How GE’s Larry Culp Found a Way Out of the Mess Jack Welch Made

Not that long ago, the prospect of General Electric Co. fading from view would have been almost laughable. As recently as 2000 the company co-founded by Thomas Edison was the world’s most-highly valued corporation, with its stock worth about $600 billion, and for decades it boasted a AAA credit rating—the same as that of the U.S. government.

But the financial crisis of 2008 laid bare a sobering fact: The conglomerate’s transformation into one of the nation’s largest financial services companies had loaded it with unnoticed risks that brought it to the brink of financial collapse. That led to two chief executive officers—both alums of GE’s vaunted management talent factory—trying to shore up the house that Jack (Welch) built by selling off disparate business lines and attempting to winnow its massive debt. But it took an outsider to do what those who’d grown up at GE couldn’t or wouldn’t.