Good evening, I'm William D. Cohan.

Welcome back to Dry Powder. Each week, I receive feedback from readers and sources about Wall Street's biggest characters and concerns. This weekend, however, I will be focusing exclusively on the GE news.

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Bill

The Jack Welch Conundrum

Twenty years after stepping down as the leader of GE, and being minted the C.E.O. of the century, Jack Welch’s baby is about to become three companies. What went wrong?

The news that GE, the venerable conglomerate founded in 1892, was committing an act of corporate meiosis and splitting itself into three pieces—a jet-engine manufacturing company; a health-care machine manufacturing company; and a power business—leads me to ask a deceptively simple question. Who lost GE, and when? 

Was it Jack Welch, the revered “C.E.O. of the Century,” as Fortune dubbed him, who made GE the most valuable and respected company in the world, but perhaps made it too hot to handle in the process? Did Jack pick the wrong successor in Jeff Immelt? After all, he had a bench that included, at one time or another, Dave Calhoun, the C.E.O. of Boeing; David Zaslav, the C.E.O. of Discovery Communications and the architect of the still-pending Hollywood blockbuster merger with the Warner Media assets; David Cote, who went on to become the highly successful and respected C.E.O. of Honeywell after Jack forced him out of GE; Jim McNerney, one of Calhoun’s predecessors atop Boeing; and Bob Nardelli, who after losing out to Immelt became the C.E.O. of Home Depot, and then Chrysler. 

For the last three years, I have been researching, reporting and writing my new book, Power Failure, about the rise and fall of GE. I have interviewed hundreds of current and former GE executives. I spent many hours with Jack before he died, in March 2020, and many hours with Jeff, getting his take on what happened and why ...

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