Jack Welch quotes

Jack Welch was an American business executive and author, best known for his tenure as CEO of General Electric (GE). His management style emphasized efficiency, competitiveness, and innovation. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential corporate leaders of the late 20th century. Here are 137 of his quotes:

Change before you have to. (Jack Welch)
Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy. View quote
Jack Welch
Control your own destiny or someone else will. View quote
Jack Welch
Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. View quote
Jack Welch
The Internet is the Viagra of big business. View quote
Jack Welch
Business has to be fun. For too many people, it's "just a job." View quote
Jack Welch
Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be. View quote
Jack Welch
Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while. View quote
Jack Welch
Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur. View quote
Jack Welch
Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act. View quote
Jack Welch
I've learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success. (Jack Welch)
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. View quote
Jack Welch
There are advantages to being the chairman. One of my favorite perks was picking out an issue and doing what I called a "deep dive." It's spotting a challenge where you think you can make a difference- one that looks like it would be fun- and then throwing the weight of your position behind it. Some might justifiably call it "meddling." I've often done this- just about everywhere in the company. View quote
Jack Welch
Change has no constituency-and a perceived revolution has even less. View quote
Jack Welch
When you were made a leader you weren't given a crown, you were given the responsibility to bring out the best in others. View quote
Jack Welch
The best way to support dreams and stretch is to set apart small ideas with big potential, then give people positive role models and the resources to turn small projects into big businesses. View quote
Jack Welch
I wanted to change the rules of engagement, asking for more- from fewer. I was insisting that we had to have only the best people...If you wanted excellence, at a minimum, the ambience had to reflect excellence. View quote
Jack Welch
In manufacturing, we try to stamp out variance. With people, variance is everything. View quote
Jack Welch
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%. View quote
Jack Welch
Getting every employee's mind into the game is a huge part of what a CEO job is all about. Taking everyone's best ideas and transferring them to others is the secret. There's nothing more important. View quote
Jack Welch
Arrogance is a killer, and wearing ambition on one's sleeve can have the same effect. There is a fine line between arrogance and self-confidence. Legitimate self-confidence is a winner. The true test of self-confidence is the courage to be open-to welcome change and new ideas regardless of their source. Self-confident people aren't afraid to have their views challenged. They relish the intellectual combat that enriches ideas. (Jack Welch)
When the amount of change externally exceeds the amount of change internally, the end is in sight. View quote
Jack Welch
We bring together the best ideas - turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies. View quote
Jack Welch
In GE every day, there's an informal, unspoken personnel review-in the lunchroom, the hallways, and in every business meeting. That intense people focus-testing everyone in a myriad of environments-defines managing at GE. In the end, that's what GE is. We build great people, who then build great products and services. View quote
Jack Welch
An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage. View quote
Jack Welch