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General Electric: Reg Jones and Jack Welch Introduction Wall Street Journal proclaimed Reg Jones as a "management legend". Jones was well known for the creation of sectors that managed the strategic business units exclusively designed to support strategic planning activities, key characteristic on GE's management process. Jones entered to the CEO position with a challenging, decentralized organization (190 departments) changed at the time from 190 departments to 43 SBU, nevertheless, the new structure was still shaky. He successfully managed through the change and as a result, Jones was very pleased with the accomplishments and continued pushing the strategic planning approach. By 1980’s, Jones vision was to positioned the company to a sustained earnings growth faster that the growth of the US economy at the time. This is when he started preparing the road for his successor, at the time one of his Sector Business head, Jack Welch. As described by the Wall Street Journal, GE “replaced a legend with a live wire”. Full of ideas, energy and extremely aggressive he took over the CEO position with the idea of making GE #1 Or #2 in any arena where they were competing, as well structure and diversified company. Every business needed to be evaluated under the following criteria: Fix, sell or close. On the other hand Welch believed in a lean and agile organization, eliminating all those positions that were not adding direct value to the processes in placed. Jack Welch was also very radical in chipping away bureaucracy eliminating the sector organization previously established by Jones, serious reductions of personnel took place. Contributions REG JONES CONTRIBUTIONS JACK WELCH CONTRIBUTIONS He made the SBU structure and planning processes inherited to work At first he created two additional sectors: Technical Systems, Services and Materials He hired strategic planners during the transition period Introduce a new planning approach oriented to key issues.
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