After 92 days in the hospital battling discitis -- a spinal infection so serious that the doctors were worried he might not make it and newspapers began preparing his obituary -- former GE CEO Jack Welch, 73, has finally gone home.
It's often been suggested that the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are of above-average height. We've never done the number-crunching ourselves, but unofficial studies suggest the assertion has merit. Arianne Cohen, the 6'3'' author of The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life from on High, maintains there is a tangible correlation between height and success -- and offers up a variety of theories on why tall people tend to thrive in business and elsewhere. Fortune recently sat down with Cohen to talk about the role height plays in the workplace.
Jack Welch "would bet on" a U.S. comeback in the automotive business if unions and other parties make appropriate concessions, the former General Electric chairman and CEO said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.
When Jack Welch gave a guest lecture at MIT's Sloan School of Management in 2005, someone in the crowd asked, "What should we be learning in business school?" Welch's reply: "Just concentrate on ne...
It's tough to find an executive who has delivered top performance across as wide a swath of business as Boeing CEO W. James McNerney. In a 19-year career at General Electric, he ran GE's Asian oper...
It's tough to find an executive who has delivered top performance across as wide a swath of business as Boeing CEO W. James McNerney. In a 19-year career at General Electric, he ran GE's Asian operations, its light bulb business and its jet engine business, among others - performing so well that he was a finalist to succeed CEO Jack Welch in late 2000. When he didn't get that job, 3M recruited him almost instantly to be CEO; the stock rose 34 percent on his watch. He left 3M to become Boeing's chief in mid-2005, and since then the stock is up 30 percent.
Game On!
Every Tuesday morning I have a meeting with my business partners in our Union Square offices. At that table I have people who are essentially my "kitchen cabinet." One represents development. Anoth...
Even now, nearly five years after his retirement from General Electric, Jack Welch commands the spotlight. He is still power-lunching, still making the gossip columns, still the charismatic embodim...
At GE under Welch, employees were ranked as A, B, or C players, and the bottom group was relentlessly culled.
After 92 days in the hospital battling discitis -- a spinal infection so serious that the doctors were worried he might not make it and newspapers began preparing his obituary -- former GE CEO Jack Welch, 73, has finally gone home.
It's often been suggested that the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are of above-average height. We've never done the number-crunching ourselves, but unofficial studies suggest the assertion has merit. Arianne Cohen, the 6'3'' author of The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life from on High, maintains there is a tangible correlation between height and success -- and offers up a variety of theories on why tall people tend to thrive in business and elsewhere. Fortune recently sat down with Cohen to talk about the role height plays in the workplace.
Jack Welch "would bet on" a U.S. comeback in the automotive business if unions and other parties make appropriate concessions, the former General Electric chairman and CEO said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.
When Jack Welch gave a guest lecture at MIT's Sloan School of Management in 2005, someone in the crowd asked, "What should we be learning in business school?" Welch's reply: "Just concentrate on ne...
It's tough to find an executive who has delivered top performance across as wide a swath of business as Boeing CEO W. James McNerney. In a 19-year career at General Electric, he ran GE's Asian oper...
It's tough to find an executive who has delivered top performance across as wide a swath of business as Boeing CEO W. James McNerney. In a 19-year career at General Electric, he ran GE's Asian operations, its light bulb business and its jet engine business, among others - performing so well that he was a finalist to succeed CEO Jack Welch in late 2000. When he didn't get that job, 3M recruited him almost instantly to be CEO; the stock rose 34 percent on his watch. He left 3M to become Boeing's chief in mid-2005, and since then the stock is up 30 percent.
Game On!
Every Tuesday morning I have a meeting with my business partners in our Union Square offices. At that table I have people who are essentially my "kitchen cabinet." One represents development. Anoth...
Even now, nearly five years after his retirement from General Electric, Jack Welch commands the spotlight. He is still power-lunching, still making the gossip columns, still the charismatic embodim...
At GE under Welch, employees were ranked as A, B, or C players, and the bottom group was relentlessly culled.
Once upon a time, there was a route to success that corporate America agreed on. But in today's fast-changing landscape, that old formula is getting tired.
In what universe is it even conceivable that the United States could fail to reach the semifinals of something called the World Baseball Classic? Not only fail to win, but could field a team that i...
"Put the fish on the table," says George Kohlrieser, a professor at the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland. You've got to go through the "smelly, bloody process of cleaning it," but the reward is "a great fish dinner at the end of the day."
IN AN INTERVIEW with Jack Welch in the late 1980s, I challenged him about his strategy to make GE No. 1 or No. 2 in all its markets--or get out. At the time Welch was working hard to reinvent the c...
