Lafley and Immelt: In search of billions

These top CEO pals are under the gun to deliver profitable growth for the behemoth companies they lead. But P&G and GE are tough challenges, says Fortune's Geoff Colvin.

By Geoff Colvin, senior editor-at-large

(Fortune Magazine) -- A.G. Lafley and Jeffrey Immelt have lots in common. They're silver-haired CEOs launched from Harvard Business School to become chiefs of giant, iconic companies.

They started their careers at the same place - Procter & Gamble. Today they're CEOs on the modern American plan: overscheduled, overscripted and underslept, soft-spoken and informal, disdaining neckties except when they can't.

But that's not why they're friends. What makes Immelt and Lafley one of the business world's most interesting buddy acts is something else they share, a problem that virtually everyone in business now faces, but one that for them is defined with razor sharpness and is playing out on a giant scale. Good thing they have one other thing in common - they're showing how to solve it.

General Electric's Immelt, 50, and Procter & Gamble's Lafley, 59, have come to know each other only in the past five years, but they talk often now and clearly feel a sense of shared challenges and philosophies.

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