Archived from on October 16, 2007. Public service Immelt served as Chairman of The Business Council, a nonpartisan organization, in 2005 and 2006. He was famous for insisting that people in the bottom 10% be fired. What are you working on? When we talk about becoming a digital industrial company and deepening our global presence, we mean making the portfolio deeper, not broader. He has also served on the board of Catalyst, a not for profit organization dedicated to advancing women in business. On June 6, 2018, Immelt was named executive chairman of athenahealth. Immelt was awarded the 2014 American Football Coaches Association Tuss McLaughry Award, given to a distinguished American or Americans for the highest distinction in service to others.
They were intended to focus us on creating value for customers by making our core businesses leaner, faster, more technical, and more global, and putting them on the cutting edge of the digital age. Immelt initiated one of his first major acquisitions in his area of operating expertise, the medical business. We need to look for the next tipping point. After that meeting I went to the board and got its support for creating the Global Growth Organization. Initially we focused on increasing the productivity of their service contractsâfor example, improving the uptime, or the time on wing, of our jet engines and reducing the turnaround time for overhauls. Fundamentally, that put the horizontal operations in regions on par with the vertical businesses.
We also went all in with our move into additive manufacturing, or 3-D printingâwhich I see as part of the digital industrial transformation. Who do you think did it? In this example, that might mean talking to remaining team members about the next roles they might play. Connected to that were my beliefs that the days of 4% annual growth in the developed economies were over and that the forces of economic nationalism would only gain strength. After graduating from Harvard, Immelt followed in his father's footsteps, taking a job at General Electric. In 2016, Immelt spoke at the commencement for Clemson University's College of Arts, Architecture, and Humanities as well as the College of Engineering and Science.
We are respected by Chinese customers and the government. We became a major force in the technologies that will drive productivity in this era: the industrial internet and additive manufacturing. We had to persevere: Whenever one door closed, we opened another. According to documents filed with the Federal Elections Commission, Immelt lives with his wife Andrea in New Canaan, Connecticut. Immelt also pledged to promote diversity among top management. Be All In Half measures are death for big companies, because people can smell lack of commitment.
And I ran the place! On January 21, 2011, President Obama announced Immelt's appointment as chairman of his outside panel of economic advisers, succeeding former chairman. Such companies commonly adopt a matrix structureâand then find it frustratingly difficult to manage. He was commencement speaker at the on May 20, 2007, where he was awarded the honorary Doctor of Laws. As reported in BusinessWeek , the Delta chairman Leo F. New structuresâsuch as regional councils in which leaders of the businesses and the functions meet periodically to share goals for local markets and figure out how they can collaborate to achieve themâhave taken root.
Immelt's strategies have contributed to a build-up of cash. Employment had dropped from 315,000 in 2002 to 307,000 in 2013. He is currently the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the U. In 2013, the authorization for the council was not renewed, causing the council to be permanently shut down. In July 2011 Immelt's General Electric announced that it is in the process of relocating its X-ray division from Wisconsin to China. We wanted a company that was capable of having a higher market share globally than we had in the United States. At Dartmouth College, Immelt majored in applied mathematics and served as president of his fraternity, Phi Delta Alpha.
So now that we iterate on a lot of our products continuously, we also iterate on the way we talk to one another about careers, strategy, and business outcomes. In the rail industry, one mile per hour of velocity is worth hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. We need to figure out what we are missing, where we should go faster. He was commencement speaker at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute on May 17, 2008 and received an honorary degree. In the spring of 2016 we started to talk about making additive manufacturing a stand-alone business: providing machines, materials, and expertise to a range of industries, even beyond the ones we compete in. Within 30 days of that meeting we acquired two companies for a billion and a half dollars: Arcam, which specializes in electron-beam melting systems, and Concept Laser, which specializes in powder-bed-based laser metal printing. Immelt was named a member of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2006.
He delivered motivational speeches to workers on the factory floor in Louisville from atop a forklift and donned a uniform to accompany technicians on house calls. Controversies Immelt has been associated in the press with a number of public controversies. I had 10 times more self-confidence because I knew I could work through issues of my own creation. Even more telling is their order backlog outside the United States. For example, do people on big teams feel differently about the company than people on small teams do, and do they perform their jobs faster, the same, or more slowly? Separately, Rice and his leadership team sought to clarify roles in the regional and global organizations, establishing frameworks and thresholds for decision making in areas such as pricing, financing, hiring, and performance reviews. These initiatives went beyond the expectations of customers. That company has the largest independent steam power plant in Pakistan, about 1.
I had reflected on that for more than a decade. We could see it being very disruptiveâmaking what we want, where we want, with workers who are more productive and more valuable. Then we built the Predix platform, which we aimed to make the operating system for the industrial internet. General Electric year end employment has varied from 273,000 in 2010 to 305,000 in 2014, a net increase of 37,000. Director 2018 The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation Trustee 2010 Robin Hood Foundation Director - CollectiveHealth, Inc. Immelt was born in Cincinnati. The couple were married in 1986 and their daughter, Sarah, was born a year later.
Our portfolio was simply too broad and too opaque. The bad news is that they have little tolerance for the bureaucracy of a conventional multinational. He appointed a lead director to balance his role as chairman. In 2013, the authorization for the council was not renewed, causing the council to be permanently shut down. New competitors emerged, business models changed, and we ushered in an entirely new way to invest. Another crucial way I enlisted people in the cause was by forging personal relationships.