Winning by Jack Welch, Suzy Welch Page A

It takes a deep knowledge of your business and strong persuasion skills to make a case that will galvanize others.
    A great example of an energizer is Charlene Begley, who started with GE as a financial management trainee in 1988. After several years in various jobs, Charlene was selected to run GE’s Six Sigma program in the transportation business. That’s where her leadership really began to shine. Galvanized by her intensity, her team really got its Six Sigma program on the corporate radar screen.
    It’s hard to unpick Charlene’s ability to energize because it’s a brew of skills all mixed together. She is a great communicator, who can clearly define objectives. She’s dead serious about work, but she doesn’t take herself too seriously. In fact, she has a good sense of humor and shares credit readily. Her attitude is always upbeat: no matter how hard the job, it can get done.
    Charlene’s ability to energize that Six Sigma team was one of the key characteristics that got her out of the pile and set her on GE’s fast track. After Six Sigma and a couple of other leadership roles, she was made head of GE’s corporate audit staff and eventually became CEO of GE Fanuc Automation. Today, at thirty-eight, Charlene is CEO and president of GE’s $3 billion rail business.
    The third E is edge, the courage to make tough yes-or-no decisions. Look, the world is filled with gray. Anyone can look at an issue from every different angle. Some smart people can—and will—analyze those angles indefinitely. But effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information. *
    Little is worse than a manager at any level who can’t cut bait, the type that always says, “Bring it back in a month and we’ll take a good, hard look at it again,” or that awful type that says yes to you, but then someone else comes into the room and changes his mind. We called these wishy-washy types last-one-out-the-door bosses.
    Some of the smartest people that I’ve hired over the years—many of them from consulting—had real difficulty with edge, especially when they were put into operations. In every situation, they always saw too many options, which inhibited them from taking action. That indecisiveness kept their organizations in limbo. In the end, for several of them, that was a fatal flaw.
    Which leads us to the fourth E—execute—the ability to get the job done. Maybe this fourth E seems obvious, but for a few years, there were just the first three Es. Thinking these traits were more than sufficient, we evaluated hundreds of people and labeled a slew of them “high-potentials,” and moved many of them into managerial roles.
    In that period, I traveled to personnel review sessions in the field with GE’s head of HR, Bill Conaty. At the review sessions, we would refer to a single page that had each manager’s photo on it, along with his or her boss’s performance review and three circles, one for each E we were using at the time. Each one of these Es would be colored in to represent how well the individual was doing. For instance, a person could have half a circle of energy, a full circle of energize, and a quarter circle of edge. *
    Then one Friday night after a weeklong trip to our midwestern businesses, Bill and I were flying back to headquarters, looking over page after page of high-potentials with three solidly colored-in circles. Bill turned to me. “You know, Jack, we’re missing something,” he said. “We have all these great people, but some of their results stink.”
    What was missing was execution.
    It turns out you can have positive energy, energize everyone around you, make hard calls, and still not get over the finish line. Being able to execute is a special and distinct skill. It means a person knows how to put decisions into action and push them forward to completion, through resistance, chaos, or unexpected obstacles. People who can execute know that winning is about