Roberto Goizueta and Jack Welch are two of the best leaders in American companies.

Welch and Goizueta Leadership Assignment

INTRODUCTION

Roberto Goizueta and Jack Welch are two of the best leaders in American companies. They have created much value and wealth for their shareholders. Goizueta was born in a wealthy family and is an aristocratic, formal gentleman who likes a nice predictable schedule. He has a deep respect of tradition. Being the chairman and chief executive of Coca-Cola, he essentially runs a one-product company. Whereas Welch was born in a poor family and grown in an environment that was full of competition. Welch is impulsive and charming. Being the chairman and chief executive of General Electric, he runs a conglomerate with a dozen businesses. He puts almost every aspect of GE management a heavy element of competition. Though there are many differences in their style of working, both of them do have good wealth-building skills and share some common characteristics to become successful leaders. In the following, an analysis of these common characteristics will be discussed.

COMMON CHARACTERISTICS

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COMMON CHARACTERISTICS

First of all, both of Goizueta and Welch have the vision and the ability to sort out the noise from the signal and then to drive just for essence of what’s important. Good leaders need to direct the employees to do things that will be beneficial to the companies, and discourage them from doing things that deviate from the goal of the company. In order to achieve that, leaders need to be confident and have strong belief on the decision that they made. Good leaders also need to make sure their team members are in the same direction and motivate them consistently to achieve the goal. In some very fundamental ways, Goizueta and Welch did business similarly. They were not distracted by outside events. They know exactly what they needed to do. They were able to deliver what need to be done to their employees and they did that consistently and relentlessly.

Secondly, most good leaders are willing to accept change so that in case the corporation is threatened by external environment change, they will be capable of leading the employees to cope with the risk the company faces. Change should be initiated instead of attended, in other words, good leaders create revolution before change becomes impending. Being the leaders of big blue-chip corporations, both of them recognized the importance of introducing changes to improve their corporations. They were capable of coming up with some formula that would get them into the right businesses and to spur their tradition-bound bureaucracies to accept change. They are both energetic and tried to speed up decision-making in every front.

Successful leaders create value and nurture unique culture of the organization; they know how important a unified mentality of doing things can contribute to effectiveness and to goals achievements. As Welch admits that it is impossible to know everything about each of his businesses in GE, exerting and cultivating a culture of creativity and initiative contribute to GE’s success because people can do things right by themselves! Yet, unique culture does not mean unified mind-set that may just limit creativity.

CONCLUSION

From the stories of Goizueta and Welch, it can be concluded that in order to become a good leader, he or she needs to be capable of making quality decision that can help to lead to the success of the corporation. In additions, a good leader should be competent in change creation and management. This is another inherent asset of effective leaders. Whilst effective change management entails prompt decision-making and analytical ability, it also requires the ability to balance the past and the future. Last but not least, most successful leaders are energetic. This allows them to have more energy to motivate and spread their ideas to their employees and enables their employees to have better performance. Successful leadership ultimately create value to the organization. As opposed to managers whose temptation is to oversee processes and people, leaders should also design and conceive the process leading to value creation. To achieve so, effective leaders certainly have to be subtly conscious of the business and the underpinnings of the organization.