Terrific.

Well, thanks, everybody, for showing up live, showing up

on the stream for this Authors at Google talk.

And I could not be more excited to be

introducing our guests today.

So I'll read a little bit to make sure I

don't miss the good stuff.

Although, there's so much, we could spend a whole hour

on this.

JACK WELCH: We don't need to do that.

LASZLO BOCK: Just a little.

Just a little.

Some people may not have heard of you two.

JACK WELCH: OK.

LASZLO BOCK: So just in case.

We're thrilled to host Jack and Suzy Welch today.

Jack was chairman and CEO of General Electric

during a revolutionary time in its history,

a time when it went from a great company

to the greatest company.

And the management practices that Jack instilled

and the team he built have been lauded ever since.

And it's a once in a generation kind of company, an institution

that he built and created.

Suzy, an author and journalist, former editor-in-chief

of "The Harvard Business Review,"

a keen judge of people and talent, and a fantastic writer.

They've been partners and collaborators

for over a decade.

They're both involved in the Jack Welch Management

Institute, which is a leadership development

program and an online MBA program as well.

And they're here to speak to us today

about their book, "The Real Life MBA: Your no

BS guide to winning the game, building a team,

and growing your career."

And everything that you talk about in here

resonates incredibly deeply.

It's a personal thrill, actually,

to be here because of my own history, my few minutes

I spent at GE, unfortunately after your tenure.

And it's a delight to meet you in person as well, Suzy.

So as you can see, I had a lot of comments and questions.

So what we do is I'd kick things off,

and then we'll open it up to questions.

We also have an online page where people online are

submitting questions, and somebody

will come up and tee those up.

JACK WELCH: Great.

LASZLO BOCK: And I have the advantage in that

I've read this cover to cover.

I don't know if everybody in the room has yet had a chance to.

But just for a context setting question,

it's been about 20 years since you've been at GE,

and you two have been partners in crime for some time.

What have you been up to?

What have you been doing?

JACK WELCH: Traveling the world, selling a message of business.

Business is good.

Winning is good.

When companies win, good things happen.

You get a cheerful crowd like this in the room

because Google wins.

You wouldn't have that if it was in the tank.

So basically we're out selling how to make it win

and why winning is good.

And we're also running 24 private equity companies.

And we started a school, which now has 900 MBAs.

We've spoken to over a million and a quarter people.

Excuse my voice.

I've been doing this for three weeks.

And I'm a burned out guy now, but I love doing it.

We both love doing it, and we learn every day

from different people.

We've been in the Midwest.

We've been across the East Coast.

And then we've been in this beautiful bubble

called California.

LASZLO BOCK: Now, you were saying

when we were talking before that what you see here

in Silicon Valley-- and you've been to some other companies.

You've talked to folks.

You were both telling me it's a little different from

once you get 50 miles from here, once you get in the Midwest,

once you get to the South.

What are you seeing everywhere?

How's it different?

JACK WELCH: Well, it's a tougher grind.

It's a tougher grind.

Since the 2008 recession, things have gotten a lot tougher.

And people out there aren't back to employment levels

they were at before.

They're not sure that the company that they signed up for

is still the same company.

They've lost some benefits.

Some other things have gone away.

Companies have shrunk down.

The word across most of the country is do more with less.

That's the slogan.

No matter where you go, do more with less.

It's not the slogan here.

SUZY WELCH: This morning when we were

getting ready to come here-- we've been here for a few days,

and obviously we in our lives had dealings

with Silicon Valley companies.

And I just was ruminating.

And I said to Jack, it is really like a different planet here.

We've just been through the Midwest,

Kansas City, Minneapolis.

And just the questions are different,

and the expressions are different.

And it's like this very-- and I'm

saying this in the most positive way, because it's

a beautiful thing.

But it's a very shiny, happy place

compared to many other pockets in the United States.

Where the sense of possibility here is amazing,

but we've been in rooms filled with people

who have a very different sense of what the world feels

like right now.

And wouldn't it be an amazing, marvelous thing

if the whole country was experiencing

what you're experiencing?

It's great.

JACK WELCH: The best way to think about this is Google

runs a survey every quarter.

SUZY WELCH: Not Google.

