I didn't finish this book, but I'm probably not going to so this is as close as it's going to get to a proper review.

It was an interesting book. For me I found it was over half what I could call "common sense" and the other half was irrelevant to my interests (despite the majority of my career having some management component, big corporate management is something I have little interest in and no aspirations towards).

My favourite chapter was where he talked about the qualities required for a manager and executive manager and how to formally assess and review managerial staff. While I disagreed with some of the details he shared I realised that I would have *loved* to have received a review along the guidelines he shared. While I've had the occasional useful performance reviews as a minion, I don't think I've ever received a worthwhile review in my capacity as a manager.

Even more interestingly his review strategy allowed me to self-asses myself as a manager and receive some insight to where I am weak and why I found myself retreating as I briefly toyed with an executive role.

For me what I read was worthwhile and the review section was provocative and interesting, but over all I think I was the wrong target market.

Winning explores the changes of recent times and the new economic realities, and more than that, it identifies the central, immutable principals of doing business right and doing it well.

"Winning is a book for the people in business who sweat, get their nails dirty, hire, fire, make hard decisions, and pay the price when those decisions are wrong," said Welch. "I see this book as a handbook for people in the trenches, turning their companies and the economy around, not just today, but for years to come. I think it will be useful for people just starting their careers or their own businesses to seasoned managers running multi-billion dollar enterprises. I've learned an enormous amount about what works and what doesn't work throughout my career and I'm very excited about sharing it in Winning."

Welch will teach people how to win in business by distilling his experience in three critical areas: working within an organization, dealing with competitors, and handling matters of life and career. Critical to Welch's writing such an accessible, useful guide is his unique collaboration with his wife, Suzy, the former editor of the Harvard Business Review, who brings expertise in management, writing talent and a woman's sensibility to articulating the components of Welch's success.

This book is so great written by Jack Welch who is one of the most prominent CEOs of the last century. He has earned name recognition from people around the world.
It’s written clearly and simply it's not filled with "the same old stuff". Even the principles you've heard before are presented through his own interesting experiences.
Unlike many other authors who can be somewhat academic. Welch talks a lot about ethics and the need to win fairly while maintaining high ethical standards. He has a whole section devoted to the mission and values of a company and the need for them to be embodied in corporate culture … not just words on a wall. He also talks about winning at the personal level as well as the corporate level and how they are intertwined.
The book is really about how to win and Welch has some clear ideas about what it takes. He is a straight talker and advocates that for everyone … the term he uses is candor, and the need to foster candor in the corporate environment eliminating a lot of “politics”
Welch has opinions on just about every aspect of running a successful business, from Leadership to hiring & firing, from people management to crisis management. On strategy he talks about finding the “big idea”; about finding the right people and applying best practices
This is one of the most important business books I've readand one of the simplest to understand. This book inspire me and I am sure it will do the same for all of you I recommend it to everybody not only those in business field.

Wish I had read this book a long, long time ago. Lots of good insights and practical ideas. The book covers a wide range of subjects from leadership, candor, competition, change, budgeting, strategy and your career.
In the chapter about hiring people, Welch says the most important question to ask a candidate is why they left their previous job, and the one before that. And to dig deep, listening to find out if maybe they expected rewards too fast, or they didn't get along with their boss, or it wasn't the right environment. This question tells you more about the candidate than anything else.
About firing, for whatever reason, it shouldn't come as a surprise to the people being asked to leave. He talks about how important it is to keep employees informed about how the business is performing; adopting an open-book approach. Being transparent and candid.
In the chapter about 'Your Career,' Welch explains why it's important to be yourself at interviews. "The company should know who it's getting and you should show them, so you see how they react."
And Welch writes that if you really want to find a great job, "choose something you love to do..." If you do that, you'll never really work again.

This is a purist's book. The author has taken a leaf straight out of the text book and put them in real world, in terms of management, planning, budgeting, you name it and you have it.

Some of the ideas, suggestions really work in real world, provided you put them into practice. Which brings me to the point, about me-self, whether I could put them into practice.

Well, me being a software engineer, that too from India, I guess, I prefer to take a back seat, when trying to implementing this.

The author tells about work hard, earn more chits exchange them with work from home, and mentions about surging ahead in the corporate ladder. Also the period when the author implemented his ideas, strategies and obtained results is entirely different from the period that I am into, so, I differ in few of the points.

But none the less, its an extraordinary book!! Worth spending so much time on reading it slow!