CNN Financial Editor Todd Benjamin speaks to Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. The following is a transcript of the interview.
Picture a hallway. You're walking down it, alone. Before you reach the end, you need to reach a decision. Your engineers have been hard at work on a daring new product. But now the stakes have grow...
When Zurich Financial let Bob Miller go in February 2003, he wasn't worried. His résumé was impeccable. He had 20 years of experience under his belt and plenty of references describing him as a hig...
Your company may be on top now, but someone somewhere is gunning for you. It's easy for yesterday's revolutionaries to become today's reactionaries, warns management guru Gary Hamel. "The wet cemen...
Growing Through Acquisition
No. 5
Global Office asked three British senior executives to put their management questions to legendary former General Electric CEO Jack Welch.
On a Sunday evening in 1879, Thomas Edison and his assistants powered up an electric bulb and took turns watching it. Over the past 18 months their quest for a workable filament had generated nothi...
1/2 The crunch of leaves says November. New Yorkers run their marathon. The peachy new $20 bills are in the spend cycle. And there are 53 shopping days until Christmas. Let the rampant holiday comm...
There were groans in early September at Universal Studios. Once again it was time for executives at Hollywood's third-largest movie studio to meet the man who would head their new parent company. T...
Q I am about to start my annual performance appraisal, known as forced ranking. That means I rate my employees and dismiss the weakest 5 percent. We've used the method for years, but this time I h...
It's a familiar scene. An industry under fire. A congressional committee demanding answers. A corporate CEO called to testify.
In February at the Pebble Beach Golf Links, amid the crashing waves of the Pacific and bellowing sea lions, three dozen of America's most powerful business leaders gathered for a showdown. Among th...
GRAND PRIZE WINNER, DUMBEST MOMENT OF 2002
Jack Welch was tearing himself apart.
The first big thing that Bob Nardelli wanted to be was a pro football player. But at 5-foot-10 and 195 pounds, he was the smallest guy on the line at Western Illinois University. "The rest of the w...
1 THE HEADLINES Transitions: Former President Bill Clinton joins an investment advisory firm
Who could have predicted that FORTUNE's Manager of the 20th Century would spend year one of retirement embroiled in a sex scandal? Between consulting and golf, Welch allegedly squeezed in an affair...
After listening to 30 minutes of America-bashing from the television audience on the BBC talk show Question Time, Philip Lader, a former U.S. ambassador to Britain under President Clinton, was prac...
When Jack Welch was choosing his successor at General Electric last November, he agonized over selecting just one of his top candidates. "I love all three of these guys!" he said.
The former CEO of General Electric surprised the business world earlier this month when he took a part-time one-year contract at LBO shop Clayton Dubilier & Rice. He will be making a handful of new...
Jack Welch has long been considered the Michael Jordan of Wall Street--a man praised for his unbeatable skills. News of Welch's retirement has garnered as much press attention as Jordan's decision ...
Working on a book about his 40 years in management put Jack Welch in a reflective mood--an uncharacteristic state for this tough-minded CEO. As he himself puts it, "I was never a person who looked ...
In 1994, when he was a young pup of a manager at General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt had a bad year. A very bad year. The sort of year you don't want to tell Jack Welch about. Immelt's plastics divisi...
A show of hands, please: Who thinks we have underperformers in this organization? (All hands go up.) What's your estimate of how many--is it 5%? (Virtually all hands go up.) 10%? (Most hands go up....
Near the end of May, General Electric stock was selling for just under $50 a share. At the same time, an option to buy a GE share for $55, valid until January 2003, was going for $6.90 on the Ameri...
Jack Welch said something the other day that brought me up short: "Human relationships are declining in the selling game." It jarred me because I'd been wondering whether maybe the exact opposite w...
Before we get started, before we give you our fabulous advice on how to manage your ego, and those of your big-headed colleagues, let's get one thing straight: We have nothing against ego, per se. ...
He has been crowned Manager of the Century by Fortune magazine. But just as Jack Welch gets ready to step down from his perch atop the world's most valuable public company and pass control to CEO-d...
The 1990s were to business what the 1940s were to Hollywood. The personalities were larger than life, the audience all agog--and nowhere did the klieg lights shine more brightly than on America's m...
By now we've all heard plenty about the job Jack Welch has done running General Electric for the past 20 years. Is there any CEO or company more lionized than Welch or GE? Seems like it gets more p...
A few years back Whirlpool, the appliance maker that had been reliably pumping out dishwashers and dryers for decades, decided to tackle quality head-on. Executives at the company implemented their...
