Throughout my 41 years at General Electric, I've experienced a lot.In the media, I've gone from prince to pig and back again.And I've been called many things. In the early days, some called me a crazy, wild man.When I became CEO two decades ago, Wall Street asked, "Jack who?" When I tried to make GE more competitive by cutting back our workforce in the early 1980s, the media called me "Neutron Jack." When they learned we were focused on values and culture at GE, people asked if "Jack has gone soft." I've been No.1 or No.2 Jack, Services Jack, Global Jack, and, in more recent years.Six Sigma Jack and e-Business Jack. When we made an effort to acquire Honeywell in October 2000, and I agreed to stay on through the transition (  ) , some thought of me as the Long-in-the-Tooth Jack hanging on by his fingertips to his CEO job. Those characterizations said less about me and a lot more about the stage our company went through.Truth is, down deep, I've never really changed much from the boy my mother raised in Salem, Massachusetts. When I started on this journey in 1981 , standing before Wall Street analysts for the first time at New York's Pierre Hotel, I said I wanted GE to become " the most competitive enterprise on earth." My objective was to put a small-company spirit in a big-company body, to build an organization out of an old-line industrial company that would be more high-spirited, more adaptable, and more flexible than companies that are one-fiftieth our size.I said then that I wanted to create a company " where people dare to try new things ?where people know that only the limits of their creativity and drive, their own standards of personal excellence, will be the ceiling on how far and how fast they move." I've put my mind, my heart, and my courage into that journey every day of the 40-plus years I've been lucky enough to be a part of GE. As the author sees it, the many nicknames of him indicate   _  .
the change of his character with the time the various opinions of different journalists his company's different stages of development his popularity among his friends and  s