Jeff Immelt D'78, chairman and CEO of GE, visited Tuck in March.
GE's Immelt advises students "don't panic"
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—March 31, 2009
CONTACT: Kim Keating,
603-646-2733
HANOVER, N.H.—An overflow crowd of students, staff, and faculty gathered at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business on March 25 to hear the chairman and CEO of General Electric, one of the world's most powerful and influential companies. Recently voted the Financial Times "Man of the Year" and one of Barron's "World's Best CEOs," Dartmouth graduate Jeffrey Immelt D'78 drew a record crowd eager to understand how one of the world's great leaders copes in times of economic downturn. Since joining GE in 1982, and now seeing the company through one of the most staggering financial meltdowns since the Great Depression, this is an issue that Immelt has had to reckon with.
Tuck Professor Vijay Govindarajan introduced Immelt to the audience. Since January 2008, Govindarajan has held the post of professor-in-residence and chief innovation consultant at GE. He was given the weighty task of helping to accelerate GE's growth and innovation agenda. "In these tough and turbulent economic times, we need leaders who accept reality but proceed with confidence. Jeff Immelt is a leader par excellence," Govindarajan said. "He is an optimist who inspires hope and is able to strike the right balance between short-term results and long-term ambition."
Immelt's ability to reconcile optimism with pragmatism was made evident throughout the hour-and-a-half long discussion. "The things I've seen in the last year are things I never thought I'd see," he said. Leading one of the world's largest companies at a time like this is no easy task. Immelt elaborated: "It's like being at the helm of a battleship in the middle of a hurricane. You're going to take on water, and you're going to have to make decisions on the fly."
In spite of the state of the economy, Immelt advised, "Don't panic—be cool. Don't worry about what you can't fix." He spoke of self-renewal and intellectual curiosity as attributes essential to a leader who can both thrive in times of plenty and survive when things get tough.
"Unlike many degrees, what you get at Tuck is a license to learn. In business it's not about what you know but about how fast you learn. You have to keep renewing yourself. You've got to be able to take a punch and then dig deep into your reservoirs of self confidence. Business is not a straight line. It's about bobbing and weaving and picking yourself up," he said.
For students at Tuck, advice from one of the world's gurus of business couldn't have come at a more opportune time. To the audience members before him - hoping to understand how to make it to the top - Immelt closed by saying, "You're smart enough. You're here. The question is will you do it? Do you want to?" Whatever the answer to that question may be, he finished, "You must always measure yourself in terms of how you define success."
Founded in 1900, Tuck is the first graduate school of management in the country and consistently ranks among the top business schools worldwide. Tuck remains distinctive among the world's great business schools by combining human scale with global reach, rigorous coursework with experiences requiring teamwork, and valued traditions with innovation.
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