Jeffrey R. Immelt

Leadership is an intense journey into yourself. You can use your own style to get anything done. It's about being self-aware. Every morning, I look in the mirror and say, 'I could have done three things better yesterday.'

When you take over a company like GE, you think you're going to visit 100 businesses. You're going to go see the factories you haven't seen before. You're going to see a site in Texas and one in Canada and stuff like that. That has fallen by the wayside.

I had an instinctive feeling that the people who have little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way... so I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things that concerned our people.

Everyone in the United States asks me about being a woman CEO. To be honest, it has had no impact on my career. While I was at BCG, it didn't matter whether you were a man or a woman. The only thing that mattered was that you were good at your job.