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• Mr. Welch in Newsweek
• Winning official site
• Bio on Mr. Welch

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Tavis: It's an honor to welcome Jack Welch to this program. The former chairman and CEO of General Electric has certainly not slowed down since stepping down from his post at G.E. In addition to his busy public speaking schedule, he serves as an advisor to any number of Fortune 500 CEOs, but he's also a bestselling author, as if you didn't know. His latest book 'Winning' has been a fixture on the New York Times bestseller list, as was his earlier memoir 'Jack: Straight from the Gut.' I love both of them, and I'm glad to have him here. Mr. Welch, nice to have you.

Jack Welch: Tavis, thanks so much for having me.

Tavis: I'm honored to have you here. Let me start with a bit of an unorthodox, perhaps, way to start our conversation, a little tricky question. I'll soften up after this: Tell me why I shouldn't believe that modern-day contemporary CEOs are just schmucks? I mean, every time--every day I look in the paper or I pick up a magazine I'm reading about another corporation run amok, another CEO who sold people out. Tell me why I shouldn't believe that CEOs, quite frankly, respectfully, sir, are scum?

Welch: Massive overstatement. Every day millions of people are going to work in this country--a lot of great CEOs, people running restaurants, people running big companies and small trying to compete and create a valued proposition for customers and create jobs. I was down in Atlanta last week. 50 of the fastest growing companies in Atlanta were honored. I never heard of any of them, and they had to have sales over $100 million. Here were these 50 people going up and getting their awards. They were on fire, Tavis, and that's happening all around the country. You get some high-profile messes that have colored the landscape, but in actual fact America's thriving, good people are busting their butts to make it happen, and you shouldn't have that attitude.

Tavis: As CEOs go, as CEOs are concerned, tell me in your mind what the values--I don't mean economically--but what the value is, the worth of a CEO, a corporate leader, is today to his or her corporation as compared to 25-40-50 years ago?

Welch: Great. Today, a CEO is much more engaged. He's in the middle of the action. I mean, if you go to and look at CEOs of 25 years ago, when I first became CEO, it was more or less a coronation. It was the coronation of a CEO. It was the culmination of his career, and from that point on he was sliding down and giving pompous speeches, et cetera. Today a guy gets the job or a woman gets the job, and they're in hand-to-hand combat in the global competitive world, and they gotta be out finding a vision, exciting the team, and taking the company to the next step. It's a whole different job. It's 24/7, it's at it all the time for survival.

Tavis: Let me ask you what these corporate CEOs who you do advise--I mentioned a moment ago that you serve as a formal and informal advisor to any number of Fortune 500 CEOs. Tell me what they feel, the ones who are doing good work. How do they feel about being tainted, being painted with this broad brush of CEOs run amok, back to my first question. Are they offended by this?

Welch: They hate it more than you can imagine. Imagine spending 30 years of your life to get to this job, to be doing the job, to be working hard every day, to be giving it everything you got, and you pick up the paper and here it is. But, you know, if you look at Congress and Senate, and you look at attorney generals here and there, there's always some scandal with somebody--politicians somewhere, some other deal. Business has turned into a battle right now. We had a great run in the nineties, businesses there. But these people are--they hate it. How would you like to have it? I mean, it's no good. It's bad.

Tavis: How much--let me rephrase that--has Congress done enough, given the corporate scandals we've had of late, to assure the American people that they can trust American enterprise? Should more be done? If so, what ought to be done?

Welch: They may have done too much.

Tavis: You think too much?

Welch: They may have done too much. I mean, Sarbanes/Oxley was desperately needed. It was a law that the public clamored for, but any law that passes the Senate 99 to nothing--

Tavis: Something's wrong with it. Ha ha ha ha!

Welch: You know that.

Tavis: Unless it's a Congressional gold medal for Nelson Mandela, something's wrong.

Welch: Something's wrong. And this may have been excessive. Now it's not a big burden for the big companies, but small companies with all these financial controls that are in there now and the penalties that go on with small entrepreneurial companies, it's tough. Now some of the things on boards could be modified a little bit, but it was a great law, it was put in place at the right time. Now we just need to modify it a little bit to make it more reasonable.

Tavis: Beyond Sarbanes/Oxley, what do you think can be done or ought to be done to restore the trust of the American public in corporate America so that folk don't feel like corporations are out of control?

Welch: Keep telling the story of good corporations, winning corporations give back. Tavis, the thing that you gotta understand is that losing corporations aren't worth a darn. They don't pay taxes, the employees are scared, they can't give back. You take California with all of the dot-coms that went on. They couldn't do anything for their people when the companies fell apart. Winning companies give back. We had 45,000 mentors in G.E. around the world, taking inner-city kids, mentoring them, having their products be graduates of schools. It's unbelievable. We paid taxes, we have great community involvement.

