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
No one is doing something in your business - getting a sale, having a key customer, working on an R&D project - doing anything that's more important than something you say is going to change the company.
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.
Focus on a few key objectives ... I only have three things to do. I have to choose the right people, allocate the right number of dollars, and transmit ideas from one division to another with the speed of light. So I'm really in the business of being the gatekeeper and the transmitter of ideas.
Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.
The 3Ss of Winning in business are speed, simplicity, and self-confidence.
The biggest cowards are managers who don't let people know where they stand.
Don't manage - lead change before you have to.
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.
The idea of let's all share the pain equally, or let's freeze salaries altogether - it's ass-backwards. It's absolutely ass-backwards.
When there's change, there's opportunity.
I believe that in any initiative, you can't have a flavor of the month. When you believe something is profound in a company, you can not be a logical leader. You have to go to the lunatic fringe. There is no way that logic is what you need to change people.
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.
Trying to get people to face reality and see the world the way it really is is an absolutely critical aspect of leadership, in my view.
The biggest opportunity for big companies has come by far in the digitization of internal processes.