Talking with Suzy Welch

Boston Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer talked with former Harvard Business Review editor Suzy Welch about her career and her current BusinessWeek column that she writes with her husband, former GE CEO Jack Welch.

In the interview, Welch disclosed that few people ask the couple any more about their personal life — they were having an affair that led to Welch’s divorce from his second wife and Suzy being fired from her job at the Harvard Business Review. She also noted that she writes the BusinessWeek column with some back and forth with her husband.

Here is an excerpt:

Q: After graduating from Harvard College, you wrote for the Miami Herald and the Associated Press. Why did you leave newspapers?

A: I love writing and i loved journalism a lot, but I had a growing uh-oh feeling in my stomach about the invasion of privacy issues that go along with journalism, so that was creeping up. Then, when I was at the AP, I had seminal moment when Christa McAuliffe cq very, very sadly died in the space shuttle explosion and I was assigned to sit on her parents’ front lawn until they came home. And I had a moment where I had to stop and say, ‘Can I keep doing this?’ I just had too many queasy moments. Very serendipitously and fortunately, around that time I was asked to do business reporting for the AP — not because I had any business ability, but because there was a hole and I was an available body. So I started covering business and I really loved it and really found it interesting. I didn’t know anything about it and I was intrigued. It was the 80s and business was becoming front-page news and I wanted to know more. So I applied to business school and I was unbelievably lucky to get in, and I went. It all came together at the same time. My original plan was to go business school and become a business reporter, but then I got very lucky to be hired by Bain & Co. and I just loved it.

Read more here.