In the 20 years that Jack Welch led GE, its revenues rose from $30 to $130 billion and company value went from $14 to $410 billion. Isn’t this sort of miracle? Not surprisingly, each of us would like to be the next god of corporate improvement, but little do we know what it takes to follow in Jack Welch’s footsteps.

Jack Welch joined GE in 1960; he worked in the initial years on restructuring plan, which included retrenching, positioning the SBUs, planning proper segmentation and positioning of the products and most importantly selling off the unsuccessful SBUs of GE. He was named CEO of GE in 1981. “You can’t grow long-term if you can’t eat short-term,” is the philosophy practiced by Jack Welch. Balancing long-term and short-term goals is a tricky job. Many long term goals will have short term goals that lead to them. Not only does this make practical sense but it helps managers grounded and not to lose sight of them. He turned around GE with by utilizing human process. According to him respecting individual worker is most important for any organization.

Jack Welch developed 4 E model of leadership. The four Es are Energy, Energizers, Edge and Execute. People with energy possess boundless vigour and get up every day ready to attack the job at hand. High energy people drive the creativity in organization. Energizers outline a vision and get people to carry it out. Energizers know how to get people excited about a cause or a campaign. They are selfless in giving others the credit when things go right, but quick to accept responsibility when things go wrong. Those with edge are competitive types. They don’t shy away from making really difficult decisions; decisions such as hiring, firing and promoting. They are confident of decisions taken. Welch says that the key to successful leadership is implementation of plans. Without measurable executions, the other “E’s” are useless. Smart executers recognize that activity and productivity are not the same and are capable of converting energy and edge into execution and action which lead to constructive results.

Under Welch’s leadership, managers had wide autonomy in building their GE units in entrepreneurial fashion. Determined to connect the collective power of GE employees, Jack Welch redefined also relationships between boss and subordinates. He wrote: “The individual is the fountainhead of creativity and innovation, and we are struggling to get all of our people to accept the countercultural truth that often the best way to manage people is just to get out of their way. Only by releasing the energy and fire of our employees can we achieve the decisive, continuous productivity advantages that will give us the freedom to compete and win in any business anywhere on the globe.”

Do not manage: Welch doesn’t like the term ‘manage’. To him, it invokes negative image, such as ‘keeping people in the dark’ and ‘controlling and oppressing people’. Welch’s goal was to lead, create a vision and make people passionate about their work. Leadership, according to Welch, anyone who contributes, comes up with good ideas and can energize, excite and inspire other people rather than weaken, depress and control is a good leader.

Bureaucracy really cripples organizations. Conversely, working in a smaller firm can mean negotiating and then developing new policies and practices every time a new situation arises. Clearly, Welch dealt with an advanced and deep-rooted bureaucracy when he joined GE. Lifting this constraint was a key to his strategy. When Jack Welch took over GE when it had more than 400,000 employees spread around the world; that meant a lot of confusing and contradictory regulations and rules were floated. The first thing he did was writing policy, training staff, measuring adherence to standards, establishing gatekeepers, and installing controls.

Welch never feared change; he insisted that his managers, from senior level on down, must embrace change. Everything is constantly changing, says Welch. Right from market conditions, the business environment, consumer spending habits habits, advances in technology, new products, competition everything keeps changing.

He always acknowledged the facts so that the company could exploit it.
According to Welch, CEOs and all managers who deliberately ignore the facts of their business, the business environment, and general market and economic conditions are doomed to fail.

In 2009, Welch founded the Jack Welch Management Institute (JWMI), a program at Chancellor University that offered an online executive MBA. The institute was acquired by Strayer University in 2011. Welch has been very actively involved with the curriculum, faculty and students since the beginning of the institution. JWMI’s MBA program was recently named the number one most influential education brand on Linkedin and one of the top business schools to watch in 2016.

 At GE, Welch became known for his teaching and growing leaders. He has taught at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and teaches seminars to CEOs all over the globe. More than 35 CEOs at today’s top companies are trained under Jack Welch. He demonstrates his passion for the institute by being highly involved with the students, faculty, and the development of the curriculum. JWMI students have direct access to Jack Welch, and he hosts quarterly video conferences with his students.

Jack Welch is a long-time Republican Party supporter; in an interview on CNBC he backed Donald Trump because he likes the real estate mogul’s policies on tax reform, government regulations and national security more than those of Hillary Clinton. Welch is candid about his views and opinions for the forthcoming US Presidential Elections taking place on November 8^th 2016.

Despite a growing global population, different branches of education, increased numbers of professional institutions, higher education being adopted as important agenda by governments, all over the world the availability of skilled workers is actually shrinking. This is because less importance is given to analytical skills, strategy designs, conceptualization, sensitization to real time issues and contemporary issues. The dynamics of demographic gaps in developing world related to age and sex are drastically bizarre. Birthrates are still high, and population is growing. While the younger population is growing in numbers, the older population’s longevity due to innovations in healthcare is increasing.  Over the next few decades, many countries will experience what David Bloom, chair of the department of global health and population at Harvard’s School of Public Health, has called a “demographic dividend”: a rising proportion of young people entering the workforce, driving productivity and economic growth.

