MBA Students Invited to Global Chat with CEO of GE Moderated by CNBC’s "Closing Bell's" Maria Bartiromo

Over fifty UNC Kenan-Flagler MBA students were among the invited guests as GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt addressed several hundred graduate business students scattered across the United States and Europe during a “GE Live” broadcast October 24.

“The bad news is that you are going to live history,” Immelt said. “You’re all going to look back 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now and you are going to remember this time, right now.” The good news, he joked, “is we own CNBC. There’s never been a better time to be in the business news business.”

Immelt spoke from New York University’s Stern School of Business, and CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo moderated. Selected students asked questions via a live stream from auditoriums at UNC Kenan-Flagler, the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Emory’s Goizueta Business School, Thunderbird School of Global Management, London Business School and Spain’s IESE Business School.

“UNC was one of the seven business schools selected to participate in the GE Live event because of GE’s strong track record of attracting great candidates from the school,” said Doug Deihl (MBA ’07), who helped organize the event and shared breakfast with UNC participants before the broadcast. “UNC is one of the core schools for GE's Experienced Commercial Leadership Program (ECLP) and is strategically aligned with GE’s focus on developing strong leaders.”

The GE chief forecast “seismic change” in business and in government, a period during which global corporations will have to prove themselves to consumers and adapt to the consequences — intended and unintended — of increased government involvement in each country where they do business.

To thrive in a time that will require both intensified globalization and “connected and scalable localization,” Immelt advised business students to acquire a few core skills: “You have to learn the world, you have to learn technology, and you have to learn how to intersect with the government.”

Successful leaders, Immelt continued, will be those “who keep their cool, keep their calm, and know what they believe in. Now is not a time for me or for you to give up on your dreams.”

Two first-year UNC Kenan-Flagler students were selected to face the cameras as Immelt fielded questions from each school. David Shields asked how the CEO’s role had changed during the last year and how it would change in the coming year.

GE would have to rethink how the company does scenario planning, put the safety of the company first, and commit itself to “transparency no matter what the consequences,” Immelt said. “You are never done in this world that we live in today. You always have to have one or two ideas that are kind of what you do next,” he said of his work as CEO, quoting Harriet Tubman’s admonition to passengers on the Underground Railroad, “If you hear the dogs, keep running.”

ECLP sponsors GE Live to provide a forum for students to hear about the company’s developments and to interact directly with top executives at the company, Deihl said.

ECLP offers recent graduates sales, marketing, leadership and business-specific training and immerses them in four six-month rotational assignments within the sales and marketing functions of one of GE’s four core businesses. Deihl is in his third rotation with GE Commercial Financial, working in the Global Sponsor Finance division.

ECLP has hired nine Kenan-Flagler students over the past five years, according to Deihl. Six students are in the interview process this year, and one, Howard Henward, has accepted an offer after interning with GE Energy last summer.