Continues at: https://outline.com/zyHms4
They came by the dozens in luxury sedans, black Ubers and sleek helicopters. As they did each August, General Electric’s most important executives descended on a hilltop above the Hudson River for their annual leadership gathering.
Just an hour’s drive from New York City or a short flight from Boston, Crotonville, N.Y., is the home of GE’s management academy, famed for culling and cultivating a cadre of leaders the company saw as its most valuable product.
Crotonville is where Jack Welch, GE’s larger-than-life former chief executive, held his lecture sessions in “The Pit,” a large sunken auditorium where he coached the future CEOs of companies such as Boeing and Home Depot . Welch remade and expanded the campus during his two decades running GE.
Opened in 1956, the 60-acre property is half conference center, half country retreat. Behind a guard house lolls a mix of low-slung brick residence halls, classroom buildings and restaurants, a fieldstone plaza with a fireplace, hiking trails and a helipad.
Welch and other GE bosses would visit nearly every month to lead programs for middle managers, customers and executives from other companies who wanted to learn the GE leadership magic. For the 300,000 people who work at GE, a trip to Crotonville is an ardent desire and a treasured accomplishment.
This pilgrimage in August 2017 was different. The stock price had been slumping, and longtime CEO Jeff Immelt had just stepped down after a frustratingly middling 16-year tenure. The new boss, John Flannery, had started a monthslong review of every corner of America’s last great industrial conglomerate.
On that summer afternoon, the auditorium buzzed with whispers of what was ahead. No one doubted the 125-year-old company’s ability to rise again. It always had.
Continues at: https://outline.com/zyHms4