The Great Transformer

by Adi Ignatius
FROM THE SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2017 ISSUE

W hen Jeff Immelt announced that he was stepping down as chief executive of GE,
the Wall Street view of his tenure was tepid. Analysts acknowledged his
leadership through 9/11 and the Great Recession. But some also hammered him
for the 30% decline in GE’s share price and noted that the company’s stock was the worst-
performing component in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Those points, while fair, obscure a
bigger one: Immelt utterly remade the organization he inherited from Jack Welch.

In “How I Remade GE,” which anchors our Spotlight package, Immelt calls the organization’s
revamping “the most consequential makeover in its history.” The company Welch handed him
was a productivity machine, a colossus of disparate businesses. But, Immelt says, “I believed that
the company couldn’t simultaneously be good at media, pet insurance, and making jet engines.”
He set out to fashion a simpler organization focused on industrial businesses—GE’s traditional
strength, where the company’s enormous scale could drive growth.

In the same way that Welch embodied a certain approach to leadership, Immelt embodied the
evolving thinking about leadership and management. Having exited financial services, media
and entertainment, and appliances, he invested in wind turbines and other high-margin
businesses that run on exceptionally long cycles. He also made a bold bet on digitization. His
vision took 16 years to implement and will take more time to play out. Others complain about
short-termism, but Immelt did something about it.

A version of this article appeared in the September–October 2017 issue (p.10) of Harvard Business Review.

Adi Ignatius is the editor in chief of Harvard Business Review.

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