Top 100 Jack Welch Quotes
#1. As a leader, your job is to energize people around the mission and vision you've articulated.
Jack Welch
#2. What is a budget review? A personal review with numbers
Jack Welch
#3. RULE 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.
Jack Welch
#4. A company has only so much money and managerial time. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest. They cut their losses everywhere else.
Jack Welch
#5. The biggest cowards are managers who don't let people know where they stand.
Jack Welch
#6. Lack of candor blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they've got. It's a killer.
Jack Welch
#7. The Internet is the Viagra of big business.
Jack Welch
#8. Above all, good leaders are open. They go up, down, and around their organization to reach people. They don't stick to the established channels. They're informal. They're straight with people. They make a religion out of being accessible. They never get bored telling their story.
Jack Welch
#9. Genuine leadership comes from the quality of your vision and your ability to spark others to extraordinary performance.
Jack Welch
#10. Strategy means making clear-cut choices about how to compete.
Jack Welch
#11. In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.
Jack Welch
#12. An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn't have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.
Jack Welch
#13. 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.
Jack Welch
#14. 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.
Jack Welch
#15. Control your destiny or somebody will.
Jack Welch
#16. Today, all arrows point toward the biotech, nanotech, and information technology industries, and the convergence among them.
Jack Welch
#17. Does coaching work? Yes. Good coaches provide a truly important service. They tell you the truth when no one else will.
Jack Welch
#18. Every great leader has a generosity gene.
Jack Welch
#19. The biggest opportunity for big companies has come by far in the digitization of internal processes.
Jack Welch
#20. People aren't the same. Business is, in my opinion, all about the team that fields the best players. It's not about an idea. An idea goes away. Somebody catches up with it. It's not about a widget.
Jack Welch
#21. As leaders, we owe it to every employee to let them know where they stand in the organization.
Jack Welch
#22. It is better to act too quickly than it is to wait too long.
Jack Welch
#23. I've learned in a hundred ways that I rarely regretted acting but often regretted NOT acting fast enough.
Jack Welch
#24. When employees underperform, a leader tells them so.
Jack Welch
#25. Drucker said: 'If you weren't already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?' ... Simple, right? But incredibly powerful.
Jack Welch
#26. I never put myself out there as an employment agency,
Jack Welch
#27. Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy.
Jack Welch
#28. 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.
Jack Welch
#29. Ideally, the star will be replaced within eight hours. This sends the message that no single individual is bigger than the company.
Jack Welch
#30. Don't lose youself on the way to the top.
Jack Welch
#31. An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.
Jack Welch
#32. 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.
Jack Welch
#33. Good leaders have a generosity gene.
Jack Welch
#34. We've only been wealthy in this country for 70 years. Who said we ought to have all this? Is it ordained?
Jack Welch
#35. Give me a highly successful unionized industry.
Jack Welch
#36. I was afraid of the internet ... because I couldn't type.
Jack Welch
#37. If you can't energize others, you can't be a leader.
Jack Welch
#38. 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.
Jack Welch
#39. The secret of success is changing the way you think.
Jack Welch
#40. Wright is a visionary with a great strategic mind, and he's a strong business leader with outstanding people skills, ... He's a terrific guy and will be a key force in guiding the company's future growth.
Jack Welch
#41. Real communication is an attitude, an environment. It is the most interactive of all processes. It requires countless hours of eyeball to eyeball, back and forth. It involves more listening than talking.
Jack Welch
#42. 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.
Jack Welch
#43. Just because you are the boss doesn't mean you are the source of all knowledge.
Jack Welch
#44. If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.
Jack Welch
#45. 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.
Jack Welch
#46. In difficult times your best must be hugged, loved, kissed, rewarded, paid - everything. And your worst must be the people that leave, because your best are going to take you to the next game.
Jack Welch
#47. If we get the right people in the right job we've won the game.
Jack Welch
#48. Getting candor right - with your reports, your peers, and your boss - is a skill that can make or break your career.
Jack Welch
#49. 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.
Jack Welch
#50. Change has no constituency and a perceived revolution has even less.
Jack Welch
#51. When you become a leader success is all about growing others.
