A leader's role is not to control people or stay on top of things, but rather to guide, energize and excite.
Interpretation
A leader should motivate and inspire rather than merely manage and command.
In this quote, Jack Welch emphasizes that effective leadership is about empowering and motivating others rather than exerting control or authority. A true leader inspires their team by providing guidance and creating an environment that energizes and excites individuals to perform at their best. This approach fosters collaboration and innovation, leading to greater success for the entire organization.
In practice
In a team meeting to inspire cooperation and enthusiasm among colleagues.
You've got to eat while you dream. You've got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum if you will. Getting it done in the short-range, and delivering a long-range plan, and executing on that.
I wanted to change the rules of engagement, asking for more- from fewer. I was insisting that we had to have only the best people...If you wanted excellence, at a minimum, the ambience had to reflect excellence.
Control your own destiny or someone else will.
The idea flow from the human spirit is absolutely unlimited. All you have to do is tap into that well. I don't like to use the word efficiency. It's creativity. It's a belief that every person counts.
An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn't have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.
Genuine leadership comes from the quality of your vision and your ability to spark others to extraordinary performance.
I pick up the details that drive the organization insane. But sweating the details is more important than anything else
It is often possible to decide the issue of a battle merely by making an unexpected shift of one's main weight.
It is not about gender, it is about experience, leadership, and vision.
I despise politics. There is no room for it in a company. My life is going to be way too short to deal with that.
We need leaders, we ourselves need to lead from a place that has the audacity to believe that we ourselves can extend the fundamental assumption that all men are created equal to every, man woman and child on this planet. And we need the humility to recognize that we cannot do it alone.
I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president's wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.