Jack Welch's Quotes.

Jack Welch (Jack Welch, November 19, 1935 – March 1, 2020) was an American businessman.

From 1981 to 2001, for a full 20 years, he served as Chairman and CEO of General Electric (General Electric), a leading US manufacturing company. During his tenure, he led approximately 2,000 mergers and acquisitions, increasing the market capitalization from $14 billion to $370 billion, and for his role in leading the company's growth, he was selected as the "Greatest CEO of the 20th Century" by Fortune magazine in 1999.

He was also the mastermind behind the hostile mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, and layoff frenzy that swept across the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, earning him the nicknames "Management God" and "Neutron Jack." Like a neutron bomb that destroys only the people inside while leaving the building intact, he pursued a terrifying restructuring method where he completely overhauled the internal personnel of acquired companies or drastically sold off assets in smaller pieces and then improved the financial statements. Because of this, his son was reportedly assaulted by the son of a laid-off worker while on his way to school. If you want to know more about his achievements, read the 'Salim Knowledge Series - Jack Welch' edition. His autobiography is 'Jack Welch: Winning.'

Until the early 2000s, he received worldwide acclaim for being a 'master of management,' and his autobiography and books on his management techniques were used as management textbooks in numerous universities and research institutes. However, as time passed into the 2010s, his legacy began to hinder the company, causing GE to falter. The octopus-like expansion through mergers and acquisitions, ruthless restructuring, and aggressive financial expansion through Capital became core success factors during Jack Welch's era but, as time went on, these elements turned into core failure factors that shook the entire group. Even in Jack Welch's immense success, there was a duality, and his success factors and management techniques became the decisive reason why GE was unable to adapt to the dynamically changing market over time. In particular, it is the general consensus that he neglected the manufacturing sector that was the foundation of GE, focusing only on active outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions, and outward expansion through finance, causing the group to lose its fundamental competitiveness.

Crucially, since the 2008 global financial crisis, GE's Capital sector became a massive source of weakness that shook the entire group, and these weaknesses hampered GE's progress, leading to the decision in 2021 to sell off the Capital sector and its subsidiaries. This effectively ended Jack Welch's vast legacy, turning it into a case study of failure. GE's stock price also plummeted to less than one-fifth of its peak in 2000 after nearly 20 years, with many core business units sold off at bargain prices. As a result, GE was delisted from the Dow Jones Index in 2018.

He died on the morning of March 1, 2020, at the age of 84.

○ People hate change. The future is unknown, but change brings opportunity. We must find a better way to work every day.

○ If you can't accept failure, you won't know how to succeed brilliantly.

○ If you don't control your own destiny, you'll end up being controlled by someone else.

○ You can talk all you want. What matters is action.

○ Change voluntarily before you're forced to change.

○ It's tough when you lose confidence. You need to succeed at something small to regain it. Being free to act and achieve results in your work increases confidence.

○ If you pay more attention to human management than to the quantitative evaluation of strategy, you will be better off.

○ The cruelest thing is to not tell employees how to improve and then immediately fire them if they don't improve.

○ Employees need to be free from the worry of being laid off so that they can focus on their work and do it well. People need to make money and have their work go well so that they have money to spend.