As soon as Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric's chairman, became chief executive in 2001, his foreign-based managers began pressing him to move some major operations overseas.

"They'd say, 'GE will never be really global until you do,' " Immelt recalled. For years, his reaction was, "That's really stupid; no need to do that."

But his managers kept up the pressure, and Immelt figured that "with so much smoke, there must be a fire."

So in 2004, he moved GE Healthcare from Wisconsin to outside London, the home of Amersham, a company GE had just bought.