This article examines the successful transformation of General Electric under CEO Larry Culp, highlighting his focus on changing the company's culture and beliefs to foster a problem-solving environment. The piece emphasizes the shift from a blame-oriented culture to one that encourages effort and progress, ultimately leading to significant financial recovery and growth for GE Aerospace.
When Larry Culp became CEO of General Electric in October 2018, he was the first outsider to lead the company in its 126-year history. He inherited a crisis that looked terminal. GE’s stock had plummeted, falling 45% in 2017 and another 58% in 2018.
The company’s debt load far exceeded its market capitalization, and its credit rating was sliding toward junk. The corporation that had been worth $594 billion in 2000, making it the most valuable company in the world, had become, by most Wall Street accounts, a slow-motion collapse. Culp slashed the dividend and wrote down $22 billion in the power division. But among his first strategic priorities was to attend to a diagnosis that sounded almost naive: GE’s deepest problem was not its portfolio. It was its beliefs. The company had built a culture of blame, one where problems were hidden, mistakes punished, and finger-pointing passed for problem-solving. As Culp later put it, “A problem-solving culture is far more effective operationally than a finger-pointing culture.” That conviction became the foundation of one of the most striking corporate turnarounds of the past decade. Today, GE Aerospace has a $190 billion backlog and posted 21% revenue growth in 2025. Culp’s contract has been extended through 2027. What happened at GE was not just a financial turnaround. It was a belief intervention. Drawing on the research in my book Beyond Belief, I call this “high-agency leadership”: the practice of deliberately choosing and installing beliefs that make effort feel worthwhile, action feel possible, and progress feel visible. The research behind it, drawn from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics, shows that agency is not a personality trait. It is a learnable capability that operates through three specific mechanisms. This applies well beyond turnarounds. Any time a team has stalled, whether because of a failed product launch, a round of layoffs, a leadership transition, or the slow creep of learned caution in a mature organization, the underlying issue is often the same: People have stopped believing their effort will change anything. High-agency leadership is for any leader facing a gap between the strategy on the whiteboard and the energy in the room. How to Override the Brain’s Default For decades psychologists, following the lead of Martin Seligman, assumed helplessness was learned. But Steven F. Maier and Seligman overturned that conclusion in a 2016 paper using brain-imaging techniques unavailable in the 1960s. They showed that passivity is the brain’s default response to sustained adversity. What has to be learned is not passivity but the belief that effort matters. Maier identified a neural pathway that is instrumental to that learning; Seligman calls it the “hope circuit.” It does not come pre-installed and must be built through experience. The implications for leaders are immediate. When teams seem frozen amid AI disruption, restructuring, or market uncertainty, the instinct is to diagnose a motivation problem or a talent gap. Maier and Seligman’s research points to something more fundamental: The hope circuit has gone quiet. The pathway that tells the brain my effort changes outcomes has been deactivated. Strategy decks and town halls will not reactivate it. Direct evidence that action produces results will. That is what Culp understood at GE. He introduced kaizen events : Small teams tackled real problems and saw tangible results within a week. He did not try to inspire people into agency. He engineered the conditions for it to develop, giving frontline workers direct, repeated proof that what they did here mattered. Three Belief Mechanisms That High-Agency Leaders Use Agency does not operate in isolation. In Beyond Belief I identify three mechanisms—attention, anticipation, and agency—that together form a kind of operating system for leadership. High-agency leaders have all three running well. They change what the organization sees. In 2018, David E. Levari and colleagues published a study in Science that should be required reading for every leadership team. They asked participants to identify blue dots on a screen. As they reduced the number of blue dots over time, participants did not register the decline in frequency. Instead, they expanded their definition of “blue” to include dots that were more purple. Levari called this “prevalence-induced concept change.” When a phenomenon becomes rarer, we don’t see the change. We unconsciously redefine what counts as the phenomenon. This tendency isn’t limited to blue dots. People see what they expect to see, whether their expectations are positive or negative. Richard Wiseman’s decade-long research on luck at the University of Hertfordshire confirmed the pattern: People who believed opportunities existed noticed more of them. An organization primed to look for dysfunction will keep finding it, even after things improve. Culp used this insight in reverse: By reframing the operating assumption from “problems mean someone screwed up” to “problems are opportunities to improve,” he changed what people’s perceptual filters were tuned to detect. Instead of hiding issues, they started surfacing them. They shape what people expect. The neuroscientist Anil Seth describes perception as a “controlled hallucination.” The brain does not passively receive reality. It generates predictions and checks them against incoming data. The neuroscientist Tor Wager and colleagues showed this using fMRI: When people believed they were receiving pain relief, their brains released endogenous opioids and reduced pain-processing activity. The belief generated a measurably different neurological state. For leaders, this means that how you frame a change initiative affects more than buy-in. It affects the actual experience your team has. Telling people “AI is going to transform your