Jack Welch Quotes - Page 9

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.

Shareholder value is the result of you doing a great job, watching your share price go up, your shareholders win, and dividends increasing. What happens when you have increasing shareholder value? You're delivering better employees to their communities and they can give back. Communities are winning because employees are involved in mentoring and all these other things. Customers are winning because you're providing them new products.

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.

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.

As leaders, we owe it to every employee to let them know where they stand in the organization.

A strategy is something like, an innovative new product; globalization, taking your products around the world; be the low-cost producer. A strategy is something you can touch; you can motivate people with; be number one and number two in every business. You can energize people around the message.

I wanted to change the rules of engagement, asking for more- from fewer. I was insisting that we had to have only the best people...If you wanted excellence, at a minimum, the ambience had to reflect excellence.

I actually think that the economy has got some positives. It's got the market. It's got consumer confidence and it's got banks throwing - I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world.

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

Creative artists have great passion.

The record results for the third quarter once again demonstrate the ability of GE's diverse mix of leading global businesses to deliver top-line growth, increased margins and strong cash generation.

What the Commission is seeking cuts the heart out of the strategic rationale of our deal.

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.

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.

If you reward candor, you'll get it.

The best way to support dreams and stretch is to set apart small ideas with big potential, then give people positive role models and the resources to turn small projects into big businesses.

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.

Most organizations fail in driving change.

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.

The quality of an idea does not depend on its altitude in the organization...An idea can be from any source. So we will search the globe for ideas. We will share what we know with others to get what they know. We have a constant quest to raise the bar, and we get there by constantly talking to others.

The main social responsibility for a company is to win.

What's important at the grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the customer isn't satisfied, if the stuff is getting stale, if the shelf isn't right, or if the offerings aren't right, it's the same thing. You manage it like a small organization. You don't get hung up on zeros.

Globalization has taken a hit in that there is some sand in the gears because most of us have supply chains that are all over the world that we've had to lengthen.

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.

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.