Jack Welch Quotes

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

The team with the best players wins.

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.

Creative artists have great passion.

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

One of the ways we'll know that Work-Out has been successful is that my style of leadership will no longer be tolerated in this company.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you managed a baseball team, would you listen more closely to the team accountant or the director of player personnel?

Stretch targets energize. We have found that by reaching for what appears to be the impossible, we often actually do the impossible; and even when we don't quite make it, we inevitably wind up doing much better than we would have done.

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.

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

If you reward candor, you'll get it.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

This shows you are never too old to get surprised.

Face reality as it is, not as it was, or as you wish it were. Be candid with everyone. Don't manage, lead. Change before you have to. If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete. Control your own destiny, or someone else will.

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

One of the things about leadership is that you cannot be a moderate, balanced, thoughtful, careful articulator of policy. You've got to be on the lunatic fringe.

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.

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

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.

There is no straight line to a dream.

Strategy means making clear-cut choices about how to compete.

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.

You hang around with good people, you play a lot of golf, and you have a pretty good life. That's what success is all about. It's getting people you like, who want to take the hill with you, who want to win, who have the passion. This is not rocket science.

"Every leader makes mistakes, every leader stumbles and falls. The question with a senior level leader is, does she learn from her mistakes, regroup, and then get going again with renewed speed, conviction and confidence?"

Just because you are the boss doesn't mean you are the source of all knowledge.

A leader's role is not to control people or stay on top of things, but rather to guide, energize and excite.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Too many people believe that one big, public success will solve their self-confidence problems forever. That only happens in the movies. In real life, the opposite strategy is what works. Call it the small victo-ries approach. In time you will discover that all failing really does teach you something you needed to know- so you can regroup and stretch again, with ever more...nerve.

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

Its a marathon, its not a sprint. Ten years. Fifteen years. You've got to get up everyday, with a new idea, a new spin, and you've got to bring it to work, every day

Trust happens when leaders are transparent.

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

I was afraid of the internet... because I couldn't type.

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.

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.

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.

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

What the Commission is seeking cuts the heart out of the strategic rationale of our deal.