Top 200 Jack Welch Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It is better to act too quickly than it is to wait too long.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

53. “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.”

— Jack Welch

54. “Don’t make the process harder than it is.”

— Jack Welch

55. “The world belongs to passionate driven people.”

— Jack Welch

56. “Make winners out of every business in your company. Don’t carry losers.”

— Jack Welch

57. “Arrogance is a killer, and wearing ambition on one’s sleeve can have the same effect. There is a fine line between arrogance and self-confidence.”

— Jack Welch

58. “Real communication is an attitude, an environment. It is the most interactive of all processes. It requires countless hours of eyeball to eyeball, back and forth. It involves more listening than talking.”

— Jack Welch

59. “The team with the best players usually does win – this is why you need to invest the majority of your time and energy in developing your people.”

— Jack Welch

60. “The world will belong to passionate, driven leaders – people who not only have enormous amounts of energy, but who can energize those whom they lead.”

— Jack Welch

61. “No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.”

— Jack Welch

62. “Strategy is simply resource allocation. When you strip away all the noise, that’s what it comes down to. Strategy means making clear cut choices about how to compete. You cannot be everything to everybody, no matter what the size of your business or how deep its pockets.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

64. “Failing to differentiate among employees – and holding on to bottom-tier performers – is actually the cruelest form of management there is.”

— Jack Welch

65. “Business is a game, and as with all games, the team that puts the best people on the field and gets them playing together wins. It’s that simple.”

— Jack Welch

66. “I was never the smartest guy in the room. From the first person I hired, I was never the smartest guy in the room. And that’s a big deal. And if you’re going to be a leader – if you’re a leader and you’re the smartest guy in the world – in the room, you’ve got real problems.”

— Jack Welch

67. “The most important quality of leadership is intellectual honesty. The reality principle – the ability to see the world as it really is, not as you wish it were.”

— Jack Welch

68. “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.”

— Jack Welch

69. “The thing it taught me was that winning’s a helluva lot more fun than losing. It also taught me that the team with the best players that worked together the best wins.”

— Jack Welch

70. “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.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

72. “I believe social responsibility begins with a strong, competitive company. Only a healthy enterprise can improve and enrich the lives of people and their communities.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

74. “When all is said and done, teaching is what I try to do for a living.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

76. “Someone, somewhere has a better idea.”

— Jack Welch

77. “Excellence and competitiveness aren’t incompatible with honesty and integrity.”

— Jack Welch

78. “People who are coaches will be the norm. Other people won’t get promoted.”

— Jack Welch

79. “If you can’t energize others, you can’t be a leader.”

— Jack Welch

80. “What is a budget review? A personal review with numbers.”

— Jack Welch

81. “Nobody is too important to lead the initiative you say is important.”

— Jack Welch

82. “The best thing workers can bring to their jobs is a lifelong thirst for learning.”

— Jack Welch

83. “Simple messages travel faster, simpler designs reach the market faster and the elimination of clutter allows faster decision making.”

— Jack Welch

84. “When employees underperform, a leader tells them so.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

86. “Shun the incremental and go for the leap.”

— Jack Welch

87. “Stretch targets energize. We have found that by reaching for what appears to be the impossible, we often actually do the impossible; and even when we don’t quite make it, we inevitably wind up doing much better than we would have done.”

— Jack Welch

88. “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.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

91. “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.”

— Jack Welch

92. “Take the middle 70 percent and tell them what they need to do to get into the top 20 percent.”

— Jack Welch

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

— Jack Welch

94. “Again, your challenge is not just to improve. It is to break the service paradigm in your industry or market so that customers aren’t just satisfied, they’re so shocked that they tell strangers on the street how good you are.”

— Jack Welch

95. “Get the best player because whether it’s soccer or whether it’s anything else the team with the best players wins. So focus your energy on getting the best and getting rid of the weakest.”

— Jack Welch

96. “Every employee, not just the senior people, should know how a company is doing.”

— Jack Welch

97. “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.”

— Jack Welch

98. “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.”

— Jack Welch

99. “No one can guarantee you a job other than satisfied customers. That’s the only thing that works. Nothing creates work other than products and services you provide that create satisfied customers.”

— Jack Welch

100. “The last thing you want to do is be a bore. When you wake up in the morning, give yourself a good mirror test. If you look like you’re going to be a sulking, pouting bore, slap yourself in the face before you go out to the office.”

— Jack Welch