Jack Welch quotes:

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  • Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

  • Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.

  • 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.

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

  • An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

  • There's no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.

  • 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.

  • Control your own destiny or someone else will.

  • The Internet is the Viagra of big business.

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

  • 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.

  • Change before you have to.

  • My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • In order to lead a country or a company, you've got to get everybody on the same page and you've got to be able to have a vision of where you're going. America can't have a vision of health care for everybody, green economy, regulations - can't have a bunch of piece-meal activities. It's got to have a vision.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 team with the best players wins.

  • If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.

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

  • You got to be rigorous in your appraisal system. The biggest cowards are managers who don't let people know where they stand.

  • 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.

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

  • Don't manage - lead change before you have to.

  • 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.

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

  • You got to be rigorous in your appraisal system. The biggest cowards are managers who don't let people know where they stand."

  • The 1980s will seem like a walk in the park when compared to new global challenges, where annual productivity increases of 6% may not be enough. A combination of software, brains, and running harder will be needed to bring that percentage up to 8% or 9%.

  • HR should be every company's killer app. What could possibly be more important than who gets hired?

  • That's all managing is: just coming up with the right questions and getting the right answers.

  • Protecting underperformers always backfires.

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

  • Take lack of candor. ... I'm not talking about boldface lying, but a tendency to withhold information. That behavior is far more common, and it frustrates teams and bosses to no end.

  • Be candid with everyone.

  • 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.

  • Lack of candor blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they've got. It's a killer.

  • If your CFO is more important than your CHRO (Chief Human Resource Officer) you're nuts!

  • I might not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but I'm pretty good at getting most of the other bulbs to light up.

  • Real change agents comprise less than 10% of all business people.

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

  • People always overestimate how complex business is. This isn't rocket science. We've chosen one of the world's simplest professions.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Excellence and competitiveness aren't incompatible with honesty and integrity.

  • Control your destiny or somebody will.

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

  • 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...

  • If I had to run a company on three measures, those measures would be customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and cash flow.

  • 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.

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

  • 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 record results for the third quarter once again demonstrate the ability of GE's diverse mix of leading global businesses to deliver top-line growth, increased margins and strong cash generation.

  • Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur.

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

  • Leadership is helping other people grow and succeed. it is not just about you. It's all about them.... everyone deserves a chance.... you can never let yourself be a victim.

  • If there is anything I would like to be remembered for it is that I helped people understand that leadership is helping other people grow and succeed. To repeat myself, leadership is not just about you. It's about them

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • So every time you think about your work-life balance issue, remember what your boss is thinking about - and that's winning. Your needs may get heard - and even successfully resolved - but not if the boss's needs aren't met as well.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The quality of an idea does not depend on its altitude in the organization...An idea can be from any source. So we will search the globe for ideas. We will share what we know with others to get what they know. We have a constant quest to raise the bar, and we get there by constantly talking to others.

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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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.

  • Companies don't give job security. Only satisfied customers do.

  • 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.

  • On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world,

  • Managers can waste a lot of time at the outset of a crisis denying that something went wrong. Skip that step.

  • What business could be mature when you have economies with more than 2 billion people in India, China and Southeast Asia?

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

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

  • 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 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.

  • Some people have better ideas than others; some are smarter or more experienced or more creative. But everyone should be heard and respected.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • We've only been wealthy in this country for 70 years. Who said we ought to have all this? Is it ordained?

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

  • Any jerk can have short-term earnings. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the company sinks five years later.

  • The biggest cowards are managers who don't let people know where they stand.

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

  • Culture drives great results.

  • Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.

  • 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.

  • You measure your people and you take action on those that don't measure up.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • We know where most of the creativity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies-in the minds of those closest to the work. It's been there in front of our noses all along while we've been running around chasing robots and reading books on how to become Japanese-or at least manage like them.

  • The 3Ss of Winning in business are speed, simplicity, and self-confidence.

  • 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.

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