Jack Welch
1935 – 2020 American business executive, chairman and CEO of General Electric
Chief executive of General Electric from 1981 to 2001 whose focus on profits and share price made him a management icon and a symbol of the layoff era.
- Religion
- Roman Catholic
- Affiliations
- General Electric
Jack Welch led General Electric for two decades and multiplied its market value, becoming the most celebrated manager of his time. He cut tens of thousands of jobs early in his tenure, earning the nickname Neutron Jack, and ran a rank-and-yank system that fired the lowest-rated tenth of managers each year. He expanded GE Capital until finance drove much of the company's profit, a shift that later left GE badly exposed. Long seen as the embodiment of shareholder-value management, Welch himself said late in life that treating shareholder value as a strategy was the dumbest idea in the world. His legacy is debated between admiration for his results and criticism of the human and financial costs.
Connections
- associate of Milton Friedman — Welch became the emblem of Friedman's shareholder-value doctrine, though he later called maximizing shareholder value the dumbest idea in the world.