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
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