Jack Welch Quotes

200 Jack Welch Quotes

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‘I chose to put my career first,’ she said, ‘and I cannot blame anyone for my happiness or lack thereof.
Jack Welch

It’s not that bosses want you to give up your family or your hobbies. They’re just driven by the desire to capture all of your energy and harness it for the company.
Jack Welch

If you want real work-life balance, find a company that accommodates it as part of its everyday business.
Jack Welch

If you don’t fulfill your own joy with your work-life plan, one day you’ll wake up in a special kind of hell, where everyone is happy but you.
Jack Welch

You can look at China and feel victimized. Or you can look at it and be excited about conquering the challenges and opportunities it presents.
Jack Welch

The only quota that I ever thought worked was the exposure quota.
Jack Welch

The paralyzing weight of socialism will gradually give way, and the EU will move steadily forward.
Jack Welch

Board members cannot get into an us-versus-them dynamic with the very people they are supposed to help.
Jack Welch

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.
Jack Welch

I just don’t like quotas in the boardroom or in the office. Winning companies are meritocracies. They practice differentiation, making a clear distinction between top, middle and bottom performers. This system is candid and fair, and it’s the most effective way for an organization to field the best team.
Jack Welch



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.
Jack Welch

Work-life moaners tend to be a phenomenon of below-average performers.
Jack Welch

I don’t give a damn if we get a little bureaucracy as long as we get the results. If it bothers you, yell at it. Kick it. Scream at it. Break it!
Jack Welch

Pleasing the boss should never be more important than pleasing the customer.
Jack Welch

I don’t want to be part of a book. I’m just a grungy, lousy manager.
Jack Welch

Am I going to be the one who blows this place up?
Jack Welch

I twice had to leave the front row of the auditorium to run to the bathroom.
Jack Welch

Without the right leaders developing and owning them, we’d get good-looking presentations and so-so results.
Jack Welch

The mindset of yesterday’s manager – accepting compromise, keeping things tidy – bred complacency. Tomorrow’s leaders must raise issues, debate them, and resolve them. They must rally around a vision of what a business can become.
Jack Welch

We’re all familiar with … absurdities: too many approvals, duplication, pomposity, waste.
Jack Welch



We want to change the competitive landscape by being not just better than our competitors, but by taking quality to a whole new level.
Jack Welch

I would have liked to have done things a lot faster. I’ve been here [At GE] for 17 years. Imagine if I’d taken 4, 3, or even 1 years too long in making my decisions. I would have had a rude awakening.
Jack Welch

As we became leaner, we found ourselves communicating better, with fewer interpreters and fewer filters. We found that with fewer layers we had wider spans of management. We weren’t managing better. We were managing less, and that was better.
Jack Welch

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

Business isn’t complicated. The complications arise when people are cut off from information they need.
Jack Welch

My job is to put the best people on the biggest opportunities, and the best allocation of dollars in the right places. That’s about it. Transfer ideas and allocate resources and get out of the way.
Jack Welch

Leaders… inspire people with clear visions of how things can be done better.
Jack Welch

We’re going to demand from you earnings growth every year. And don’t give us any shrugs about that. Those are the rules of the road… You take charge of your destiny. If you don’t, we will.
Jack Welch

As I went to bigger pieces of GE, I found bigger bureaucracies, layers and all that stuff and it wasn’t friendly. Business was very serious-turf-boxes. Business isn’t that. Business is ideas and fun and excitement and celebrations, all those things.
Jack Welch

When you’re running an institution, you’re always scared at first. You’re afraid you might break it.
Jack Welch

If someone tells me ‘I’m working 90 hours a week,’ I say, ‘You’re doing something terribly wrong.’ I go skiing on the weekend, I go out with my buddies on Friday and party. You’ve got to do the same or you’ve got a bad deal.
Jack Welch



Speed is everything. It is the indispensable ingredient in competitiveness. Speed keeps business and people young. It’s addictive, and it’s a profoundly American taste we need to cultivate.
Jack Welch

My parents were so cute: My father always told me a cemetery was the best neighbor you could have. It’s quiet, it doesn’t yell at you. Of course, I bought that I thought that was the way it was.
Jack Welch

[His mother talking on a stutter he had] She told me I didn’t have a speech impediment. Just that my brain worked too fast.
Jack Welch

When I stop learning something new and start talking about the past versus the future, I will go.
Jack Welch

I wanted to make $30,000 by the time I was 30.
Jack Welch

By teaching her, I focused on golf in a way that I’d never done. And I’ve gone to a whole new level.
Jack Welch

I spend enough hours to get the job done.
Jack Welch

[On leadership] The biggest challenge is to be fair. No one trains you to be a judge.
Jack Welch

Tell people the truth, because they know the truth anyway.
Jack Welch

People who cheat are simply weak.
Jack Welch



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