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

From 1981 to 2001, he served as chairman and CEO of General Electric (GE), a major American manufacturing company, for a remarkable 20 years. During his tenure, he led over 2,000 mergers and acquisitions, increasing the company's market capitalization from $14 billion to $370 billion. For his contributions to the company's growth, Fortune magazine named him the "Greatest CEO of the 20th Century" in 1999.

He was also the driving force behind the hostile mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, and layoffs 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 leaves the buildings intact but obliterates the people inside, he would acquire companies, leave the exterior intact, and then completely overhaul the internal personnel or break down assets and sell them off in large chunks to improve the financial statements. As a result, he was even physically attacked by the son of a worker who was laid off while commuting to school. To learn more about his accomplishments, read "Jack Welch: An Endless Challenge and Courage" his autobiography.

Until the early 2000s, he was lauded worldwide as a "management genius," and his autobiography and books on his management techniques were used as textbooks in universities and research institutes. However, as time passed and the 2010s rolled around, his legacy became a burden on the company, causing GE to falter. Acquisitions through octopus-like expansion, ruthless restructuring, and aggressive financial expansion through capital companies were all key factors in Jack Welch's success at the time. However, over time, these factors became the root cause of management failure, shaking the entire group from its foundation. There was a duality to Jack Welch's immense success, and the factors and management techniques of that success over time became the determining factors for GE's inability to adapt to the dynamically changing market. In particular, it is generally agreed that GE neglected its core manufacturing sector, focusing on aggressive outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions, and external expansion through finance, ultimately leading to a loss of core competitiveness for the entire group.

Following the global financial crisis of 2008, GE's capital division became a huge source of trouble that shook the entire group, and the company was finally forced to sell its capital division and its subsidiaries in 2021. Jack Welch's vast legacy has now been largely written off as a failure. GE's share price has plummeted to less than one-fifth of its 2000 peak, and many of its core business units have been sold off at bargain prices. The company was also removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2018.

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

○ People hate change. No one knows the future, but change brings opportunity. You should always be looking for a better way to do your job.

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

○ If you don't control your own destiny, you will be controlled by others.

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

○ Change willingly before you are forced to change reluctantly.

○ It's tough to lose confidence. You need to succeed in small things to regain your confidence. Being free to act and produce results in your work will boost your confidence.

○ You'll be better off paying more attention to people management than to a numerical evaluation of strategy.

○ The cruelest thing you can do to an employee is to not tell them how they can improve, and then throw them out the door if they don't get better.

○ Employees need to be free from the fear of being laid off in order to focus on their work and get things done. People need to make a profit and do a good job to earn money.