Channeling, Or Cancelling, Jack Welch
By Ben Comer, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
This month’s cover story digs into Adial Pharmaceuticals, a small operation with big ambitions, and its new CEO, Cary Claiborne. During his 40-year professional career, Claiborne has worked in executive financial positions representing just about every major industry sector. In the second half of his career, driven by a desire to make a difference and work for mission-driven organizations, Claiborne made a home in life sciences, an industry he describes as “the place I want to work.”
Claiborne got his start in the General Electric (GE) Financial Management Program, joining fresh out of undergraduate school in 1982, one year after Jack Welch became, in his mid-40s, the company’s youngest CEO ever. Welch and the culture he established at GE taught Claiborne business management lessons he says have served him well at every company he has worked for after leaving GE Capital in 1997. The question is, did Welch lead Claiborne, and the hundreds (if not thousands) of executives touched by Welch’s influence, down a dead-end street?
Once heralded as among the greatest business managers of all time, Welch’s stewardship of GE, and the management principles he espoused (Welch died of renal failure in 2020), have come increasingly under fire in recent years. The financialization of a company such as GE in the 1980s and 1990s, and Welch’s obsessive focus on quarterly earnings, is not the right strategy for 21st-century leadership, writes Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, in a new “emerging leader edition” of his True North book series. Today’s leaders must build for the long term and prioritize organizational transparency and openness over smoke and mirrors.
Other Welchian apostates are even more cutting. David Gelles, a former Financial Times and current New York Times journalist, whose recent book on Jack Welch is titled The Man Who Broke Capitalism, takes issue with Welch’s “explosive temper” and “violent rhetoric,” among other things, writing that Welch personifies “an outdated model of executive leadership, one defined by toxic masculinity, a disregard for workers, and a myopic obsession with short-term results.” That does sound like the 1980s.
Unlike the binary oppositional politics of today, however, it seems intuitively sensible to assume that one of the most successful CEOs in recent history might have some useful ideas and strategies worth remembering. Claiborne elaborated on these fundamentals in our interview, and even George acknowledges in his Truth North update that Welch’s hardness and willingness to challenge employees was actually a form of tough love, which “let people know that he was committed to their success.”
Just as science moves forward through past experiments, taking instruction from success and learning from failure, leaders in the 21st century need not fully repudiate the titans of yesteryear, but instead stand to gain by extracting the principles that work, discarding those that don’t, and using the future as a lens for creating culture and strategy for success today.