Jeff Immelt gives his side of the GE story

Good morning.

The collapse of GE is one of the most spectacular business stories of our times. At the turn of the century, it was the most valuable company in the world, and its leader—Jack Welch—was dubbed “Manager of the Century” by Fortune. Today, the company is a shadow of that. And investors lost hundreds of billions of dollars on the ride down.

So why, if you served as CEO for 17 of those sad 21 years, would you write a book about it? That’s the question Ellen McGirt and I ask Jeff Immelt on this week’s episode of Leadership Next. I won’t give away his answer here, but it is worth listening to (on Apple or Spotify). And for that matter, the book is worth reading. Immelt has always been a good storyteller. And while most business memoirs tell the story of success, Immelt’s Hot Seat is the rare tale of what went wrong.

Immelt admits some mistakes. He believes, for instance, he should have moved more quickly to address the problems at GE Capital. He wishes he had restructured his company to be more nimble. “Instead of eight big P&Ls, I wish we had 100 small P&Ls.” He rejects some of the common criticisms—for instance, the notion he was unwilling to take bad news from his team. “For 15 years, I heard nothing but bad news.” He also pushes some of the blame back onto his predecessor, forward onto his successor, and aside on a few former colleagues along the way. 

But the real lessons of the book are the downsides of complexity—GE was such a behemoth, that he never really got his arms around it—and the unpredictable role of luck. “I never viewed myself as a victim and I never wanted Hot Seat to be a victim story,” he told us. “But to do what we needed to get done, I couldn’t have the global financial crisis.  It was a torpedo right in the middle of the boat…. GE is a fun company to run when you have tailwinds. It was a bitch to run” in a financial crisis.

More news below. And check out this essay by Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and Ford Foundation President Darren Walker on what business can do to help bring the pandemic to an end.

Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com

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This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.