Learn from the leaders

After Henry Ford, Jack Welch is perhaps the most influential CEO of all time. The rules he laid down for General Electric have become standard practice for most corporations now: get out of any business in which you are not among the top three, cut your costs by 10 per cent and have 10 per cent fewer employees on your rolls in a year. A CEO, Welch said, may not be the brightest person around; so long as he can get the right person for the right job, he has done his job well. His suggestions were bold and contemptuous of legacies.

Welch was also the one who first saw the possibilities of moving work to India. This was in the early 1990s. Welch was on a private visit to India — to meet his friend, Kushal Pal Singh of DLF — and was captivated by what he saw. There was a large pool of youngsters who were fluent in English. The telecom revolution was beginning to happen. Why not locate GE call centres in India, asked Welch. Customer queries the world over could be answered out of Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi. The savings could run into hundreds of millions of dollars. Before anybody else, he saw the merits of locating crucial research work in India. He had seen the number of Indians at work in laboratories across the United States, and knew instantly how best to tap that talent. That opened the floodgates to India for MNCs.

Welch happens to be a prolific writer and an avid talker. But the essence of his thought process is captured in Jack, Straight from the Gut, which he has co-authored with John A Byrne (Warner Books, 2001). It gives clear insights into his leadership years at GE — how he managed his A-team, how he cut deals, and how he got its various businesses on track.

Welch is not the only inspirational honcho from the world of business. Andy Grove of Intel wrote in 1996 his bestseller, Only the Paranoid Survive (Doubleday). Intel has always had a stranglehold on the microprocessor market. Grove sustained it over long years by staying paranoid about market share. The title of the book was actually Grove’s pet advice to his employees. In the book he admits that he doesn’t remember when he hit upon the phrase, but he explains what it means: unless a market leader is paranoid, rivals will chip away at its market share till there is nothing left. There are several examples of companies that went bust because they became complacent. Success, according to Grove, has within itself the seeds of its own destruction. That Intel has heeded his advice can be seen from its huge share of the market. Its long dominance has now become an entry barrier — taking on Intel is not something the weak of heart should attempt.

Like Welch and Grove, George Soros is a role model for many. His take on markets, stocks and currencies is nothing short of the divine word for many. His fight for an open society is well known. Soros is of Hungarian Jewish descent. He survived the Nazi years, emigrated to England in 1947, and graduated from the London School of Economics in 1952. Four years later, he was in New York. The rest is history. Soros has written several books, most of which turned out to be bestsellers. But has the story of his life been properly told? Soros: The Life of a Messianic Billionaire by Michael T Kaufman (Alfred Knopf, 2002) gives a good insight into his life.

There are no free lunches in Soros’s world. Somebody who saw him play tennis with his young children found that the billionaire investor did not give away a single point without a fight. Though young of age, the kids had to sweat it out to score against him. His explanation was simple: had he given the game away, the children would never learn how to fight for what they want! Little wonder there are not too many men like Soros around.

(bhupesh.bhandari@bsmail.in)