ISBN: 978-1-60320-978-6
You’re a newly minted CEO with a struggling global company. You make the tough call to lay off more than 100,000 people while simultaneously deciding to invest $50 million in an executive education center. Are you flippin’ nuts? “We were downsizing the company, and I needed a place where people could congregate and get the message straight from the horse’s mouth, says Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric. “I used GE’s Crotonville center as a vehicle to teach where we were going and why—our corporate values and vision.” The decision was brilliant. GE is iconic for having an inordinate number of alums in CEO positions at other companies. Decades later Steve Jobs spent the last two years of his life essentially perfecting his own version of Crotonville at Apple. The corporate university model might have been around before Jack Welch, but he made it vital and sexy.