Jeff Immelt is one of the U.S.’s most prominent business leaders, having served as the chief executive officer of General Electric from 2001 to 2017. Immelt worked his way up the executive ladder at GE, serving under and then replacing the company's legendary CEO, Jack Welch. Since stepping down as the CEO, he has taught at Stanford Business School. In his memoir, Hot Seat, Immelt writes about his career at GE, during which he visited China regularly, helping oversee the company’s major expansion there. In this lightly edited interview, we began by discussing his first experiences of doing business in China.
Jeff Immelt.Illustration by Lauren Crow
Q: In your book, you write about what you learned at the helm of GE, and about how you built GE’s capabilities in China. Can you give us a sense of how that began?
A: My first trip to China was in the late ‘80s, when I was working in GE plastics. I flew into Hong Kong and then to Shenzhen. We were building what's called
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