Top 258 Quotes & Sayings by Jack Welch - Page 4

Six Sigma is a quality program that, when all is said and done, improves your customers' experience, lowers your costs, and builds better leaders.

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

Approach every meeting with a purposeful, high-energy, ready-to-make-a-contribution attitude, and watch how fast leadership’s perception of you follows your behavior.

When I stop learning something new and start talking about the past versus the future, I will go.

As a leader, you have no right to have any employee wonder how they fit in and where they are going.

The record results for the third quarter once again demonstrate the ability of GE's diverse mix of leading global businesses to deliver top-line growth, increased margins and strong cash generation.

In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.

If you get the best people on your team, you've got plenty of time to do the things you like to do and can add more value to.

If you reward candor, you'll get it.

As leaders, we owe it to every employee to let them know where they stand in the organization.

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

Creative artists have great passion.

The idea of let's all share the pain equally, or let's freeze salaries altogether - it's ass-backwards. It's absolutely ass-backwards.

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.

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.

When it comes to strategy, ponder less and do more.

No one is doing something in your business - getting a sale, having a key customer, working on an R&D project - doing anything that's more important than something you say is going to change the company.

Managers can waste a lot of time at the outset of a crisis denying that something went wrong. Skip that step.

There are advantages to being the chairman. One of my favorite perks was picking out an issue and doing what I called a "deep dive." It's spotting a challenge where you think you can make a difference - one that looks like it would be fun - and then throwing the weight of your position behind it. Some might justifiably call it "meddling." I've often done this just about everywhere in the company.

A good leader remains focused. Controlling your destination is better than being controlled by it

When it's time to let someone go, do it right. No surprises. No humiliation.

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.

Lack of candor blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they've got. It's a killer.

Nobody is too important to lead the initiative you say is important.

We have the brand, and we have the fulfillment capability. Now we had to get the Net, and that's the easiest part of the game.

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

It's the internet like the flu - it just spreads like crazy.

What the Commission is seeking cuts the heart out of the strategic rationale of our deal.

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

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.

What is a budget review? A personal review with numbers

The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action-fast.

I wanted to change the rules of engagement, asking for more- from fewer. I was insisting that we had to have only the best people...If you wanted excellence, at a minimum, the ambience had to reflect excellence.

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.

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.

Trying to get people to face reality and see the world the way it really is is an absolutely critical aspect of leadership, in my view.

On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.

That's all managing is: just coming up with the right questions and getting the right answers.

Make winners out of every business in your company. Don't carry losers.

I believe that in any initiative, you can't have a flavor of the month. When you believe something is profound in a company, you can not be a logical leader. You have to go to the lunatic fringe. There is no way that logic is what you need to change people.

For a large corporation to be effective, it must be simple. For an organization to be simple, its people must have self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. Insecure managers create complexity, real leaders do not clutter.

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.

Most organizations fail in driving change.

What Sam Walton did was to go into one of the most mature industries of all and find a way to make it grow, grow, grow, double-digit, month after month, year after year. He did it by innovation, customer focus, and above all, speed.

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.

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

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.

If you've got a company that has a mentality inside that is filled with searching for a better idea every day, not just as a slogan but as a real concept, you will have innovation around you all the time.

The quality of an idea does not depend on its altitude in the organization...An idea can be from any source. So we will search the globe for ideas. We will share what we know with others to get what they know. We have a constant quest to raise the bar, and we get there by constantly talking to others.

Control your destiny or somebody will.

Too many people believe that one big, public success will solve their self-confidence problems forever. That only happens in the movies. In real life, the opposite strategy is what works. Call it the small victo-ries approach. In time you will discover that all failing really does teach you something you needed to know- so you can regroup and stretch again, with ever more...nerve.

If you can't energize others, you can't be a leader.

I think the move by Mr. Greenspan was welcomed by everyone here.

With leadership the question at the beginning of the day is, 'how far can we take this...how big can we grow it...and how fast can we get there?'

Change has no constituency and a perceived revolution has even less.

Leading a big company means never allowing a company to take itself too seriously.

People who are coaches will be the norm. Other people won't get promoted.

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.

Face reality as it is, not as it was, or as you wish it were. Be candid with everyone. Don't manage, lead. Change before you have to. If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete. Control your own destiny, or someone else will.

The main social responsibility for a company is to win.