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What is also very clear is that Welch had a bold playbook. His vision of factory floor competence boosted margins and cash, even while investing heavily. He expected hard work and exceptional performance from his managers, and he benchmarked diligently as an accountability tool. His playbook also included a heavy emphasis on global expansion and, in his later years, a hyperfocus on the internet as a productivity tool. His initiatives were never optional, but he sold the merits hard. He took little for granted.
Lessons From the Titans
Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, and Rob Wertheimer
Treat every strategy with caution, and take care to avoid becoming intellectually or emotionally wedded to your preferred strategy. You may be horribly wrong and need to bail on it. As Scott McNealy famously said, “fail fast”—the sooner the better. We sometimes use the expression “that dog won't hunt”—not in reference to a person but to a strategic approach that just isn't working, no matter what we do. It's hard to say that if you're irrationally attached to a strategy.
That’s because the distinction that matters most to us is the application, not the underlying technology (the book isn’t adequately clear about this). If a company asks a chatbot to read résumés and predict who will perform well at a job, and accepts or rejects job applicants on the basis of the responses, that’s still predictive AI, and all of our skepticism applies. The point of the application is to make decisions, not generate text.
AI Snake Oil
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
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