When you take over a company like GE, you think you're going to visit 100 businesses. You're going to go see the factories you haven't seen before. You're going to see a site in Texas and one in Canada and stuff like that. That has fallen by the wayside.

September 11 was horrific, but I've been through enough crises before that I had my own pattern as to how to collect facts, what a leader should do, how to communicate with people, how to set up operating mechanisms to work our way through it.

The one thing that people don't get about GE is that, to the people who work here, it's not a company. It's not just a job. You feel like you're part of a 120-year-old ever-growing, ever-improving family.

Jeffrey R. Immelt Quotes