Culture drives great results.
Ninety-nine point nine percent of all employees are in the pile because they don’t think.
Face reality as it is, not as it was, or as you wish it were. Be candid with everyone. Don’t manage, lead. Change before you have to. If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete. Control your own destiny, or someone else will.
I’ve learned in a hundred ways that I rarely regretted acting but often regretted NOT acting fast enough.
The main social responsibility for a company is to win.
Any time there is change, there is opportunity. So it is paramount that an organization get energized rather than paralyzed.
If you don’t deliver, you don’t earn the flexibility.
If GE’s strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.
Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.
Any jerk can have short-term earnings. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the company sinks five years later.
Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital – the world’s best talents and greatest ideas.
We’ve only been wealthy in this country for 70 years. Who said we ought to have all this? Is it ordained?
Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It’s just cultural. People just don’t want to do it.
Give me a highly successful unionized industry.
A company has only so much money and managerial time. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest. They cut their losses everywhere else.
I’m not perfect, but if there are any points given for caring about people with every fiber of your being and giving life all you’ve got every day, then I suppose I have a shot.
That’s all managing is: just coming up with the right questions and getting the right answers.
Just because you are the boss doesn’t mean you are the source of all knowledge.
Be candid with everyone.
The value decade is upon us. If you can’t sell a top-quality product at the world’s lowest price, you’re going to be out of the game.