Jack Welch Quotes
200 Jack Welch Quotes
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Every employee, not just the senior people, should know how a company is doing.
Jack Welch
When it comes to strategy, ponder less and do more.
Jack Welch
If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.
Jack Welch
The art of leading comes down to one thing: facing reality, and then acting decisively and quickly on that reality.
Jack Welch
Too often we measure everything and understand nothing.
Jack Welch
Don’t play with businesses that can’t win. Businesses that are number 3, number 5 in their market – Christ couldn’t fix those businesses. They’re going to lose anyway.
Jack Welch
It is true that candid comments definitely freak people out at first.
Jack Welch
I particularly liked the people who had had the wind knocked clear out of them but proved they could run even harder in the next race.
Jack Welch
Managers can waste a lot of time at the outset of a crisis denying that something went wrong. Skip that step.
Jack Welch
Companies have a habit of sending expendable bodies to run new ventures. It’s nuts. For a new business to succeed, it has to have the best people in charge, not the most available.
Jack Welch
There is no one right mentor. There are many right mentors.
Jack Welch
Speed keeps business and people young.
Jack Welch
My job is to find great ideas, exaggerate them, and spread them like hell around the business with the speed of light.
Jack Welch
The leader’s unending responsibility must be to remove every detour, every barrier to ensure that vision is first clear, and then real.
Jack Welch
It doesn’t mean a thing to say I’m going to do it. It only means something to do it.
Jack Welch
Sam Walton was an authentic America hero, certainly one of mine. But for one group of folks, he has been nothing but trouble – those managers of mature businesses, of whatever size, whose standby excuse for stagnation is that their markets are mature, and therefore it’s all beyond their control. What Sam Walton did was go into one of the most mature industries of all and find a way to make it grow, grow, grow, double-digit, month after month, year after year. He did it by innovation, customer focus, and above all, speed.
Jack Welch
People with positive energy just love life.
Jack Welch
Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
Jack Welch
Change before you have to.
Jack Welch
We can’t afford to waste time in bureaucracy.
Jack Welch
I have been asked literally thousands of questions. But most of them come down to this: What does it take to win?
Jack Welch
I think winning is great. Not good – great. Because when companies win, people thrive and grow. There are more jobs and more opportunities.
Jack Welch
Have a positive attitude and spread it around, never let yourself be a victim, and for goodness’ sake – have fun.
Jack Welch
Effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible.
Jack Welch
Setting the mission is top management’s responsibility. A mission cannot be delegated to anyone except the people ultimately held accountable for it.
Jack Welch
In the most common scenario, a company’s mission and its values rupture due to the little crises of daily life in business.
Jack Welch
Lack of condor blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got. It’s a killer.
Jack Welch
We are socialized from childhood to soften bad news or make nice about awkward subjects.
Jack Welch
Eventually, you come to realize that people don’t speak their minds because it’s simply easier not to.
Jack Welch
To get candor, you reward it praise it, and talk about it. Most of all, you yourself demonstrate it in an exuberant and even exaggerated way.
Jack Welch
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.
Jack Welch
A company has only so much money and managerial time. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest. They cut their losses everywhere else.
Jack Welch
I didn’t invent differentiation! I learned it on the playground when I was a kid.
Jack Welch
Protecting under-performers always backfires. The worst thing, though, is how protecting people who don’t perform hurts the people themselves.
Jack Welch
Differentiation rewards those members of the team who deserve it.
Jack Welch
Once we made the case for differentiation and we linked it to a candid performance appraisal system, it worked as well in Japan as it did in Ohio.
Jack Welch
While being in the middle 70 percent can be demotivating to some people, it actually revs the engines of many others.
Jack Welch
In China, a young woman asked how any businessperson in her country could practice candor and differentiation when ‘only the voice of the boss is allowed.’ I’d ask, ‘Why aren’t you asking those questions to you own bosses?’ The answer would come back, ‘I can’t bring that up. I’d get killed.’
Jack Welch
Some people have better ideas than others; some are smarter or more experienced or more creative. But everyone should be heard and respected.
Jack Welch
Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the better.
Jack Welch
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