“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
“We’ve only been wealthy in this country for 70 years. Who said we ought to have all this? Is it ordained?”
-Jack Welch
“The Internet is the Viagra of big business.”
-Jack Welch
“There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow…It goes without saying that no company, small or large, can win over the long run without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it…”
-Jack Welch
“I don’t feel under-taxed in any way at all.”
-Jack Welch
“Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.”
-Jack Welch
“In my lifetime, Mitt Romney is the most qualified leader I’ve ever seen run for the presidency of the United States.”
-Jack Welch
“Our behavior is driven by a fundamental core belief: the desire, and the ability, of an organization to continuously learn from any source, anywhere; and to rapidly convert this learning into action is its ultimate competitive advantage.”
-Jack Welch
“There are only two sources of competitive advantage: the ability to learn more about our customers faster than the competition and the ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition.”
-Jack Welch
“Too often we measure everything and understand nothing. The three most important things you need to measure in a business are customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and cash flow. If you’re growing customer satisfaction, your global market share is sure to grow, too. Employee satisfaction gets you productivity, quality, pride, and creativity. And cash flow is the pulse—the key vital sign of a company.”
-Jack Welch
“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
“The secret of success is changing the way you think.”
-Jack Welch
“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.”
-Jack Welch
“The 3Ss of Winning in business are speed, simplicity, and self-confidence.”
-Jack Welch
“The most important job you have is growing your people, giving them a chance to reach their dreams.”
-Jack Welch
“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
“Companies don’t give job security. Only satisfied customers do.”
-Jack Welch
“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.”
-Jack Welch
“Protecting underperformers always backfires.”
-Jack Welch
“The hero is the one with ideas.”
-Jack Welch
“All of management is about self-confidence”
-Jack Welch
“Every employee, not just the senior people, should know how a company is doing.”
-Jack Welch
“Nothing of any importance has ever been accomplished by a pessimist.”
-Jack Welch
“Trust happens when leaders are transparent.”
-Jack Welch
“You are not a leader to win a popularity contest-you are a leader to lead.”
-Jack Welch
“The best thing workers can bring to their jobs is a lifelong thirst for learning.”
-Jack Welch
“Does coaching work? Yes. Good coaches provide a truly important service. They tell you the truth when no one else will.”
-Jack Welch
“Any company trying to compete…must figure out a way to engage the mind of every employee.”
-Jack Welch
“A leader’s role is not to control people or stay on top of things, but rather to guide, energize and excite.”
-Jack Welch
“Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy . . . Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”
-Jack Welch
“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
“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.”
-Jack Welch
“An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”
-Jack Welch
“Number one, cash is king… number two, communicate… number three, buy or bury the competition.”
-Jack Welch
“Be candid with everyone.”
-Jack Welch
“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.”
-Jack Welch
“Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital – the world’s best talents and greatest ideas.”
-Jack Welch
“I was never the smartest guy in the room. From the first person I hired, I was never the smartest guy in the room. And that’s a big deal. And if you’re going to be a leader – if you’re a leader and you’re the smartest guy in the world – in the room, you’ve got real problems.”
-Jack Welch
“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”
-Jack Welch
“The biggest cowards are managers who don’t let people know where they stand.”
-Jack Welch
“You can’t grow long-term if you can’t eat short-term. Anybody can manage short. Anybody can manage long. Balancing those two things is what management is.”
-Jack Welch
“You’ve got to eat while you dream. You’ve got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum if you will. Getting it done in the short-range, and delivering a long-range plan, and executing on that.”
-Jack Welch
“Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.”
-Jack Welch
“The team with the best players wins.”
-Jack Welch
“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
“Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.”
-Jack Welch
“What’s important at the grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the customer isn’t satisfied, if the stuff is getting stale, if the shelf isn’t right, or if the offerings aren’t right, it’s the same thing. You manage it like a small organization. You don’t get hung up on zeros.”
-Jack Welch
“Out-innovating them is the way to beat China. And to do everything that we do in this country to support innovative policy, that drives innovation and new products and more jobs and creates jobs. You can’t – you can’t put a wall up around here. We tried that in the ’30s. It didn’t work.”
-Jack Welch
“Don’t manage – lead change before you have to.”
-Jack Welch
“Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.”
-Jack Welch