Jeffrey R. Immelt Quotes

Every leader needs to clearly explain the top three things the organization is working on. If you can’t, you are not leading well.

Enron and 9/11 marked the end of an era of individual freedom and the beginning of personal responsibility.

Work hard with passion and courage. Life is a marathon of contribution. You really must work hard to accomplish something… Find your passion and get good at it.

There is no real magic to being a good leader. But at the end of every week, you have to spend your time around the things that are really important: setting priorities, measuring outcomes, and rewarding them.

Surviving a failure gives you more self-confidence. Failures are great learning tools – but they must be kept to a minimum.

I’m a complete globalist. I think like a global CEO. But I’m an American. I run an American company. But in order for GE to be successful in the coming years, I’ve gotta sell my products in every corner of the world.

I think that if you run a big company, you’ve got to, four or five times a year, just say, ‘Hey team, look, here’s where we’re going.’ If you do it 10 times, nobody wants to work for you. If you do it zero times, you have anarchy.

As one of America’s largest exporters, GE remains committed to producing more products in the United States, which is our home and largest market.

I’m out talking about this company (General Electric) seven days a week, 24 hours a day, with nothing to hide. We’re a 130-year-old company that has a great record of high-quality leadership and a culture of integrity.

Good leaders are very curious, and they spend a lot of time trying to learn things.

The most important thing I’ve learned since becoming CEO is context. It’s how your company fits in with the world and how you respond to it.

In business as in life, sometimes bad things happen to good people, and sometimes good things happen to bad people. But over time, if you play long enough, everybody gets what he deserves – good and bad.

I have learned that nothing is certain except for the need to have strong risk management, a lot of cash, the willingness to invest even when the future is unclear, and great people.

I think this notion that it’s the population of the U.S. against the big companies is just wrong.

President Obama has asked me to chair his new President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

I love working with customers. Sales has really influenced everything I do. It has instilled in me the important traits of operating with a sense of urgency and listening to people.

Leadership is an intense journey into yourself. You can use your own style to get anything done. It’s about being self-aware. Every morning, I look in the mirror and say, ‘I could have done three things better yesterday.’

I’d be lying if I didn’t say there were days when I went back and said, ‘I wish I’d done this. I should have done that. I handled this the wrong way.’ But it’s always in the motivation of getting better. I’ve never once looked in the mirror and said, ‘Oh boy, can’t do this one.’

Good leaders don’t tell people what to do, they give teams capability and inspiration.

Seeing people in person is a big part of how you drive any change process. You have to show people a positive view of the future and say “we can do it”

I was never afraid of failure. I realized that I was responsible for my own success and that every day offers a new beginning and I was confident in my ability to improve.

You can’t delegate growth or customer satisfaction.

September 11 was horrific, but I’ve been through enough crises before that I had my own pattern as to how to collect facts, what a leader should do, how to communicate with people, how to set up operating mechanisms to work our way through it.

Is France a completely open market to G.E.? No, of course not. I think we’re more discerning about China because it’s China, and they’re big, and they’re more concerning. But the best global companies are ones that are nuanced.

Live with passion. Live with purpose.

And people is the most important part of my job. I spend one third of my time on people.

The best thing you can give as a leader is a reason to trust. People want to trust. They’re hungry for it. But they’re selective. They’ll only give it to a motivator, a communicator, a teacher, a real person. Someone who in good times and bad always does the right thing.

I think we should have basically the same tax policy that Germany, Japan, the U.K., everybody else has, which is a tax rate in the mid-20s and no loopholes. Zero. The U.S. has the most antiquated tax system. And that means some people are going to pay more taxes, and some people are going to pay less.

When you take over a company like GE, you think you’re going to visit 100 businesses. You’re going to go see the factories you haven’t seen before. You’re going to see a site in Texas and one in Canada and stuff like that. That has fallen by the wayside.

I do business in 170 countries; none of them is perfect. There is not even one country that I think of, and I am like, ‘God, that did everything that I wanted it to do.’