The Jack Welch MBA

If managers were rock stars, Jack Welch would be the Mick Jagger of the corporate world. Countless people dream of becoming a stellar leader like the legendary former boss of General Electric (GE) - or at least thousands read his regular column in the US-magazine “Business Week”, watch his online tv show "It's Everybody's Business", or follow him on Twitter. Now they can even get one step closer to achieving their goal: thanks to their idol's 12 million dollar investment in Ohio's Chancellor University there now is an MBA degree on offer through its newly named Jack Welch Management Institute (JWMI). The start of enrolment is planned for the autumn of 2009.

Noel M. Tichy, who already led GE’s Leadership Development Center in Crotonville, New York, will serve as dean of the new business school, which has proudly announced a “unique program that will bring together a traditional business curriculum with Jack Welch’s innovative management philosophy and practices.” The Jack Welch Institute will offer two graduate-level degree programs, an MBA and a Master of Management. Classes will be offered both online and at the school’s Cleveland campus. The JWMI MBA program consists of twelve classes; tuition will be approximately $ 21,600.

The university has no accreditation with AACSB, however, and so far only offers undergraduate degrees in business, paralegal studies, criminal justice, and information technology. Nevertheless the Jack Welch Institute aims at delivering solid business education, coursework, with instruction on topics from strategy to marketing to finance. In addition there will be courses in entrepreneurship, human resource management, career management, communication and ethics. The school has yet to articulate the details, but one thing is clear: the classes will be embellished with Jack Welch’s canon of teachings on every aspect of business practice.

Welch himself sounds excited about the project: “We want to reach a lot of people, more than you can just reach in one class or at one school, with a management philosophy and a set of practices we really believe in. We know they work. We think this school, with its fresh approach, reach, accessibility and flexibility, has the potential to change lives and organizations for the better.” Over the next several months Welch and Tichy will be recruiting professors and business leaders in the school’s “Fellows Program” of guest advisors and teachers. What they will have to teach will be “accessible to everyone, across the globe", since classes will be offered online.

Reviews so far have been less than enthusiastic. The business magazine “The Economist”, for example, wonders if the curriculum is actually based on Mr Welch's management techniques - and what sort of an education that would be. The British publication suspects there would be “no place for the sort of bleeding-heart MBA Oath”, pledging to serve society rather than maximise profits that many Harvard Business School graduates have taken this summer. After all, Mr Welch became famous for launching the shareholder-value maximisation movement with a speech in 1981 on “Growing Fast in a Slow-Growth Economy”. In his active days Welch had no patience for sentimentality: if a business was not first or second in its industry, it should be sold or closed – hence his nickname “Neutron Jack”. He also earned the analogy with the neutron bomb, which kills people but leaves buildings intact because he fired more than 100,000 of GE's 411,000 workers when he took charge. 

Since leaving GE, Mr Welch's reputation has remained strong, whereas GE's has suffered: its market capitalisation is now barely 20 percent of what it was when Mr Welch left. Is GE's poor performance since then a reflection of what a great job he had done? Or is it his legacy? The “Economist” reckons these are excellent questions for a proper case-study in a MBA program.

www.jwmi.com

www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13931070