Jack Welch Quotes

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

Control Your Own Destiny or Someone Else Will

When you were made a leader you weren't given a crown, you were given the responsibility to bring out the best in others.

If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.

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

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.

Change before you have to.

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

If you are not confused, you don´t know what is going on.

You can look at the situation and feel victimized. Or you can look at it and be excited about conquering the challenges and opportunities it presents.

Common mission trap for companies: trying to be all things to all people at all times.

If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.

It is better to act too quickly than it is to wait too long.

When you become a leader success is all about growing others.

Control your own Destiny or somebody else will

Effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information. Little is worse than a manager who can’t cut bait.

Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the better.

When you own your choices, you own their consequences.

No vision is worth the paper it's printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.

Don't lose youself on the way to the top.

The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there.

When launching something new, you have to go for it—“playing not to lose” can never be an option.

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

IT’S SAID that you can only live life forward and understand it backward.

Differentiation favors people who are energetic and extroverted and undervalues people who are shy and introverted, even if they are talented.

The final relationship that cannot be ignored is with disrupters: They are individuals who cause trouble for sport - inciting opposition to management for a variety of reasons, most of them petty. Usually these people have good performance - that's their cover - and so they are endured or appeased. A company that manages people well takes disrupters head-on. First they give them very tough evaluations, naming their bad behaviour and demanding it change. Usually it won't. Disrupters are a personality type. If that's the case, get them out of the way of people trying to do their jobs. They're poison.

When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?

There are no finite answers to many questions. What really counted was your thought process.

Change before you have to

Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and build self-confidence.

the only career worth pursuing is the one that turns your crank.

Life is too short to spend every day doing something you don’t love.

In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?

General Electric CEO Jack Welch said in Winning: “No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” —Jack Welch, author and CEO of GE from 1981-2001

We've all been guilty at one point or another in our careers of boasting of perfect hindsight. It's a terrible sin. If you don't make sure your questions and concerns are acted upon, it doesn't count.

Underneath, you would surely see that the best care passionately about their people—about their growth and success. And you would see that they themselves are comfortable in their own skins. They’re real, filled with candor and integrity, optimism and humanity.

If a job doesn’t excite you on some level—just because of the stuff of it—don’t settle.

Indeed, the biggest winners in the world are those who answer yes to the question, “Am I living the life I choose?

RULE 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.

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 . . . the best way to hold your customers is to constantly figure out how to give them more for less.—Jack Welch, Chairman, General Electric

Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across the river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and were still doing it when I crossed the river. They were part of the dream from which I recognized the Welches, my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts.

The third way is less common and certainly less of a layup—a culture of integrity, meaning a culture of honesty, transparency, fairness, and strict adherence to rules and regulations. In such cultures, there can be no head fakes or winks. People who break the rules do not leave the company for “personal reasons” or to “spend more time with their families.” They are hanged—publicly—and the reasons are made painfully clear to everyone.

leadership, very simply, is about two things:          1.   Truth and trust.          2.   Ceaselessly seeking the former, relentlessly building the latter.

as Google CEO Larry Page put it in his 2014 TED talk: “The main thing that has caused companies to fail, in my view, is that they missed the future.

People development should be a daily event, integrated into every aspect of your regular goings-on.

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

If I had to run a company on three measures, those measures would be customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and cash flow. ” Jack Welch, former CEO of GE

Retired General Electric CEO Jack Welch said, “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

As former General Electric CEO Jack Welch said in Winning: “No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.”27

It was like being a fly on the wall at a meeting. JACK WELCH ON HIS JOB AT AGE TWELVE AS A CADDY FOR LOCAL BUSINESSMEN AT A SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS, COUNTRY CLUB

Jack Welch‟in dediği gibi kendisine güveni olmayan kişiden korkarım. Çünkü o ne yetkilendirme, ne paylaşım, ne ekip çalışması, ne içindeki motivasyonu bir yere götürmez.

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. —Jack Welch

People identify some of the greatest brands today with the people who revolutionized the industries of those businesses: Microsoft – Bill Gates, Apple – Steve Jobs, GE – Jack Welch, and so on.

