GE’s turnaround story sounds like corporate mythology until you see the numbers. On Larry Culp’s first day as CEO in 2018, GE’s market cap was just $96 billion, down more than 80% from its peak in September 2000. Today, the combined valuations of the three enterprises Culp created, GE Aerospace, GE Healthcare, and GE Vernova, total $689 billion.

That valuation swing is why Nelson Peltz told Fortune Daily he was “sure GE was going to file for Chapter 11” until “Larry arrived and performed the most amazing rescue” he’d ever read about. The headline stake is simple: when a company looks like it’s drifting toward formal insolvency, the difference between paralysis and execution is everything. In Culp’s case, the rescue was not just financial engineering. It was operational, and it started with the way he insisted on seeing the business.

Fortune describes how Culp did not want to meet at GE Aerospace’s executive offices near Cincinnati. Instead, he brought the reporter to what he calls “go gemba,” a Japanese phrase for going to the place where the real work happens, on the factory floor. In a historic plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, where GE manufactures engines for military aircraft like the F-16 fighter jet and Apache helicopters, Culp walked through how crews turn “red” to “green.” The mechanics are blunt: it is about finding ways to get crucial parts to the station that needs them. Flow charts and decks from headquarters, in his framing, can obscure what is really going on.

That factory-floor approach matters because it changes what leaders optimize for. A turnaround on paper can hide operational brittleness, especially in industrial businesses where delivery performance, parts availability, and quality are non-negotiable. When a company is under pressure, it often falls into the “slide deck economy,” where narratives substitute for throughput. Culp’s counterpunch was to make leadership spend time where constraints show up, then tie those observations back to execution. The reporter notes how Culp was visibly comfortable doing it: a GE polo shirt and steel-toed shoes, pointing out the rooms where daily work gets coordinated and problems get worked.

The operating method is also inseparable from how Culp communicates with labor and earns permission to change. Fortune says that whenever he holds a “kaizen” session at a plant, Culp spends time explaining to union reps how productivity gains will come, and what they will mean for workers. The promise is not abstract. His logic, as described, is that higher sales eventually mean more jobs. This is not a feel-good add-on. In an industrial turnaround, labor dynamics can be a gating factor for anything from process changes to throughput improvements.

A former Danaher manager, now a CEO, provides another useful lens. Fortune says the manager was astounded by Culp’s first encounter when he ran Danaher. During a week-long kaizen session at a plant in Saginaw, Michigan, the manager recalls Culp drawing lines on the floor “with the sensei from Japan,” and then moving machines from one station to another with engineers and welders. The second-order point is the board-level one: leaders who only direct rarely learn; leaders who roll up their sleeves do. Fortune also includes the operational politics detail that Culp sought “buy-in” from Teamster leaders every day during the session, building relationships instead of treating labor as an obstacle.

Now zoom out to why this turnaround is so consequential for decision-makers beyond GE. Culp’s market cap transformation tracks with the way he split the business into three enterprises and helped them accumulate value: GE Aerospace, GE Healthcare, and GE Vernova. Combined valuations totaling $689 billion put the trio among the top U.S. industrial companies by market value, second only to Tesla ($1.5 trillion), and 16th overall, edging the likes of Visa, J&J, and ExxonMobil. That kind of ranking does not happen by accident. It is what markets tend to reward when clarity improves, risk is compartmentalized, and operational performance aligns with investor expectations.

There is also a governance implication hidden in plain sight. Peltz’s Chapter 11 framing is a reminder that in a crisis, boards and capital markets compress timelines. When a CEO needs a “miracle,” the fix has to show traction quickly, or the downside gets worse. Culp’s factory-floor approach, plus the focus on kaizen and union buy-in, suggests a strategy built to survive scrutiny and execution deadlines at the same time.

Finally, consider what this means for peers in similar roles. If your industrial business is struggling, the temptation is to treat turnaround as a spreadsheet exercise. Fortune’s account of Culp argues the opposite: the rescue is operational first, then financial. Watching crews turn “red” to “green” is not just a leadership quirk. It is a way to find the real bottlenecks, reduce performance guesswork, and create a change process that workers and union representatives can support. In other words, Culp’s $96 billion starting point and the $689 billion endpoint are not just a valuation story. They are an operating cadence story. And that is the part that executives can actually replicate, even when their company is not GE.