Jack Welch Quotes

Our next CEO needs to thrive in a highly dynamic environment, to be capable of accelerating what is working very well for Cisco and disrupting what needs to change.

Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders.

The world is starving for original and decisive leadership.

To build a great company, which is a CEO's job, sometimes you have to stand up against conventional wisdom.

We started Kotter International to improve leaders' ability to deal with big, important transformations in organizations - and in their lives.

The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective.

Well, I've ruffled a few feathers at all the institutions I've led. But I think that's part of leadership.

My leadership style is to produce a fear of not changing..

Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.

To me, success in the job is setting a vision, guiding an organization through change - which is exactly what I did at Digitas, and I'm very proud of that - and bringing people together and with you. That, to me, is what it takes to be successful.

Create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place, and then translate that vision into a reality.

The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.

Once an organization has a strong sense of mission, leaders can focus on trying new things.

Great leaders understand that historical success tends to produce stable and inwardly focused organizations, and these outfits, in turn, reinforce a feeling of contentment with the status quo.

What I sell is the higher knowledge of knowing what's next and not following the trend of what's now.

There's a lot of books out there about how you lead change in business, but I've certainly not seen any... on how you do that in public institutions.

The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.

Don't wait for someone to tell you what to do. Develop an innovative solution and work as a team to make it happen.

Leadership involves risk-taking.

Governing is about making tough decisions, but it's also about figuring out a better way to do things.

Leadership is... to make sure you never limit the idea or opportunity.

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

Visionary CEOs are not 'just' great at assuring world-class execution of a tested and successful business model: they are also world-class innovators.

When we talk about change, we, the business leaders, have to implement it. We have to look at what we're not doing and what we should be doing.

Very often, if a founder is waiting around for someone else to tell him what to do, the company is near death.