Jack Welch was Chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001.
57 Facts About Jack Welch
2.
When Welch retired from GE, he received a severance payment of $417 million, the largest such payment in business history up to that point.
3.
Jack Welch was born in Peabody, Massachusetts, the only child of Grace, a homemaker, and John Francis Welch Sr.
4.
Jack Welch attended Salem High School, where he participated in baseball, football, and captained the hockey team and became second lieutenant right after graduating.
5.
Late in his senior year, Jack Welch was accepted to University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he studied chemical engineering.
6.
Jack Welch worked in chemical engineering at Sunoco and PPG Industries during his college summers.
7.
Jack Welch graduated in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering, turning down offers from several companies in order to attend graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
8.
Jack Welch graduated from the University of Illinois in 1960 with a master's and a PhD in chemical engineering.
9.
Jack Welch worked as a junior chemical engineer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, at a salary of $10,500, which would be equivalent to approximately $106,000 in 2022 dollars.
10.
In 1961, Jack Welch planned to quit his job as junior engineer because he was dissatisfied with the raise offered to him and was unhappy with the bureaucracy he observed at GE.
11.
Jack Welch was persuaded to remain at GE by Reuben Gutoff, an executive at the company, who promised him that he would help create the small-company atmosphere Jack Welch desired.
12.
In 1963, an explosion at the factory which was under Jack Welch's management blew off the roof of the facilities, and he was almost fired for that episode.
13.
Jack Welch oversaw production as well as the marketing for the GE-developed plastics Lexan and Noryl.
14.
Not long after, in 1971, Jack Welch became the vice president of GE's metallurgical and chemical divisions.
15.
Jack Welch held that position until 1979, which involved him working with the corporate headquarters, exposing him to many of the "big fish" he would one day be among.
16.
In 1977 Jack Welch was named senior vice president and head of Consumer Products and Services Division, a position he held until 1979 when he became the vice chairman of GE.
17.
In 1981, Welch became GE's youngest chairman and CEO, succeeding Reginald H Jones.
18.
Jack Welch pioneered a policy of informality at the work place, allowing all employees to have a small-business experience at a large corporation.
19.
Jack Welch worked to eradicate perceived inefficiency by trimming inventories and dismantling the bureaucracy that had almost led him to leave GE in the past.
20.
Jack Welch closed factories, reduced payrolls and cut lackluster units.
21.
Jack Welch valued surprise and made unexpected visits to GE's plants and offices.
22.
Jack Welch popularized so-called "rank and yank" policies used now by other corporate entities.
23.
Jack Welch broadened the stock options program at GE, extending availability from top executives to nearly one third of all employees.
24.
Jack Welch is known for abolishing the nine-layer management hierarchy and bringing a sense of informality to the company.
25.
In Jack: Straight from the Gut, Welch stated GE had 411,000 employees at the end of 1980, and 299,000 at the end of 1985.
26.
Jack Welch reduced basic research, and closed or sold off under-performing businesses.
27.
Jack Welch adopted Motorola's Six Sigma quality program in late 1995.
28.
In 1980, the year before Jack Welch became CEO, GE recorded revenues of roughly $26.8 billion and in 2000, the year before he left, they were nearly $130 billion.
29.
Jack Welch served as Chairman of The Business Council in 1991 and 1992.
30.
Twenty years later, the company's market capitalization was only $200 billion, and Jack Welch refused to discuss its decline, other than noting much of the decline had resulted from investments in real estate, and that his immediate, handpicked successor Jeff Immelt had to deal with the after effects of the September 11,2001, terrorist attack.
31.
Jack Welch disputed scientists who classified PCBs as forever chemicals that can cause negative health consequences.
32.
Jack Welch went on to call the Obama administration's prioritization of addressing climate change "radical behavior".
33.
The retired Jack Welch publicly praised his former firm's "slim-down" and return to being an industrial company.
34.
Jack Welch often received criticism for a lack of compassion for the middle class and working class.
35.
Jack Welch stated that he did not want more money, nor a more traditional stock package, but instead preferred to retain the lifestyle he had enjoyed as GE's CEO.
36.
In September 2004, the Central Intelligence Agency published a parody of Jack Welch applying his management skills while serving as imagined Deputy Director of Intelligence.
37.
In 2005, he published Winning, a book about management co-written with Suzy Jack Welch, which reached No 1 on The Wall Street Journal bestseller list and appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list.
38.
Since September 2006, Jack Welch had been teaching a class at the MIT Sloan School of Management to a hand-picked group of 30 MBA students with a demonstrated career interest in leadership.
39.
In December 2016, Jack Welch joined a business forum assembled by then president-elect Donald Trump to provide strategic and policy advice on economic issues.
40.
Jack Welch had been very actively involved with the curriculum, faculty and students since the beginning of the institution.
41.
At GE, Jack Welch became known for his teaching and growing leaders.
42.
Jack Welch had taught at MIT Sloan School of Management and taught seminars to CEOs all over the globe.
43.
Jack Welch administered surveys on satisfaction regularly and scrutinized the results to find scores that needed improvement.
44.
Jack Welch said that he would like better leadership training for MBA students.
45.
Jack Welch's second wife, Jane Beasley, was a former mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer.
46.
Jack Welch married Welch in April 1989, and they divorced in 2003.
47.
Jack Welch served briefly as the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review.
48.
Beasley informed the Review and Wetlaufer was forced to resign in early 2002 after admitting to the affair with Jack Welch while preparing an interview with him for the magazine.
49.
Jack Welch died from kidney failure at his home in New York City on March 1,2020, at age 84.
50.
Jack Welch stated that global warming is "the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring", and that it is a form of "mass neurosis".
51.
Jack Welch was widely criticized for his views on the job numbers from September 2012.
52.
Jack Welch stood by his tweet, stating if he could write it again, he would add question marks at the end to make it clear that his intention was to raise a question over the legitimacy of the numbers.
53.
Still, in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Jack Welch wrote that the debate led to people looking at unemployment data more carefully and skeptically.
54.
Jack Welch has been criticized for practices that have harmed workers and the company: he eliminated thousands of jobs at GE contributing to a reduction of the US manufacturing base.
55.
Jack Welch was a leading proponent of mergers and acquisitions, helping to give rise to an economy that is more concentrated and less dynamic.
56.
Jack Welch pioneered "financialization," changing GE from a manufacturing company into, effectively, an unregulated bank, which harmed GE over the long term.
57.
On March 11,2010, Jack Welch cameoed as himself in the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, appearing in the season four episode "Future Husband".