Quotes By Jack Welch

Be candid with everyone.

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 Internet is the Viagra of big business.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Change before you have to.

The team with the best players wins.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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