Quotes By Jack Welch

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.

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

Give me a highly successful unionized industry.

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.

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.

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.

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

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%.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The team with the best players wins.