Jack Welch Quotes

I actually think that the economy has got some positives. It's got the market. It's got consumer confidence and it's got banks throwing - I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world.

We know where most of the creativity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies - in the minds of those closest to the work.

Hierarchy is an organization with its face toward the CEO and its ass toward the customer.

When you become a leader success is all about growing others.

If we get the right people in the right job we've won the game.

As a leader, your job is to energize people around the mission and vision you've articulated.

The best way to support dreams and stretch is to set apart small ideas with big potential, then give people positive role models and the resources to turn small projects into big businesses.

People development should be a daily event, integrated into every aspect of your regular goings-on.

If you want risk taking, set an example yourself and reward and praise those that do.

We've all been guilty at one point or another in our careers of boasting of perfect hindsight.

It's a terrible sin.

If you don't make sure your questions and concerns are acted upon, it doesn't count.

I've learned in a hundred ways that I rarely regretted acting but often regretted NOT acting fast enough.

When the amount of change externally exceeds the amount of change internally, the end is in sight.

The last thing you want to do is be a bore. When you wake up in the morning, give yourself a good mirror test. If you look like you're going to be a sulking, pouting bore, slap yourself in the face before you go out to the office.

GE's businesses turned in a terrific first quarter. Our products and services are being well received in unusually robust global markets.

Strategy is not a lengthy action plan. It is the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances.

Great leaders love to see people grow. The day you are afraid of them being better than you is the day you fail as a leader.

Don't make the process harder than it is.

The most important quality of leadership is intellectual honesty. The reality principle - the ability to see the world as it really is, not as you wish it were.

In the future, those who are not coaches will not be promoted.

What Sam Walton did was to go into one of the most mature industries of all and find a way to make it grow, grow, grow, double-digit, month after month, year after year. He did it by innovation, customer focus, and above all, speed.

Insecure managers create complexity. Frightened, nervous managers use thick convoluted planning books and busy slides filled with everything they've known since childhood ... ... . They worry that if they're simple, people will think they're simple minded. In reality, of course, it's just the reverse. Clear, tough minded people are the most simple.

Control Your Own Destiny or Someone Else Will

If you don't have public hangings for bad culture in a company, if you don't take people out and let them say, they went home to spend more time with the family. It's crazy.

The idea flow from the human spirit is absolutely unlimited. All you have to do is tap into that well. I don't like to use the word efficiency. It's creativity. It's a belief that every person counts.

The best thing workers can bring to their jobs is a lifelong thirst for learning.

Number one, cash is king ... number two, communicate ... number three, buy or bury the competition.

In any bad situation you can not let yourself be a victim.

Shareholder value is the result of you doing a great job, watching your share price go up, your shareholders win, and dividends increasing. What happens when you have increasing shareholder value? You're delivering better employees to their communities and they can give back. Communities are winning because employees are involved in mentoring and all these other things. Customers are winning because you're providing them new products.

You talk about seeing around corners as an element of success. That's what differentiates the good leader. Not many people have it. Not many people can predict that corner. That would be a characteristic of great leaders.

Strategy is simply resource allocation. When you strip away all the noise, that's what it comes down to. Strategy means making clear cut choices about how to compete. You cannot be everything to everybody, no matter what the size of your business or how deep its pockets.

Again, your challenge is not just to improve. It is to break the service paradigm in your industry or market so that customers aren't just satisfied, they're so shocked that they tell strangers on the street how good you are.

If GE's strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.

Simple messages travel faster, simpler designs reach the market faster and the elimination of clutter allows faster decision making.

A strategy is something like, an innovative new product; globalization, taking your products around the world; be the low-cost producer. A strategy is something you can touch; you can motivate people with; be number one and number two in every business. You can energize people around the message.

Set stretch goals. Don't ever settle for mediocrity. The key to stretch is to reach for more than you think is possible. Don't sell yourself short by thinking that you'll fail.

Any time there is change, there is opportunity. So it is paramount that an organization get energized rather than paralyzed.

There is no straight line to a dream.

Trying to get people to face reality and see the world the way it really is is an absolutely critical aspect of leadership, in my view.

No one can guarantee you a job other than satisfied customers. That's the only thing that works. Nothing creates work other than products and services you provide that create satisfied customers.

Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.

Control your own Destiny or somebody else will

The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important - and then get out of their way while they do it.

Globalization is now no longer an objective but an imperative, as markets open and geographic barriers become increasingly blurred and even irrelevant.

Take the middle 70 percent and tell them what they need to do to get into the top 20 percent.

Globalization has taken a hit in that there is some sand in the gears because most of us have supply chains that are all over the world that we've had to lengthen.

The story about GE that hasn't been told is the value of an informal place. I think it's a big thought. I don't think people have ever figured out that being informal is a big deal.

One of the jobs of a manager is to instill confidence, pump confidence into your people. And when you've got somebody who's raring to go and you can smell it and feel it, give 'em that shot.

Getting every employee's mind into the game is a huge part of what a CEO job is all about. Taking everyone's best ideas and transferring them to others is the secret. There's nothing more important.

I don't think environmentalists have the slightest reason to be concerned about globalization because every time you move a plant to a new place you upgrade the neighborhood. You put in global standards. You put in modern plants. And all the plants around it get improved.

