“What became apparent to me over time,” one former GE executive told me about Jeff, “was he never really grew from the national sales manager that he was at Plastics. That was his core competency. It’s what he always talks about on the sales side. So the full P&L capability that you’ve got to have to be the successful CEO—that Jack had, Cote had—where they understood how their initiatives or actions, everything they did, came back, connected to the numbers, the value creation, [Jeff] couldn’t connect the dots on that stuff. It’s shocking. I don’t know how people didn’t see it. But he was
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