Jack Welch Best Quotes & Sayings

Life is too short to spend every day doing something you don't love. — Jack Welch

Don't make the process harder than it is. — Jack Welch

With leadership the question at the beginning of the day is, 'how far can we take this ... how big can we grow it ... and how fast can we get there?' — Jack Welch

It is better to act too quickly than it is to wait too long. — Jack Welch

Again, your challenge is not just to improve. It is to break the service paradigm in your industry or market so that customers aren't just satisfied, they're so shocked that they tell strangers on the street how good you are. — Jack Welch

I think that ideally that is how a company works. It becomes a place of ideas, not a place of position. — Jack Welch

Control your own Destiny or somebody else will — 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

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

The team with the best players usually does win - this is why you need to invest the majority of your time and energy in developing your people. — Jack Welch

I guarantee you it will not be anyone from the outside. — 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. — Jack Welch

An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn't have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people. — Jack Welch

Someone, somewhere has a better idea. — Jack Welch

Six Sigma is a quality program that, when all is said and done, improves your customers' experience, lowers your costs, and builds better leaders. — Jack Welch

Indeed, the biggest winners in the world are those who answer yes to the question, Am I living the life I choose? — Jack Welch

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. — Jack Welch

A leader's job is to look into the future and see the organization, not as it is, but as it should be — Jack Welch

If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete. — Jack Welch

Ideally, the star will be replaced within eight hours. This sends the message that no single individual is bigger than the company. — Jack Welch

It's the internet like the flu - it just spreads like crazy. — 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. — Jack Welch

Does coaching work? Yes. Good coaches provide a truly important service. They tell you the truth when no one else will. — Jack Welch

Get the best player because whether it's soccer or whether it's anything else the team with the best players wins. So focus your energy on getting the best and getting rid of the weakest. — Jack Welch

If you want risk taking, set an example yourself and reward and praise those that do. — Jack Welch

First and most obvious, 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

Genuine leadership comes from the quality of your vision and your ability to spark others to extraordinary performance. — Jack Welch

Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital - the world's best talents and greatest ideas. — Jack Welch

Stretch targets energize. We have found that by reaching for what appears to be the impossible, we often actually do the impossible; and even when we don't quite make it, we inevitably wind up doing much better than we would have done. — Jack Welch

You never know how diverse your career can be. I think it's wonderful. My life has always been the next page, not the last page. — 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. — Jack Welch

The team with the best players wins. — 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. — Jack Welch

HR should be every company's killer app. What could possibly be more important than who gets hired? — Jack Welch

If you get the best people on your team, you've got plenty of time to do the things you like to do and can add more value to. — Jack Welch

In difficult times your best must be hugged, loved, kissed, rewarded, paid - everything. And your worst must be the people that leave, because your best are going to take you to the next game. — Jack Welch

People aren't the same. Business is, in my opinion, all about the team that fields the best players. It's not about an idea. An idea goes away. Somebody catches up with it. It's not about a widget. — Jack Welch

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

The best thing workers can bring to their jobs is a lifelong thirst for learning. — 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. — Jack Welch

Trust is enormously powerful in a corporation. People won't do their best unless they believe they'll be treated fairly. The only way I know how to create that kind of trust is by laying out your values and then walking the talk. You've got to do what you say you'll do, consistently, over time. — Jack Welch

The thing it taught me was that winning's a helluva lot more fun than losing. It also taught me that the team with the best players that worked together the best wins. — Jack Welch

When all is said and done, teaching is what I try to do for a living. — Jack Welch

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. — Jack Welch

This shows you are never too old to get surprised. — Jack Welch

What the Commission is seeking cuts the heart out of the strategic rationale of our deal. — Jack Welch

The value decade is upon us. If you can't sell a top-quality product at the world's lowest price, you're going to be out of the game. — Jack Welch

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

The most important job you have is growing your people, giving them a chance to reach their dreams. — Jack Welch

Leading a big company means never allowing a company to take itself too seriously. — Jack Welch

I think every leader has an obligation - the absolute obligation - to treat everyone fairly. But they also have the obligation to treat everyone differently. Because people aren't all the same, and the last thing you ever want to do, in my opinion, is let the best in your organization be treated like the worst in your organization. It does nothing for your future. — Jack Welch

If you managed a baseball team, would you listen more closely to the team accountant or the director of player personnel? — Jack Welch

Real change agents comprise less than 10% of all business people. — 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

I started my career at General Electric in a small office under a guy named Greg Liemandt, and his direct boss was Jack Welch. I would say those two have had the most profound impact on my career. — Peter Barris

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. — 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. — Jack Welch

When I was a young guy, when I first started with G.E., Jack Welch sent us all to Japan because in those days Japan was gonna crush us. And we learned a lot about Japan when we were there. But over the subsequent 30 years, the Japanese companies all fell behind. And the reason why they fell behind is because they didn't globalize. — Jeffrey R. Immelt

Business is a game, and as with all games, the team that puts the best people on the field and gets them playing together wins. It's that simple. — Jack Welch

If work is just going in every day and getting a check, it's an ugly life. When you can make work a meaningful purpose, you've hit the jackpot for people. — Jack Welch

Great leaders love to see people grow. The day you are afraid of them being better than you is the day you fail as a leader. — Jack Welch

Good leaders have a generosity gene. — Jack Welch

The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor. — Jack Welch

Jack Welch, the transformational former CEO of General Electric and business guru, says that an effective mission statement answers the question "How are we going to win in this business?" He believes, after years of experience, that this is the most effective way to convey your business' mission to the world, and that winning should be your business objective. — Devon Wilcox

The story about GE that hasn't been told is the value of an informal place. I think it's a big thought. I don't think people have ever figured out that being informal is a big deal. — Jack Welch

Hierarchy is an organization with its face toward the CEO and its ass toward the customer. — Jack Welch