Immelt: Consummate Company Man

So different in some ways, so much alike in others.

Jeffrey R. Immelt, the General Electric Co. manager chosen to succeed the venerated John F. “Jack” Welch Jr. as GE’s chief executive next year, is a tall, loping man with an easy manner and warm style, whereas Welch is known for his tough, exacting and aggressive approach to management.

But there is no question what they have in common: an indisputable desire to lead and improve a company’s fortunes, often through radical change. And by all accounts, Immelt, 44, also shares Welch’s intensity and zeal, even if he doesn’t show it as much as Welch.

“Starting in high school, everything he did he was as a leader,” said Charles Lillis, who hired Immelt--a broad-shouldered Harvard Business School graduate--at GE in 1982.

“He oozed leadership material,” said Len Vickers, for whom Immelt worked when Vickers ran GE’s corporate marketing group and helped create the slogan “We bring good things to life.”

“He was a strong marketing guy. But he’s no clone of Welch. There are no clones, and there shouldn’t be,” Vickers told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last year when rumors started that Immelt was in contention to succeed Welch.

For the last three years, Immelt has been president and chief executive of GE Medical Systems, a unit with $7 billion in annual sales that makes diagnostic instruments and other medical equipment. Before that, he held various management posts at GE’s plastics and appliances groups.

Immelt is a consummate company man. Not only has he spent nearly all of his working life at GE, but his father Joseph also worked for 38 years in GE’s aircraft engine division in Cincinnati.

Immelt also spent much of his time in the plastics business of GE, which Welch says is his favorite division of the company. Immelt even met his wife, Andrea, while working there.

With an undergraduate degree in applied mathematics, he also has a strong technical background, leaving him well-positioned to carry on the rigorous quality-control system called Six Sigma that Welch adopted and hopes will be one of his legacies.

In the three years he spent running GE’s medical systems business in Waukesha, Wis., Immelt gained a reputation as a quick study but also as someone who related well to his employees and other members of the business community.

Welch and Immelt seemed to hit it off. “I think they did get along well from the outset,” Lillis said. “Jack is very respectful of really good talent.”

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GE taps Jeffrey R. Immelt to succeed CEO Jack Welch. A1