Culp will be based out of GE’s new Boston headquarters in Fort Point, according to the Culp joined Danaher in 1990 and worked his way up to the top position over his 24-year career with the company. Classmates sought out big-name companies, but Culp thought Danaher’s relative obscurity would give him the chance to have a bigger impact quickly, he told students in a talk last year at Montgomery College in Maryland.
“I was very happy with my post-CEO life,” he In Culp’s first day on the job, GE’s stock shot up 7%. After his resignation from Danaher, he has served as a senior lecturer at Harvard.
Culp has acknowledged that a turnaround will take years.If he can restore GE to its old self, he could go down as one of the greatest CEOs ever, surpassing even Welch at his cult-status peak. “Even the smallest operation was scrutinized, be it the act of picking up a tool, the organization of parts, or the distance a worker moved to get the product to the next stage of production,” according to a study by the University of Virginia’s Darden business school.A month after Danaher bought Radiometer, a maker of blood analysis technology, in 2004, the top 40 managers of the acquired company split into six study groups to seek efficiencies.
Unfavorable contracts that past managers negotiated have helped Power become GE’s biggest cash drain. MORE Virtual Learning … Culp also could Welch could do no wrong in the eyes of most investors and business media.The reckoning also was deferred because GE’s questionable accounting and selective disclosures made it almost impossible for shareholders to see which businesses were truly thriving and which weren’t. Further obscuring the picture, its in-house bank, GE Capital, was so vast that troubled businesses such as long-term-care insurance or subprime mortgages could fester without drawing much attention.Cracks finally became visible under Immelt, who ran GE much like Welch, constantly buying and selling companies. By yearend, GE had cut its quarterly dividend to a penny—30¢ lower than its all-time high in early 2009—and the stock had fallen almost 40%.
The group slashed that to less than two days by cutting two departments out of the production flow.Radiometer executives then presented the new owners with their updated strategy, boasting of their 40% market share in key product segments. The company pioneered the euphemistically named practice of earnings management; it could sell a handful of assets at the end of the quarter to give earnings a boost. Danaher was Culp’s first job out of HBS. Meet other alumni in your city and welcome recent graduates!
The name “Danaher” doesn’t appear on the building’s exterior. At the tour’s end, he urged them to face up to production issues as early in the process as possible—or, as he put it, “Let’s make it red, make it ugly, let’s go fix them,” Wiesner recalls. Culp brought his The descent began decades ago. Whereas Culp expanded his former company with acquisitions, his first job at GE will be to shrink it. GE preserved its public bearing as one of the world’s greatest companies partly because of its name: Everyone wanted to believe in General Electric, maker of lightbulbs and jet engines, corporate child of Thomas Edison, keystone of 20th century industrial America.
– Larry Culp The case method, which is used across all HBS classes, places students in the tough position of the decision maker. When Larry Culp stepped down in 2014 after 25 years at Danaher and 13 years as chief executive, he was only 51. Wall Street Journal Global Economics Editor Jon Hilsenrath, Fox News contributor Richard Fowler and FBNGeneral Electric's new CEO H. Lawrence Culp Jr [Larry] is back in the spotlight after making his first earnings call with shareholders on Oct. 30.
At $27 billion in revenue, it’s one of GE’s biggest businesses, yet investors value it at zero—or worse. He was right; things worsened as the power business continued to deteriorate and investors inured themselves to hearing one bad-news bombshell after another. JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst Stephen Tusa, who predicted GE’s collapse before his peers, has argued that there still hasn’t been a true accounting of the extent of the company’s problems.Culp’s many acolytes aren’t fazed. “I wish I had more hours in the day, I wish we had started sooner, but I can’t deal with any of that. GE's performance fell short of Wall Street's expectations, reporting both a In early October, the embattled industrial conglomerate announced it was replacing CEO John Flannery with Culp. How do you control it to make sure this performance repeats itself?”A mountain of work remains. Then John Flannery was too busy dousing fires during his short reign to build rapport with shareholders. REGISTER NOW Alumni News Larry Culp Jr. Named New GE Chairman And CEO. The company evolved from a real estate firm that brothers Mitchell and Steven Rales founded in 1969. Wall Street was always skeptical of Welch’s successor, Jeffrey Immelt, who overpaid for some early acquisitions and later committed the cardinal sin of cutting the dividend. GE Power, which produces electricity-generating equipment, is by itself larger than Danaher.
The company didn’t respond to requests for interviews for this story.Its headquarters are on the eighth floor of a glass building wedged between a federal credit union and an upscale restaurant in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Foggy Bottom. One of his first assignments was helping assemble air conditioners at a plant in Japan—his introduction to lean thinking. It’s an oddly frequent focus of academic inquiry, perhaps because its executives seem more willing to speak with professors than the media, which Danaher tends to ignore. GE Power, in particular, shows how hard it will be for Culp to untangle the knots his predecessors tied. The new chief executive is trying to summon his inner Jack Welch.When Culp arrived two days later, alone, in jeans, it marked the first time a GE chief executive officer had visited the plant since the company bought it 18 years ago. A half-hour after leaving, Culp sent another email promising to return.The wind turbine business is among the least of Culp’s worries.
Radiometer’s CEO told the Harvard researchers, “We probably knew our own existing customers very well, but we did not know our competitors’ customers.”What other companies might see as success could be viewed with suspicion at Danaher.