The Fast Company Interview: Jeff Immelt

Bring me through some of the experiences that were formative and that helped you get to this office.

The first real break I got was in the late 1980s. I got home one day from my job in plastics and was told I was going to Louisville [Kentucky] in the [consumer appliance] service business. I was in the go-go business of all time, building my career, and I said, "You've got to be kidding me." But I was told that Jack wanted somebody from outside the business to go in and fix this quality problem with compressors in refrigerators. It was like being sent to the far side of the moon. It was a very tough business going through a very tough cycle. And I went from running an organization of a couple hundred sales and marketing people to having 7,000 employees in consumer service, most of whom were union members fixing 3 million compressors in the middle of the biggest crisis that business ever had. That was just pure survival. It was an incredibly good test for me.

What did you learn from that experience?

It was, how do you manage a tough business at a tough time? Operationally, I became very good, in terms of attention to detail. But I also became a very good communicator. Coming here to see Jack, for two and a half years, I didn't have one good thing to say. I never said, "Wow, things are great." Instead, I said, "We fixed another million compressors this year. Here's how much it cost." The business lost money for two years. Every line was going straight down. You learned how to motivate people during a tough time, and you learned how to keep your own wits and not to panic. If you panic, everybody goes with you pretty fast.

And how do you motivate people through a tough spell?

It's a combination of dealing with the reality while communicating the road out: "Here's what we've got to do, but once we do, there is a road out of here." When I came up here, it was all about telling the truth. I was 32 years old at the time and came to see Jack, and believe me, the meetings were brutal. But I learned to tell the truth all the time. I had only bad news. I'd say, "Here's the Weibel curve, Jack, it's going like this." And he would say, "No, it isn't. You can't be right. You can't possibly be right." And I would tell him, "Well, actually, Jack, I am right, and it's going to cost us a couple of hundred million bucks." And he would say, "That can't possibly be true." And I would say, "Well, it actually is true." That was a great experience. Thank God I got it. Only a guy like Jack would have had enough faith in a guy like me. Seeing that has made me understand the need to take chances on people.

Of course, you're probably exhibit A on getting through a tough spell. How did you survive the warning from Welch in 1995 that you could be fired?

I believed in myself. There was only one person at that time who thought I had a future at GE, and it was me. It's like you see people in a meeting looking at you and covering their eyes quickly. They're thinking, "Dead man walking." I recognized that I had made a few mistakes in the whole thing, and I recognized that the only person who could get us out of it was me. I also knew I was a good guy. What I tell people is, "Don't let me define your success." I learned at that moment that Jack wasn't going to define who I was. In business as in life, sometimes bad things happen to good people, and sometimes good things happen to bad people. But over time, if you play long enough, everybody gets what he deserves -- good and bad. I was able to play through it, fix it, and it gave me a lot more confidence to face other things.

From what I've heard, it got pretty hairy, though. At one point, you nearly got into a fistfight with the sourcing manager of General Motors at a Shoney's restaurant, right?

[Immelt laughs out loud.] That was 1994, and I was trying to get pricing up in not always agreeable terms. We had a small disagreement. Let's put it that way.

In your latest letter to GE shareholders, I felt that for the first time you've begun to develop your own leadership vocabulary. It conveyed ideas and thoughts that are starting to form what might be called the Immelt Era. Where did that stuff come from?

It takes time. When I got the job, I knew I wanted the company to be more innovative, more global, and more focused on the customers. But it does take a year or two or three to really put ideas into initiatives and get the team aligned. And you've got to get enough results in the pipeline so that when you talk about the things, people aren't going to say, "You know, that's a bunch of you-know-what." I can say, "We're doing imagination breakthroughs, and, by the way, here are 20 examples that closed last year." It does take time to get there. But again, one of the things I learned from Jack is that when you're running GE, it's your job to pick ideas, pick people, and spread those ideas across the company. It's not as much a question of confidence as much as it is a combination of confidence and actually seeing the pathway you want to follow -- not just for a year or two but for a long period of time.