Jack Welch Quotes

At a big company, often size turns into constipation; it fogs the lens about what's really happening. Sometimes with size and success comes the notion that since we've done things to be successful, we have the formula and can institutionalize it. That can be death.

You can lead a bureaucrat to water, but you can't make him think.

Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.

The problem with Microsoft is that it's so committee-driven and slow.

Big bureaucracies in business and government—they fail too.

If you think you're doing everything right, then you have a tendency to stand pat.

Don't get so stuck in your ways that you can't change.

The commonest error of politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

Failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision

A wise man changes his mind, a fool never does.

The Civil Service rewards those who do no more than sit at their desks and say no.

Bureaucracies cling to their office space, their secretaries [assistants], their official cars, and their every allotted dollar and personnel position with a tenacity that drowning men might well envy.

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept..

Decisions that lawmakers made decades or even a century ago have essentially locked us into ways of doing things, as the cost of changing looms more heavily than the potential benefits of trying something different.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

In an organization that is unwilling to change, find the opportunity to talk and interact with people - figure out why they don't want to change. It could be habits. It could be people's personal equities and reputations are defined by the role they're in or the process they've mastered.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

The establishment can't change. It can't give people anything different; it can't make the turn.

The military likes to figure out how to do something, put it in a manual or an operating procedure, and perfect doing it, and have everyone do it the same way. I don't like that.

If you give the boss all the decision-making power, they see the world through their eyes. The big innovations are generally such a shift that they won't see it. For a long time, it looked like it was just inevitable that you would get slow and bureaucratic.

The Titanic hit the iceberg not because they could not see it coming but because they could not change direction.

Maybe because I've worked in the BBC for so long I am completely allergic to meetings.

Turner Broadcasting went from a very entrepreneurial, risk-taking company where I had a tremendous amount of freedom and autonomy to a corporate, bureaucratic nightmare.

There are far too many politicians out there who take the wrong position and stick with it and never admit that they should do something different.