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Jack Welch successfully led General Electric through a period of great change. Do you think he sees change as a danger, an opportunity or a challenge? What is

Jack Welch’s general attitude to change?

1.“We want to be a company that is constantly renewing itself, leaving the past behind, adapting to change and innovation. Managements that hang on to weakness for whatever reason – tradition, sentiment, or their own management weakness – won’t be around in the future”.

2.“How do you bring people into the change process? Start with reality. Get all of the facts out. Give people rationale for change, laying it out in a clearest, most dramatic terms. When everybody gets the same facts, they’ll generally come to the same conclusion.”

3.“The difference between winning and losing will be how the men and women of our company view change. If they see it as a threat, we lose. But if they are provided with the educational tools and are encouraged to use them – to the point where they see change as an opportunity, then every door we must pass through to win big around the world will swing open to us.”

4.“Gradual change doesn’t work very well in the type of transformation General Electric has gone through. If your change isn’t big enough, the bureaucracy can beat you. Look at Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. They said, ”This is what it’s going to be.” And then they did it. Big bold changes.”

5.“(GE leaders always) have enormous energy and the ability to energize and invigorate others, to stimulate and relish change and not be frightened or paralyzed by it, and to see change as an opportunity, not a threat.”

6.“Most bureaucracies unfortunately still think in incremental terms rather than in terms of fundamental change. Changing the culture means constantly asking now how fast am I going, how well am I doing versus how well I did a year or two years before? How fast and how well am I doing compared with the world outside? Are we moving faster, and are we doing better against that external standard?”

Adapted extracts from Jack Welch Speaks, by Janet Lowe

Language focus

1.Find words or phrases in the quotations which suggest the idea of change.

2.Find words or phrases in the quotations which mean:

a.to seek for changes

b.to become suitable for new needs and different conditions

c.to try to keep something

d.reasons or principles on which a system or practice is based

e.potential danger

f.to consider something

g.to stimulate

h.to defeat

i.risky, courageous