Jeffrey Immelt '78

What I've learned since graduation

"THE BASEMENT OF PHI DELT WAS PROBABLY THE BEST PREPARATION FOR THE BOARDROOM. I was the president of my fraternity, and I learned how to be really fast on my feet. Otherwise I'd have to chug a beer. It made you pretty adept at managing an unruly crowd, which is not a bad background for a CEO."

"EVEN THOUGH I DON'T SOLVE DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS ANYMORE, I USE THE REASONING PROCESS THAT I LEARNED IN THEMATH DEPARTMENT AT DARTMOUTH EVERYDAY.You can say, 'What does a CEO of GE do?' You pick people. You've also got to have a sense for digging deep into problems and trying to learn about new things. The whole game, if you're a math major, is kind of digging and analyzing."

"YOU DON'T DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF IF YOU'RE DOING WHAT EVERYBODY ELSE is DOING. I went to Harvard Business School right out of Dartmouth, and everyone who left Harvard my year went to work at investment banks and consulting firms, and at Atari, the old video game company. I went to GE, which was viewed more as a kind of sleepy old light bulb company in those days, so there were not a lot of people lined up all over the place to go work there."

"YOU COME OUT OF BUSINESS SCHOOL WITH IDEALISTIC FEELINGS, based on management theory, about what it is going to take to motivate your employees.That gets shattered pretty fast. My first job at GE was in the plastics business, and the job that I loved most in that division was being a sales manager. It was a real learning experience to discover that for a guy who's been selling plastics in Texas for 25 years, what motivates him is how much money he makes and how much good we can do for his customers."

"WHEN ALL OF THE BUTTONS ARE FLASHING RED ON YOUR DASHBOARD EVERY DAY, YOU HAVE TO KEEP AN EVEN TEMPER AND NOT PANIC. I ran the service business at GE's appliance division in the late 1980s. I arrived in the middle of a big product recall: We had to repair 2.5 million rotary compressors that were recalled from refrigerators in peoples homes all over the world. I think what we did is we communicated very openly with the consumer and projected confidence. We also had really detailed flow charts on what had to be ordered and what had to be done."

"AN IMPORTANT THING THAT JACK WELCH TAUGHT ME IS THAT ONLY GOOD is GOOD. There's never any winking about standards. If you don't measure up, you get immediate and instantaneous communication. I spent an extended period in his doghouse in 1994. I was running the plastics business and he told me, 'You know, Jeff, you just had the worst year in the company last year.' Then he said, 'lf you don't fix it, you're going to have to go, but I'm gonna give you a thousand percent of my support, and I think you're gonna do it.' And it worked. Tremendous leader."

"YOU HAVE TO HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR TO DO THIS JOB. I know half the company pretty well because I've worked in it. But since I became chairman-elect, I've spent a lot of time just getting to know the businesses that I'm not quite as familiar with, like the aircraft engines business, some parts of GE Capital, NBC, the power generation business. The guys from CNBC who do the business journalism, they love to ride me. When I first went to Dartmouth, I had a very nice looking afro, which has since thinned. They show my Dartmouth freshman book picture on the air every time they say my name."

JOB TITLE: Chairman-elect and president of General Electric, the world's most valuable company NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT: After 18 years at the conglomerate, he's been named the successor to legendary CEO Jack Welch, who is retiring AGE: 45 FAMILY: Married to Andrea; daughter Sarah is 14 COLLEGE MAJORS: Mathematics and economics