An estimated 31% of organizations worldwide find it difficult to fill positions because of talent shortages in their markets, reports the 2012 Talent Shortage Survey from ‘Manpower’, an international employment agency. When it comes to attracting employees with critical skills, the task becomes even more difficult. Today, 65% of global companies and more than 80% of companies in fast-growth economies are having problems finding employees with the skills they need, reports Towers Watson, an HR consultancy. This fact is despite the growing ranks of college-educated workers and the high unemployment in some of the best-educated markets.

Charles Handy, the Ireland born writer and management philosopher is well-known all over the world for his work on organizational structures and designs. Handy told the world that the perennial shortage faced by the business world for the skilled manpower will be solved by the Shamrock kind of organization. The shamrock leaf shape is a symbolic representation of an organization with three types of workforce, having a main body of core workers with connected lobes of part-time/temporary workers and freelance workers. According to him, this structure of workforce symbolizes the Shamrock ( each leaf symbolizing one structure of workforce). The 3-leafed clover or shamrock was supposedly used by St Patrick to illustrate the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. This says that God exists in three forms – as God the Father, as God the Son (ie Jesus Christ) and as God the Holy Spirit. Handy describes the Shamrock model as the network model of organizations. A network-based structure manages the diverse, complex, and dynamic relationships among multiple organizations or units.

The first leaf consists of core workers in the organization. They are qualified professional technicians and managers. They are essential to the continuity of the organization, and have detailed knowledge of the organizational work culture, processes, objectives and practices. They are on the roll of the organization. The core workers adhere to the organizational rules and regulations framework.

The second leaf consists of operational outsourcing of the company. The second group consists of contracted specialists such as the advertising firms, R&D, computing, security and the catering and courier services. They operate with the organization’s existential culture and are rewarded with fees rather than with salaries or wages. Their contribution to the organization is measured in output rather than in hours, in firm results rather than in how much time is spent by them.

The third leaf of Handy’s shamrock consists of a flexible labor force, discharging part time, temporary and seasonal roles. They too operate within the organization’s culture. Handy says though they may be employed on a informal and relaxed basis they must be managed systematically and not casually. Their worth should be measured in terms of their output. They usually consist of part time employees in production, sales, IT, R&D and other processes. Sometimes they work from their homes and are electronically linked with the organization.

The best example of Shamrock organization is various SBU units of Rank Xerox, the UK based company.  In the early nineties when Rank Xerox experienced that their business processes were not sufficiently documented and this was causing many hurdles in their system they went in for business area analysis (BAA).  They identified 145 distinct business processes and 80 data entities. Through a process called “affinity analysis”, these two inputs were used to form a 145 x 80 matrix. Affinity analysis allowed Rank Xerox to identify clusters of processes and data relationships. 17 business processes were identified, which matched the functional areas reasonably well. Feeling that 17 distinct areas were too many to redesign at one time, senior management prioritized these into seven main areas. They were customer order life cycle, customer satisfaction, installed equipment management, integrated planning & processes, logistics, financial management, personnel management. Without skilled and experienced manpower the business integration was not possible. Xerox adopted the Shamrock pattern, besides their core employees they hired operational outsourced labor and a mix of flexible part-time labor force; thus growing in the Shamrock way.

In the present scenario not only business organizations but even governments of many countries have started operating in the Shamrock way. The Brazilian government has proposed a new outsourcing commission, an organization that would be able to define and enforce new laws that affect buyers and sellers of outsourced services. The first point to note is that the commission is aiming to respond to new corporate structures that have long been common in the US and Europe. It has been common for companies to explore the outsourcing of non-core processes. The commission aims at helping bring in the Brazilian employment law into an age where companies are not single bodies, but collectives of different legal entities, individual contractors, and occasional collaborators. If you analyze closely there are specific areas where Brazilian employment law is quite uncommon compared to other nations.

Handy has gone on record stating that more and more individuals will opt out of formal organizations as the work culture restricts their creativity and freedom. The breed of intelligent and artistic workers prefers selling their services at a pace and at a price which suit them. We already are seeing some dynamic organizations taking real advantage of Shamrock style. Handy argues, nevertheless, that organizations can do a lot more to help the individuals channelize their creativity and innovativeness and by doing so rich profits can be reaped.  We are witnessing far-reaching cultural styles in business operations today. In an ever clambering world of business organizations like LG, Samsung, GE, P&G, HP, Timberland etc are already using principles of Shamrock organization. These organizations have realized that innovations are fostered with its adaptation.

The Japanese are ahead of the rest of the world. In Japan, the most talented people move around from experience to experience as quickly as possible which ensures their talents can be tested in different situations, with different organizational cultures and different managers. When you are exposed to drastically different work cultures, you realize different facts and perspectives. This ensures in one discovering what he is good at. The Shamrock culture works brilliantly in Japan.

Handy’s deliberation has given the world ideas on work-life balance. Many people have opted for serving an organization from outside which helps them manage their career and life both optimally. Handy has an exciting revelation of predicting future trends and changes in organizational structures and workplace practices. He envisages that in 21^st century most men and women will experience a mix of paid work, voluntary activities, higher studies, and personal life. Most having two or more paid sources of work. Coining the phrase ‘portfolio worker’ to describe this phenomenon he has also anticipated the downfall of large hierarchical organizations. He says that those large hierarchical organizations will be replaced with more loosely structured federated global enterprises.

Great days ahead for Shamrock organizations!!!