Winning by Jack Welch, Suzy Welch Page B

results.
    If a candidate has the four Es, then you look for that final P—passion. By passion, I mean a heartfelt, deep, and authentic excitement about work. People with passion care—really care in their bones—about colleagues, employees, and friends winning. They love to learn and grow, and they get a huge kick when the people around them do the same.
    The funny thing about people with passion, though, is that they usually aren’t excited just about work. They tend to be passionate about everything. They’re sports trivia nuts or they’re fanatical supporters of their alma maters or they’re political junkies.
    Whatever—they just have juice for life in their veins.
     
    HIRING FOR THE TOP
     
    The three preliminary acid tests and the 4-E (and 1-P) framework apply to any hiring decision, no matter what level in the organization. But sometimes, you need to hire a senior-level leader—someone who is going to run a major division or an entire company. In that case, there are four more highly developed characteristics that really matter.
    The first characteristic is authenticity. Why? It’s simple. A person cannot make hard decisions, hold unpopular positions, or stand tall for what he believes unless he knows who he is and feels comfortable with that. I am talking about self-confidence and conviction. These traits make a leader bold and decisive, which is absolutely critical in times when you must act quickly.
    Just as important, authenticity makes leaders likable, for lack of a better word. Their “realness” comes across in the way they communicate and reach people on an emotional level. Their words move them: their message touches something inside.
    When I was at GE, we would occasionally encounter a very successful executive who just could not be promoted to the next level. In the early days, we would struggle with our reasoning. These executives demonstrated the right values and made the numbers, but usually their people did not connect with them. What was wrong? Finally, we figured out that these executives always had a certain phoniness to them. They pretended to be something they were not—more in control, more upbeat, more savvy than they really were. They didn’t sweat. They didn’t cry. They squirmed in their own skin, playing a role of their own inventing.
    Leaders can’t have an iota of fakeness. They have to know themselves—so that they can be straight with the world, energize followers, and lead with the authority born of authenticity.
    The second characteristic is the ability to see around corners. Every leader has to have a vision and the ability to predict the future, but good leaders must have a special capacity to anticipate the radically unexpected. In business, the best leaders in brutally competitive environments have a sixth sense for market changes, as well as moves by existing competitors and new entrants. *
    The former vice-chairman of GE, Paolo Fresco, is a gifted chess player. He carried that skill into every global business deal he made over the course of thirty years. Somehow, because of his intuition and savvy, he could put himself in the chair of the person across the table, allowing him to predict every move in a negotiation. To our amazement, Paolo always saw what was coming next. No one ever came close to getting the better of him—because he knew what his “adversary” was thinking before the adversary himself knew.
    The ability to see around corners is the ability to imagine the unimaginable.
    The third characteristic is a strong penchant to surround themselves with people better and smarter than they are. Every time we had a crisisat GE, I would quickly assemble a group of the smartest, gutsiest people I could find at any level from within the company and sometimes from without, and lean on them heavily for their knowledge and advice. I would make sure everyone in the room came at the problem from a different angle, and then I would have us all wallow in the