Jack Welch Winning Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

People with big personalities can make very big targets of themselves.

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.

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.

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.*

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.

Look, anyone can manage for the short term—just keep squeezing the lemon. And anyone can manage for the long—just keep dreaming. You were made a leader because someone believed you could squeeze and dream at the same time.

RULE 3. Leaders get into everyone’s skin, exuding positive energy and optimism. You know that old saying “The fish rots from the head.” It’s mainly used to refer to how politics and corruption filter down into an organization, but it could just as easily be used to describe the effect of a bad attitude at the top of any team, large or small. Eventually, everyone’s infected. The leader’s mood is, for lack of a better word, catching. You’ve seen the dynamic a hundred times. An upbeat manager who goes through the day with a positive outlook somehow ends up running a team or organization filled with…well, upbeat people with positive outlooks. A pessimistic sourpuss somehow ends up with an unhappy tribe all his own. Unhappy tribes have a tough time winning. Of course, sometimes there are good reasons to be down. The economy is bad, competition is brutal—whatever. Work can be hard. But your job as leader is to fight the gravitational pull of negativism. That doesn’t mean you sugarcoat the challenges your team faces. It does mean you display an energizing, can-do attitude about overcoming them. It means you get out of your office and into everyone’s skin, really caring about what they’re doing and how they’re faring as you take the hill together.

From my days in the Pit, I learned that the game is all about fielding the best athletes. Whoever fielded the best team there won. Reuben Gutoff reinforced that it was no different in business. Winning teams come from differentiation, rewarding the best and removing the weakest, always fighting to raise the bar. I was lucky to get out of the pile and learn this my very first year at GE—the hard way, by nearly quitting the company.

When Jack Welch eventually wrote his biography, it wasn’t called Intense Analysis; it was titled, Straight from the Gut.

That’s more easily said than done;

Take the value “We treat customers the way we would want to be treated.” That’s pretty tangible, but Bank One had literally identified the ten or twelve behaviors that made that value come to life. Here are some of them: Never let profit center conflicts get in the way of doing what is right for the customer. Give customers a good, fair deal. Great customer relationships take time. Do not try to maximize short-term profits at the expense of building those enduring relationships. Always look for ways to make it easier to do business with us. Communicate daily with your customers. If they are talking to you, they can’t be talking to a competitor. Don’t forget to say thank you. Another value Bank One had was: “We strive to be the low-cost provider through efficient and great operations.” Some of the prescribed behaviors included: Leaner is better. Eliminate bureaucracy. Cut waste relentlessly. Operations should be fast and simple. Value each other’s time. Invest in infrastructure. We should know our business best. We don’t need consultants to tell us what to do.

Jack Welch, the transformational former CEO of General Electric and business guru, says that an effective mission statement answers the question “How are we going to win in this business?” He believes, after years of experience, that this is the most effective way to convey your business’ mission to the world, and that winning should be your business objective.

Today, all arrows point toward the biotech, nanotech, and information technology industries, and the convergence among them.

Stepping back from almost any situation with an underperformer, it’s always easy to see the solution. They need to move on—sooner rather than later. Up close, however, organizations tend to draw out departures, as people fret about the employee’s emotional reaction to being let go. Oftentimes, managers feel guilty about putting a friend out of work, or remorseful they didn’t give candid enough feedback along the way, or both.

The only antidote is simplicity. The simplicity of leading through truth and trust. Ceaselessly seeking the former, relentlessly building the latter. In every decision, in every action. Truth is a determined pursuit, a personal and unquenchable fire, burning to know what is really happening inside the company and out.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is the team that fields the best players wins.” @Jack_Welch #JoinTheRide

Over the course of your career, your Detroit will surely call you at one point or another. If you can go, that’s great. If you can’t, make peace with the reasons why.

Jack Welch said, “The team that sees reality the best wins.” Notice

Every ending is just an opportunity to start again, wiser, more experienced, and more emboldened for the next act.

Increasingly, I have become concerned that the motivation to meet Wall Street earnings expectations may be overriding common sense business practices,” he said. “Too many corporate managers, auditors, and analysts are participants in a game of nods and winks. In the zeal to satisfy consensus earnings estimates and project a smooth earnings path, wishful thinking may be winning the day over faithful representation. As a result, I fear that we are witnessing an erosion in the quality of earnings, and therefore, the quality of financial reporting. Managing may be giving way to manipulation. Integrity may be losing out to illusion.” It was a remarkable speech.

People who publicly struggle with work-life balance problems or continually turn to the company for help get pigeonholed as ambivalent, entitled or incompetent—or all of the above. Rarely do people in the top 20% of any organization complain about work-life balance. At home, as at work, they’re so competent that they’ve figured out and implemented sustainable solutions. Below-average performers, by contrast, have three strikes against them. First, they tend to be less expert at organizing their time and sorting through priorities, not just at work, but at home. Second, because of their middling performance, these people have been told they have limited chances of advancement. That lowers their self-confidence and raises their ambivalence. And finally, they’re not as financially secure as people in the top 20, giving them fewer resources to buy work-life balance with nannies or personal trainers or whatever. Put all three dynamics together, and it’s no wonder underperformers struggle publicly with work-life dilemmas and ask for help so often.

Achieving work-life balance is a process. Getting it right is iterative. You get better at it with experience and observation, and eventually, after some time passes, you notice it’s not getting harder anymore. It’s just what you do.

Forget the arduous, intellectualized number crunching and data grinding that gurus say you have to go through to get strategy right. Forget the scenario planning, yearlong studies, and hundred-plus-page reports. They’re time-consuming and expensive, and you just don’t need them. In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.

But differentiation is all about being extreme, rewarding the best and weeding out the ineffective. Rigorous differentiation delivers real stars—and stars build great businesses. Some contend that differentiation is nuts—bad for morale. They say that differential treatment erodes the very idea of teamwork. Not in my world. You build strong teams by treating individuals differently. Just look at the way baseball teams pay 20-game winning pitchers and 40-plus home run hitters. The relative contributions of those players are easy to measure—their stats jump out at you—yet they are still part of a team. Everybody’s got to feel they have a stake in the game. But that doesn’t mean everyone on the team has to be treated the same way.

as Jack Welch approximated the point more pungently in his 2005 book Winning, “In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.”)