On a warm Sunday afternoon in Palm Beach, Fla., at the end of Thanksgiving weekend, Jack Welch climbed aboard a General Electric corporate jet and told the pilots they would not be flying to New Yo...
Jeffrey Immelt must be having that Phil Bengston feeling right about now.
New York City's Meatpacking District is home to meat wholesalers, prostitutes of indeterminate gender, and some of Jack Welch's money: The General Electric CEO is an investor in Chinghalle, a new r...
It's beginning to look as though Jack Welch may never retire. The GE CEO, who was appointed a month after Ronald Reagan's election, announced that he would stay until the end of next year to overse...
The new boss at Lucent is the old boss, Henry Schacht, 66. In charge at Xerox and at Campbell Soup: Paul Allaire, 62, and David Johnson, 68, who also ran those companies years ago. Grandpa's back--...
At General Electric, numbers are a very big deal. Take $10.7 billion. That's how much money GE made last year--more than any other public company. Then there's 20, which is how many years Jack Welc...
On a hot morning in Beijing last June, the CEOs of General Electric's 20 or so businesses in China gathered in a windowless conference room for one of their thrice-yearly internal meetings. Each ga...
Jack Welch's and Robert Rubin's books will have to do some serious business to recoup advances of $7.1 million and $3.3 million, respectively. The standard rags-to-riches bio won't cut it. Here are...
Why should you want to run a funky business? Maybe because Jack Welch does, at least according to Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom, authors of Funky Business (Financial Times Prentice Hall, $...
Baby-boomers can rightfully claim credit for providing most of the digital technology and entrepreneurial imagination that unleashed the new economy. Although the building blocks of microprocessors...
For all the effort that goes into our FORTUNE 500 list, we may omit a ranking or two. Luckily, Golf Digest picks up the slack. In its March issue, the magazine's staff ranks the top 200 FORTUNE 500...
I want a revolution," Jack Welch told another General Electric executive just after the company revealed Welch would be its next CEO. He got what he wanted soon enough. Looking back from our high-t...
Now that the 20th century is pretty much in the bag, business people have to turn their energies to the one that starts in January. It's a big task, and all any of us has to work with is the capita...
You don't become head of General Electric by being a scaredy-cat, but one thing frightens Jack Welch, even after 18 years in the job: the sheer size of the company. "Don't talk to me about how big ...
The hottest and highest-stakes CEO succession race of the decade--and maybe of the century, no exaggeration--is the race to follow Jack Welch as CEO of General Electric, so I grab any chance I get ...
You can see the curtain moving as they shift scenery backstage in Fairfield, Conn., in preparation for the climactic act of Jack Welch's career--the act that sees him hand to a successor the orb an...
For a nationwide satellite broadcast, GE CEO Jack Welch and Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher recently met with FORTUNE editors John Huey and Geoffrey Colvin. The subject: how to create great co...
Intensity of interest in our Most Admired Companies increases every year, so plenty of executives, directors, investors, shareholder activists, and researchers are sure to focus on a change we've m...
For most investors, there's just General Electric, arguably the world's most successful company--a maker of refrigerators, light bulbs, and more sophisticated industrial equipment. At another level...
One of our competitors (the biweekly owned by a perennial Republican presidential wannabe) has been making noise lately about its plans to launch a new foreign edition next year. We'd like to welco...
Traditionalists at NBC were appalled. General Electric CEO Jack Welch had announced that he was changing the name of the landmark RCA Building at 30 Rockefeller Center to the GE Building. This was ...
Two things don't get served at the River Cafe: locally caught striped bass and General Electric CEO Jack Welch. Health officials caution against eating the fish; a sign in the entrance warns Welch ...
Conventional wisdom says you must attend an Ivy League or similarly elitist institution to have a shot at the executive suite. A look through the alumni directory of the decidedly egalitarian Unive...
JACK WELCH and Roberto Goizueta don't know each other well--they see each other three times a year at meetings of the Business Council, and they exchange birthday cards in November. They have the k...
IF EVERYBODY THINKS business needs better leadership--and apparently everybody does--then why is the corporate world's understanding of how to teach leadership still Stone Age primitive? Says MIT's...
THE MOST VALUABLE product on this planet is not the microchip, not the automobile, not the television set. No, sir. What has produced more wealth than any other thing dreamed of by the mind of man ...
Now that Westinghouse has agreed to take over CBS, the inevitable comparisons are being made between CEO Michael Jordan and the CEO of another manufacturing company that owns a television network, ...
