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 at 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. Since 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
Any jerk can have short-term earnings. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the company sinks five years later.
—Jack Welch
Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.
—Jack Welch
Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy.
—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
Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.
—Jack Welch
Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.
—Jack Welch
Topics: Authority, Money
Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
—Jack Welch
Topics: Reality
If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.
—Jack Welch
We bring together the best ideas—turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.
—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
I don’t feel under-taxed in any way at all.
—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 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
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
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
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
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
The biggest cowards are managers who don’t let people know where they stand.
—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
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%.
—Jack Welch
Control your own destiny or someone else will.
—Jack Welch
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
Not good — great.
—Jack Welch
I guarantee you it will not be anyone from the outside.
—Jack Welch
Control your destiny or somebody else will.
—Jack Welch
Topics: Self-Control, Vision, Destiny
Change before you have to.
—Jack Welch
You’ve got to eat while you dream. You’ve got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum if you will. Getting it done in the short-range, and delivering a long-range plan, and executing on that.
—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
Change has no constituency—and a perceived revolution has even less.
—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
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