Quotes By Jack Welch

Give me a highly successful unionized industry.

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

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.

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.

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%.

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

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

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

Control your own destiny or someone else will.

Be candid with everyone.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The team with the best players wins.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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