David Cote's career is a study in how quickly fortunes can turn, both for individual executives and for the companies they run. He started on the night shift at a General Electric aircraft engine plant in New Hampshire and worked his way up to running the company's appliance business. Then in 1999, GE's chief executive at the time, Jack Welch, told Cote he wanted him out by the end of the year, offering no real explanation despite Cote pressing him on it.
Three years later, Cote became chief executive of Honeywell. He spent the next 15 years engineering a turnaround at the industrial conglomerate, a run that delivered shareholder returns roughly one and a half times greater than the S&P 500 over that period. He retired from Honeywell in 2018.
Retirement did not stick. Cote later partnered with Goldman Sachs to identify an acquisition target, eventually landing on Vertiv, an 80 year old company focused on cooling systems for data centers. He took the role of executive chairman there.
The early years were rough. Vertiv's stock fell roughly 55 percent by early 2023, a stretch that tested the turnaround thesis Cote had bet on. The company's fortunes shifted as demand for AI data centers accelerated, driving a surge in need for the kind of industrial cooling infrastructure Vertiv builds. Vertiv also expanded through acquisitions, including CoolTera in late 2023. Since going public, the company's market value has grown from under 11 billion dollars to about 109 billion dollars.
Cote's path from an abrupt, unexplained ouster at one of America's most storied industrial companies to a second act steering two separate corporate turnarounds has made him a frequently cited example of how a career setback can prove temporary, and sometimes the setup for something bigger.