Jack Welch Quotes

You know, I think when people are in important positions in big organizations, they often get tied up with the minutia of managing money, managing things. They often forget that people deserve to be led.

A good director has to be a captain - he has to work with a lot of people every day.

I describe management as arts, crafts and science. It is a practice that draws on arts, craft and science and there is a lot of craft - meaning experience - there is a certain amount of craft meaning insight, creativity and vision, and there is the use of science, technique or analysis.

To invent is to discern, to choose.

I've been head of strategy at IBM and together with my colleagues built our five-year plan. My priorities are going to be to continue to execute on that.

Strategy 101 is about choices: You can't be all things to all people.

Inventories can be managed, but people must be led.

Business requires understanding financial matters, but management is different from running the financial aspects of the business - it requires understanding complex systems, how they operate, the nature of organisations, what happens when people interact in groups and how to motivate and guide people.

What I learned at LucasArts was, you don't make your bets on ideas: ideas are cheap. You make your bets on people.

Prioritization sounds like such a simple thing, but true prioritization starts with a very difficult question to answer, especially at a company with a portfolio approach: If you could only do one thing, what would it be? And you can't rationalize the answer, and you can't attach the one thing to some other things. It's just the one thing.

Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to.

Whoever has the best take is what matters. My challenge is finding the best take, and it'll always be that.

I think effective leaders typically are able to see the future to a certain degree and then try to take actions to shape it in some way.

My job is not to make decisions but to set stretch objectives and help our managers work out how to reach them.

I feel like the business side came more naturally to me along with the product design side, but managing and effectively leading large organizations of people is something that is perpetually challenging and the topic on which I am constantly looking for good advice.

As the director, you are the organiser who has to have all the answers. You are the person with maximum clarity.

Floor time is valuable. Our leadership isn't going to bring something up that's going to take up floor time and not be successful.

As a director, you realise the bigger picture.

Management always has a big influence on your success, no matter how good or how bad the business is itself.

There is a common and persistent belief out there that entrepreneurship is about creativity - that it's about having a great idea. But it's not, really. Entrepreneurship isn't about creativity. It's about organization-building - which, in turn, is about people.

We have all the good policies, all right visions, but the problem is implementation. When we come out of national conference, we want those leaders we have chosen to be those who can implement policies.

You have to ruthlessly prioritize.

The key to leadership is having a vision, and being strong enough to say no and not try to please everybody. Thats a recipe for failure. Leadership is practiced through attitude and actions, rather than words and memos.

One of the hardest things for the president is to distinguish the routine issues that come through from the essential issues that affect the long term, and not to let himself get sucked into the battles of the bureaucracy for marginal issues, and to keep them focused and to keep his mind clear on what the fundamental things are that he has to accomplish.

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.