Jack Welched

Thanks Mr Welch. I only came 3,000 miles and put on my best bib and tucker for the promise of an interview. Yes it was a promise. "Your people" met "my people" and we made a deal. I watched you at the conference speaking about integrity. Fine words but where was that interview? You talked a lot about values. I have a few of my own. One is that I keep my promises.

I didn't ask a question from the floor like that other journalist who had the temerity to suggest that your so-called Session Cs (ranking-style executive appraisals) had been rejected as unworkable by the rest of corporate America. You dismissed that in the same way that you ducked the question from the stage interviewer who asked you why you chose Jeff Immelt to succeed you at General Electric.

That's fair enough. You don't have to take criticism any more with your $700m net worth and annual earnings even in your "retirement" estimated at $10m a year from books, consultancy and what you pick up on the lecture circuit. Good luck to you.I don't care about any of that.

I sat through the session with the chief executives where you laid in to some of the guys round the table. But I didn't chip in because we were fixed to meet straight afterwards.

Spoilt brat

A Fortune reporter had the same deal but you walked out on her. Was it something she said? So I hear you saying you're done for the day. What's going on, I'm thinking? What about my questions? "Can we talk Mr Welch?" I ask.

"I'll speak off the record," you say. Not the deal but OK. "I want to ask you about Bob Nardelli." You wave your hand. "I'm not doing that," you say. "Let's talk about Session Cs then," I say. But you're off out of the door leaving a trail of embarrassed PR people and one less than amused chief executive in Lars Dalgaard, the boss of SuccessFactors, an up and coming performance management company that had brought you to its annual conference in New York.

I thought only pop stars and spoilt brat actors did this kind of thing.

I really did want to ask you about Bob Nardelli though. What I'm trying to get my head round is this: should I regard Mr Nardelli as a success? What indeed should he think about himself?

Here is a man who was a real "A" lister for you, who came within a whisker of getting the top job at GE and was snapped up soon afterwards to run Home Depot, the retailing giant.

By some standards Mr Nardelli did well at Home Depot taking revenue from £45bn in 2000 to $81bn in 2005. But that wasn't good enough for investors who had become accustomed to seeing the company double in size every four years.

Kicked out

He was ousted with a pay off worth $210m to cushion the blow. Some cushion. Still here was one of the corporate elite kicked out of two companies within the space of five years (you had made it clear that Nardelli would not be staying at GE after the succession had been announced).

I wondered what you thought about all this, what you thought indeed about the ever shortening tenure of chief executives in general. Isn't there something rotten at the heart of the capitalist system when high calibre people are tossed aside like that, pay off or no pay off? Will Bob Nardelli forever be regarded as the "nearly man"? What can that do for his esteem? These are not tough questions for you but they matter a lot to the next generation of executive talent .

I did quite a bit of reading up for this interview. I'd heard all those two cents stories you told on the stage and was wanting to get a bit deeper in to the Session Cs because, as you know, there is stuff happening in performance management that takes them on a notch or two. That's why we were here. Lars Dalgaard is moving appraisals to another level.

I wanted to explore all that but it didn't happen. I sometimes wonder why I do this stuff. I'm reminded of the remark Dorothy Parker wanted on her tombstone: "Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgement."