Hot Seat

By Jeff Immelt

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:** How leadership actually works when everything goes wrong, what it takes to make decisions that affect hundreds of thousands of people, and why the hardest part of leading is not the strategy but the stamina required to keep going when every choice feels impossible.

**Who This Book Is For:** Anyone who has ever wondered what it is really like to run a major organization, anyone who aspires to lead through difficult times, and anyone who wants an honest account of success and failure from someone who experienced both at the highest level.

Most leadership books are written by people who want to tell you how smart they are. They describe a world where the right framework, applied at the right moment, produces predictable results. They imply that if you just follow their system, you too can achieve greatness without ever losing sleep. This is not that book. Jeff Immelt ran General Electric for sixteen years, from 2001 to 2017. He took over from Jack Welch, one of the most celebrated CEOs in American history, just days before September 11, 2001. In his first week on the job, terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center, and one of GE's employees died in the attack. The company's reinsurance business faced billions in potential losses. The aviation industry, which GE served as a major engine manufacturer, ground to a halt. That was day one. What followed was a decade and a half of near-constant crisis. The 2008 financial collapse nearly brought down GE Capital, the company's massive financial arm. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill implicated GE equipment. A hostile takeover bid from a competitor threatened the company's independence. Through it all, Immelt had to make decisions that affected hundreds of thousands of employees, millions of shareholders, and communities around the world. The story of GE under Immelt is complicated. The company's stock price declined significantly during his tenure. Critics have called his leadership a failure. Some of that criticism is fair. Immelt himself acknowledges mistakes in this book with unusual candor. He admits to bad acquisitions, missed signals, and decisions made too slowly. But that is precisely why this book matters. Most leadership books are written by winners who conveniently forget their losses. Immelt wrote this book after leaving GE, knowing that his legacy was already being debated and often dismissed. He wrote it anyway, because he believed there was something valuable in the experience of leading through difficulty, even when the results were mixed. The central question of this book is not "How do you succeed?" It is "How do you lead when success is not guaranteed?" That is a…