Jack Welch
Jack Welch
John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr.is a retired American business executive, author, and chemical engineer. He was chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001. During his tenure at GE, the company's value rose 4,000%. In 2006, Welch's net worth was estimated at $720 million. When he retired from GE he received a severance payment of $417 million, the largest such payment in history...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth19 November 1935
CityPeabody, MA
CountryUnited States of America
For a large corporation to be effective, it must be simple. For an organization to be simple, its people must have self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. Insecure managers create complexity, real leaders do not clutter.
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.
What the Commission is seeking cuts the heart out of the strategic rationale of our deal.
They were making a deal for a property that clearly was a property that we wanted to own, so we had to act, and act as quickly as we could, and make the offer more attractive.
We have built a company with a business mix and operating system that will allow us to deliver record results in any foreseeable economic climate, ... We have just completed a very successful management transition and I've never been more confident about the company's future.
Wright is a visionary with a great strategic mind, and he's a strong business leader with outstanding people skills, ... He's a terrific guy and will be a key force in guiding the company's future growth.
No one is guaranteed a job in this.
We have the brand, and we have the fulfillment capability. Now we had to get the Net, and that's the easiest part of the game.
If you reward candor, you'll get it.
The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor.
Some think that it is cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10 percent of our people. It isn't. It's just the opposite. What I think is brutal and "false kindness" is keeping people around who aren't going to grow and prosper. There's no cruelty like waiting and telling people late into their careers that they don't belong - just when the options are limited and they're putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages.
If you're not in Germany, you're not in Europe. And if you're not in Asia, you're nowhere.
My job is to find great ideas, exaggerate them, and spread them like hell around the business with the speed of light...And to put resources in to support them. Keep finding ideas. That's the job of just about all of our CEOs.
What Sam Walton did was to 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.