Jack Welch Quotes

Control your destiny or somebody will.

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.

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

In the future, those who are not coaches will not be promoted.

Its a marathon, its 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

Failing to differentiate among employees — and holding on to bottom-tier performers — is actually the cruelest form of management there is.

My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.

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

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.

If you're not in Germany, you're not in Europe. And if you're not in Asia, you're nowhere.

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.

Take lack of candor. ... I'm not talking about boldface lying, but a tendency to withhold information. That behavior is far more common, and it frustrates teams and bosses to no end.

If you don't have public hangings for bad culture in a company, if you don't take people out and let them say, they went home to spend more time with the family. It's crazy.

Most organizations fail in driving change.

In every company, differentiation is never more important than it is in times of trouble, and that's the time when everyone tends to go to the well and equalize rather than differentiate.

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.

I never put myself out there as an employment agency.

Take the middle 70 percent and tell them what they need to do to get into the top 20 percent.

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.

You have no right to be a leader if someone who works for you doesn't know where they stand.

Ninety-nine point nine percent of all employees are in the pile because they don't think.

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.

In manufacturing, we try to stamp out variance. With people, variance is everything.

I'm not perfect, but if there are any points given for caring about people with every fiber of your being and giving life all you've got every day, then I suppose I have a shot.

If you reward candor, you'll get it.

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.

Any time there is change, there is opportunity. So it is paramount that an organization get energized rather than paralyzed.

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

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.

One of the ways we'll know that Work-Out has been successful is that my style of leadership will no longer be tolerated in this company.

In any bad situation you can not let yourself be a victim.

Set stretch goals. Don't ever settle for mediocrity. The key to stretch is to reach for more than you think is possible. Don't sell yourself short by thinking that you'll fail.

Globalization is now no longer an objective but an imperative, as markets open and geographic barriers become increasingly blurred and even irrelevant.

Strategy means making clear-cut choices about how to compete.

If we get the right people in the right job we've won the game.

If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by

Good leaders have a generosity gene.

If you don't deliver, you don't earn the flexibility.

Just because you are the boss doesn't mean you are the source of all knowledge.

Your goal, in other words, should be to make your bosses smarter, your team more effective, and the whole company more competitive because of your energy, creativity, and insights.

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

There is no straight line to a dream.

One of the things about leadership is that you cannot be a moderate, balanced, thoughtful, careful articulator of policy. You've got to be on the lunatic fringe.

Not surprisingly, work-life moaners tend to be a phenomenon of below-average performers.

This shows you are never too old to get surprised.

People always overestimate how complex business is. This isn't rocket science. We've chosen one of the world's simplest professions.

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.

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

Shun the incremental and go for the leap.

Don't take a job because your mother wants you to. Don't be a victim. You own your decision.