Grund hierfür seien die strategischen Weichenstellungen, die Immelt vorgenommen hat, um GE erfolgreich für die Herausforderungen des 21. Jahrhunderts zu positionieren. Den Originalartikel finden Sie hier:

By John Gapper and Dan Roberts

It is winter in Fairfield, Connecticut, and snow lies on the wooded hills around the headquarters of General Electric. Despite the cold, there are signs of renewal in this secluded spot: the snow is melting in patches, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has breached 10,000 again and Jeffrey Immelt's waistline has shrunk.

At times in the two years since he succeeded Jack Welch as chairman and chief executive, Mr. Immelt has looked as if he felt the strain. He took office on September 7 2001, four days before the world changed, and endured the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack and the end of the bull market. The challenge of following the widely admired Mr. Welch was daunting even to such a self-confident man.

Mr. Immelt, a 47-year-old former college football player at Dartmouth College, is a big man - 6ft 4in - and tends to eat too much when under pressure. But he looks slimmer and fit these days. Dressed casually in a V-necked sweater, without a tie, he radiates good health and humour. After a year of hectic activity, changes to his pay and GE's corporate governance, and intriguing acquisitions, his personality has been stamped on GE.

In financial terms, 2003 was not GE's best. It admitted that it could not maintain the double-digit earnings growth of the Welch era and its market capitalisation has slipped from a peak of $594bn in August 2000 to $309bn today. Yet it was the year that Mr. Immelt showed how he will remake the world's biggest industrial company to face the 21st century's challenges: the rise of China and India, low growth and inflation, and geopolitical volatility.

In doing so, he is helping to rebuild the reputation not only of American companies but also of the country's business leaders. After a decade-long bull market in which many flaky enterprises briefly flourished, and some chief executives enriched themselves egregiously, Mr. Immelt represents a different style of leadership. His careful remodelling of his own company is leading a wider reassertion of the primacy of shareholders and customers.

"Any one of the challenges that GE faced when Jeff took over would have been enough to finish off most companies, and knock out their CEOs. It was just brutal," says Bob Wright, a vice-chairman of GE and chairman and chief executive of NBC, the broadcasting network that it owns. "He is a low-key guy by the standards of more show business CEOs but he is very tough and focused and he has got a broad, engaging mind."

For these reasons, Jeff Immelt is the Financial Times' Man of the Year. GE's acquisitions of Vivendi Universal, the French-owned Hollywood studio, and Amersham International, the British medical diagnostic and bioscience company, have shown he is seeking growth in new and bold ways. And he is gradually turning the quintessential US company - an industrial colossus descended from the Edison Electric Light Company, which still supplies the lights for the White House Christmas tree - into a global enterprise.

"To pull this off has taken a lot of guts, a lot of discipline and a lot of thoughtfulness," says Kurt Schansinger, a portfolio manager with Merrill Lynch Balanced Capital Fund, which owns 1.5m GE shares. "It has not come without short-term costs: profit growth has been slow; there has been dilution from both the acquisitions and disposals; and some people feel he has been a little too cautious. But if he was looking for a way to make people forget about Jack Welch, he couldn't have done much better." In order to expand globally as he wants, Mr. Immelt must improve GE's image. It still smarts from the experience, in the final days of the Welch era, of having to abandon its proposed merger with Honeywell when Mario Monti, the European competition commissioner, imposed stringent conditions. Mr. Immelt recognises there is work to be done to prevent GE's being seen as merely an acquisitive, anonymous American behemoth.

"There is the notion of nuance," he says. "I mean, GE is my life. I love GE. We are a forceful company but we have never been a nuanced company. We go into a room and say 'Hey, we're big, and so we're great' instead of saying: 'Look, we're big so we can be a good citizen, which means we can do things, and therefore we can be profitable and we can grow.' "

If GE needs a friendlier face, Mr. Immelt is a more natural candidate than Mr. Welch, a hard-charging engineer who culled the bottom 10 per cent of performers annually. Mr. Welch's personal stock has suffered since he left. A widely publicised divorce led to disclosures about his lucrative retirement package. More broadly, revelations of abuse at Enron and Tyco have cast a shadow over the imperial style of leadership.

That has helped Mr. Immelt to establish his own presence. "No one would want to swap places with a guy following in the footsteps of a legend," says Bob Corcoran, who runs GE's s management school in Crotonville, New York. "Jeff was cursed and blessed with an event [September 11 2001] that helped make a break with the past. He also has a way [in contrast to Mr. Welch] of leaving certain things unsaid, which makes people feel his goals are their own."

In some ways, Mr. Immelt has GE ingrained even more deeply in him than Mr. Welch. His father worked there for 38 years and he himself joined in 1982, after studying mathematics at Dartmouth and gaining an MBA from Harvard. He rose through a series of marketing and management jobs in its appliances, plastics and medical divisions. He became head of GE Medical Systems in 1997, before winning a three-man competition for the top job.

