By: Bruno J. Navarro
President
Obama’s “divide-and-conquer” approach isn’t what great
leaders do, Jack
Welch said Thursday.
The renowned former General
Electric CEO chided the president for blaming
others for economic woes.
“It was the insurance executives in health
care. It was the bankers in the collapse. It was the oil
companies as oil
prices go up. It was Congress if things didn’t go the way
he wanted. And recently it’s been the Supreme
Court,” he said.
“He’s got an enemies list that would make Richard Nixon
proud.”
Welch, who helmed GE for 21 years and founded the
Jack Welch
Management Institute at Strayer University, penned an
op-ed article for Reuters with wife Suzy Welch this week in which he tackled the
idea of Obama’s enemies list.
“Surely his supporters must think this particular tactic
is effective, but there can be no denying that the country is more polarized
than when Obama took office,” Welch wrote, making a case for presumptive
Republican presidential nominee Mitt
Romney.
“Without doubt, Romney is not the model leader (his
apparent lack of authenticity can be jarring), but he has a quality that would
serve him well as president — good old American pragmatism,” he wrote. “Perhaps
that’s the businessman in him. Or perhaps you just learn to do what you’ve got
to do when you’re a GOP governor in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts or
the man charged with salvaging the scandal-ridden Salt Lake City
Olympics. If Romney’s long record suggests anything, it’s
that he knows how to manage people and organizations to get things accomplished
without a lot of internecine warfare.”
In 1981, Welch became GE’s youngest CEO, and increased
its market value by $387 billion, making it the world’s most valuable company.
But the move came in part by slashing GE’s workforce by more than 100,000
workers, earning him the nickname he despised, “Neutron Jack,” a reference to the
bomb designed to eliminate people while leaving buildings intact.
On “The Kudlow
Report,” Welch argued that “great leaders are interested
in coalescing” the way they would run a company.
“You don’t have one division pinned against the other,”
he said. “You try to get the whole company pull together.”
Asked by host Larry Kudlow whether he
thought Romney could win the White House, Welch agreed.
“Absolutely,” he said. “It’d be great for the country.
We’d be a stronger country. We’d have more jobs. We’d have more people getting a
piece of the pie. And we wouldn’t have this divisive nature that we have with
this president, screaming at one group and then screaming at the next group in a
high-pitched voice.
“He was in
Florida this week screaming and yelling about rich people.
He went after the Supreme Court. We’ve got to stop this, Larry.”
Earlier in the interview, Welch said he was seeing modest
growth in short-cycle sectors such as food and chemicals, along with “real
strength” in non-residential construction and infrastructure.
“While the economy was strong, it wasn’t accelerating the
way I thought it would after the fourth quarter,” he said.
Tailwinds included consumer confidence and the Federal
Reserve.
“On the negative side, though, we’ve got gasoline prices,
we’ve got Europe, we don’t know where China is going and we’ve got tax increases
right around the corner,” he said.
Tune in:
"The Kudlow Report" airs weeknights
at 7 p.m. ET.
Questions? Comments, send your emails
to: lkudlow@kudlow.com
© 2012 CNBC, Inc. All Rights Reserved
URL: http://www.cnbc.com/id/47035575/
No comments:
Post a Comment