Jack Welch’s Strategy to Blog Reading (The Solution to Information Overload)
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Jack Welch: What can he teach you about blog reading and writing?
1.
Jack Welch is the famous Ex-CEO of GE. Under his reign of 20 years, GE went from a $14 billion in 1981 to close to $400 billion! Because of this stellar performance, Jack Welch is known as the “best manager of the century”!
Because of Welch, many management ideas like “Six Sigma” became popular. But one of Welch’s most controversial ideas was the most important pillar in GE’s exponential growth. What was that idea?
Fire The Bottom 10% of Employees
Welch bought about a culture of tracking the performance of all GE employees. And every year, the employees who made the bottom 10% were let go. Very soon, GE was left with the smartest people working for them. After a few sessions of firings, even the bottom 10% of GE was better than the top 10% of other companies!
2.
“As you read, so will you write.”
- Roy H. Williams
Does it surprise you to know that each and every popular writer is an avid reader? From Stephen King to Isaac Asimov to Roy H. Williams - all of them were voracious readers. Read well and you will write well.
But today, most people are overwhelmed with the quantity of reading. People have 200 books in their wishlists. And 150 RSS feeds in their RSS readers.
How To Go From Quantity Reading to Quality Reading?
So what should you do to read less but read well? What can you do to not be overwhelmed by the number of things you have to read? Simple: use Jack Welch’s strategy!
Fire the Bottom 10% of Your RSS Feeds!
Get rid of the bottom 10% of your RSS feeds. Do this every month until you are left with less than 20 feeds! And every time you feel like adding a new RSS feed to your feed reader, make sure you delete one RSS feed before adding a new one.
3.
But What If I Miss the Newest Big Thing?
People fear that getting rid of information equals to them missing important news. But those fears are baseless. Because if something is really news worthy, more than one person will talk about it. And you will hear about it.
Your success doesn’t depend on being the first one to know the news. Instead, it depends on your ability to focus on the quality stuff only.
By restricting your RSS feeds, you not only gain time to do more important things, but you also create a quality filter: only useful things will cross your desk.
A-Pile vs B-Pile of Reading
If you are still hesitant, you can do this: create two accounts with your RSS feed reading website. Save only the best 20 feeds in one account: your A-Pile. And store all the other mediocre ones in the B-Pile. Spend time reading the A-Pile everyday. And spend time on the B-Pile only when you have time.
You’ll soon find that your B-Pile is close to worthless. After some time, you’ll spend less than 60 minutes a week going through your B-Pile - even if it has 150 feeds!
Action Summary:
- Reduce the number of RSS feeds you read everyday. A good manage-able number is to limit them to 20.
- Delete at least 10% of your RSS feeds today. And repeat the deletion every month until you are left with 20.
- Before adding a new RSS feed, delete an old feed! This way, you’ll only add a feed that is of top quality. And your overall quality of reading will improve tremendously!
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Wow! I’ve read many people talk about information overload. But no one made it as interesting and easy to act on as you Ankesh. You are definately in my top 20 blog feeds.
Posted 16 Jul 2007 #
It was an amazing read & your blog site is too good.
Posted 16 Jul 2007 #
Thanks Jamie for your constant kind words and encouragement.
Thanks Sunil too.
Posted 16 Jul 2007 #
You made a good point. I have over 300 blogs bookmarked and over 60 RSS FEED subscription. I spent hours and hours read through those posts and find meaningful one.
Great way to reduce the amount of time on reading blog. I am glad that I word for myself, otherwise, I might be fired by my boss.
Posted 17 Jul 2007 #
Welch’s idea of firing the bottom 10% works great for about 3 cycles. Then you’re into your talented core team. I disagree with this approach and don’t it was the critical key to GE growth.
Posted 02 Aug 2007 #
Eric: Thanks for your opinion. I tend to agree with you when it comes to employees. In fact - I don’t even believe that status reports can show which employees are in the bottom 10% for most tasks.
But you can adapt Welch’s strategy for other purposes. Combine it with a limitation strategy (that determines how big your core is/should be) and you will always improve the performance of that particular purpose.
For eg: in the purpose of RSS feeds - determine that your core is 20 or 30 feeds. And then use the Welch strategy to get rid of 10% every week - until you reach 30 feeds. And then, every so often - review your feeds again. This way, you will always improve the feeds you read.
Posted 03 Aug 2007 #