General Electric (GE) competes in many different industries ranging from appliances, aviation, and consumer electronics, to energy, financial services, health care, oil, and wind turbines. These industries are quite diverse, but there are similarities among several of them. In fact, GE’s businesses are grouped in four divisions: GE Capital, GE Energy, GE Technology Infrastructure, and GE Home & Business Solutions. In recent years, more than 50 percent of GE’s annual revenue has come from its financial services businesses. However, GE has reduced its assets in financial services—GE Capital provides approximately one-third of its total earnings. In 2012, much of GE’s growth in revenues came from the manufacture and sale of jet engines for major airliners and from its increasing business in the oil and gas industry. In 2013 (based on 2012 data), GE was ranked the eighth largest corporation in the Fortune 500. Additionally, in 2013 it was ranked eleventh in Fortune magazine’s list of the 50 most admired companies. Thus, GE has been a highly successful company.

GE has an impressive history and is one of the few widely diversified firms to achieve such success. GE is a highly influential global corporation. Its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, was selected by President Obama to chair an advisory group on economic and job creation concerns. However, GE has experienced some “bumps in the road” along the way. This is to be expected because it is difficult to manage a large, widely diversified set of businesses. For example, GE never achieved the desired success with its NBC assets and sold them in 2012. In addition, it experienced significant declines in revenues and profits from its financial services businesses with the substantial problems that occurred in that industry beginning in 2008. In 2012, GE Capital rebounded and added revenue growth and profits but with a lower