Winning

by Jack Welch

First, they don’t flood start-up ventures with adequate resources, especially on the people front.

Companies have a habit of sending expendable bodies to run new ventures. It’s nuts. For a new business to succeed, it has to have the best people in charge, not the most available.

For instance, new ventures should report at least two levels higher than sales would justify. If possible, they should report directly to the CEO. At the very least, they should always have a special place on the CEO’s priority list.

kept Noryl as a separate business because—even with its successful launch and rapid growth—I thought it would still benefit from autonomy. In fact, Noryl (now a billion-dollar business) wasn’t folded into the Plastics marketing and sales operation for fifteen years.*

Keep your mouth shut if it bothers you.

Humility will serve you well with your peers; someday

Fox quickly beat MSNBC and eventually surpassed the longtime cable news leader, CNN.

With good leadership, a merger should be complete within ninety days.

Now, I am a huge fan of Six Sigma, the quality improvement program that GE adopted from Motorola in 1995 and continues to embrace today.

One thing that is sure to kill stickiness is inconsistency in services or products.

But not really—you might have had some internal process or cost improvements, but the customer has experienced nothing but inconsistency!

Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and Johnson & Johnson also have enormous “employee brands,”

which is to say, their people get a real

It is much, much easier to get a job from a job.

One reason why people often get sucked into the vortex is that they wait too long before they start looking for another job. This is a tricky matter.

One of my objectives is to prove I don’t make the same mistakes twice.”

Now, not everyone in business wants to get a bigger and better job, but a lot of people do. If you’re among them,

But an even more effective way to get promoted is to expand your job’s horizons to include bold and unexpected activities.

Come up with a new concept or process that doesn’t improve just your results, but your unit’s results and the company’s overall performance.

James’s hours, however, were not going to make it in a company where line managers generally showed up at 8:00 a.m. or earlier, and every meeting and work routine revolved around that.

Manage your relationships with your subordinates with the same carefulness that you manage the one with your boss.

There is no one right mentor. There are many right mentors.

Don’t be a downer. The fourth and final way to help yourself get promoted is as hard or as easy as you make it—have a positive attitude and spread it around.

Once or twice or more times than that, you will not get promoted. Don’t let it break your stride.

To get ahead, you have to want to get ahead.

Bad bosses come in every variety. Some grab all the credit, some are incompetent, some kiss up but kick down; others bully and humiliate, have mood swings, withhold praise and money, break promises, or play favorites.*

But never mind industry specifics. The world has jerks. Some of them get to be bosses.

All in all, he may end up making you want to feel very sorry for yourself. Don’t!

Generally speaking, bosses are not awful to people whom they like, respect, and need.

The problem, the HR executive said, is that people generally overrate their performance on the job and their popularity with the team—most often by a factor of two or more.

Any kind of confrontation, however, is incredibly risky. Your boss may be waiting for just such a moment to dump you. In fact, he may have been hoping his negative vibes would eventually inch you into his office with the question, “So what am I doing wrong?” so that he can answer, “Too much for this to go on any longer.” Still, you have to talk. There is no way around it. Just remember, before you go into that meeting, be prepared and have options in the event that you come out of it unemployed.

More than anything else, come to grips with the fact that you are staying with a bad boss by choice. That means you’ve forfeited your right to complain.

Most bosses are perfectly willing to accommodate work-life balance challenges if you have earned it with performance. The key word here is: if.