Jack Welch
#52. For a large corporation to be effective, it must be simple. For an organization to be simple, its people must have self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. Insecure managers create complexity, real leaders do not clutter.
Jack Welch
#53. Life is too short to spend every day doing something you don't love.
Jack Welch
#54. Ninety-nine point nine percent of all employees are in the pile because they don't think.
Jack Welch
#55. Make winners out of every business in your company. Don't carry losers.
Jack Welch
#56. Cash is king. Get every drop of cash you can get and hold onto it.
Jack Welch
#57. A leader's job is to look into the future and see the organization, not as it is, but as it should be
Jack Welch
#58. 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.
Jack Welch
#59. A leader's role is not to control people or stay on top of things, but rather to guide, energize and excite.
Jack Welch
#60. The 3Ss of Winning in business are speed, simplicity, and self-confidence.
Jack Welch
#61. 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.
Jack Welch
#62. When you own your choices, you own their consequences.
Jack Welch
#63. When it comes to strategy, ponder less and do more.
Jack Welch
#64. Trust is enormously powerful in a corporation. People won't do their best unless they believe they'll be treated fairly. The only way I know how to create that kind of trust is by laying out your values and then walking the talk. You've got to do what you say you'll do, consistently, over time.
Jack Welch
#65. Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.
Jack Welch
#66. Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
Jack Welch
#67. 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.
Jack Welch
#68. There's no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.
Jack Welch
#69. 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.
Jack Welch
#70. Real change agents comprise less than 10% of all business people.
Jack Welch
#71. We bring together the best ideas - turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.
Jack Welch
#72. Not surprisingly, work-life moaners tend to be a phenomenon of below-average performers.
Jack Welch
#73. 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.
Jack Welch
#74. We have built a company with a business mix and operating system that will allow us to deliver record results in any foreseeable economic climate, ... We have just completed a very successful management transition and I've never been more confident about the company's future.
Jack Welch
#75. Get the best player because whether it's soccer or whether it's anything else the team with the best players wins. So focus your energy on getting the best and getting rid of the weakest.
Jack Welch
#76. Nobody is too important to lead the initiative you say is important.
Jack Welch
#77. IT'S SAID that you can only live life forward and understand it backward.
Jack Welch
#78. In the future, those who are not coaches will not be promoted.
Jack Welch
#79. For a large organization to be effective, it must be simple.
Jack Welch
#80. Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and build self-confidence.
Jack Welch
#81. You have no right to be a leader if someone who works for you doesn't know where they stand.
Jack Welch
#82. In any bad situation you can not let yourself be a victim.
Jack Welch
#83. Trust happens when leaders are transparent.
Jack Welch
#84. 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.
Jack Welch
#85. Don't manage - lead change before you have to.
Jack Welch
#86. Focus on a few key objectives ... I only have three things to do. I have to choose the right people, allocate the right number of dollars, and transmit ideas from one division to another with the speed of light. So I'm really in the business of being the gatekeeper and the transmitter of ideas.
Jack Welch
#87. Indeed, the biggest winners in the world are those who answer yes to the question, Am I living the life I choose?
Jack Welch
#89. In every company, differentiation is never more important than it is in times of trouble, and that's the time when everyone tends to go to the well and equalize rather than differentiate.
Jack Welch
#90. Leading a big company means never allowing a company to take itself too seriously.
Jack Welch
#91. The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action-fast.
Jack Welch
#92. Managers can waste a lot of time at the outset of a crisis denying that something went wrong. Skip that step.
Jack Welch
#93. My bosses cautioned me about my candor. Now my GE career is over, and I'm telling you that it was my candor that helped make it work.
Jack Welch
#94. If your CFO is more important than your CHRO (Chief Human Resource Officer) you're nuts!
Jack Welch
#95. There is no straight line to a dream.
Jack Welch
#96. A good leader remains focused. Controlling your destination is better than being controlled by it
Jack Welch
#97. With leadership the question at the beginning of the day is, 'how far can we take this ... how big can we grow it ... and how fast can we get there?'
Jack Welch
#98. People who are coaches will be the norm. Other people won't get promoted.
Jack Welch
#99. Never miss out on an opportunity like a good recession.
Jack Welch
#100. 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.
Jack Welch
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