Mike Nudelman / Business Insider
When Jeff Immelt became the CEO of General Electric in 2001, he was following Jack Welch, one of the late-20th century’s most prominent corporate leaders. Just days after he took over the corner office, the US was attacked on September 11. Then came the financial crisis and the Great Recession.
During his tenure, Immelt has fundamentally reshaped GE, shedding businesses and reversing a century of conglomeration. I asked him about all that when we sat down at our IGNITION 2015
conference.
Henry Blodget:
I read an article recently that said that after 14 years at the helm, you have finally remade GE and made it your own. So what is that?
Jeff Immelt:
In 2001, GE was just a classic conglomerate: financial services, media, industrial.
I always had an idea to maybe make the company more focused on those things that I thought we were best at, and that’s a high-tech, manufacturing-based, global product and service enterprise. And that’s what we are today.
We’re the world’s biggest infrastructure technology company. We more or less had this vision 10 or 15 years ago, but certainly the financial crisis accelerated some of the activities along those lines.
Blodget:
If you had the vision 15 years ago, why did it take so long?
Immelt:
With a company our size it’s always steps and transitions you make over time. Early on, we started exiting some of the pieces of financial services, some of the more commodity businesses, like plastics, and things like that. And the idea we had was to do this over a relatively long period of time, keep the earnings power in place but transition the pieces as time goes on, and again this wasn’t just for GE, but for the world.
The biggest impediment – or let’s say the biggest challenge and opportunity – was the financial crisis, which in many ways affected anybody that was in financial services the day Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. The whole world got re-rated, and so that in some ways made it slower than we wanted it to be but in some ways made us even more determined to get to the point we