Nobody raised a stink when Fortune magazine named Jack Welch manager of the century in 1999, in light of the fact that GE had become the most admirable company in corporate America. Better yet, CEOs around the world were striving to learn his leadership style and his much-coveted management practices or rules.

Welch's rules also gained currency in China after then-CEO of Haier, Zhang Ruimin or 张瑞敏 in Chinese, decided to take a page from Welch's playbook and turn Haier into another global powerhouse instead of a traditional Chinese company bound by bureaucracy and nepotism . To that end, Zhang went to Boston to seek the counsel of Jack Welch, trying to follow Welch's businesslike approach and use that to hone Zhang's own managerial skills in China.

Welch told Zhang that business leaders in China had to ask their people to create value for companies by fostering creativity instead of sticking to the antediluvian rules championed by predecessors. Which is to say that you have to find the right people or like-minded sorts who are sympathetic to your views. All the same, just rid them if they are not receptive to your thinking; you just don't want such obdurate sods sabotaging your efforts to enhance your company's operational efficiency.

" You own these businesses. Take charge of them. Get headquarters out of your hair. Fight the bureaucracy. Hate it. Kick it. Break it," Welch reportedly made such statements, according to Fortune's Geoffrey Colvin, who wrote several exceptional cover stories featuring Jack Welch's management style for Fortune when John Huey and Norman Pearlstein were still at the helm at Time Inc, which owned Fortune magazine way back.

Welch also set store by the notion that a company has to find its own competitive advantage; otherwise, it would be a mistake to take on a competent rival that has the upper hand in this field. Case in point: it would be foolhardy for most American companies to compete with Asian companies in terms of production and labour costs, considering that such costs r much lower in China and Vietnam. " To stay competitive, GE must be No. 1 or No. 2 in its industry," says Jack Welch.

Convinced that GE had to be a lean organization, Jack Welch introduced Six Sigma and graded its employees on a five-level scale, using it as a means to weed out the underdogs who failed to get their work done. For good measure, He was not loth to sell GE's underperforming businesses because he wanted GE to be a service company.

You might think an old geezer like Jack Welch would balk at embracing digitization. You are wide of the mark. Actually, Jack Welch paid heed to the need to go digital after he started palling around with Scott McNealy, co-founder of technology company Sun Microsystems. They both appeared on the cover of the same issue of Fortune magazine in 2000 and riffed on technological advances that had transformed the way people did business. Welch told Fortune that "Scott McNealy has taught him lots about the need to go digital."

What can a Chinese business leader learn from Jack Welch? I'd say it's not just about employee performance reviews, execution customer feedback, strategic planning and cost-cutting. It's more to do with a leader's willingness to be a game-changer in his industry. You have to be the cage-rattler if you want to survive.