Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch Dies at 84

Monday, March 02, 2020
GoLocalPDX Business Team

Jack Welch who served as the CEO of General Electric Co. for two decades is dead at 84.

“Mr. Welch’s success, driven by a hard-nosed strategy to slash less profitable businesses and unproductive employees, made him an international celebrity in the 1980s and drove GE to become the most valuable U.S. company during the 1990s. He groomed a generation of business leaders who went on to run giants such as Boeing Co. and Home Depot Inc.,” wrote the Wall Street Journal on Monday.

After his retirement in 2001 he wrought the best-selling books about business leadership, but GE’s troubles in the decades after his exit—under his handpicked successor, Jeff Immelt—raised questions about Welch’s management methods and whether he pushed the conglomerate too hard - writes the WSJ.

He is survived by his third wife, Suzy, and four adult children from his first marriage. He married Suzy, a former Harvard Business Review editor, in 2004 after a highly public divorce from his second wife. The couple started an online M.B.A. program and co-wrote several business books.

"GE traces its roots back more than century to Thomas Edison and John Pierpont Morgan, but the modern GE was built by Mr. Welch. He was nicknamed “Neutron Jack” because he eliminated some 100,000 jobs in his early years as chief executive and insisted that managers systematically fire their worst performers. He pressured GE workers around the globe to drive themselves to ever-more-demanding efficiency standards," writes the WSJ.

“My job is not to know everything about each business,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 1999. “It is to pick the people who will run the business and to decide how much money business A versus business B or C gets.”