Jack Welch Quotes

Be candid with everyone.

When I stop learning something new and start talking about the past versus the future, I will go.

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

In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.

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.

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

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.

Change before you have to.

If you're a leader and you're the smartest guy in the world - in the room, you've got real problems.

Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy . . . Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.

Without doubt, there are lots of ways to measure the pulse of a business. But if you have employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow right, you can be sure your company is healthy and on the way to winning.

Managers often hold on to resisters because of a specific skill set or because they've been around for a long time. Don't.

Don't take a job because your mother wants you to. Don't be a victim. You own your decision.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Your goal, in other words, should be to make your bosses smarter, your team more effective, and the whole company more competitive because of your energy, creativity, and insights.

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.

The thing it taught me was that winning's a helluva lot more fun than losing. It also taught me that the team with the best players that worked together the best wins.

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.

When employees underperform, a leader tells them so.

Shun the incremental and go for the leap.

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

Every great leader has a generosity gene.

The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor.

If you get the best people on your team, you've got plenty of time to do the things you like to do and can add more value to.

I've learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.

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.

Six Sigma is a quality program that, when all is said and done, improves your customers' experience, lowers your costs, and builds better leaders.

Common mission trap for companies: trying to be all things to all people at all times.

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.

In my lifetime, Mitt Romney is the most qualified leader I've ever seen run for the presidency of the United States.

Don't make the process harder than it is.

We have the brand, and we have the fulfillment capability. Now we had to get the Net, and that's the easiest part of the game.

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.

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.

As leaders, we owe it to every employee to let them know where they stand in the organization.

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.

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.

As a leader, you have no right to have any employee wonder how they fit in and where they are going.

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.

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

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.

Take time to get to know people. Understand where they are coming from, what is important to them. Make sure they are with you.

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.