Recuperating in his hospital room after an angioplasty in early May, General Electric CEO Jack Welch sent a memo to two dozen top executives. He pointed out that the day after news of his heart pro...
John Francis Welch looked wan. He has made dozens of trips to Asia as CEO of General Electric and for the first time came back with a debilitating parasite. (The affliction had nothing to do with t...
My name is Julie. I am a ... technophobe. And it's going to take more than 12 steps to help me. Fortunately there are others similarly unaddicted, so I don't feel too bad. According to a survey spo...
MANAGING/COVER STORY 40 JACK WELCH'S NIGHTMARE ON WALL STREET The management fiasco at Kidder Peabody represents an ugly blot on the record of GE's CEO. It is a brutal lesson in how not to run a bu...
TALK ABOUT stretch targets: Could any corporation operate without working capital? The answer may surprise you. A fast-growing number of companies are setting that audacious goal because pursuing i...
NO ONE SEEMS to be noticing, but Jack Welch has been quietly shifting policy at General Electric in a way that suggests a seismic change in corporate strategy. For years, GE's huge financial arm, G...
Could I trouble you for a few moments, valued fellow worker? The ten top- selling business books of this holiday season have been brought to my attention by the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops of Milwa...
JACK WELCH has led General Electric through one of the most far-reaching programs of innovation in business history, and consultant Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan business sc...
MORE THAN any other executive, Jack Welch is known for breakthrough management ideas and the will to apply them. As General Electric's chief executive since 1981, Welch, 57, has led the revolution ...
OUR HEROES define our times. At the turn of the century, America elected a rough-riding President, Teddy Roosevelt, to spur along its Horatio Alger- fueled dreams of getting the job done, of produc...
The problem with the legions of books out there meant to help you change your corporate culture is that they tend to lack, well, substance. Sure, their pages abound with management buzzwords like l...
JACK WELCH never met Ivan W. Gorr. Welch is famous for demanding that each of General Electric's lines of business ranks No. 1 or No. 2 in market share. Cooper Tire & Rubber, of which Gorr is CEO, ...
Just to reach their centennials -- which Coca-Cola, Olin, and others do this year -- companies have had to endure 23 recessions, the Great Depression, six wars, innumerable changes in the tax code,...
SPECIAL REPORT/COVER STORY 24 WHAT I WANT U.S. BUSINESS TO DO IN '92 With the American economy convalescing and the world order in stunning metamorphosis, the globe's largest business sector senses...
DON'T TRY THIS at home, but consider these two alternative methods for boiling a live frog. If you drop little Freddie into boiling water, he will hop right out, say those familiar with this classi...
MANAGING/COVER STORY 40 GE KEEPS THOSE IDEAS COMING It wrote the book on management. Now Jack Welch is rewriting it: Managers will forgo old powers -- directing and controlling -- for new duties he...
ARE AMERICAN corporations ready for the New Age? Michael Murphy, founder of the Esalen Institute, thinks so. Next year Murphy, 60, hopes to start luring business groups to Esalen, the Big Sur spa w...
I WAS AN ONLY CHILD,'' says Jack Welch. ''My parents were about 40 when they had me, and they had been trying for 16 years. My father was a railroad conductor, a good man, hardworking, passive. He ...
WOULD HE sell them off, shut them down, snip their suspenders, and send them weeping into the street? Kidder Peabody's top investment bankers had every reason to worry in March as they waited for J...
SAY FAREWELL to the classic postwar American manager, that model of rational decision-making who coolly piloted us through the prosperity of the Fifties and the go-go of the Sixties, only to begin ...
Long before most chief executives knew what corporate restructuring was, Jack Welch was doing it. He jolted GE to life in 1981, after being named its eighth and, at 45, youngest chairman. Since the...
LAST FALL an influential New York security analyst received three unexpected visitors from Hitachi, the $21-billion-a-year maker of consumer electronics products and computers. Like most Japanese g...
Jack Welch bristles whenever he sees himself referred to as Neutron Jack (as in, when he enters a factory the building remains standing but the workers are wiped out). Welch picked up the nickname ...
TO THE CASUAL eye, much of what General Electric has been up to lately seems to epitomize the humbled circumstances of American business. For more than a century GE brought the world wondrous inven...
General Electric's proposed acquisition of RCA for $6.28 billion -- the largest non-oil merger ever -- unites two companies that have rebounded strongly after several disappointing years. Thornton ...
LAST FALL an influential New York security analyst received three unexpected visitors from Hitachi, the $21-billion-a-year maker of consumer electronics products and computers. Like most Japanese g...
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