Jack Welch Quotes

200 Jack Welch Quotes

1 2



Every employee, not just the senior people, should know how a company is doing.
Jack Welch

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

If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.
Jack Welch

The art of leading comes down to one thing: facing reality, and then acting decisively and quickly on that reality.
Jack Welch

Too often we measure everything and understand nothing.
Jack Welch

Don’t play with businesses that can’t win. Businesses that are number 3, number 5 in their market – Christ couldn’t fix those businesses. They’re going to lose anyway.
Jack Welch

It is true that candid comments definitely freak people out at first.
Jack Welch

I particularly liked the people who had had the wind knocked clear out of them but proved they could run even harder in the next race.
Jack Welch

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

Companies have a habit of sending expendable bodies to run new ventures. It’s nuts. For a new business to succeed, it has to have the best people in charge, not the most available.
Jack Welch



There is no one right mentor. There are many right mentors.
Jack Welch

Speed keeps business and people young.
Jack Welch

My job is to find great ideas, exaggerate them, and spread them like hell around the business with the speed of light.
Jack Welch

The leader’s unending responsibility must be to remove every detour, every barrier to ensure that vision is first clear, and then real.
Jack Welch

It doesn’t mean a thing to say I’m going to do it. It only means something to do it.
Jack Welch

Sam Walton was an authentic America hero, certainly one of mine. But for one group of folks, he has been nothing but trouble – those managers of mature businesses, of whatever size, whose standby excuse for stagnation is that their markets are mature, and therefore it’s all beyond their control. What Sam Walton did was 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.
Jack Welch

People with positive energy just love life.
Jack Welch

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

Change before you have to.
Jack Welch

We can’t afford to waste time in bureaucracy.
Jack Welch



I have been asked literally thousands of questions. But most of them come down to this: What does it take to win?
Jack Welch

I think winning is great. Not good – great. Because when companies win, people thrive and grow. There are more jobs and more opportunities.
Jack Welch

Have a positive attitude and spread it around, never let yourself be a victim, and for goodness’ sake – have fun.
Jack Welch

Effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible.
Jack Welch

Setting the mission is top management’s responsibility. A mission cannot be delegated to anyone except the people ultimately held accountable for it.
Jack Welch

In the most common scenario, a company’s mission and its values rupture due to the little crises of daily life in business.
Jack Welch

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

We are socialized from childhood to soften bad news or make nice about awkward subjects.
Jack Welch

Eventually, you come to realize that people don’t speak their minds because it’s simply easier not to.
Jack Welch

To get candor, you reward it praise it, and talk about it. Most of all, you yourself demonstrate it in an exuberant and even exaggerated way.
Jack Welch



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

A company has only so much money and managerial time. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest. They cut their losses everywhere else.
Jack Welch

I didn’t invent differentiation! I learned it on the playground when I was a kid.
Jack Welch

Protecting under-performers always backfires. The worst thing, though, is how protecting people who don’t perform hurts the people themselves.
Jack Welch

Differentiation rewards those members of the team who deserve it.
Jack Welch

Once we made the case for differentiation and we linked it to a candid performance appraisal system, it worked as well in Japan as it did in Ohio.
Jack Welch

While being in the middle 70 percent can be demotivating to some people, it actually revs the engines of many others.
Jack Welch

In China, a young woman asked how any businessperson in her country could practice candor and differentiation when ‘only the voice of the boss is allowed.’ I’d ask, ‘Why aren’t you asking those questions to you own bosses?’ The answer would come back, ‘I can’t bring that up. I’d get killed.’
Jack Welch

Some people have better ideas than others; some are smarter or more experienced or more creative. But everyone should be heard and respected.
Jack Welch

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



1 2


Return from Jack Welch Quotes to Quoteswise.com