the travelling glutton

Winning by Jack Welch, former CEO of GE.

This is a hodge-podge of tips for employees in a large corporation, largely gleaned from Welch's book tour Q&A sessions. This is his second book after his autobiography.

It is divided into five sections: on management philosophy, running your company, dealing with competition, managing your career and miscellany.

I enjoyed the parts on management philosophy, running the company and managing your career. Here's a quick summary on what Welch says about them.

Management philosophy

Every company should have a vision that is concrete, announces exactly where is it going and excludes obvious things such as "values quality and service" (which company doesn't value these?). Values should be exact and contain nitty gritty details describing real behaviours that are lived in the day to day running of the company. They should not be derailed by events like economic recessions and changes in the market.

Welch says that candour is lacking in most companies and that this stops communication and therefore inhibits the flow of ideas. Candour declutters as it saves time (less BS), creates more ideas and speeds up the generation of ideas as they get debated, refined and implemented faster.

Next, a company must practise differentiation for both its product lines and employees. For product lines, there must be a standard below which they must be changed to meet the standard, sold or shut down. Employees should be split into the top 20%, middle 70% and bottom 10%. The top 20% should be showered with money, praise and training while the middle 70% be given nurture with specific goals to hit. The bottom 10% should be let go as soon as possible. Welch adds that everyone needs to have dignity and a voice no matter which part of the spectrum an employee belongs to.

The company

For hiring, Welch recommends taking people who have integrity, intelligence (meaning intellectual curiosity and breadth of knowledge, not necessarily a brand name degree) and maturity. Leaders should also have positive energy, the ability to energise others, edge (i.e. courage in making yes or no decisions), execution (the ability to get the job done) and passion. For top management, add in authenticity, the ability to see round corners, having heavy-duty resilience and surrounding themselves with people who are better and smarter than them.

In an interview, the one question the interviewer should ask is why the candidate left the job. Was it because of the boss, the team, the environment or other factors? The interviewer should ask challenging questions such that the ideal candidate shows curiosity and firm self-confidence, not overenthusiastic acquiescence.

Welch has eight rules for leaders:

The competition

Strategy boils down to finding the right "aha" thing (service/product, not quite fleshed out well) and set the direction according to it. Put the right people in place and then work like crazy to execute better than everyone else. Find the best practices and improve them every day.

I found that the rest of the section on the competition wasn't yet relevant to me and only skimmed through most of it. The main takeaway is that the employee should always have the right attitude, i.e. that company missions and values come first.

Your career

I liked this section the best. First, he laid out the general signals, both good and bad, of job fit:

Next, he talked about how to get promoted. First is to exceed expectations, then be sure not to force your boss to use his political capital defend you. (I.e. don't be a pain in the ass, don't be too cocky, follow the company culture, don't be too cagey with information, don't be too obviously panting after your career goals.) Next, manage down as carefully as you manage up, be an early champion of major projects of initiatives, search for more mentors (especially those in unlikely positions), have a positive attitude and spread it around, and don't let setbacks get you down.

The best thing I got from this book was the part about bosses. He inspired my reflection on my previous bosses, leading me to realise the biggest obstacle I had with my last boss. His main point was not to let yourself be a victim no matter how bad the boss is. If the case is that he treats everyone badly, it just means that he's a jerk and that's the way he is. If he's impossible only to you then you have to reflect carefully on your performance. Gauge your personal productivity, face time in office, contribution to projects, how good a team player you are, whether you boast too much. Also consider your attitude toward authority. Change whatever you need to change and also ask your boss what he is thinking. While it is a risky move because the boss may be waiting for that opportunity to dump you then, the outcome would be that you would then know his problem with your attitude or performance. Lastly, consider the endgame for your boss. If he is on his way out, all you need to do is wait for the day to come. If not, his (rather meh) advice is to hang in there and perform brilliantly so that someone would notice you and reward you with a promotion or lateral transfer. If all really sucks and you can't do anything more within the job scope, then it's time to move on and find a new job somewhere else. Leave gracefully. (I think he meant graciously?)

One thing that disturbs me is that Welch has little time for work-life balance; he has a dim view, if any, of it. He thinks work-life balance policies are only for HR pamphlets for recruitment purposes. To him, life revolves around work, with golf taking up any slack. He says that the boss's top priority is competitiveness. He wants you to be happy but only inasmuch as it helps the company to win. Most bosses are perfectly fine with accommodating work-life balance challenges, but only if you earn it with performance. People who publicly struggle with work-life balance problems or continually turn to the company for help get pigeonholed as ambivalent, entitled, uncommitted, and /or incompetent. In the end, work-life balance problems are for the employee, not theh employer to solve. I really couldn't agree with him in this chapter and all I can say about it is that this gives a glimpse of how companies think they own their employees' time. No wonder he had two failed marriages behind him.

The last bit of the book answers any other questions that didn't fit into earlier sections. Nothing very groundbreaking here.

Verdict

This was very useful in giving me an idea of corporate culture and what is expected of white-collar executives. I found the bit on dealing with bosses very helpful although I suspect any book on office politics and managing your boss would be even better. For that, I give it three stars. If I was already an executive and had read up on managing up, I'd probably give it just two stars.

