JACK WELCH, THE STUTTERER WHO BECAME THE HEAD OF GENERAL ELECTRICS

Time and time again we see the impact that stutterers have made on the human experience from science (Isaac Newtown, Robert Boyle ), medicine (Dr. Gerald Maguire) politics (Vice President Joseph Biden, King George VI, Winston Churchill), literature (John Updike, Lewis Carroll), journalism (Byron Pitts, John Stossell), sports and entertainment (Ellis Lankster, Ron Hopper, Kenyon Martin, Bo Jackson), business (Arthur Blank, Jack Welch) etc.



Today I will focus on Jack Welch the former CEO and chairman of General Electrics. Jack Welch have attributed the development of his strong confidence to his mother (we saw a similar story with Vice President Joseph Biden and his mother Jean Biden in my last blog). As a kid growing up Jack Welch recalled being teased and ridiculed because of his stutter. It was during these difficult and lonely times that his mother encouraged and motivated her son to stand tall.



Jack Welch recalled in an article in Capitalism Magazine (February 28, 2002) that: My mother never managed people, but she knew all about building self-esteem. I grew up with a speech impediment, a stammer that wouldn't go away. Sometimes it led to comical, if not embarrassing, incidents. In college, I often ordered a tuna fish on white toast on Fridays when Catholics in those days couldn't eat meat. Inevitably, the waitress would return with not one but a pair of sandwiches, having heard my order as "tu-tuna sandwiches."
My mother served up the perfect excuse for my stuttering. "It's because you're so smart," she would tell me. "No one's tongue could keep up with a brain like yours." For years, in fact, I never worried about my stammer. I believed what she told me: that my mind worked faster than my mouth.


Jack Welched continued: I didn't understand for many years just how much confidence she poured into me. Decades later, when looking at early pictures of me on my sports teams, I was amazed to see that almost always I was the shortest and smallest kid in the picture. In grade school, where I played guard on the basketball squad, I was almost three-quarters the size of several of the other players.



Yet I never knew it or felt it. Today, I look at those pictures and laugh at what a little shrimp I was. It's just ridiculous that I wasn't more conscious of my size. That tells you what a mother can do for you. She gave me that much confidence. She convinced me that I could be anyone I wanted to be. It was really up to me. "You just have to go for it," she would say. Jack Welch obtained his Masters and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1960. Fortune Magazine in 1999 named Jack Welch "Manager of the Century." Jack Welch turned GE into a multi billion dollar company by the time he retired in 2001. Jack Welch did not allow stuttering to hold him captive. Armed with his mother's support in empowering him with confidence despite of his stuttering he became one of the most successful CEO's in modern history.

Please leave your comments and thoughts about this story. Thank you.

Below is a video with Jack Welch counseling young people on mentoring. Click on the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ipNo1BLeIk&feature=related