“If you want to stay around a long time, you’ve got to change,” said General Electric (GE) CEO Jeff Immelt last Thursday in his first sit-down interview since GE announced a massive restructuring in April. Immelt talked with Fortune on The Chat, a new video interview show taped before an audience of Facebook(FB) employees at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters.
Nearly 14 years in the top job, Immelt is, he notes, “one of the few CEOs in the history of the world that has done a hundred billion dollars of acquisitions and a hundred billion dollars of dispositions.” His latest remaking of GE involves the sale of the company’s vast financial assets. “The ability to get reasonable returns in financial services just was impossible for us,” Immelt said, and he went on to explain what the new GE will look like.
