Bounderyless Leadership

Essay by thisfridayCollege, UndergraduateA-, July 2008

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When Welch became a CEO, the GE was delayered and distaffed to a great extent. One of the first important steps Jack took was reorganizing the company. By removing seven layers in the company with hundreds of subgroups and divisions with many managers within each group, Welch reconfigured the structure so that there were only three layers which made the communication with each division direct and open. This helped to improve control and free flowing communication and allowed sharing the high responsibilities between everyone in the company.

This approach helped to incorporate diversity called “bounderyless” company. Bounderaless company is the one described as “an open, anti-parochial environment friendly toward the seeking and sharing of new ideas, regardless of their origins” (Bartlett, 2004, p. 8). During the interview, Jack Welch said: “Bounderaless was to remove all the barriers among different functions (engineering, manufacturing, marketing and the rest). We knocked down external walls with our suppliers just as we knocked out the less visible walls of race and gender internally.

Simply put, bounderyless thinking meant we were open to the best ideas and practices from anywhere - another colleague, another department, another country or even another company. It changed our thinking and broadened our awareness” (Byrne, 2007).

With this new system, the members of the team shared ideas and learned quickly from each other which lead to a successful cooperation and improved effectiveness of team work in GE. The way this system was implemented is by sharing hundreds assessments through posting in order to guide manager of any part of the company, who is in charge of implementing a new operation. Some of the examples are controlling an account, reorganizing a process, using common practices not only to be efficient but also “to increase the organization's intellect and, thus, its effectiveness”...