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, 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.”
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Top leadership news
How Delta plans to get passengers to pay more
Delta Chief Commercial Officer Joe Esposito has been looking for new ways to push the airline’s yearslong strategy to diversify its revenue away from main cabin ticket sales. Initiatives include testing 44 first-class seats on domestic flights and more partnerships with consumer brands. He is also looking to beef up Delta’s travel services business, make in-flight meals more gourmet, and even service engines for rival airlines.
Beware of the ‘great flattening’
Citi CEO Jane Fraser’s turnaround hinges on flattening management from 13 to eight layers and reorganizing the bank into five divisions that report directly to her, boosting speed, accountability, and performance. So far, it’s hard to argue with the results. Flat organizations are all the rage at the moment, but experts warn de-layering efforts can backfire if they are just about cost-cutting or an attempt to demonstrate impact; structure matters less than culture, purpose, and relationships in making such overhauls stick.
Software needs new price model
Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy sees the major software players beginning to sort the AI winners from the losers. His company’s strong Q1 results validated its consumption-based pricing model and showed that traditional software can transition to AI compute, he told Fortune. “It’s important to understand that all software companies are not the same.”
The markets
S&P 500 futures are up 0.25% this morning. The last session closed up 0.22%. The STOXX Europe 600 was down 0.22% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.20% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.91%. South Korea’s KOSPI was up 3.68%. China’s CSI 300 was down 0.98%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 0.86%. India’s NIFTY 50 was down 0.70%. Bitcoin was down at $73K.
Around the watercooler
I wrote that Boomers were choking America’s economy. Their responses to me were revealing by Nick Lichtenberg
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Gen Z is rejecting $200 dates and choosing ‘solo-maxxing’—and dating apps are taking a hit by Sydney Lake
Arianna Huffington warns Gen Z that no one with an ‘interesting job’ can simply shut their laptop at 5 p.m.—and if you can, you should change jobs by Orianna Rosa Royle
This home-builder dropped out of high school and worked construction for $8 an hour—by 22, he was making $200K from his trade empire by Emma Burleigh
CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.
