- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady interviews Jeff Immelt about a new project.
- The big leadership story: Delta looks beyond the main cabin.
- The markets: U.S. futures surge after Nvidia’s new PC ‘superchip’ sparks a software rally.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. My first question for Jeff Immelt after reading his raw recollections of life after GE on his new Substack,the Long View, was, why now? It’s been nine years since Immelt suddenly stepped down as CEO—a time that he described in his post as “one of the saddest moments of my life.” He’s written a book about it, talked about it and moved on to a new chapter as a Stanford lecturer and venture partner at New Enterprise Associates. The conglomerate he led for 16 years no longer exists, split into three Fortune 500 public companies: GE HealthCare Technologies,GE Vernova and GE Aerospace. Having covered Immelt from the start of his tenure through the tough times and beyond, I was eager to know what moves him now and what he’s learned along the way. We spoke yesterday by phone—below are excerpts from our conversation.
Why now? “One of the things I learned when I did the book was to think about life in longhand, not bullet points. I take better notes. I think about things more fully. Other than the GE team, the people I spend the most time talking to are CEO friends of mine and (their questions) are: How did you find your way? What are you going to do? It’s all about life stuff, so I thought about writing about that and just decided that a book was just too heavy a lift, given all the other things I want to do. So this is about wanting to think about the stuff I was doing in longhand, but also recognizing that the journey I had been on, millions of people were going on.”
On what he wants people to see as his GE legacy. “I’m completely past it. That did not come easily, by the way. And the second thing I’d say is, look, I own a lot of stock. I’ve kept my stock, I cheer for [Larry Culp], so I really have nothing other than wanting to support. Time’s been my friend. Look at it now. Let everybody that’s out there do their own analysis. I don’t need to do it for them. Sometimes, things just take time to unfold … If there’s a couple hundred CEOs and thousands of people who say, ‘I’m glad I worked with Jeff, he taught me, he helped me, he was there when I needed him’—that would make me really happy.”
On AI and tech: “What’s not being covered enough is: what does a company actually do to get the benefits of artificial intelligence? You need a more micro view. Healthcare inflation this year is 12%. There’s a 500,000-nursing shortage. How could technology change that? … I lived all over the place, but I’d never done Silicon Valley. I saw the willingness to bet big at scale, which I think all legacy companies struggle with today. It just smacks you in the face when you go out there: Apple, Amazon, Google, they are huge companies, and they still move quickly. When I play golf on Sunday mornings, they talk about the products they work on. They don’t say, ‘I’m in an organization, I’m a VP.’ I find both those things refreshing.”
On leadership: “You live your life to prepare yourself for the worst day, not the best day. What does it really feel like to not have the success you want? There’s no way to say that without talking about the bad stuff. I taught at Stanford for seven years, and I would watch the students, and they learn from the shit, you know, they don’t learn from the good stuff, right? I have to say, having that in the back of my mind allowed me to open up and talk pretty frankly about what it felt like.” Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
The post From GE’s hot seat to Substack: Jeff Immelt reflects on a new chapter and why now is the time to get candid appeared first on Fortune.
