Mr. Immelt will be chairman of a new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness that Mr. Obama intends to create by executive order. In a statement, Mr. Obama said he wants the council to “focus its work on finding new ways to encourage the private sector to hire and invest in American competitiveness.”  The council will be a reconfigured version of the board Mr. Volcker led, the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. That body, created by Mr. Obama when he took office in the thick of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is set to expire on Feb. 6.  The changes signal what the White House describes as “a new phase of our recovery,” a shift from crisis to job creation. They come as Mr. Obama has been working hard to repair his frayed relations with the business community. Mr. Immelt, who was a member of the original board, has often been by the president’s side in recent months, as Mr. Obama has sought to spotlight his efforts on behalf of American companies overseas.  Mr. Immelt’s appointment comes as Mr. Obama has increasingly turned to people with close ties to the business sector for counsel in the wake of the setbacks of the midterm elections, something highlighted by the appointment of William M. Daley, the former Commerce secretary and senior executive at JPMorgan Chase, as the president’s chief of staff.  It was well known in Washington that Mr. Volcker, who was sometimes harshly critical of the nation's banks, had been frustrated in his role as an outside adviser to the president, although Mr. Obama did push for a measure that restricts the ability of banks whose deposits are federally insured from trading for their own benefit that became known as the “Volcker rule.”  Perhaps no company outside of the banking sector was hit as hard by the financial crisis as G.E., certainly none that seemed healthy before the economic tailspin. Its big finance arm, GE Capital, long a cash machine that bolstered the mother ship’s bottom line, became an albatross, threatening to pull down the entire enterprise. G.E. cut its dividend for the first time since the Great Depression, lost its triple-A credit rating and hastily arranged a $3 billion investment from the billionaire Warren E. Buffett.  Having skirted disaster, G.E. recovered gradually. By late 2010, its finance unit was on the mend, with the size of its debts and troubled loans trending downward. But investors are used to getting more from G.E., which earned $22 billion on revenue of $173 billion in 2007.  So G.E. revamped its strategy in the wake of the financial crisis. Its heritage of industrial innovation reaches back to Thomas Edison and the incandescent light bulb, and with that legacy in mind, G.E. sought to go back to basics. The company, Mr. Immelt insisted, must rely more on making physical products and less on financial engineering — a path that, he said, is also necessary for the American economy as a whole.  Mr. Immelt candidly admitted that G.E. was seduced by GE Capital’s financial promise — the lure of rapid-fire moneymaking unencumbered by the long-range planning, costs and headaches that go into producing heavy-duty material goods. Other industrial corporations were enthralled with finance, of course, but none as much as G.E., which became the nation’s largest nonbank financial company.  The big buildup of GE Capital occurred during the tenure of Mr. Immelt’s famous predecessor, Jack Welch. But while Mr. Immelt, who took over in 2001, spun off the unit’s insurance business, he also bulked up on commercial real estate and other loans. In 2004, G.E. even bought a subprime lender in California, WMC Mortgage, which it shed in 2007 for a $1 billion loss.  Mr. Immelt faced enormous expectations from the start: he won the job after a well-publicized bake-off with two other prominent G.E. executives, W. James McNerney Jr., who went on to run Boeing) and Robert L. Nardelli (Home Depot and Chrysler). He then had to deal with 9/11, with a power turbine business that fell off a cliff, with NBC’s fall from first to last place in the ratings, and with the realization that the company’s insurance business was under-reserved by $10 billion.  He was not a clone of the blustery, impatient Mr. Welch, just as Mr. Welch was not a clone of his predecessor, the statesmanlike Reginald H. Jones. But that’s an amazing thing about G.E.: it has an uncanny talent for picking exactly the right leader for each different era. In its 128-year existence, it has had 10 leaders , and only one — the founder Thomas Edison, of all people — was a bust.  Despite his gentle voice and manner, Mr. Immelt has a powerful presence. At 6-foot-4, with a full head of graying brown hair and a football player's body -- a body that at one point ballooned to 280 pounds but has held steady at 220 for some years now -- he could not easily fade into the surroundings.  Not surprisingly, athletics were a big part of his growing up in a middle-class household in Cincinnati, where his father worked for 38 years at GE Aircraft Engines, rising to middle management.  The younger of two brothers, Mr. Immelt was a good student in high school, but his first love was sports. He played football at Dartmouth College, where he majored in applied mathematics. But what he learned most was how much he liked to lead; he was also president of his fraternity, Phi Delta Alpha.  During summers, he worked on a Ford Motor assembly line in Cincinnati. ''I learned a lot about how to communicate to people, what makes them respond,'' Mr. Immelt said.  After graduation, he did a brief stint in Procter & Gamble's brand management operation, then went to Harvard for his M.B.A. It was the early 80s, when the term yuppie was just entering the language, and investment banks and consulting firms were dangling huge salaries in front of bright M.B.A.'s.  Unlike many of his friends, Mr. Immelt was not tempted. ''Big companies weren't considered glamorous back then,'' he said. ''But I always wanted to build things and to lead groups of people.'' When G.E. offered him a job, he jumped at it.  In 1983, after a year in the corporate office at Fairfield, Conn., Mr. Immelt was named Dallas district sales manager for GE Plastics. One of his subordinates was a young woman named Andrea Allen. She soon moved to Chicago, but they stayed in touch, and the friendship blossomed. They married in 1986. A year later, their daughter, Sarah, was born, and Mrs. Immelt quit to become a full-time homemaker.  In 1989, Mr. Immelt switched to GE Appliances, where he rose through the customer service and marketing ranks. He returned to GE Plastics in 1992 as general manager, and stayed there until he was named president of Gems in 1997. Under his leadership, sales rose 75 percent. Operating profits at the unit, which is based in Waukesha, Wis., doubled, and its share of the worldwide medical equipment market has gone to 34 percent from 25 percent.  ''Before Jeff, our focus was on cost cutting,'' Ms. Klein said. ''Jeff brought a growth mindset.''
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