When compared the the business books that claim to have a magic formula that applies to any business, person or situation, the opinionated perspective of one guy and his experience was a welcome relief. I admit, when I first started the book, the abrasive tone and grating voice of the author was offputting--I didn't think I was going to get through much. However, it wasn't long before I forgot all about the audio experience and became engrossed in the material.

Even at the times when I felt that the author was being harsh or I flat-out disagreed with the content, I could recognize the merit behind the underlying points. More often though I found the insights spot-on, and I often found that I had tuned out of the book because it got my mind racing in terms of how it applies to my situations. (Ironically, something that rarely happens with the "formula for success" type books.)

The book was packed with hard-earned wisdom from a lifetime of business and management experience. I finished the book feeling that I had gotten a lot for the time I spent on it.

This book is the heart of HR department, great book would give you some hits and ways to evaluate and choose your career. Nevertheless , Jack exaggerates the importuning of HR which is not the reality. Read Winning the Answers book as added value on top of the Winning book.
كتاب ممتاز ، اعتبره قلب قسم إدارة الموارد البشرية ، فيه بعض النصائح والإرشادات عن تقييم الوضع الحالي و المستقبلي للموظف
مال الكاتب إلى تضخيم أهميه وظيفية إدارة الموارد البشريه في قيادة الشركة ، مما أتوقع انه ليس واقعيا، حبيت الكتيب -
winning the answers

For the last couple of months, my company has been going through a transformation. In the beginning, I (as well as a lot of my co-workers) didn't understand some decisions made by our managers: firings, many promotions, the introduction of strict rules. The first half of this book explains most of these decisions very well. Of course, the reasons for each decision are different, but there's one key concept that will help you understand them - honesty. Be honest as a manager (tell the employees 'why'), be honest as an employee (don't be afraid to ask the manager 'why?'). Thanks to asking 'why?' I've learned the answers from the managers and replaced frustration with motivation.

The second part of this book feels outdated to me. I'm not a hudge of 'putting a lot of money to your idea' when can't even know if somebody will buy it.

The chapters about promotions and work-life balance are pretty cool and can also save you a lot of time and frustration if you're wondering "wtf you didn't get a raise in the last 5 years" :)

خلاصة تجربة رائعة لاحد اهم المدراء التنفيذين في القرن الحادي والعشرين . سوف يمدك الكتاب بنصائح رائعة عن بيئة العمل وما هي طرق النجاح فيها. انصح الجميع بقراءته فسوف يحدث فرقا في تفكيرك

Wide-ranging business advice from someone who was very successful over the course of his career. Topics include performance reviews, mergers and acquisitions, strategy, budgeting, hiring, and firing.

My favorite part was the bit about building trust in the organization through candor. In social life we've learned to be polite, not be critical of others, etc. In business you have to be honest, direct, and straight-forward with people, especially when you have critical feedback for them. In a word, candor.

Unlike other books on business, this was not a meta-review of many great businesses (e.g. "Good to Great") or a consultant trying to peddle their wares (most of them). It's just a guy telling you what worked for him, and your mileage may vary.

Winning is one of the book I like the best, due to its practicality. Although I finished reading this book since 6 years ago, I still remember the chapter on Strategy which is really practical. That chapter contains questions that you can use to run a workshop to develop a strategy for your company. It as well suggests the best practices of companies that win.

This book covers all the topics that management have to concern, starting from how to set corporate vision and values, candor as the best way to communicate internally, how to differentiate people, what good leaders should do. It also includes how to hire, manage, and even fire people, as well as "change before you have to change", crisis management, budgeting and evaluation, how to grow your business organically (in other word, horizontally), concerns and pitfalls in mergers and acquisitions, and Six Sigma as a quality improvement program.

The book even cover personal part on your career, including work-life balance that he admitted he could not do this well himself.

If you have not read this book yet, I strongly recommend it is really worth your time. Then you will read it not just once, but many times like me.

Хорошие и очень ценные уроки от одного из лучших топ-менеджеров мира.

Уэлч в свое время вытянул из кризиса компанию General Electric и сделал её одной из самых успешных в мире (с 1981 по 2001 гг., общая стоимость корпорации возросла в 30 раз - с 14 до почти 400 миллиардов долларов. General Electric стала второй компанией по прибыльности в мире). Теперь Джек ушёл на заслуженный отдых и делится своим богатым опытом со всеми кому это интересно и необходимо.

Хорошая книга и сам автор достоин уважения.