General Electric, Jack Welch. He once said in an interview: ‘You would not believe how difficult it is to be simple and clear. People are afraid that they may be seen as a simpleton. In reality, just the opposite is true.

Your people give their days (and sometimes their nights) to you. They give their hands, brains, and hearts. Sure, the company pays them. It fills their wallets. But as a leader, you need to fill their souls. You can do that by getting in their skin, by giving the work meaning, by clearing obstacles, and by demonstrating the generosity gene. And you can do it, perhaps most powerfully, by creating an environment that’s exciting and enjoyable.

Change before you have to.—Jack Welch Wisdom is the reward for a lifetime of listening when you would have preferred to talk.—Doug Larson Communication creates collaboration. Big ears are better than big egos. When you’re not listening, ask good questions.—Bill Walsh The

Tell them to grab on to the career that engages their brain and heart and soul and gives them meaning. Tell them that eventually, the money will come, and if it doesn’t, in time, they will find themselves rich with something money can’t buy. And that, obviously, would be happiness.

The empty factories, hollowed-out cities, and unemployed workers—all lorded over by a wealthy ruling class—have contributed to the broad sense of disenfranchisement afflicting so much of the country, a combustible mix that helped lay the groundwork for the political rise of Welch’s friend, Donald J. Trump.

When you are an individual contributor, you try to have all the answers. That’s your job—to be an expert, the best at what you do, maybe even the smartest person in the room. When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?

Every job you take is a gamble that could increase your options or shut them down.

Working to fulfill someone else’s needs or dreams almost always catches up with you.

Control your own destiny, or someone else will.

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

You cannot go global on the phone or online,

It sounds awful, but a crisis rarely ends without blood on the floor. That’s not easy or pleasant. But sadly, it is often necessary so the company can move forward again.

Only satisfied customers can give people job security. Not companies.

lo que es el marketing en esencia: el producto adecuado, en el lugar adecuado, al precio adecuado, con el mensaje adecuado, ofrecido por el equipo adecuado.

learning is truly a value, growth for every employee is a real objective, mistakes aren’t always fatal, and there are lots of people around whom you can reach out to for coaching and mentoring.

Welchism has made America poorer, less equal, and more insecure. It has hollowed out factory towns while filling Wall Street’s coffers. It has left corporations unaccountable for their failings, while leaving more of the population vulnerable to the whims of highly paid executives. And it has created an economy where once proud industrial companies lose their way, with sometimes fatal consequences.

Look, winning and losing can’t be quantified. They are states of mind, and losing happens only when you give up. Seen that way, then, the world can be filled with winners, and there is room for them all.

At the end of the day, effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible. They give people a clear sense of the direction to profitability and the inspiration to feel they are part of something big and important.

What is trust? I could give you a dictionary definition, but you know it when you feel it. Trust happens when leaders are transparent, candid, and keep their word. It’s that simple. Your people should always know where they stand in terms of their performance. They have to know how the business is doing. And sometimes the news is not good—such as imminent layoffs—and any normal person would rather avoid delivering it. But you have to fight the impulse to pad or diminish hard messages or you’ll pay with your team’s confidence and energy.

Is there another way to judge potential? NASA thought so. When they were soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success and instead selected people who had had significant failures and bounced back from them. Jack Welch, the celebrated CEO of General Electric, chose executives on the basis of “runway,” their capacity for growth. And remember Marina Semyonova, the famed ballet teacher, who chose the students who were energized by criticism. They were all rejecting the idea of fixed ability and selecting instead for mindset.

Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.

The boss would be present at the beginning of each session, laying out the rationale for the Work-Out. He or she would also commit to two things: to give an on-the-spot yes or no to 75 percent of the recommendations that came out of the session, and to resolve the remaining 25 percent within thirty days. The boss would then disappear until the end of the session, so as not to stifle open discussion, returning only at the end to make good on his or her promise.*

Financial deregulation, easy credit and regulatory neglect combined with the degradation of our value system to create a religion of money and of power. The achievement of infinite wealth and fame became the ultimate standard, to be achieved at any price. The junk-bond peddlers and the raiders, the speculators and the savings-and-loan hustlers with their legions of consultants, their lobbyists and their friendly politicians, turned this country into a vast casino. Crimes were committed, crimes against the entire nation. These crimes will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. They have also undermined confidence in a system that was built up over generations. The nation will need a lengthy recovery from this madness.