Mr. Immelt and his wife have one daughter and he says the past two years have "brought us closer together, not pushed us apart". He has a lot of stamina and needs relatively little sleep. Mr. Wright recalls finding Mr. Immelt watching basketball on tele-vision at 3am on a GE corporate jet during one business trip.

He has gently marked out some distance between himself and Mr. Welch by making corporate governance changes, including appointing a lead director to balance his role as chairman. He has renounced the stock options packages that made Mr. Welch rich, instead receiving "performance share units" tied to GE's results. But he concedes that it will take more than such changes to reverse the tide of cynicism about business.

"I think it is one of those things you cannot give speeches about," he says. "The better thing I can do is lead by example ... I am just convinced that over time, as people see more and learn more, they are going to see that business people like their companies, that these jobs are honours, and we treat them that way. I do not blame anybody for being cynical right now and when you are at the peak of cynicism only actions and time will solve it."

For all that, Mr. Immelt shows no sign of running GE less forcefully than Mr. Welch, or personifying it less. He refers to himself unselfconsciously as "leader", rather than chairman or CEO. "There are always things that are the prerogative of the leader, that I am sure people around here are saying 'This is crazy. What is he doing?'. But people have to know that the leader cares about certain things. It is as important that they see the passion as what that passion is."

Unlike some chief executives, he shows genuine signs of interest in what other people have to say. He uses his clout to quiz interesting people on his travels on business and global trends. And he reads voraciously: "Every day I get through the FT - I start with the FT - the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times business section, page six of the New York Post, but then I read Modern Healthcare, Diagnostic Imaging, Modern Railroads, Entertainment Weekly ..."

This is not idle curiosity; his research is all applied to GE. "You know, I'm a learner, and most good leaders that I like are kind of the same way. They are curious. It is a constant process of learning, and then declaration," he reflects. "But you have to declare. You have to say: 'OK, based on that, here is what we're doing, get in line.' Everybody has to get in line."

Mr. Wright says Mr. Immelt is forceful in a quiet way. "You have to be very tough [to run GE]," he says. "Jack was a screamer, and he would shout you down. Jeff is more of an arguer. He pushes you back and pushes you back. He is tough to the point of stubborn. You either get it the first time, or the second. If it takes you three, you should probably not be around."

Mr. Immelt's plan for GE has become clear this year. He wants to rely less on finance and has started to cut GE's exposure with a planned spin-off of its mortgage and life assurance operations. Instead, he is trying to expand into higher-growth industries and build its operations in fast-growing economies such as China's.

The first sounds fine on paper but is a considerable management challenge. As Mr. Immelt puts it, "the way GE works is that we have disciplined processes ... very good routines about information flow". That style can jar with independent-minded employees in research-based and creative industries: although Mr. Welch acquired NBC in 1985, he avoided Hollywood, wary of both earnings volatility and the difficulty of controlling a studio. Some have remarked on the parallel with Kidder Peabody, a Wall Street investment bank, which GE sold in 1994 after a bond trading scandal.

Mr. Immelt is undaunted, insisting that GE is capable of managing both Amersham's research scientists and Universal's producers. "Clearly the entertainment business has a different type of person and there are different ways of managing but ...if the measurements are good, then people get paid a lot of money, and that is fine. I compare that to our experience in investment banking with Kidder Peabody. The compensation was totally divorced from the metrics."

The second challenge - expanding in fast-growing markets such as China - is unavoidable but difficult to finesse, both managerially and politically. The increasing reliance of US companies such as Wal-Mart on Asian manufacturing, and the outsourcing of services to India, has stimulated protectionist sentiment in Washington. GE wants to save $1bn by sourcing $5bn of parts and services from China by 2005, and to offset that with $5bn of sales.

Still, there is no escaping the cultural challenge that globalisation represents. Mr. Immelt says that most of its top 600 executives did not even have passports in 1981, when Mr. Welch became chairman, but he estimates that he now spends perhaps half of his time travelling, much of it on trips abroad. He pronounces Amersham the American way, with an accent on the final "sham".

"I am what I am. I am not going to pretend. I was doing "Charlie Rose" [a talk show] and he said: 'Do you consider yourself a US guy running a global company, or a global company that is American?' or dah, dah, dah. I said: 'To be honest with you, I'm not that deep.' I'm an American, and I run an American company, but I work for shareholders and if they want GE to be great in 10 or 20 years, we have to look at the world as our market."

In his autobiography, Mr. Welch remarks that one reason Mr. Immelt stood out was he was "really comfortable in his own skin". After two tumultuous and stressful years, GE's new leader looks that way again. "People are always going to say: 'I like this, I don't like that, and that is what makes the world go around', but I want to take off the table . . that I may have some devious motive, other than love for the company, and a desire to leave it better than I found it."