Inspirational Quotes by Jack Welch (American Businessperson)

Inspirational Quotations 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

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

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

Give me a highly successful unionized industry.
—Jack Welch

You can’t grow long-term if you can’t eat short-term. Anybody can manage short. Anybody can manage long. Balancing those two things is what management is.
—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: Leadership, Leaders

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

You can’t behave in a calm, rational manner. You’ve got to be out there on the lunatic fringe.
—Jack Welch

The team with the best players wins.
—Jack Welch

The idea flow from the human spirit is absolutely unlimited. All you have to do is tap into that well. I don’t like to use the word efficiency. It’s creativity. It’s a belief that every person counts.
—Jack Welch

One of the jobs of a manager is to instill confidence, pump confidence into your people. And when you’ve got somebody who’s raring to go and you can smell it and feel it, give ’em that shot.
—Jack Welch

If you have a reputation as a big, stiff bureaucracy, you’re stuck.
—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

Control your destiny or somebody else will.
—Jack Welch
Topics: Destiny, Vision, Self-Control

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

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

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

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

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

Culture drives great results.
—Jack Welch

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

Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy.
—Jack Welch

Don’t manage—lead change before you have to.
—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

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

Be candid with everyone.
—Jack Welch

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

Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.
—Jack Welch

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