Jack Welch, Bill Lane and GE

Bill Lane, speechwriter for former GE boss Jack Welch, was the guest speaker at Dana Rubin’s latest meeting of the NY Speechwriter’s Roundtable this month. Lane, a tall Irishman from Brooklyn wearing slacks and an open collar, addressed about 20 speechwriters gathered in a dining room on the second floor of the Pfizer building in New York. He admitted to us that he was now past sixty (“I can’t believe that word just came out of my mouth”). He was there to share some of the anecdotes and insights that he’s gathered in a memoir of his years working with Welch. The book is entitled Jacked Up. If that title sounds crude, you’ve got the point.

As Lane told us in his opening remarks, “The language was uniformly foul around GE. . . Jack had a terrible, terrible mouth. I called my mom, who’s 91 years old and spends half the day on her computer – and spends the other half day in church – I told her, “Mom, you might not want to read this book because some of the talk in it you’re not going to like . . . ”

“And she said, “Why would you put bad words in a book?”

“I said, “Well, because that’s the way we spoke around that place.”

Welch emerges as a character we might find in a play by Mamet or a cartoon in the back pages of Hustler Magazine. He was of course, a genius, but also a misogynist, a bully, a Daddy Warbucks with the vocabulary you might hear during a fistfight between Hell’s Angels and the Teamsters.

Welch was capable of dictatorial sexism – telling the only female vice president at GE “no more babies, got it? You’re not having any more kids!” And he was a bully who punched Lane on one occasion and often abused other employees. One speechwriter who fell into disfavor was fired when Jack found him still occupying an office.

“You still here?”

“Just trying to make a contribution, Jack.”

“Yeah, well, you came for lunch and you stayed for dinner. See ya!”

Lane said, “I don’t think Jack’s bullying, his bad language or his attitudes toward women accomplished anything and I don’t think there’s anything to be learned from them. Some people don’t like them being in this book. I tried to tell them this is a period piece. This is a snapshot of GE maybe seven – eight years ago . . . and things have changed considerably around there now. That does not reflect the atmosphere of General Electric today. That would not be tolerated today.”

Lane was conflicted about revealing the foul language and the unpleasant side of his legendary boss’s nature. “Have I crossed an ethical line here?” he asked us. He seemed torn between guilt over possibly betraying a man he has great affection for, and the importance of telling the truth. Is a speechwriter ethically bound to silence the way a priest who hears confession is? By publishing the book, Lane has chosen not to stroke one man’s ego, but to provide a lesson for all – the necessity for corporate communications to insist on “absolute candor.”

We learned about the positive aspects of Jack Welch’s personality.

“He was the best business communicator I have ever seen.” Lane told us. “I have said before that I worked for twenty years as a speechwriter to a guy who didn’t really need a speechwriter. I don’t think I made that point too much to Jack in case he started thinking. But in any case, we transformed that company in the way GE communicated over a period of about eight or nine years,” Lane went on. Lane ran the corporate officers’ meeting and the general managers’ meeting, which were the two big annual meetings in GE. Typical presentations in those meetings you would “stand up and tell everyone how great your new locomotive is, and how great your new financial service product is and how everything is wonderful with a big elaborate slide show.”

One day when Welch and Lane were preparing the agenda for a meeting. Something happened that changed completely the way those meetings operated. Welch suddenly stopped and froze for a long moment, concentrating intently. “It was like smoke was coming out of his ears.”

Then Welch said “No, no, no! We’re not doing this anymore! No more reports! We’re sick of reports! Anything that doesn’t tell people what to do and how to do it is a waste of time!”

“From that time forward,” Lane continued, “anybody that wanted to get on the agenda had to have something to share with the general crowd. It had to be a gift. If you walked out with nothing but how great this guy’s locomotive was, you’ve wasted their time. Jack then took this further into what he called “the bore test.” If what you had to talk about was going to be boring to anyone in the room – not on the program.” Lane made a gesture across his throat.

“What a refreshing change! It suddenly became okay to stand up and say, as one guy did in the plastics business: “Look, six months ago we tried to raise prices on GM – on our plastics – we had about forty pounds per car.” He said “They didn’t take the price increase and we insisted . . . and they fired us! We lost our biggest customer. And then it took six months, the CEO’s had to get involved to negotiate, all of us lost a bunch of money, we finally got them back. What I’m going to tell you over then next ten minutes is how we screwed up. Where we made the mistake when we raised prices on this customer and how we rectified it once we got our minds right.” That was his presentation

“And you had 500 people sitting there writing notes, because every one of them at some point was going to have to raise prices on a customer. It was okay to stand up and say “this is what we did wrong, learn from it.” The meetings became real family meetings, sharing. If you ever got up there and tried to BS people or be disingenuous in any degree, you weren’t thrown off the stage, you were fired from the General Electric Company. Absolute candor was the rule.“

There followed what Lane called “the Perry Mason period,” with people confessing to mistakes on the podium and some of them crying, and Jack having to give them a hug and tell them to “go and sin no more.”

Retooling the communications at the corporate level at GE was the thing Bill Lane was proudest of in his work with Jack Welch. He stressed that change several times, contrasting it to the old way of making obfuscating, self-serving reports and presentations. “We used to lie, to tell each other everything was wonderful, that business was terrific! But nothing was learned, people would leave those meetings empty handed. . . now they walk out with, maybe not something for everyone, but at least a lesson had been learned.”

“The best one of these presentations I ever heard was by a guy named Dave Nissen who ran Global Consumer Finance (which) he started through acquisitions all pasted together and grew it into about $14 billion business. He stood up and said “You know, we did a lot of smart things, we did a lot of stupid things. Over then next eight or ten minutes I am going to tell you what we have learned in making acquisitions.” Five hundred people there, taking notes, learning from the world master of acquisitions. It doesn’t get any better than that in a 400,000 person organization to have people stand up there and share and help each other. That’s the way we changed GE, at least at the corporate level.”

Lane then suggested that we as speechwriters and communications experts might copy this tactic in transforming the culture at other companies. He said: “You can do it only if you have the total support of the CEO. He or she has to believe in this concept of eliminating the BS from meetings and people having helpful conversations with each other.”

Other points he made were: Keep people off the agenda – even the big shots – if they have nothing useful to say. Get rid of PowerPoint. It’s a corrupting and infecting waste of time, and a lazy person’s way to do a presentation. Welch would say, “Turn that thing off and tell me what you have to say. Do you have anything to say?”

Lane emphasized the importance of absolute candor, as Welch himself did in his book a few years ago. The vital step is in taking control of the meetings at the corporate level or the division level. If you’re a speechwriter or communications officer who can get the full backing of the CEO, you can make a huge difference in the culture of the company.

Of course, Lane had a very special relationship with his CEO. They both came from Irish working class neighborhoods – Welch in Boston, Lane in Brooklyn, so they shared a lot in background, language and point of view. Clearly Lane had won the trust and backing from Welch that he needed. The communication between the two was a model of the candor they enforced on the company. For me, that seems to answer the ethical question Bill Lane asked of the group of us – you cannot demand absolute candor on the one hand and expect a load of flattery from your closest communications partner.

In any case, the real story here is not how bad Jack Welch was, but how good he and Lane were together in transforming the culture of General Electric. As we learned, Bill Lane’s pay rose into the high seven figures, mostly from stock options. The stock split five times in twenty years and never failed to declare a dividend. It’s hard to beat success like that. Obviously, Lane could not have made any changes in GE without Welch – but the more interesting question is could Welch have done as much without Lane?

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© 2008 Mike Landrum