Top 200 Jack Welch Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Change before you have to.”

— Jack Welch

Featured in: Change Quotes

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

— Jack Welch

Featured in: Leadership Quotes

3. “If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.”

— Jack Welch

Featured in: Inspirational Entrepreneurship Quotes

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

— Jack Welch

Featured in: Leadership Quotes

5. “When there’s change, there’s opportunity.”

— Jack Welch

6. “Control Your Own Destiny or Someone Else Will.”

— Jack Welch

7. “There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”

— Jack Welch

Featured in: Quotes About Balance

8. “Strategy is not a lengthy action plan. It is the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

10. “Trust happens when leaders are transparent.”

— Jack Welch

11. “A leader’s job is to look into the future and see the organization, not as it is, but as it should be.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

14. “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.”

— Jack Welch

15. “There are only two sources of competitive advantage: the ability to learn more about our customers faster than the competition and the ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition.”

— Jack Welch

Featured in: Competition Quotes

16. “The team with the best players wins.”

— Jack Welch

17. “A leader’s role is not to control people or stay on top of things, but rather to guide, energize and excite.”

— Jack Welch

18. “In the end, your integrity is all you’ve got.”

— Jack Welch

Featured in: Integrity Quotes

19. “The biggest opportunity for big companies has come by far in the digitization of internal processes.”

— Jack Welch

20. “Culture drives great results.”

— Jack Welch

21. “No company, small or large, can win over the long run without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it.”

— Jack Welch

22. “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.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

24. “Cash is king. Get every drop of cash you can get and hold onto it.”

— Jack Welch

25. “Great leaders love to see people grow. The day you are afraid of them being better than you is the day you fail as a leader.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

27. “Keep learning; don’t be arrogant by assuming that you know it all, that you have a monopoly on the truth; always assume that you can learn something from someone else.”

— Jack Welch

28. “If we get the right people in the right job we’ve won the game.”

— Jack Welch

29. “Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.”

— Jack Welch

Featured in: Confidence Quotes

30. “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.”

— Jack Welch

31. “If I had to run a company on three measures, those measures would be customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and cash flow.”

— Jack Welch

32. “Just because you are the boss doesn’t mean you are the source of all knowledge.”

— Jack Welch

Featured in: Boss Quotes

33. “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.”

— Jack Welch

34. “Take time to get to know people. Understand where they are coming from, what is important to them. Make sure they are with you.”

— Jack Welch

35. “Be candid with everyone.”

— Jack Welch

36. “Every great leader has a generosity gene.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

39. “Never miss out on an opportunity like a good recession.”

— Jack Welch

40. “Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.”

— Jack Welch

41. “HR should be every company’s killer app. What could possibly be more important than who gets hired?”

— Jack Welch

42. “Without doubt, there are lots of ways to measure the pulse of a business. But if you have employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow right, you can be sure your company is healthy and on the way to winning.”

— Jack Welch

43. “The secret of success is changing the way you think.”

— Jack Welch

44. “I might not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but I’m pretty good at getting most of the other bulbs to light up.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

46. “You talk about seeing around corners as an element of success. That’s what differentiates the good leader. Not many people have it. Not many people can predict that corner. That would be a characteristic of great leaders.”

— Jack Welch

47. “Companies don’t give job security. Only satisfied customers do.”

— Jack Welch

48. “The 3Ss of Winning in business are speed, simplicity, and self-confidence.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch