He still keeps the payroll ledger from his grandfather’s workshop. He took over General Electric when it was close to the edge and ended up splitting it into three companies. His method did not come from a boardroom.
At the latest Farnborough International Airshow, Larry Culp gave interviews with a GE Aerospace Boeing 747 behind him. It was not a corporate jet, nor was it there simply to decorate the stand. It is the company’s flying test bed, an airborne laboratory where engines are mounted and flown long before they ever reach an airline.
Culp wanted to bring it to the show. While much of the industry was discussing what aircraft might look like ten or fifteen years from now, he preferred to display a far less glamorous side of the business: everything that has to happen to prove that an engine is safe and reliable before it enters service.
That familiarity with machinery goes back long before GE.
Culp was born in 1963 in the Washington area. His grandfather had founded a small welding and machining shop in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1938, which was later taken over by Culp’s parents. At its peak, it employed about a dozen people. Culp still keeps the ledger in which his grandfather recorded their wages. He says he looks at it from time to time because behind numbers that seem tiny today were families whose livelihoods depended on that workshop functioning properly.
When he completed his MBA at Harvard in 1990, many of his classmates wanted to go into consulting or investment banking. He joined Danaher, an industrial company that at the time made hand tools and was far from the fashionable destination for a Harvard graduate.
Three years later, he was already running a business: a company that manufactured gauges for service-station tanks. Larger units followed. In 2001, at 38, he became CEO of Danaher. He stayed for thirteen years, during which the company increased both its sales and its market value fivefold. After leaving, he went on to teach at Harvard Business School.
Then, in 2018, came General Electric.
Culp joined the board in April and became CEO in October, the first outsider to lead GE in its 126-year history. The company was carrying enormous debt, an unwieldy corporate structure and a market capitalization that had fallen to 96 billion dollars.
Over the following years, he eliminated more than 100 billion dollars of debt, reduced the central corporate structure and made a decision that for decades would have seemed unthinkable: breaking up General Electric.
GE HealthCare became independent in 2023. GE Vernova, which contains the energy businesses, followed in 2024. Culp remained with GE Aerospace.
Today, the three companies have a combined market value of around 689 billion dollars.
GE Aerospace has about 57,000 employees and an installed base of nearly 80,000 commercial and military engines. It is a huge company, but Culp still talks about it using language that sounds remarkably similar to what one might hear on a factory floor.
When asked whether the volume of orders received at Farnborough means the company now has to go out and buy more machinery, he answers that the investment began long before. An air show may generate plenty of headlines, but an engine takes years to move from order to delivery, and production had already been increasing beforehand.
GE is now sold out into the early 2030s.
At Farnborough, among other agreements, it announced a multiyear commitment with IndiGo for more than one thousand engines. But Culp watches other numbers to determine whether the company will actually be able to deliver.
During the first half of the year, engine deliveries rose by more than 30 percent compared with the previous year. And the suppliers that had been constraining production the most have now increased output at sequential double-digit rates for nine consecutive quarters.
For him, that matters more than announcing an order. It means those suppliers are adding capacity.
He does not expect 30 percent growth to be repeated every year. His calculation is much simpler: in the second half of 2026, they need to deliver more than in the first half, and in 2027 more than in 2026.
The supply chain occupies much of his time.
GE has already acquired some smaller suppliers that, according to Culp, operate better inside the company. It may do so again. But he does not begin with the assumption that buying a company is necessarily the solution.
First, he wants to identify what is holding production back.
It may be a machine, a shortage of workers, a process that takes too long or a component that does not arrive on time. Sometimes GE can help a supplier solve the problem. At other times, acquiring it makes sense. What he refuses to do is confuse ownership with a solution: owning the bottleneck does not make it disappear.
The price of oil adds another complication to the business.
When crude prices rise, airlines have a greater incentive to retire older aircraft and replace them with models that burn less fuel. That benefits Boeing and Airbus and creates demand for new engines.
But GE also makes a great deal of money maintaining engines that are already flying. If an airline retires an older aircraft early, years of spare-parts and maintenance revenue disappear with it.
Culp does not seem particularly concerned about the contradiction. He says that if something is good for Boeing or Airbus, it ultimately tends to be good for GE as well. And he adds that, for now, something matters more than oil prices: people still want to fly.
At Farnborough, he spoke with executives from several airlines and had done the same weeks earlier at the IATA annual meeting in Rio. According to Culp, none of them talked about a significant drop in demand despite higher crude prices.
That leaves GE with work everywhere: new engines, maintenance of the existing fleet and defense.
And much of what Culp is deciding today will not even become visible during his tenure.
The next generation of single-aisle aircraft, which will one day replace the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, does not yet exist. It may still be a decade or more away.
GE Aerospace is betting on an engine architecture known as open fan. The idea is to achieve a major improvement in efficiency while at the same time simplifying parts of the engine and reducing maintenance costs.
Boeing and Airbus have not yet decided which technology they will use.
For Culp, waiting for that decision would mean arriving too late.
An engine that is expected to fly ten or fifteen years from now needs to begin testing today. GE has already announced, together with Airbus and through CFM International —its joint venture with Safran—, a flying test bed to work on the architecture.
When describing what he wants from that engine, Culp often refers to an idea from Jim Collins that he calls the genius of the “and.” He does not want to choose between durability and efficiency. He wants both.
It is a way of thinking that Culp has carried with him since Danaher.
There, he became a firm believer in lean manufacturing and kaizen. For years, he worked with Japanese senseis, and when he arrived at GE, he brought several of them into its plants to work directly with the teams.
At GE Aerospace, that system eventually became known as FLIGHT DECK.
That is why, when he explains how the company managed to increase deliveries by more than 30 percent, he does not talk only about new machines. There was capital investment, but also changes in processes, training, work organization and time devoted to identifying what was slowing down each part of production.
Culp still keeps that payroll ledger from his grandfather’s workshop. He now has 57,000 people under his leadership and tens of thousands of engines flying around the world.
The scale has changed completely. The question he asks when faced with a problem has not changed nearly as much: where is it getting stuck, and what needs to be done to get it moving again.