When the tsunami came I called to give a donation to G.E. 'cause they were matching it. I called the second day, and I said, 'How's it going?' they said, 'Fabulous. 2.6 million from our employees in the first 24 hours.' Those are incredible stories, and they gotta keep getting out. When I went around giving these Q&A sessions with companies, a lot of people felt bad who worked in companies. I said, 'Is your company bad?' 'No, no, not ours. Ours is fine.' Tavis, that's the way it is for most companies--good Americans going to work every day trying to compete, and they're winning for the most part, and winning the right way. Look, we had some bad apples doing some bad stuff, but it won't be the last time it's ever done.

Tavis: You mentioned inner-city kids a moment ago, and I say this respectfully--I would never disrespect Jack Welch--but respectfully I say to you it's one thing--and you're on the lecture circuit a lot--it's one thing for Jack Welch to show up and to speak to a roomful of inner-city kids about how, if they work hard and if they dream big, they can perhaps run G.E. one day. It's another thing when an African American CEO shows up or a Latino CEO or a woman CEO shows up. How do you grade corporate America in the most multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic America ever, for showing these people that they can do the same thing Jack Welch has done?

Welch: I mean, rapid progress. If you want to look at the last 10 years, over the 40 years I've been in business, it's gone like this, and now it's going like this. And whether it's CEOs like Dick Parsons or a Ken Chenault or a woman like Anne Mulcahy at Xerox, or whether it's people like that, this is happening. This is happening, whether it's Lucent with Pat Russo. We're getting some great stories. I mean, we haven't got enough yet, but clearly the pipeline is now filled, so that the idea that there isn't anybody available anymore, that idea is falling apart, and you're starting to see boards really move in this area.

Tavis: Um, tell me the major difference between this book 'Winning' and the last book 'Jack: Straight from the Gut'?

Welch: 'Jack' was all about me, Tavis. It was an autobiography. It was about Jack and his life and how he got here and how he got there. This is the product of going around with my wife for 3 years, sitting in front of 300,000 people, our audiences, and listening to questions, and answering Q&As, and having this incredible package of data: What do you do when you work for a bad boss? How do you get promoted? All of these questions they got. What about work/life balance? What about this and that and the next thing? And then going back and codifying it and trying to take 40 years of experience, with a great editor and writer, my wife, and putting it together and answering their questions. Hopefully this book will answer questions for any kid graduating from college to any middle manager and even help a few CEOs. But it takes care--it deals with every aspect of career and life.

Tavis: In many respects, and I'm telling you stuff that you know better than I do--America is no longer the world's leading manufacturer. In so many other areas we no longer have the distinction of being the best, of being number one, although we are the U.S. of A. We're still not number one in as many areas as we used to be.

Welch: We're still number one, we're just threatened.

Tavis: We are threatened. We're threatened more in many respects but in many areas we are not number one.

Welch: Like textiles.

Tavis: Exactly. So I guess the question is, how on balance does America get back to being number one across the board? I'm thinking of Thomas Friedman's book that the world is flattening. How do we compete in this new global world?

Welch: By moving up the food chain, more and more value-added services, more of those 50 companies in Atlanta coming up everywhere doing new things. Look, why don't we look at it this way: when I got the job in 1980, the prime rate was 23 percent, unemployment was 13 percent. Inflation was running at 14 percent, and the GDP had been negative for 9 straight quarters. You want to talk about bad times? Today look at us. 5 percent unemployment, 4 percent a quarter GDP, inflation at 4 percent. Tavis, stop looking at the cup half-empty. It's more than half-full.

Tavis: Let me close with this--I have about 30 seconds left, and this isn't fair to ask you in 30 seconds but I'm curious. In the Newsweek article where you were featured on the cover a couple of weeks ago, one of the things that came out of that article was that you are practicing your faith more now. You're going to church more now than you did, for obvious reasons, I suspect, than you did when you were a CEO. I'm curious, how might you have been a different CEO had you been practicing your faith then as you are now?

Welch: I don't think an iota different.

Tavis: Not one difference?

Welch: No. I think I always tried to be open, candid, and fair. Nobody was ever surprised who worked for me. Transparent relationships with people. I think faith is more about me and what I'm trying to find out about myself. It's not about how I would have led.

Tavis: The new book by Jack Welch, with Suzy Welch, don't want to leave Suzy out of this, 'Winning.' I'm sure you'll pick up a copy if you don't already have one. Up next, singer-songwriter Tori Amos. Stay with us.