Jack Welch
General Electric’s CEO In late 2001, General Electric (GE) chairman and chief executive Jack Welch decided to turn over the reins to his star protégé and handpicked successor, Jeffrey Immelt. Welch is profiled as one of the late twentieth centurys most powerful and admired managers, and looks at his unusual management and leadership style. Many people consider the idea that what made GE great was due to Welch. Will his successor be able to preserve the Welch legacy and continue his formidable record of success? Under the leadership of Jack Welch, General Electric has become the largest and most admired company in the world, with a market value of $447bn. Fortune has called Welch the leading management revolutionary of the century, and his biographer, Janet Lowe, sees him as the worlds greatest business leader who, more than anyone else, created the management model of the twenty-first century. Born in 1935, John Francis Welch, Jr grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. ... Despite having a stutter, Welch quickly became a confident natural leader. ... From the start, Welch was an entrepreneur within the corporate world. ... The bureaucracy so grated upon Welch that he almost quit in 1961, but a superior, recognizing his ability, raised his salary and granted him freedom to work in his own style. Welch eventually led and remade GE Plastics in his own image: bold, brash and often chaotic as it captured market after market. ... Welch, though, was already looking forward to a new era in which the old rules and traditions did not apply. ... Within GE he became known as Neutron Jack, after the neutron bomb, which allegedly destroyed people but left property intact.