The Great Transformer

When 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.