In manufacturing, we try to stamp out variance. With people, variance is everything.

If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.

Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.

Ninety-nine point nine percent of all employees are in the pile because they don't think.

The biggest opportunity for big companies has come by far in the digitization of internal processes.

You have no right to be a leader if someone who works for you doesn't know where they stand.

If you are not confused, you don´t know what is going on.

The final relationship that cannot be ignored is with disrupters:
They are individuals who cause trouble for sport - inciting opposition
to management for a variety of reasons, most of them petty.
Usually these people have good performance - that's their cover - and so
they are endured or appeased.
A company that manages people well takes disrupters head-on.
First they give them very tough evaluations, naming their bad behaviour
and demanding it change.
Usually it won't. Disrupters are a personality type.
If that's the case, get them out of the way of people trying to do their
jobs.
They're poison.

Business is a game, and as with all games, the team that puts the best people on the field and gets them playing together wins. It's that simple.

Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It's just cultural. People just don't want to do it.

Life is too short to spend every day doing something you don't love.

The most important job you have is growing your people, giving them a chance to reach their dreams.

Nothing of any importance has ever been accomplished by a pessimist.

Arrogance is a killer, and wearing ambition on one's sleeve can have the same effect. There is a fine line between arrogance and self-confidence. Legitimate self-confidence is a winner. The true test of self-confidence is the courage to be open-to welcome change and new ideas regardless of their source. Self-confident people aren't afraid to have their views challenged. They relish the intellectual combat that enriches ideas.

The idea of let's all share the pain equally, or let's freeze salaries altogether - it's ass-backwards. It's absolutely ass-backwards.

It's the internet like the flu - it just spreads like crazy.

In the end, your integrity is all you've got.

Any company trying to compete ... must figure out a way to engage the mind of every employee.

If you have a reputation as a big, stiff bureaucracy, you're stuck.

If you've got a company that has a mentality inside that is filled with searching for a better idea every day, not just as a slogan but as a real concept, you will have innovation around you all the time.

Don't lose youself on the way to the top.

Nobody is too important to lead the initiative you say is important.

What is a budget review? A personal review with numbers

Someone, somewhere has a better idea.

Strong managers who make tough decisions to cut jobs provide the only true job security in today's world. Weak managers are the problem. Weak managers destroy jobs.

If you don't deliver, you don't earn the flexibility.

If work is just going in every day and getting a check, it's an ugly life. When you can make work a meaningful purpose, you've hit the jackpot for people.

I am often asked if leaders are born or made. The answer, of course, is both. Some characteristics, like IQ and energy, seem to come with the package. On the other hand, you learn some leadership skills, like self-confidence, at your mother's knee, and at school, in academics and sports. And you learn others at work-trying something, getting it wrong and learning from it, or getting it right and gaining the self-confidence to do it again, only better.

They were making a deal for a property that clearly was a property that we wanted to own, so we had to act, and act as quickly as we could, and make the offer more attractive.

I think every leader has an obligation - the absolute obligation - to treat everyone fairly. But they also have the obligation to treat everyone differently. Because people aren't all the same, and the last thing you ever want to do, in my opinion, is let the best in your organization be treated like the worst in your organization. It does nothing for your future.

Creative artists have great passion.

I believe that in any initiative, you can't have a flavor of the month. When you believe something is profound in a company, you can not be a logical leader. You have to go to the lunatic fringe. There is no way that logic is what you need to change people.

A leader's job is to look into the future and see the organization, not as it is, but as it should be

The main social responsibility for a company is to win.

I don't feel under-taxed in any way at all.

No one is doing something in your business - getting a sale, having a key customer, working on an R&D project - doing anything that's more important than something you say is going to change the company.

The team with the best players wins.

I think that ideally that is how a company works. It becomes a place of ideas, not a place of position.

My job is to find great ideas, exaggerate them, and spread them like hell around the business with the speed of light ... And to put resources in to support them. Keep finding ideas. That's the job of just about all of our CEOs.

We bring together the best ideas - turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.

First and most obvious, bring out the three old warhorses of competition - cost, quality, and service - and drive them to new levels, making every person in the organization see them for what they are, a matter of survival.

The world belongs to passionate driven people.

If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings and put compensation as a carrier behind it you almost don't have to manage them.

The productivity now at universities is terrible. Tenure is a terrible idea. It keeps them around forever and they don't have to work hard.

Good leaders have a generosity gene.

There are advantages to being the chairman. One of my favorite perks was picking out an issue and doing what I called a "deep dive." It's spotting a challenge where you think you can make a difference one that looks like it would be fun and then throwing the weight of your position behind it. Some might justifiably call it "meddling." I've often done this just about everywhere in the company.

Keep learning; don't be arrogant by assuming that you know it all, that you have a monopoly on the truth; always assume that you can learn something from someone else.

The team with the best players usually does win - this is why you need to invest the majority of your time and energy in developing your people.

I'm not perfect, but if there are any points given for caring about people with every fiber of your being and giving life all you've got every day, then I suppose I have a shot.

You never know how diverse your career can be. I think it's wonderful. My life has always been the next page, not the last page.

I wanted to change the rules of engagement, asking for more- from fewer. I was insisting that we had to have only the best people ... If you wanted excellence, at a minimum, the ambience had to reflect excellence.