For a large organization to be effective, it must be simple. For a large organization to be simple, its people must have self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. Insecure managers create complexity. Frightened, nervous managers use thick, convoluted planning books and busy slides filled with everything they’ve known since childhood. Real leaders don’t need clutter. People must have the self-confidence to be clear, precise, to be sure that every person in their organization—highest to lowest—understands what the business is trying to achieve. But it’s not easy. You can’t believe how hard it is for people to be simple, how much they fear being simple. They worry that if they’re simple, people will think they’re simpleminded. In reality, of course, it’s just the reverse. Clear, toughminded people are the most simple.

Wir sind Menschen, die die Luft, die wir atmen, verpesten. Und die Flüsse. Wir zerstören die großen Seen; der Eriesee ist bereits tot, und nun beginnen wir mit den Meeren. Wir füllen die Atmosphäre mit radioaktivem Niederschlag und vergiften die Knochen unserer Kinder. Und wir wissen das alles. Wir stellen Raketen her, die innerhalb weniger Minuten die gesamte Menschheit auslöschen können; sie sind bereits auf ihre Ziele gerichtet und bereit, abgefeuert zu werden. Wir haben endlich die Kinderlähmung besiegt, und dann entwickelte die U.S. Army neue Bakterienstämme, die unheilbare Krankheiten verursachen. Wir hatten die Möglichkeit, den Schwarzen in Amerika Gerechtigkeit widerfahren zu lassen, und als sie sie einforderten, widersetzten wir uns. In Asien haben wir Menschen lebend verbrannt. Wir erlauben, dass in den Vereinigten Staaten Kinder unterernährt aufwachsen. Wir erlauben, dass Leute Geld damit verdienen, indem sie auf unseren Fernsehkanälen unsere Kinder zum Rauchen überreden, obwohl wir wissen, welche Folgen das hat. Wir leben in einer Zeit, in der es immer schwieriger wird, sich einzureden, welch gute Menschen wir nach wie vor sind. Wir hassen uns gegenseitig. Und wir haben uns daran gewöhnt.

But Dave Wain that lean rangy red head Welchman with his penchant for going off in Willie to fish in the Rogue River up in Oregon where he knows an abandoned mining camp, or for blattin around the desert roads, for suddenly reappearing in town to get drunk, and a marvelous poet himself, has that certain something that young hip teenagers probably wanta imitate–For one thing is one of the world's best talkers, and funny too–As I'll show–It was he and George Baso who hit on the fantastically simple truth that everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind, but everybody, because the ancient ritual of washing with water after the toilet had not occurred in all the modern antisepticism–Says Dave "People in America have all these racks of drycleaned clothes like you say on their trips, they spatter Eau de Cologne all over themselves, they wear Ban and Aid or whatever it is under their armpits, they get aghast to see a spot on a shirt or a dress, they probably change underwear and socks maybe even twice a day, they go around all puffed up and insolent thinking themselves the cleanest people on earth and they're walkin around with dirty azzoles–Isnt that amazing?give me a little nip on that tit" he says reaching for my drink so I order two more, I've been engrossed, Dave can order all the drinks he wants anytime, "The President of the United States, the big ministers of state, the great bishops and shmishops and big shots everywhere, down to the lowest factory worker with all his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great engineers and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts and neckties and great expensive traveling cases in which they place these various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades and perfumes are all walkin around with dirty azzoles! All you gotta do is simply wash yourself with soap and water! it hasn't occurred to anybody in America at all! it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard of! dont you think it's marvelous that we're being called filthy unwashed beatniks but we're the only ones walkin around with clean azzoles?"–The whole azzole shot in fact had spread swiftly and everybody I knew and Dave knew from coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade which I must say is a good one–In fact in Big Sur I'd instituted a shelf in Monsanto's outhouse where the soap must be kept and everyone had to bring a can of water there on each trip–Monsanto hadnt heard about it yet, "Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty azzole he will be doing just that?"–"Let's go tell him right now!"–"Why of course if we wait another minute...and besides do you know what it does to people to walk around with a dirty azzole? it leaves a great yawning guilt that they cant understand all day, they go to work all cleaned up in the morning and you can smell all that freshly laundered clothes and Eau de Cologne in the commute train yet there's something gnawing at them, something's wrong, they know something's wrong they dont know just what!"–We rush to tell Monsanto at once in the book store around the corner. (Big Sur, Chap. 11)

