In 2001, Jeff was handed the most valuable, most respected company in the world to manage, and in 2017 he handed off to his successor a company badly damaged, “a company on fire,” as one executive told me. Jeff was “imperial” and “delusional,” many people explained. But the failure of the GE board to rein in Jeff’s behavior and to question Jeff’s judgment more deeply, or to push back against his imperial and delusional tendencies, together stand as one of the greatest corporate governance abdications in American history.