role” activates a threat prediction. Telling them “You now have a resource that handles the parts of your work you like least” activates an opportunity prediction. The facts are identical; the neurological response is not. Culp understood this implicitly at GE: He framed lean as a respect-for-people philosophy, a way for frontline workers to have their intelligence taken seriously, rather than a cost-cutting exercise. They concentrate effort where it has leverage. High-agency leadership is not the belief that you can control everything. Research on ICU nurses under sustained pressure found that cognitive flexibility—the ability to distinguish among what you can control, what you can only influence, and what lies beyond reach—was among the strongest predictors of sustained engagement and job satisfaction. It is the discipline to direct energy where it moves outcomes. How to Build High-Agency Leadership These three mechanisms explain how agency influences outcomes. The next question is what to do about that. Here are four practices that build agency in yourself and in your teams. Design mastery experiences. The hope circuit activates when the brain encounters direct proof that effort produces results. Psychologists call the right conditions “optimal challenges”: problems that are just beyond your current ability but achievable with effort. For teams that have been through extended turbulence, this means engineering early, reachable milestones before tackling larger bets. The wins do not need to be strategically significant. They need to be experientially real. Culp’s kaizen events at GE worked precisely this way: small teams, real problems, visible results within a week. Each event was a mastery experience that relit the circuit. Audit and replace your installed beliefs. Most leaders have never examined the core beliefs driving their biggest decisions. Write them down and then apply what I call the usefulness test: This belief may feel true, but is it producing the behavior I need? When Arvind Krishna became the CEO of IBM in 2020, he inherited an organization trapped by the belief that it was fundamentally a services and infrastructure company. That belief was defensible, grounded in decades of revenue. But it was also strangling the company’s future. Krishna explicitly reframed IBM’s identity, around hybrid cloud and AI, spinning off the $19 billion managed-infrastructure business to make the new belief structural. He chose the belief that was more useful, and the company’s trajectory followed. Rewrite the explanatory story. Research on explanatory style shows that how people explain setbacks determines whether they recover or stall. The critical variable is whether a failure gets coded as permanent or temporary, global or specific. “We’re not an innovative company” is permanent and global. “We misjudged timing on this product” is temporary and specific. Both may be defensible, but only one preserves agency. The Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull built this distinction into the company’s creative process: Early versions of every film were expected to be bad, and that expectation was made explicit. Because failure was coded as temporary and specific , people kept experimenting. The explanatory story determined the agency. Build systems that make agency the default. Agency is sustained by structure, not willpower alone. Culp didn’t ask GE’s people to believe differently and then hope for the best. He installed lean as an operating system so that high-agency behavior became the routine. He had seen the power of this approach firsthand: at Danaher, where he served as CEO for more than 13 years, the Danaher Business System embeds continuous improvement into every operating company’s daily work, making agency a structural default rather than an individual trait. Culp’s lean methodology saved $1 billion in fixed costs in GE’s gas power business alone. The system generated evidence, the evidence reinforced belief, and the belief fueled the next action. Agency compounds. Upgrade the Operating System What happened at GE was not unique in kind, only in scale. Every organization runs on an invisible operating system of shared beliefs about what’s possible, what’s threatening, and what’s worth attempting. Leaders at IBM, Pixar, and Danaher have all demonstrated, in different ways, that this operating system can be deliberately upgraded. Most leaders, though, have inherited theirs without examination. In an era when AI, geopolitical instability, and constant reorganization make it tempting to conclude that nothing you do will change what happens next, high-agency leaders treat that conclusion for what it is: a piece of outdated software. They ask the only question that matters: Is what I believe right now producing the leadership I need? And when the answer is no, they have the discipline to upgrade.
General Electric GE Larry Culp Corporate Turnaround Leadership
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Indian court says ‘no case’ against CoinDCX founders in impersonation fraudThe most recent news about crypto industry at Cointelegraph. Latest news about bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain, mining, cryptocurrency prices and more
Read more »
Last officer in Antioch, Pittsburg police corruption case sentencedThe last of 10 former Antioch and Pittsburg police officers charged in a wide-ranging corruption case was sentenced Tuesday to more than four years in federal prison.
Read more »
Conservative activist convicted in Wisconsin voter-fraud caseHarry Wait said he set out to expose the potential for voter fraud. He ordered mail ballots in the names of others — and got charged with felonies.
Read more »
Meta Ordered to Pay $375 Million in Child Exploitation CaseMeta was ordered to pay $375 million after a New Mexico jury found it liable for failing to protect children from exploitation.
Read more »
Parents question turnaround plan as Colorado charter group steps inA Colorado-based charter group is staking its claim in the San Antonio education scene.
Read more »
Sources of purpose are more universal than we might think.We tend to derive purpose from similar sources, despite the remarkable diversity of our lives.
Read more »