"WINNING: THE ULTIMATE BUSINESS HOW-TO BOOK" by Jack Welch, Suzy Welch

• Have a positive attitude and spread it around, never let yourself be a victim, and for goodness’ sake—have fun.
• In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?
• Effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible.
• Setting the mission is top management’s responsibility. A mission cannot be delegated to anyone except the people ultimately held accountable for it.
• In the most common scenario, a company’s mission and its values rupture due to the little crises of daily life in business.
• In fact, I would call lack of candor the biggest dirty little secret in business.
• Lack of candor basically blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got. It’s a killer.
• Eventually, you come to realize that people don’t speak their minds because it’s simply easier not to.
• To get candor, you reward it, praise it, and talk about it. Most of all, you yourself demonstrate it in an exuberant and even exaggerated way.
• It is true that candid comments definitely freak people out at first.
• Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak.
• 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.
• But the fact is protecting underperformers always backfires.
• Protecting underperformers always backfires. The worst thing, though, is how protecting people who don’t perform hurts the people themselves.
• The point is: it is virtually impossible to know where any given job will take you.
• A great job can make your life exciting and give it meaning. The wrong job can drain the life right out of you.
• Because there is no way to disentangle money from decisions about job and career, the best you can really do is come to terms with how much money matters to you.
• You need to find “your people,” the earlier in your career the better. No job is ideal without the presence of shared sensibilities.
• Any new job should feel like a stretch, not a layup.
• “There’s no pretraining to be a CEO.
• Working for some companies is like winning an Olympic medal. For the rest of your career, you are associated with great performance.
• Working to fulfill someone else’s needs or dreams almost always catches up with you.
• If a job doesn’t excite you on some level—just because of the stuff of it—don’t settle.
• Authenticity may be the best selling point you’ve got.
• Nothing will get you a new job faster than terrific performance in your old one.
• The goal, if you’ve been let go, is to stay out of what I refer to as “the vortex of defeat,” in which you let yourself spiral into inertia and despair.
• Every manager in the world knows what “I resigned” or “I left for personal reasons” really means.
• finding the right job gets easier and easier the better you are. Maybe that sounds harsh, but it’s just reality. At the end of the day, talented people have their pick of opportunities. The right jobs find them.
• So if you really want to find a great job, choose something you love to do, make sure you’re with people you like, and then give it your all.
• All careers, no matter how scripted they appear, are shaped by some element of pure chance.
• Do deliver sensational performance, far beyond expectations, and at every opportunity expand your job beyond its official boundaries.
• Don’t make your boss use political capital in order to champion you.
• But an even more effective way to get promoted is to expand your job’s horizons to include bold and unexpected activities.
• If exceeding expectations is the most reliable way to get ahead, the most reliable way to sabotage yourself is to be a thorn in your organization’s rear end.
• Getting on the radar screen. As I’ve said, the first and best way to get noticed is with results.
• But in my experience, there is no one right mentor. There are many right mentors.
• To get ahead, you have to want to get ahead.
• The facts are, when it comes to careers, you mainly make your own luck.
• Exceed expectations, broaden your job’s horizons, and never give your boss a reason to have to spend capital for you. Manage your subordinates carefully, sign up for radar-screen assignments, collect mentors, and spread your positive attitude. When setbacks come, and they will, ride them out with your head up.
• The world has jerks. Some of them get to be bosses.
• In any bad boss situation, you cannot let yourself be a victim.
• Generally speaking, bosses are not awful to people whom they like, respect, and need.
• Even with a huge amount of maturity and a cast-iron stomach, it is hard to see yourself as others do.
• Generally speaking, bosses are not awful to people whom they like, respect, and need. Think hard about your performance.
• Your boss’s top priority is competitiveness. Of course he wants you to be happy, but only inasmuch as it helps the company win.
• Work-life balance is a swap—a deal you’ve made with yourself about what you keep and what you give up.
• It’s not that bosses want you to give up your family or your hobbies. They’re just driven by the desire to capture all of your energy and harness it for the company.
• Keep your head in whatever game you’re at.
• Have the mettle to say no to requests and demands outside your chosen work-life balance plan.
• If you say yes to everything, you won’t get balance. You’ll get off balance. Saying no is incredibly liberating. Try it on anything and everything that is not part of your deliberately chosen work-life plan.
• Make sure your work-life balance plan doesn’t leave you out.
• If you don’t fulfill your own joy with your work-life plan, one day you’ll wake up in a special kind of hell, where everyone is happy but you.
• Outside of work, clarify what you want from life. At work, clarify what your boss wants, and understand that, if you want to get ahead, what he or she wants comes first.