Science & Tech Quote by Jack Welch

Fear, in Jack Welch's telling, isn't ideological; it's ergonomic. "I was afraid of the internet... because I couldn't type" lands as a deliberately disarming admission from a man mythologized as the hard-edged CEO who remade General Electric in the age of shareholder primacy. The punchline is its banality: the obstacle isn't the web's complexity, or its threat to legacy businesses, but his own fingers. Welch turns a cultural revolution into a personal bottleneck, collapsing grand narratives of disruption into the quiet humiliations that accompany learning.

The intent is managerial and self-protective at once. By framing his initial resistance as a skill gap rather than a worldview, he makes fear acceptable, even rational. It's not cowardice; it's friction. That matters in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when corporate America was splitting between executives who treated the internet as a fad and those who treated it as destiny. Welch signals that the barrier to entry is often mundane, and therefore solvable: get training, adapt, move on.

The subtext is a lesson about power and vulnerability. Typing is basic labor, the kind delegated to assistants in an older corporate order. Admitting he couldn't do it hints at the way technology flattens hierarchies by demanding direct participation. The internet doesn't care how big your office is; it asks you to show up, hands on keyboard. Welch's line works because it sneaks a cultural truth through self-deprecation: modernization isn't just strategy. It's muscle memory.