GE’s CEO Factory Is Dead. Good Riddance.
The company’s Crotonville academy used to be the gold standard in management training. Today’s best leaders come from closer to the action.
Jack Welch’s leadership legacy hasn’t aged well.
Photographer: Shawn Baldwin/Bloomberg
Last week, reports surfaced that after more than a year on the market, General Electric Co. finally managed to offload Crotonville, its storied leadership academy nestled along the Hudson River in the suburbs of New York City.
It’s not just Crotonville that’s a tough sell these days for GE. It’s also the executives the training center helped shape and the leadership philosophy it long espoused. A GE pedigree was once highly coveted by corporate boards looking to fill out their companies’ C-suites. But now GE-bred CEOs are developing a very different sort of reputation — that of flameouts rather than stars. For the ur-example, look no further than The Boeing Co., where three of the last four chief executives all hailed from the once powerful conglomerate. “The running joke around the company is whatever you do, don’t hire another CEO from GE!” one current Boeing manager quipped to Fortune earlier this month.