Jack Welch’s CEO factory has stopped production: Good riddance.
Last week, reports surfaced that after more than a year on the market, General Electric (GE) finally managed to offload Crotonville, its storied leadership academy nestled along the Hudson River in the suburbs of New York City. It’s not just Crotonville that’s a tough sell these days for GE. It’s also the executives the training centre helped shape and the leadership philosophy it long espoused.
A GE pedigree was once highly coveted by corporate boards looking to fill out their companies’ C-suites. But now, GE-bred CEOs are developing a very different sort of reputation—that of flameouts rather than stars. For the ur-example, look no further than The Boeing Company, where three of the last four chief executives all hailed from the once powerful conglomerate.
“The running joke around the company is whatever you do, don’t hire another CEO from GE!" one current Boeing manager quipped to Fortune earlier this month. It’s a damning indictment of the house that Jack Welch built. Welch ran the place for two decades, a period in which he developed a management system that rotated high-potential executives through different parts of the sprawling enterprise—a few years here with the now-infamous financial services division, a few there with plastics.
Ultimately, that meant mastering the “GE way" was deemed more critical to running a successful business than developing deep domain expertise. To the outside world, it gave the impression that a GE-trained executive could parachute in and expertly lead any business, which is how Crotonville graduates ended up in charge of companies like Albertsons, The Home Depot and Intuit that have seemingly little resemblance to GE. The Boeing fiasco is just the latest proof point that it’s time to
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