Steve Kerr and His Years with Jack Welch at GE

Steve Kerr is chief learning officer and a managing director of Goldman Sachs. Until March 2001, he was vice president of leadership development and chief learning officer for General Electric (GE), including responsibility for GE’s renowned leadership education center at Crotonville. He was formerly on the faculties of Ohio State University, the University of Southern California (USC), and the University of Michigan and was dean of the faculty of the USC business school from 1985 through 1989. He is a past president of the Academy of Management. His writings on leadership and “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B” (Kerr, 1975) are among the most cited and reprinted in the management sciences. During the past few years, he has been the subject of interviews in Business Week, Forbes ASAP, Fortune, Human Resource Executive, Intranet, Investors Business Daily, the New York Times, Organizational Dynamics, Knowledge Management, Organization Science, and the Wall Street Journal.