G. E.’s next chief executive, John Flannery, is highly regarded inside<br />and outside the company, said Bill George, a professor at Harvard Business School who served as chief executive of Medtronic.<br />“These people were bigger than life, and I saw it up close,” said Kevin Sharer, a former chief executive<br />of Amgen who worked as a top aide to Mr. Immelt’s legendary predecessor at G. E., Jack Welch.<br />with a big office, a tenure of 10 or 20 years, in a suit<br />and tie, is becoming a thing of the past,” said Vijay Govindarajan, who served as G. E.’s chief innovation consultant in 2008 and 2009 and now teaches at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.<br />Mr. Peltz has come a long way since then, having scored big wins forcing laggards like Heinz<br />and Wendy’s to improve their performance, and he acquired a $2 billion stake in G. E.<br />By early this year, Mr. Peltz’s Trian Fund was pressing G. E.<br />for deeper cost cuts, and to link executive pay more closely to lower expenses and higher profits.<br />“It was so quiet, you could feel the energy drain out of you,” said Ann Klee, the G. E.<br />executive who oversaw the move to Boston and the development of its new headquarters there.