JACK WELCH: Not Google.

I mean Gallop runs a-- I'm at Google,

so I got Google on the brain.

LASZLO BOCK: We do surveys every quarter, too.

JACK WELCH: Gallop does a survey every quarter

on employee engagement in America.

And in the recession, it got down to the point

where 70%, in 2008, of employees didn't like going to work,

were not engaged in their job, didn't like what was going on.

Today, six years later, seven years later,

it's 65% in the last quarter that

are disengaged with their work.

They don't like work.

Work isn't part of their life.

They don't see it as part of their life.

It's a way to get a check.

And that's a terrible thing.

And so we're out trying to change that.

We're out trying to get people to have this feeling

of excitement, about growth.

Growth is an elixir.

And what you can do to grow, how you can grow, how you get

aligned-- all these things.

We think-- and we've seen it in private equity.

I've been involved with 74 companies over the last 15

years, 24 are active now.

And we've changed lives at these companies,

because these companies were orphans in big companies.

They were broken companies.

You don't buy a private equity company because it's healthy.

You buy a sick company and try and fix it.

And you spend several years fixing it,

and then giving it freedom.

But that life is not going on in many companies.

LASZLO BOCK: But you started out by saying

you're about preaching winning.

And you famously are known for-- at GE,

you said you have to be number one or number two

in an industry, or get out of it.

You talk about the importance of growth, of winning.

What you write about here and what you're hinting at now

is people just not enjoying their work,

about there not being meaning.

And in the book, you talk about the importance

of having a mission.

Is a mission the same as winning?

Is winning sufficient?

Or is there something bigger, better?

JACK WELCH: Winning's the product

of a good mission, and a good set of behaviors,

and the consequences that come from it.

So winning is the result. It's not a starting point.

Like, for example, we say the chief characteristic

of a leader is to be a chief meaning officer.

Give the work purpose.

People come to work because they want a purpose.

They want to have a reason for being.

They want to be a part of it.

And your job as a leader is to let people

know why they're there, where they're

going, why they're going there.

And then when everybody leaves out

in most places, what's in it for them to go there?

And what are the consequences, pro and con, of doing it right?

LASZLO BOCK: But how do you find that meaning

in the kind of places you've been to over the last week?

SUZY WELCH: I'm just think about these two anecdotes.

I hear your question, and this is

a little bit of a roundabout way of saying this.

For many years after Jack retired,

we ran a seminar called "Two Days with Jack Welch."

Where 100 CEOs would come in from around the world,

and they would work with Jack for two days.

And when we first did the planning for this Jack said,

I'm just going to spend the first hour

on just talking about mission.

Because all these CEOs surely know

what the mission is of their company,

and then we'll move right on to X, Y, and Z.

So the first day starts out, and Jack looks at this crowd--

100 CEOs who had self-selected to come to a group

to work on management.

So you'd think they'd be very self-actualized

and enlightened.

And I was sitting at one table with a bunch of CEOs,

so I could hear what they were saying.

And Jack said, OK, so just jot down your mission.

And there was this weird, uncomfortable silence.

And I was actually sitting at a table

with two brothers who were co-CEOs of a family company.

And one brother said to the other, what's our mission?

And you're here.

We've been here.

We've been at Google an hour and a half or something.

I've heard the mission mentioned repeatedly.

We got a demo.

We met people in the hallway.

And the mission is just flowing all out of you,

and I actually think you also--

LASZLO BOCK: Are you getting sick of it by now?

SUZY WELCH: No, I actually dig it a lot.

I was saying to Jack, too bad none of our kids are engineers.

They know poetry and whatever.

Because this is the kind of place

a mother would want her kid to work.

And so because of that mission and that sense of incredible--

I think you all know what you're doing here

and how your work is connected to the mission.

And secondly, in our 10, 12 years

traveling around the world, we've

made the point over and over again

that it's imperative for leaders, no matter

if you're a leader of 300 people or three people,

to make sure that your people know where they stand.

How they're doing, what they're doing well,

what they could be doing better, what the trajectory

of their career looks like.

And when we travel around we say to crowds, how many of you

know where you stand?

And it is a very, very good day when 15% of the crowd