Jack Welch: Chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001

1. Lead Managers muddle - leaders inspire. Leaders are people who inspire with clear vision of how things can be done better.  
2. Manage Less “We are constantly amazed by how much people will do when they are not told what to do by management.” 
3. Articulate Your Vision “Leaders inspire people with clear visions of how things can be done better.” The best leader do not provide a step-by-step instruction manual for workers. 
4. Simplify Keeping things simple. “Simple messages travel faster, simpler designs reach the market faster and the elimination of clutter allows faster decision making.“
5. Get Less Formal “You must realize now how important it is to maintain the kind of corporate informality that encourages a training class to comfortably challenge the boss’s pet ideas.“
6. Energize Others Genuine leadership comes from the quality of your vision and your ability to spark others to extraordinary performance. Getting employees excited about their work is the key to being a great business leader.
7. Face Reality Face reality, then act decisively. Most mistakes that leaders make arise from not being willing to face reality and then acting on it.
8. See Change as an Opportunity Change is a big part of the reality in business.
9. Get Good Ideas from Everywhere New ideas are the lifeblood of business. “The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action - fast.“
10. Follow up Follow up on everything. Follow-up is one key measure of success for a business. 
11. Get Rid of Bureaucracy The way to harness the power of your people is “to turn them loose, and get the management layers off their backs, the bureaucratic shackles off their feet and the functional barriers out of their way.” 
12. Eliminate Boundaries In order to make sure that people are free to reach for the impossible, you must remove anything that gets in their way. “Boundarylessness” describes an open organization free of bureaucracy and anything else that prevents the free flow of ideas, people, decisions, etc.
13. Put Values First Don’t focus too much on the numbers. “Numbers aren’t the vision; numbers are the products.“
14. Cultivate Leaders Cultivate leaders who have the four E’s of leadership: Energy, Energize, Edge, and Execution.
15. Create a Learning Culture “The desire, and the ability, of an organization to continuously learn from any source, anywhere - and to rapidly convert this learning into action - is its ultimate competitive advantage.“
16. Involve Everyone Business is all about capturing intellect from every person. The way to engender enthusiasm it to allow employees far more freedom and far more responsibility.
17. Make Everybody a Team Player Managers should learn to become team players. Take steps against those managers who wouldn’t learn to become team players.
18. Stretch Stretch targets energize. “We have found that by reaching for what appears to be the impossible, we often actually do the impossible; and even when we don’t quite make it, we inevitably wind up doing much better than we would have done.“
19. Instill Confidence Self-confident people are open to good ideas regardless of their source and are willing to share them. 
20. Have Fun Fun must be a big element in your business strategy. 
21. Be Number 1 or Number 2 “When you’re number four or five in a market, when number one sneezes, you get pneumonia. When you’re number one, you control your destiny.“
22. Constantly Focus on Innovation “You have just got to constantly focus on innovation. And more competitors. You’ve got to constantly produce more for less through intellectual capital. Shun the incremental, and look for the quantum leap.” 
23. Live Speed “Speed is everything. It is the indispensable ingredient of competitiveness.” 
24. Behave Like a Small Company Small companies have huge competitive advantages. They “are uncluttered, simple informal. They thrive on passion and ridicule bureaucracy. Small companies grow on good ideas - regardless of their source. They need everyone, involve everyone, and reward or remove people based on their contribution to winning. Small companies dream big dreams and set the bar high - increments and fractions don’t interest them.“