his pocket.

Here’s how he put it that fateful day: “it just doesn’t make sense...to shoehorn these initiatives and scores of other individual business plans into an all-inclusive, all-GE, central strategy—one grand scheme.”

 

With the benefit of two decades of hindsight, we know how important it was for Welch not to articulate some elaborate, yet largely manufactured, strategy in the early going. We know that each of Welch’s phases built on the one that preceded it. We also know that Welch’s success was due, in large part, to his taking each phase independently. For example, only after implementing the hardware phase, and measuring the effect of those actions on the psyche of GE, did he come to understand the dire need for the software phase.

 

That same pattern holds true for each of Welch’s strategies and initiatives. Welch proved himself to be a masterful “adaptor,” devising new ideas and actions to counter or deal with the latest situation. It is telling that Welch, who quoted von Clausewitz in that 1981 speech, knew that “strategy was not a lengthy action plan.”He knew the “inevitable frictions” would lay waste to any long-term plan, and instead laid out only a few, key ideas. Perhaps the greatest irony was that the key strategy presented in that speech, number one, number two, survived for more than two decades and still guides the company today (see also Clausewitz).

 

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