Culp has pointed to the GE culture of Welch’s days, when operations were focused and lean manufacturing honed the company’s efficiency. He is a student of the purest form of those processes, which came out of Toyota. The outsider CEO has tried to rally workers by declaring that he is one of them. But even the success of Culp’s efforts would undermine a central tenet of GE’s oldest and most precious belief: that it knew how to manage any business and could teach any of its own to do so. In the end, when General Electric most desperately needed a manager to save what was left of the company, it
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