Quotes By 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.

Be candid with everyone.

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

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

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.

Change before you have to.

You got to be rigorous in your appraisal system. The biggest cowards are managers who don't let people know where they stand.

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.

We've only been wealthy in this country for 70 years. Who said we ought to have all this? Is it ordained?

The team with the best players wins.

Out-innovating them is the way to beat China. And to do everything that we do in this country to support innovative policy, that drives innovation and new products and more jobs and creates jobs. You can't - you can't put a wall up around here. We tried that in the '30s. It didn't work.

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

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.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It's just cultural. People just don't want to do it.

You measure your people and you take action on those that don't measure up.

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.

In my lifetime, Mitt Romney is the most qualified leader I've ever seen run for the presidency of the United States.

I've learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.

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.

I was afraid of the internet... because I couldn't type.

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

Control your own destiny or someone else will.

Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.

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.

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.

What's important at the grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the customer isn't satisfied, if the stuff is getting stale, if the shelf isn't right, or if the offerings aren't right, it's the same thing. You manage it like a small organization. You don't get hung up on zeros.

Don't manage - lead change before you have to.

Culture drives great results.

If GE's strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.