Former Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, GE Aerospace
Jeffrey Immelt | Innovation in Healthcare of the Future | Nahamd Speaker Series
[Transcript]
[Al & Janie Hahmad]
[Speaker Series: Though Leaders in Medicine]
[Jeffrey speaking about healthcare on stage]
Jeffrey Immelt:
So, you know, kind of what I thought I'd do is just talk about subjects that might be of interest to the people in this room and go through a couple of things just briefly. Talk a little bit about the world, a little bit about the company, then a little bit about healthcare, and then a little bit about more broadly competitiveness and what it takes to build a competitive society. And then lastly about leadership. So I'm going to do those things in quick or...
About Jeffrey Immelt
Jeffrey Immelt, former Chairman and CEO of General Electric, participated in two public events in May 2026. At the Imagine 2026 conference on May 19, Immelt discussed leadership during technological disruption and the adoption of AI. He stated that an "AI winter" is inevitable, where people may say "it doesn't work" or that too much money has been spent, and emphasized the importance of perseverance through such crises. Immelt also said that AI will differentiate performance between hospitals, banks, and airlines, and that leaders must "exercise new muscles." He advised that tech professionals should not be the ones to explain technology to the public, saying "we should never let tech people talk about tech." On May 1, Immelt appeared as the inaugural Teevens Center Leadership Fellow at Dartmouth College. During the conversation, he said that leadership involves giving people truth and context, and that "there are two magic words to being a leader: blame me." He reflected on his own experience with imposter syndrome, stating he was "not comfortable enough in my own skin to say, I don't know." Immelt also commented on organizational culture, saying "your culture is only as good as the worst person you're willing to tolerate." He praised Dartmouth's current position, calling it "the best house in a bad neighborhood" and a "differentiated opportunity."
Transcript (23 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Jeffrey Immelt0:03
So what I thought I'd do is just talk about a subject that might be of interest to the people in this room. And go through a couple things just briefly — talk a little bit about the world, a little bit about the company, then a little bit about healthcare. And then a little bit about, more broadly, competitiveness and what it takes to build a competitive society. And then lastly, about leadership. So I'm gonna do those things in quick order.
The economy — look, you can read the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times every day, but basically, you're reading more or less the same story, and that is slow growth and volatility. I've worked for GE for 32 years. I can never remember a time that the world's been more volatile than it is right now. I don't say that in a negative way. I actually think there's nothing wrong with that. I think it is the world that we live in. People want to know certainty. They wanna see stability. But that's not what we're gonna wake up and see. We're gonna wake up and see a world that's moving quickly, where the dynamics are very different than what we've known in the past. And if you can prepare yourself for volatility, I think you can lead a successful business, you can lead a happy life. If you wanna go back, go to bed tonight and wake up back in 1997, when everything was really more normal, you're not gonna be happy ever. So I just think that's the nature of the world.
Now within that, the big things that I look at — US and China, the world's two biggest economies, are actually doing pretty well. I'd say the US is the best I've seen since the financial crisis. It's moving slowly, but surely improving. China, which is quite material, almost no matter what business you're in, it has some impact. And China is going through reform and change, but still generally growing. And I think if you've got two of the world's biggest economies growing, that's a good thing. Now 40% of the world, which is Europe and Japan, not so good. These are economies that are material, but quite flat. So you have real kind of winners and losers, if you think about where the global economy stands today.
The oil prices, which you can read about almost every day — I was going over the holidays, and kind of cleaning up my mess from the previous year. And I read a study, that's one of the famous economic groups, this was dated November 18th and it said, no, oil prices will come down to about $80 a barrel, but then they'll bounce right back up to 100. So I threw that report out. And I just think the volatility is moved by a number of things — supply and demand, Saudi Arabia that wants to drive more of their force into the marketplace. But by and large, this, again, is gonna create winners and losers in the economy. For a big company like GE, it's about neutral, for a town like Miami, that might be a good thing. But if you're in Houston, which has been a boom city for the past 10 or 15 years, this is gonna be a different dynamic. So that's more volatile.
Just the state of governance — not just in the US but globally — the ways that business centers interact with government is just different today. Think about things like the Affordable Care Act, if you're in the healthcare field. The fact that we've run the country for almost five years with no budget. Just the amount of uncertainty that tax policy, immigration policy, or the lack thereof, creates for businesses and societies. Now, that's not just unique to the United States, that's going on in every corner of the world. Coming out of the financial crisis, there's just less trust that people have for their government and their leaders. And that creates just another source of volatility.
And then the last one is just innovation. If you have the chance to go visit with the entrepreneurial community in the country, it's quite remarkable today. If you go to Silicon Valley, or even a place like Miami that has a burgeoning entrepreneurial community, I think we live at a point in the world that's again, quite uniquely American, where the power of small business, the power of really these new thinkers, and new entrepreneurs have the chance to disrupt almost every business model, mine and yours. And so we all — it keeps all of us hungrier, I think, and younger and on the edge of our seat because you just never know which wave is gonna get you.
