Jack Welch Remembered by Businessweek’s Former Executive Editor
“He was the most demanding and relentlessly challenging person I have ever met,” writes John Byrne.
Welch during a Bloomberg Television interview in 2016.
Photographer: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg
The telephone call came unexpectedly on a Sunday night in early March 2002. Jack Welch was on the line, his raspy voice as familiar as any I had ever heard. After all, I had spent a full year with him, more than 1,000 hours face to face, helping to write his memoir, Jack: Straight From the Gut, published almost six months earlier.
As was typical of Jack, the legendary chief executive of General Electric Co. who died on March 1 at the age of 84, he got to the point quickly. He wanted me to know the Wall Street Journal would publish a story the following morning that would disclose a personal relationship he was having with the editor of the Harvard Business Review.