A Fireside Chat with Jeff Immelt: 16 Years Leading GE

Join us for an intimate fireside chat with Jeff Immelt, who led General Electric as Chairman & CEO for 16 years, through 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and one of the largest corporate transformations of the era.

A Fireside Chat with Jeff Immelt

We’re honored to host Jeff Immelt for an exclusive conversation with the Presidents Institute network.

Few leaders have steered an organization through more turbulence. Jeff became Chairman & CEO of General Electric on September 7, 2001, just four days before 9/11, and led the company for the next sixteen years. Over that time he navigated the burst of the dot-com bubble, the 2008 global financial crisis, the wind-down of GE Capital, and an ambitious bet to remake a 125-year-old industrial giant for the digital age. He had joined GE in 1982 and rose through its plastics, appliances, and healthcare businesses, running GE Healthcare before taking the top job. That path gave him a rare, ground-up view of what it takes to lead at scale.

Today Jeff is a Venture Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), where he works with more than 30 growth-stage companies and their founders. He has taught “Systems Leadership” at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, sits on the boards of Bloom Energy and Twilio, and is the author of Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company. His career spans the full arc from running one of the world’s largest industrial companies to backing the founders building the next generation of them.

In this 60-minute fireside chat, hosted by Hugo Drachmann, we’ll explore the themes that define leadership today:

• Leading through crisis and making decisions under extreme pressure
• Reinventing legacy businesses for a new era, and the realities of large-scale transformation and AI
• Building and backing growth: lessons from the C-suite to the venture world
• The global economic and geopolitical landscape facing leaders now

This is a conversation built for the questions today’s CEOs and senior leaders are actually wrestling with: candid, practical, and grounded in hard-won experience.

More details on the agenda and themes will follow closer to the date.

📅 Details

• Date: Wednesday 11 November 2026
• Time: 12:00 to 13:00 CET
• Where: Online via Zoom
• Format: 60 min moderated fireside chat, followed by live Q&A