So you add all those things up, you get slow growth and volatility. And you sit here in Miami, the gateway to Latin America, and Latin America is going through its own set of changes where, throughout the region, consumers are getting more wealth and there's gonna be more healthcare purchased, and consumer credit and things like that, in places like Mexico and Brazil. But if you do business in a country like Brazil, it's going through massive change and challenges and issues. So you just have to maybe not read the newspaper so much.
I think the trick for — now it's easier for me to say because we sold our media business, so when we owned NBC, I would never say don't watch TV. But now that we sold NBC I'd say don't watch TV, really, 'cause in many ways the things you're looking at almost every day in the newspaper may or may not be relevant if you have a long-term perspective and a long-term view. And I think the race is for those people that are willing — you just can't live today unless you're willing to take risk. I grew up in a company that was largely command and control. Those days are over. We're all risk managers today. And it's all about where you wanna place your bets and how you wanna approach those bets. And if you're not willing to bet, you might as well go home, 'cause the world's not gonna be kind to you. So that's a little bit about the world.
Brian and I have known each other for quite a few years. The Baptist Health System is a fantastic asset, and one of the best in the country. They've been recognized many times over for that. But fundamentally everybody in this room, no matter what business you run, you're gonna have to be a healthcare expert. The days when you could let your insurance company do one thing and your benefits person do one thing, and the CEO didn't do anything and stuff like that around healthcare — the stakes are just too high. This is gonna be 20% of the country's GDP. It's probably gonna be 20% of the world's GDP is gonna be consumed in healthcare. And so we all have to be smart about that.
GE has kind of a unique position because we have a big technology innovation business, almost $20 billion in revenue. And as a legacy employer in the United States, we've been giving employees healthcare since 1947. We have six or 700,000 covered lives. So we're a big payer. So we spend a lot on healthcare, we sell to the healthcare community. If we, in a good year, we earn more in our healthcare business than we spend on employee healthcare costs, I consider that a good year. But we see both sides of the equation. And what I thought I'd do is share — I live it every day, the team from the Baptist Health Systems knows it like pros, but just for the average citizen — what are the things that I see going on that I think are important as we all think about healthcare going forward.
The first one, I think, is the evolution towards high-deductible consumer-based plans. I just think it's only a question of when and not if this is gonna take place. The fact is, people are better consumers when they have real skin in the game. But I've seen it in my own company that when people actually have responsibility for their own healthcare, they A, take better care of themselves and B, become better consumers. And I've seen enough in my own company to say this is probably gonna happen, not just in corporate America but across the board. So I'd start with that.
The second one is it's all about chronic disease. 75% of healthcare spend is in chronic disease, and learning how to treat congestive heart failure, diabetes, all the things that really make our population sick, is where we need to take care of people. And we also have to worry about how to spend money. That's really quite important. That's where kind of the smartest systems are investing into patient health, population management, outreach to consumers. For us, the difference between getting an employee that's on the right diabetic protocol and one that's not following the rules is the difference between $700 per patient per year plus they're sicker. So I could go through disease by disease, but learning how to do chronic disease is both how we think about what we do from a technology standpoint and what most great providers and insurers are working on.
Later today we're gonna commemorate what's called the Revolution CT. And basically, in our business, in the imaging business, it's always a function of — you gotta see things better, you gotta see things faster, you gotta be able to take what you see and turn it into diagnostics, and you need to make the patient more comfortable. And the CT that — the Baptist Health System has been our partner — this is an order of magnitude, it's probably five to 10 times better than what it replaced a decade ago. So you can now freeze the beating heart, you can do cardiac diagnostics in minutes that would have taken you multiple procedures and multiple time and days gone by. So just being able to do better diagnostics and therapy about chronic disease is incredibly important.
Then there's just the need for lower cost. A lot of the systems of productivity and information technology just have been slow to getting into healthcare. The best systems do it. The other systems have had a hard time. That's why there's been more consolidation, is because the need to get better cost and quality and getting some of those procedures. The healthcare industry has invested hundreds of billions of dollars into information and information technology. But we've yet to turn that information into real knowledge and decision support. So this notion of going from connectivity to being able to do decision support — I can now on my iPad, I'm coming to see Baptist Health, I can go right online and get everybody that's touched Baptist Health on the way coming down here. I know every point of contact, all the things we're trying to do, what the sales people are talking about. Those types of tools that are commonplace in the industrial world are yet to come to maybe only the best systems in the country. And so driving low-cost systems is absolutely critical. And turning information into insight is part of that.
