From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

Jack Welch on over delivering and keep learning

From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

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Jack Welch on over delivering and keep learning

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[soft instrumental music] - The way that you came up, you joined GE right out of college. You became the CEO when you were 45, you climbed the ladder, that doesn't exist as much anymore, if at all anymore. What do you tell people when they're just starting out? - Over deliver. Always, never do what your boss asks to do, do that, that's minimum requirement. Make your boss smarter every day, whether you're going to stay in that company or go to another company. Keep learning and keep making your environment smarter. Keep learning, learning, learning, and when your boss gives you something, one of the problems I see all the time with kids out of school, I teach them all the time, they like to do the homework. The homework's what the boss gave you, that's what they've been doing for the last 12 years of undergraduate, four years of graduate or whatever. Yeah, do that, that's the ticket to the game but the game is the new and bigger and better and brighter stuff. So I tell my kids this all day, you want to over deliver. If I were to (mumbles) again I want to make you go to see your boss next week with some fresh ideas that you never thought of. I want to make you smarter, cause if I'm making you smarter you're loving me more every day. It's going to happen, it's real. And you're going to be so turned on to me, cause I'm just making you look ten feet tall, and I'm making you special, and you like me cause I'm doing that. And I'm never doing anything other than trying to deliver and over deliver. And if you do that you're just building up a resume for yourself, and a behavior of constructive flaws that's going to just change the game for you and your career. Many people are stuck after this recession in what we call Dante's hell or purgatory and they're locked in a job. The company's not growing fast, they got a family, I don't know if it's the wife or the husband that's working, but one of them's working the other one's out of work and they're trying to make it go, and they're stuck and they're bored. How do they get out of that? They get out of that with fresh thinking. Fresh thinking about their boss' job, how to help their boss, how to make it go. If their boss isn't that good they get out of it by trying to move laterally. They're going to have a promotion, to get into a place where they can start to express themselves. Bring fresh ideas, new thinking. - And so much of current thinking is almost a Silicon Valley approach to how you grow your career, how you grow a business, which is you should always be prepared to quit and start something new. Always be thinking about starting your own thing. What's your take on the idea of everyone's an entrepreneur. - That's what we used to say in GE, "Love being here, but be ready to go". If we're not providing you, I've said this speech constantly among our new people, we want you to love being here but if we're not delivering you got to be ready to go. Be a resume builder, be ready to go. Because we have an obligation, and if we lose a lot of good people in a certain area we'll know the boss is a jerk, and we'll get that boss out of there. So the best way to get your boss fired is for four of you to leave. We want it to be you love being here, but you're ready to go. And we have an obligation as leaders to make the place someplace you don't want to leave, you love it here.

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