Science & Tech Quote by Jack Welch

Jack Welch didn’t reach for Viagra because he wanted to be cute; he reached for it because it’s crude, instantly legible, and a little accusatory. “The Internet” becomes a performance drug for corporate America: not a new philosophy of value creation, but an enabler that makes old machinery look powerful again. The line flatters executives who feel their companies have gone soft, then needles them for needing chemical assistance to stay competitive.

The specific intent is motivational with a threat embedded inside it. Welch is telling big business: you’re aging, you’re complacent, and you’re about to be judged by outcomes, not pedigree. Viagra doesn’t make you young; it makes you functional on demand. That’s the Internet in Welch’s frame: a tool that can jolt procurement, distribution, customer service, and internal communication into something faster, leaner, more decisive. Not transformation-as-enlightenment, transformation-as-urgency.

The subtext is pure Welch-era managerial Darwinism. If you need a pill, you admit weakness. If you refuse the pill, you become irrelevant. He’s also inoculating against tech-utopianism: the Internet isn’t a benevolent force; it’s leverage. Used well, it amplifies power. Used poorly, it exposes impotence.

Context matters: late 1990s/early 2000s boardrooms, when “e-business” was both buzzword and panic. Welch’s metaphor cuts through consultant fog, translating digital change into executive anxiety: performance, virility, and the fear of being exposed in public.