It's been three years since I did my last book review! Not that I haven't been reading, just that I haven't been posting. I have lots of ideas about what to do with this blog (going forward :P) and I guess I'll write them up slowly as I go along. In the mean time, I present you:

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, by Hernando de Soto, President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy.

This book explains how a legal framework for property ownership that is easily accessible to the people unlocks capital (i.e. more value) for the individual and therefore the state. For example, being the legal owner of your house allows you to create more value by using it as collateral to apply for a loan to set up a new business. Developing and communist countries (the non-West) do not have this because their legal frameworks are more concerned with protecting the rights of property owners than allowing easy access to legal property. The author's studies show that it takes too much time and money to legally start a business or own property in many of these countries. The tables showing the number of steps (smallest example: 77) and the time taken (shortest time: 289 days) to register various types of properties in these countries was jaw-dropping. Because of this, the poor tend to be "extralegal": they squat on land, build their own houses without permits and run unregistered and unregulated businesses.

The ghettos consist largely of small networks by which property is only recognised in small circles. For example, if you were to buy or sell your house, you'd need to sell it to someone in your small circle where your neighbours can vouch for you that you own/built that house. Beyond that, no one would have the trust to buy it off you. Governments need to respond to this by integrating extralegal property into the legal system so that the small extralegal networks could be integrated into the national system. Taking us back to the house-selling analogy, you could then present your title deed and sell the house to anyone in the country. This needs to be done easily and cheaply so that all, not just the wealthy elite, are able to benefit. It also has to be done speedily since the non-West needs to catch up soon.

The most obvious route is for the non-West to look West for how to do it. However, the West took a gradual evolution over 100-300 years to reach the current state of affairs, i.e. regulations in place to quickly transfer and acquire property. Because of the slow evolution of ownership laws in the West, it is not immediately apparent what exactly they did to produce today's robust system. A lot of it was slowly reacting to changing environments and circumstances and experimenting with new laws (trial and error). Therefore, it is difficult to draw lessons from its history in this respect. In addition, the non-West has a whole different set of circumstances that will make it difficult to apply these same lessons.

He notes that despite the difficulties in applying lessons, one pattern remains the same:

1. Extralegal communities have their own rules and markers for recognising and protecting property. E.g. walking through the padi fields in Bali, you can tell where one property ends and the next starts by following the barking dogs (different dogs for different fields/owners).
2. Laws will only work if they follow the will of the people. I.e. the only laws that work well are those that the people want in the first place.

If non-West governments follow these patterns, they should be able to come up with laws that will be useful and relevant to that coveted legal framework.

The author argues that capitalism will thrive in the non-West once this legal framework is put into place. He argues that culture does not factor in very much and spent only two pages dismissing culture as a reason why capitalism isn't thriving in the non-West.

He gives lots of examples, making this dense topic easier to understand, but it is still tough going at points, especially for a non-economics major like me. It's informative and helpful for understanding the world, giving another perspective on the imbalance between the developed and developing world.

Dear Hanoi Travel Management,

( name and shame )

---

If you'd like to know more gory details, I'll be happy to regale you with plenty more. I thought I wouldn't write the complaint so soon after the trip in case I exaggerate. Though I've gotten over my anger with time, I realise that this is still bad enough to complain about.

My feelings now? Not angry anymore, more amused than anything else. It's just that this, and some other not-so-great experiences in Vietnam have given me an aversion to all things Viet.

(cross-posted to Facebook)

... Dean took out other pictures. I realise these were all snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance. “Good-by, good-by.” Dean walked off in the long red dusk. Locomotives smoked and reeled above him. His shadow followed him, it sped his walk and thoughts and very being. He turned and walked coyly, bashfully. He gave the boomer's highball, he jumped up and down, he yelled something I didn't catch. He ran around in a circle. All the time he came closer to the concrete corner of the railroad overpass. He made one last signal. I waved back. Suddenly he bent to his life and walked quickly out of sight. I gaped into the bleakness of my own days. I had an awful long way to go.

Bagan is especially beautiful at sunset. We took a horsecart ride through the ruins and enjoyed beautiful views through the maize fields and trees.

Shwezigon is another 24K-covered pagoda. We literally had to squint at it as so much of the noon sun reflected off the rose-tinted pagoda (rose-tinted because it's painted red under the gold leaf).

Our morning call got us up and out of the hotel at 4.45 am just to get our flight up to the temple complex

Thanks to our 4 am morning call, we got on the plane to Bagan and made it there at 8 am. We gaped in bleary-eyed shock at our guide when he announced that we'd go straight into sightseeing instead of freshening up at the hotel first. It was that or missing out on an important full moon festival. We were in luck!

Some 2000 monks from the area were invited to this pagoda festival that takes place every November full moon. Rich people from all over (mainly Yangon and Mandalay though) came to give money to accumulate merit. They had stacks of brand new never-been-touched-before notes to parcel out: the rich gave out 50 (USD 0.04) to 200 kyat (USD 0.17) notes, while the even richer had 1000 kyat ones. There was so much to give out that each monk, young or old, was issued a plastic bag for all the loot (and also so that they wouldn't have to soil their hands touching the worldly money).

( money money money )

This is a place where young novices are dressed in maroon and red, not saffron...



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