Free Winning by Jack Welch, Suzy Welch Page A

example.
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    Winning companies embrace risk taking and learning.
    But in reality, these two concepts often get lip service—and little else. Too many managers urge their people to try new things and then whack them in the head when they fail. And too many live in not-invented-here worlds of their own making.
    If you want your people to experiment and expand their minds, set the example yourself.
    Consider risk taking. You can create a culture that welcomes risk taking by freely admitting your mistakes and talking about what you’ve learned from them.
    I cannot count the number of times I’ve told people about my first big mistake—and it was huge—blowing up a pilot plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1963. I was across the street in my office when the explosion occurred, set off by a spark igniting a large tank of volatile solution. The noise was enormous, and then roof shingles and shards of glass flew everywhere. Smoke blanketed the area. Thank God no one was hurt. *
    Despite the enormity of my mistake, my boss’s boss, a former MIT professor named Charlie Reed, didn’t beat me up. Instead, his sympathetic, scientific probing of the reasons for the incident taught me not only how to improve our manufacturing process, but more importantly, how to deal with people when they were down.
    That wasn’t the only mistake in my career; I made plenty. I bought the investment bank Kidder Peabody—a cultural fit disaster—and made many wrong hires, to name just two more.
    These experiences were nothing to feel great about, but I talked about them openly in order to show that it was OK to take swings and miss, as long as you learned from them.
    You don’t need to be preachy or particularly somber about your errors. In fact, the more humorous and lighthearted you can be about them, the more people will get the message that mistakes aren’t fatal.
    As for learning—again, live it yourself. Just because you’re the boss doesn’t mean you’re the source of all knowledge. Whenever I learned about a best practice that I liked at another company, I would come back to GE and make a scene. Maybe I often overstated the case, but I wanted people to know how enthusiastic I was about the new idea. And I was!
    You can—and should—learn from one another too. Remember that executive in Chicago who asked me how he could appraise people who were smarter than he was? The answer I gave him was, “Learn from them. In the best-case scenario, all your people will be smarter than you. It doesn’t mean you can’t lead them.”
    There is no edict in the world that will make people take risks or spend their time learning. In most cases, their risk-reward equation just isn’t obvious enough.
    If you want to change that, set the example yourself. You’ll love the exciting culture you create and the results you get—and so will your team.
     
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RULE 8. Leaders celebrate.
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    What is it about celebrating that makes managers so nervous? Maybe throwing a party doesn’t seem professional, or it makes managers worry that they won’t look serious to the powers that be, or that, if things get too happy at the office, people will stop working their tails off.
    Whatever the reason, there is just not enough celebrating going on at work—anywhere. When I travel, I frequently ask audiences if they’ve done anything to recognize their team’s achievements—large or small—over the past year. I’m not talking about those stilted, company-orchestrated parties that everyone hates, in which the whole team is marched out to a local restaurant for an evening of forced merriment when they’d rather be home. I’m talking about sending a team to Disney World with their families, or giving each team member two tickets to a great show in New York, or handing each team member a new iPod or the like.
    But to my question “Do you celebrate enough?” almost no one raises a hand.
    It’s not as if GE was immune to this phenomenon. I