Page 148 - The Way to the Top

John H. MYERS

President and CEO of GE Asset Management Incorporated

After working thirty-three years for General Electric, a company that
many consider to be the best managed in the world, I’ve had the good
fortune to work in an environment full of terrific role models and leaders,

people like Jack Welch, Reg Jones, Larry Bossidy, Bob Wright, and GE’s
newest CEO, Jeff Immelt. As the infamous American philosopher Yogi
Berra once allegedly said, “You can see a lot by just watching.”

Watch what other successful leaders do, how they do it, and what
worked or didn’t work for them. The rules of business aren’t like writing a

term paper in college. Plagiarism isn’t a guaranteed F or expulsion; it’s a
best practice. Copying successful people and their ideas, emulating them,
and improving upon them is a strategy we shouldn’t be embarrassed about.

There aren’t too many original, creative thinkers in business like Thomas
Edison, Bill Gates, or Henry Ford. I know I’m certainly not one of them.
There are, however, many successful business people that we can all learn
from.

For example, in 1988, a friend referred a sixty-eight-year-old man to me

in hopes that GE’s Pension Fund would invest in his start-up golf club
company. I agreed to meet with him and I can remember thinking that I
should be courteous because of the connection to my friend, but I had
already decided that I wouldn’t invest. After all, who would back a sixty-

eight-year-old who had been passed over for the top job at Burlington
Industries fifteen years earlier and who had dropped out of the corporate
business world to start a winery in Southern California? And who would
invest in the golf club industry where few people, if any, had ever made

any money?