ABSTRACT
Jack Welsh, the former leader of GE, repeatedly stressed it was the company's diversity that was its greatest strength. By diversity he referred to both its varied business divisions and its multicultural employees. While the popular management thinking of the 1980s and 1990s was to focus on a core business and “stick to the knitting,” Jack Welsh helped the multifocused conglomerate GE to thrive. He did it, in part, by taking best practices from one division, reworking them, and applying them to other divisions in the company. As with diverse corporate divisions, so with multinational employees—take the differing and often-conflicting ideas, work them, and come up with something better.
