Jack Welch fired him from GE. He became a Fortune 500 CEO 3 years later

David Cote has already had one career most executives would envy. As CEO of Fortune 500 industrial giant Honeywell, he spent 15 years engineering a revival that delivered shareholder returns 150% greater than the S&P 500. 

Now, after coming out of retirement, he is executive chairman of Vertiv, an 80-year-old cooling company whose market cap has surged from under $11 billion to $109 billion since going public, writes my colleague Shawn Tully.

His route to the top might look preordained from where he sits today, but it includes the kind of setback that could make an executive question whether they’ll ever be fit for the corner office.

Cote began his 25-year GE career as a night-shift worker at an aircraft engine plant in New Hampshire, eventually rising to run its appliance business. In 1999, then-CEO Jack Welch approached him in the company dining room and told him he wanted him out by year-end. Cote repeatedly asked what he had done wrong. He says Welch never answered.

Three years later, Cote was CEO of Honeywell. One of corporate America’s most celebrated ...