Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Jack Welch (American Businessperson)

Jack Welch (1935–2020,) fully John Francis Welch, Jr., was a former Chairman and CEO of General Electric, the American conglomerate. He was one of the world’s most celebrated business executives.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Welch got a bachelor’s from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, all in chemical engineering. He joined General Electric (GE) in 1960, worked in the plastics business, and moved up the ranks to become General Electric’s youngest Chairman and CEO in 1981, succeeding Reginald H. Jones.

Welch’s management and leadership skills were well-known. He earned the label “Neutron Jack” for his slash-and-burn management style, where he purged underperforming businesses and employees. Under his leadership, GE expanded to become one of the world’s largest, most profitable, and well-admired companies. That aura has since been punctured as a consequence of sagging profits and sluggish stock performance in the two decades following his retirement.

During his 21-year tenure as CEO, Welch built GE into a super-conglomerate. Over the years, that business model became overly complicated, and many of Welch’s mistakes with GE’s deals and operations become evident years later. The most obvious example was GE Capital, the finance division that dealt GE a near-fatal blow during the 2008 financial crisis.

Welch retired in 2001 and was succeeded as Chairman and CEO of General Electric by Jeffrey Immelt. After retirement, Welch served as a widely read business writer, speaker, and management consultant. He wrote three best-selling business books, Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001,) Winning (2005,) and The Real-Life MBA (2015,) the latter two co-authored with his wife, the business journalist Suzy Welch.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jack Welch

The world of the 1990s and beyond will not belong to ‘managers’ or those who can make the numbers dance. The world will belong to passionate, driven leaders—people who not only have enormous amounts of energy but who can energize those whom they lead.
—Jack Welch
Topics: Leaders, Leadership

The most important job you have is growing your people, giving them a chance to reach their dreams.
—Jack Welch
Topics: Win, Giving, Dreams, People, Dream

We know where most of the creativeity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies—in the minds of those closest to the work. It’s been there in front of our noses all along while we’ve been running around chasing robots and reading books on how to become Japanese—or at least manage like them.
—Jack Welch
Topics: Creativity

The team with the best players wins.
—Jack Welch

I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.
—Jack Welch

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

Drucker said: ‘If you weren’t already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?’ … Simple, right? But incredibly powerful.
—Jack Welch

Control your own destiny or someone else will.
—Jack Welch

The biggest cowards are managers who don’t let people know where they stand.
—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

Change has no constituency—and a perceived revolution has even less.
—Jack Welch

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

Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.
—Jack Welch

Not good — great.
—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

Any jerk can have short-term earnings. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the company sinks five years later.
—Jack Welch

Number one, cash is king… number two, communicate… number three, buy or bury the competition.
—Jack Welch

It’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. Ten years. Fifteen years. You’ve got to get up everyday, with a new idea, a new spin, and you’ve got to bring it to work, every day
—Jack Welch

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.
—Jack Welch

You are never too old to get surprised.
—Jack Welch

We have built a company with a business mix and operating system that will allow us to deliver record results in any foreseeable economic climate, … We have just completed a very successful management transition and I’ve never been more confident about the company’s future.
—Jack Welch

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

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

Our planning system was dynamite when we first put it in. The thinking was fresh; the form mattered little. It was idea oriented. We then hired a head of planning, and he hired two vice presidents, and then he hired a planner; and the books got thicker, and the printing more sophisticated, and the covers got harder, and the drawings got better.
—Jack Welch
Topics: Business

Strong managers who make tough decisions to cut jobs provide the only true job security in today’s world. Weak managers are the problem. Weak managers destroy jobs.
—Jack Welch

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.
—Jack Welch
Topics: Business, Vision

Give me a highly successful unionized industry.
—Jack Welch

Be candid with everyone.
—Jack Welch

They were making a deal for a property that clearly was a property that we wanted to own, so we had to act, and act as quickly as we could, and make the offer more attractive,
—Jack Welch

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