This is Jack Welch’s key business strategy: Change, before it’s too late

Reducing a complex problem to a simple chart excited the

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE. Welch says, “When the rate of change outside the company is greater than the rate of change inside, the end is near.

when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight. The only question is when.

La gente trabaja todo el día, todos los días, intentando mejorar sus organizaciones y sus vidas. Intentando ayudar a sus familias, a sus empleados y a sus colegas, a sus clientes y a las comunidades en las que operan.

Y, claro, todo esto nos lleva a la pregunta de qué es exactamente la alineación. La respuesta es misión, comportamientos y consecuencias.

just as a brilliant strategy is worthless unless it is implemented, a powerful strategic principle is of no use unless it is communicated effectively. When CEO Jack Welch talks about aligning employees around GE’s strategy and values, he emphasizes the need for consistency, simplicity, and repetition.

As Jack Welch once said, “For a large organization to be effective, it must be simple.

GE’s system of differentiation, which separates employees into three performance categories and manages them up or out accordingly.

At the end of the day, if you don’t believe someone is set up to succeed in his current role, the kindest thing you can do is to be honest with him and support him in moving on. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch argues that protecting low performers only increases the damage when, inevitably, a manager is forced to let them go. “What I think is brutal and ‘false kindness’7 is keeping people around who aren’t going to grow and prosper. There’s no cruelty like waiting and telling people late in their careers that they don’t belong.

religion

Only when businesses were allowed to compete unencumbered by regulation would the best ideas rise to the top, their thinking went. The profit motive, they believed, was the perfect sorting mechanism, capable of distinguishing the good ideas from the bad, and giving rise to the products, services, and systems that would benefit society at large. Competition was the paramount way to organize human activity, they stressed, and it was imperative that people stopped relying on the government—or worse, their employers—to ensure their well-being. Welfare,

Our faith in bosses is so absolute that we even elected a failed businessman who played a successful one on television as president of the United States.

Then in the 1970s, the established order came under attack. A cadre of economists including Milton Friedman reimagined the purpose of the corporation and its role in society, laying the philosophical groundwork for an upending of the economic order.

Wealth grew more concentrated during his reign. Before Welch, corporate profits were largely reinvested in the company or paid out to workers rather than sent back to stock owners. In 1980, American companies spent less than $50 billion on buybacks and dividends. By the time of Welch’s retirement, a much greater share of corporate profits was going to investors and management, with American companies spending $350 billion on buybacks and dividends in 2000.

CEO compensation has grown by 940 percent since 1978. During the same time, the average worker’s wage has increased by 12 percent.

CEOs are talking about themselves as part of an interconnected whole—just as they had done a half century ago, before Welch came on the scene.

Stamping out Welchism will be a formidable challenge. The great hero of late-twentieth-century American capitalism, Welch occupies an exalted place in the business world’s collective imagination. Even today, with the ruinousness of his methods clear to see, he is revered as a master strategist, peerless in the art of maximizing shareholder value and empire building. Tactics he pioneered are still commonplace, values he embodied are still championed, and in many instances, disciples he groomed are still in charge. Twenty years after he surrendered his office to one of his loyal acolytes, we are all still very much living in Jack Welch’s world.

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, spent an hour a day in what he called “looking out the window time.

When Jack Welch remade GE, the most fabled decision he made was this: If we can’t be #1 or #2 in an industry, we must get out. Why sell a billion-dollar division that’s making a profit quite happily while ranking #4 in market share? Easy. Because it distracts management attention. It sucks resources and capital and focus and energy. And most of all, it teaches people in the organization that it’s okay not to be the best in the world. Jack quit the dead ends. By doing so, he freed resources to get his other businesses through the Dip.