GE was a mess internally, all the way down to the shop floor, before Welch took over. His impact cannot be understated.
We were big Jack Welch fans - if he hadn't grown GE the way he did, my hometown - where it was the largest employer for decades - would have been a lot poorer.
However, it seems like a lot of his financial results came from "shaping" the quarterly earnings and various unsustainable practices. And for whatever reason his the culture he brought to the company has left his successors overseeing a company that has performed as one of the worst in the whole S&P over the last 15 years. Even if you take a pure industrial company like US Steel, which I don't think anyone would point to as being on the vanguard of management or product, GE is not doing all that well. I dunno. My pet theory is that "leaning" an organization is really a one-time thing, and that it's very challenging to do so without also removing the "seed corn" of research and even development of the next big thing. Though, to be fair, Edison himself had a wildly inconsistent financial record.
I'm not a historian of management theory so I don't know if the ideas are original, or even of how well Welch followed his own advice, but plenty of the things in his books are straight-talking common sense:
* You should know your business well enough you don't need management consultants to tell you what to do
* HR and hiring are important and should be represented in your senior team accordingly
* If you want candour (which you do) you need to reward and praise it, not punish it
* When there's a crisis, don't deny there's a problem
He's not the first person to come up with every idea in his books, but even 40 years later there are companies that need to learn these things.