We’ll let Jack Welch do the introduction. From his letter to customers, share owners and employees in the GE 2000 Annual Report, his last as CEO: The most significant change in GE has been its transformation into a Learning Company. Our true “core competency” today is not manufacturing or services, but the global recruiting and nurturing of the world’s best people and the cultivation in them of an insatiable desire to learn, to stretch and to do things better every day. . . .
We have a company more agile than others a fraction of our size, a high-spirited company where people are free to dream and encouraged to act and to take risks. In a culture where people act this way, every day, “big” will never mean slow. . . .
Learning to love change is an unnatural act in any century-old institution, but today we have a Company
that does just that: sees change always as a source of excitement, always as opportunity, rather than as
threat or crisis. We’re no better prophets than anyone else, and we have difficulty predicting the exact course of change. But we don’t have to predict it. What we have to do is simply jump all over it! . . .
