The Management Lesson Of Jack Welch

With its IPO, Facebook will instantly create a thousand millionaires among its employees. Jack Welch rightly sees a future management problem in this sudden creation of wealth.

The legendary, former General Electric CEO spoke to Reuters.

He underlined that the IPO will create a schism within Facebook workforce between the newly rich employees and the rest of the staff. “Internally they’re going to have a hell of a time. There’s going to be a class of haves – those who there early – and those are have nots. ”

“They’ve gotta outline their purpose and vision more clearly then they ever have. They’ve got to make a higher purpose for these employees. ”

Having already seen this in my career, I can only agree with Jack Welch. The only way to manage such flagrant disparities in wealth within a company is to sublimate them by bringing employees around a common vision.

This vision should help maintain the sense of belonging of the less privileged employees while motivating those who no longer need to work. This is an extraordinarily difficult balance to find and that will test the management team of Facebook in the coming months.