General Electric: The Drucker question

When Jack Welch kicked off his tenure at the helm of General Electric in 1981, management guru Peter Drucker gave him a strategic pep talk. In an exchange that is now business school lore, Drucker suggested Welch ask himself a basic question: «If you weren’t already in a business, would you enter it today?» The query is apposite nearly three decades later as Welch’s successor Jeffrey Immelt grapples with problems at GE Capital, the division that under Welch became the world’s biggest non-bank f...