"The one thing I will fight to my death, this will not be laid on Jack Welch."
Former GE board member Ken Langone, to CNBC
Retirement has not been kind to former General Electric Chief Executive Jeff Immelt. Ever since his successor, John Flannery, took over this storied but troubled conglomerate last August, vowing to fix what ails it, observers have rushed to lay the blame for GE's problems at Immelt's feet.
Immelt bought back too much stock at too high a price. Immelt mismanaged the company's electrical power business. Immelt was a poor deployer of capital. He didn't shed GE Capital quickly enough. He stubbornly clung to earnings targets that were unrealistic.
"Mr. Immelt," said The Wall Street Journal in late February, "projected an optimism about GE's business and its future that didn't always match the reality of its operations or its markets."
There are plenty of people who worked with Immelt during his 16 years at the helm who are furious about this characterization. While Immelt certainly made mistakes, they say, it's a gross overstatement to claim that he inherited a smooth-functioning machine from Jack Welch, his predecessor, and then proceeded to make a hash of the place.
"As a CEO, his job was to inspire and promote confidence and make people believe," said Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN who ran NBCUniversal when it was owned by GE. "Was he overly optimistic? I never experienced that."
"I thought he was a tough-minded optimist who took the company through unbelievable challenges," said Matt Rose, the chief executive of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, LLC, a long-time GE customer. "From the outside looking in, he was a great leader who was dealt a really tough hand."
"We were never asked to sign on to an operating plan that was unrealistic," said John Rice, who served as GE's vice-chairman under Immelt. "We were asked to be aggressive. And run our business well. And if we couldn't achieve our target, and could defend what we did, we lived to fight another day."
These three and the handful of others who spoke to me (Immelt himself did not) are obviously biased. But then, so are those who are criticizing him anonymously to journalists at the Journal and elsewhere. So let's try to evaluate Immelt's tenure in a different way. As they say in boxing, let's go to the tale of the tape.