And lastly is this whole notion of who's gonna pay, right? What's the value? How much risk is gonna take place? Is it gonna be the government? Is it gonna be insurers? Is it gonna be CEOs and things like that? And this whole notion of payment reform, which was core to the Affordable Care Act, we really haven't even begun the battle to see where that all is gonna go and what's gonna be important for the future. So I would leave you a couple thoughts on healthcare: high-deductible plans, have to get more skin in the game — I've again worked here for 32 years at GE, the only time I ever talked to my wife about healthcare was when we launched this new plan. The only time we as a family ever sat down and had a conversation about healthcare was at that moment. So until those conversations happen on a kitchen table, we never get resolved. This whole notion of chronic disease, low-cost systems, turning information into insight, and just payment reform — who takes the risk, where that's gonna go — that's all gonna be critical to the future.
Last thing I'd say just to go back to chronic disease is the whole notion of what's going on with brain and brain science, which again, in a place like Miami is gonna be really important as people go more broadly into aging diseases. The nature of cost and quality of life is gonna be huge. One of the things we did is we kicked off a program with the NFL about two years ago to study traumatic brain injury, trying to bring that into local systems. Because through that pathway — the NFL is just a microcosm for all the things we're seeing in terms of aging diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and all these kids that are gonna come back from the Middle East and the army who have gone through these traumatic brain diseases — this is gonna be one of the new technologies that I'm sure people like Baptist Health System are gonna be all about.
So that's the nature of the world that we live in and what we have to do. And so as a chamber, I think making healthcare first and foremost in that. And the one thing that's sure for me is the people that — and we see this increasing, not decreasing — the people that are gonna be delivering healthcare are gonna be the systems that are moving on patients, business model, cost and quality, the way that the Baptist Health System is doing. So you gotta be proud of the systems you got here in Miami. They're leading the way. So that's healthcare.
The last thing I was gonna end with today is just the importance of culture and leadership today. Just how important it is that people believe in something. Whether you're a big company or a small company, this unity of purpose, having simple things that everybody can relate to — anytime I wanna go see a customer or anything I do, and I typically today maybe start my meetings in the CEO's office — I'm always looking for what links him or her to the factory floor. What links that person through everything they do. And when you have culture, when people believe in something, when you have alignment, great things happen. So we spent a lot of time as a company on leadership training. But we spent a lot of time just on what brings GE people together, what is important. And we kind of shaped what we believe in around what we call beliefs. We really have core common beliefs and we have five of them.
Customers determine our success. Customers determine our success. You have no idea when you run a big company how important it is that you make it personal with each and every person so that they know that customers are what puts food on the table, that determines employment security. And the interesting thing is, sometimes we get confused in management about 100 other stupid things. But if you're working on the factory floor, you know customers determine your success. You know when the factory is full, it's gonna be a good day, when the factory is empty, job security stinks. So in many ways, this is more broadly understood inside a company like ours than anything else.
Stay lean to go fast. It is easy to get bloated, it is easy to get bureaucratic, it's easy to add layers. Scarcity drives teamwork. Take things away. The best managers in our company know how work gets done in their business. Now, it sounds crazy. But I guarantee every one of you in this room, no matter how big your companies are, don't know what your people really do. And learning what your people really do makes them faster, makes them more empowered, makes you more efficient, ultimately. But stay lean to go fast is something that we really believe in.
Learn and adapt to win. The notion of perfection, the notion of command and control in the volatile world we live in today doesn't work. Management today is the art of managing mistakes. Manage them on a small level, managing them in ways that you can learn, sharing the learnings across your company. It is the notion of managing mistakes. Learn and adapt to win. The learning part is key. The winning part is key. Winning is what matters. Doing better is what matters.
Inspire and empower your team. We've done a lot in GE in the last probably two or three years. Our headquarters are much smaller. We've really emptied out headquarters, put decisions closer to customers, closer to market. We empower the teams to make the right calls, we've moved leaders closer to the action. And we totally believe that local decisions, even in big companies, get made best. We want empowered and inspired teams that believe in our mission.
And then the last thing that we all believe in together is deliver results in an uncertain world. We've got big — anytime you're in a big company like GE, some businesses are doing well and some businesses are gonna go through evolution and change. We've got a big oil and gas business, oil and gas equipment business. I say to those guys, look, you don't have to spend any time doing PowerPoint charts to tell me the price of oil has gone down. I can read the newspaper, right? I'm fully capable. What I need you spending time on is how you're still gonna deliver results even with that uncertainty. How are we gonna gain market share? Who the key customers are? So the point I make is not that our beliefs are the right ones. It's the point that beliefs matter. Having meaning matters. And people want that, teams want that. You wanna belong to something that's bigger than yourself. And that's one of the things I've always loved about GE. And with that, I'll say thank you very much.