Best 201 quotes of Jack Welch on MyQuotes

Leading a big company means never allowing a company to take itself too seriously.

Make winners out of every business in your company. Don't carry losers.

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

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

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

Most organizations fail in driving change.

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.

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.

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.

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

Nobody is too important to lead the initiative you say is important.

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.

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.

No one is doing something in your business - getting a sale, having a key customer, working on an R&D project - doing anything that's more important than something you say is going to change the company.

Nothing is worse than the person in their 40s who says, 'I'm not going to learn this.' 'I don't carry an iPad.' That will label you and put you right in the corner. Some people do it as a badge of honor. I've seen them myself, they walk around bragging [about not knowing much about technology].

Nothing of any importance has ever been accomplished by a pessimist.

Not surprisingly, work-life moaners tend to be a phenomenon of below-average performers.

No vision is worth the paper it's printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

People who are coaches will be the norm. Other people won't get promoted.

Protecting underperformers always backfires.

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

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.

Set stretch goals. Don't ever settle for mediocrity. The key to stretch is to reach for more than you think is possible. Don't sell yourself short by thinking that you'll fail.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Some think that it is cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10 percent of our people. It isn't. It's just the opposite. What I think is brutal and "false kindness" is keeping people around who aren't going to grow and prosper. There's no cruelty like waiting and telling people late into their careers that they don't belong - just when the options are limited and they're putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The art of managing and leading comes down to a simple thing. Determining and facing reality about people, situations, products, and then acting decisively and quickly on that reality. Think how many times we have procrastinated, hoped it would get better. Most of the mistakes you've made have been through not being willing to face into it, straight in the mirror that reality you find, then taking action on it. That's all managing is, defining and acting. Not hoping, not waiting fro the next plan. Not rethinking it. Getting on with it. Doing it. Defining and doing it.

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

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