The CEO Seeking to Revive Some of What Made GE So Special

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  • In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady speaks with GE HealthCare CEO Peter J. Arduini.
  • The top story: Could Greenland be next?
  • The markets: Mostly higher, with another round of large gains in Asia.
  • Plus: All the latest news and office talk from .

Good morning. Among all the corporate turnarounds in recent years, few match what Larry Culp accomplished for . Selected to lead GE in late 2018, Culp split the struggling conglomerate into three publicly traded companies:, and. The first to be spun off was GE HealthCare, which launched on the exchange on January 4, 2023. Since then, its stock has risen nearly 50%. (GE Vernova has jumped 400% since its April 2024 debut, largely due to AI-fueled electricity demand, while GE Aerospace has more than doubled in value.)

I recently talked with GE HealthCare CEO Peter J. Arduini about how he’s shaping a new era for the $20 billion annual medical technology and digital health firm while leaning on GE’s heritage. Arduini spent a large part of his early career at GE under Jack Welch and later Jeff Immelt, departing in 2005 before Culp convinced him to return. 

Our discussion made me recall why GE was admired for most of its 133-year history. This was the company founded by Thomas Edison, with a management system so effective that investors once believed it could work for light bulbs, nuclear reactors, Saturday Night Live and its obscure GE Capital finance division with equal success. At its height in 2000, GE’s market capitalization hovered around $600 billion—equivalent to over $1 trillion in today’s dollars. Then came the dot-com crash, 9/11, the Enron scandal, and the 2008 financial crisis, plus some missteps under , who never could recapture his predecessor’s magic. The global leadership gold standard was deemed too large to manage and split apart.

But Arduini has worked to bring back much of what made GE unique—from its approach to developing employees to how it created products. “The GE model was exceptional, and honestly, before Larry returned, some of that had faded. We didn’t even conduct performance reviews the same way, and he reinstated that,” Arduini noted. “I took the best of the old GE: our approach to leadership distribution, how we discuss leader development, and how we build our own virtual Crotonville development university.” However, he doesn’t miss being part of the massive company he left. “In a bigger business, decisions often take longer. And focus is critical in our industry. It’s all about signal versus noise—we want more signal, less noise. Larger companies inevitably have more noise.”

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