From near-collapse to $689 billion: Inside Larry Culp’s turnaround of GE

In today’s CEO Daily: GE needed a miracle. Larry Culp performed one.

The big leadership story: Meet the oil services giant poised to cash in on a Middle East energy rebound

The markets: Tech and semiconductor shares are dragging down Asia markets

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Shawn Tully writing from New York today. “I was sure GE was going to file for Chapter 11,” Nelson Peltz told me recently. “Then Larry arrived and performed the most amazing rescue I’ve ever read about or borne witness to.” 

He’s talking, of course, about Larry Culp, who has performed one of the greatest rescues in modern business history. On Culp’s first day as CEO in 2018, GE’s market cap measured just $96 billion, down over 80% from its peak in September 2000. Today, the valuations of the three enterprises he created (GE Aerospace which he runs, GE Healthcare, and GE Vernova) total $689 billion. Combined, they’d rank as one of the top industrial companies in the U.S. by market value, second only to Tesla ($1.5 trillion), and 16th overall, edging the likes of Visa, J&J, and ExxonMobil. Since Culp arrived, the trio has garnered annualized returns of roughly 30%, twice the record for the S&P 500. 

I wanted to know how he did it. So he agreed to show me. And it did not surprise me one bit that he didn’t want to meet at GE Aerospace’s executive offices near Cincinnati. Instead, he wanted to do what he calls “go gemba,” a Japanese phrase for where the real work happens, on the factory floor. So Culp took me on a tour of the historic plant in Lynn, Mass. that manufactures engines for military aircraft, such as the F-16 fighter jet and Apache helicopters. Culp was totally in his........

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