G. E.’s next chief executive, John Flannery, is highly regarded inside
and outside the company, said Bill George, a professor at Harvard Business School who served as chief executive of Medtronic.
“These people were bigger than life, and I saw it up close,” said Kevin Sharer, a former chief executive
of Amgen who worked as a top aide to Mr. Immelt’s legendary predecessor at G. E., Jack Welch.
with a big office, a tenure of 10 or 20 years, in a suit
and tie, is becoming a thing of the past,” said Vijay Govindarajan, who served as G. E.’s chief innovation consultant in 2008 and 2009 and now teaches at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.
Mr. Peltz has come a long way since then, having scored big wins forcing laggards like Heinz
and Wendy’s to improve their performance, and he acquired a $2 billion stake in G. E.
By early this year, Mr. Peltz’s Trian Fund was pressing G. E.
for deeper cost cuts, and to link executive pay more closely to lower expenses and higher profits.
“It was so quiet, you could feel the energy drain out of you,” said Ann Klee, the G. E.
executive who oversaw the move to Boston and the development of its new headquarters there.