American businessmen are too busy to have lunch – or, to be more precise, Jeffrey R. Immelt, chairman and chief executive of General Electric, can’t find the time to eat a meal with me.

The afternoon repast we are sharing, in a comfortable if impersonal conference room on the 53rd floor of GE’s midtown Manhattan offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, has instead been billed as “beer and pretzels”. But, of course, Immelt is also too busy to have a beer at 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon, so we are reduced to an ascetic Diet Coke (a newish kind with added vitamins) and several handfuls of pretzels for him, and a small bottle of Perrier for me.

He drinks his soda straight out of the can, I sip directly from my bottle. GE employs more than 300,000 people and this month its rising share price pushed its market capitalisation above $400bn, but, at least under Immelt, it doesn’t really do corporate excess.

I ask whom he had his real lunch with and what he ate. He spent the day with Jeff Zucker and his executive team at NBC, going over the group’s long-term strategy. They worked through a buffet meal, with Immelt eating “a little helping of chicken salad and a little pasta salad”.

So, lunch is for wimps? Immelt, who may be America’s most publicly deft CEO, doesn’t like the sound of that. “Lunch at my age is for fat people,” Immelt, a 6ft 4in former college football player with a head of full, if greying, hair, retorts. “I find that three meals a day is not conducive to my boyish good looks.”

The answer is pure Immelt. GE is ranked second in this year’s FT Global 500 – only Exxon Mobil is larger – but its Cincinnati-born boss is unshakably polite, self-deprecating and relaxed. At a time when US chief executives are under fire for excessive compensation and when GE itself has faced intermittent attack over its share-price and its unfashionable conglomerate business model, Immelt’s midwestern niceness has become a powerful corporate tool.

Now 51, Immelt joined GE in 1982. Fresh from Harvard Business School, by way of a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Dartmouth, he was wooed by Morgan Stanley and GE. For most people, Morgan Stanley would have been the obvious choice. Immelt does not demur: “It [GE] had no sex appeal versus Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs.” Morgan Stanley’s recruiters weren’t shy about pressing their advantage. Immelt still remembers, with the peculiar clarity of the painful encounters of youth, having dinner in New York with a Morgan Stanley partner “who will remain unnamed”.

“He said, ’Morgan Stanley is the best company in the world. How can you not say yes to this offer?’ He says, ’Listen, if you come to work for Morgan Stanley, in six months you’re going to be making a presentation to Jack Welch. If you go to work for GE maybe, just maybe, in 15 years you’ll shake his hand.’”

His warning, Immelt recalls, “was like a backhand right to the face – whack!” Why, then, didn’t that evening sway him? It certainly wasn’t anything as mushy as fealty to the company his father worked for: “Look, I love my father ... but by the time I graduated from business school I was maybe $30,000 or $40,000 in debt, so loyalty just didn’t have a lot to do with it.”

Instead, what drove Immelt is the motivation he returns to throughout our conversation: he has always wanted to build big things and lead the big groups of people it takes to do that. “I could see that in consulting and other places, even though intellectually it’s incredibly challenging, it wasn’t the same thing as just motivating big groups of people to accomplish great things,” Immelt recalls. “I spent the early part of my career in the plastics business. I thought we were conquering the world ... I was, I don’t know, 30, and I might have made $80,000 or $90,000 a year. The people I went to business school with were making half a million or something ... I never once thought I was getting screwed.”

I wonder, though, whether in this new gilded age, today’s Jeff Immelts are still choosing GE. Immelt insists they are. His biggest competitor for people is private equity. And while he concedes that the titans of that business are “immensely talented”, Immelt warns potential GE recruits that “going to private equity is the dumbest thing they could ever do”.

“If you just want to pick something up one year and dump it three years from now and get paid a lot, I am the wrong place to come,” he tells job-hunters. But if “you’re curious about whether or not there’ll ever be an electronic medical record in healthcare ... if you’re curious about what form digital media will take ... you ought to be with a company that’s going to finish the job, and that’s me ... I’m going to sell my butt off that this is the only place somebody can come to live their dreams.”

If you come to GE because you want to run something big and shape the world, then the biggest prize of all is running the whole thing. Jack Welch staged a high-profile, three-way internal “bake-off” to pick the NG, or “new guy”, who would do that. Immelt, who comes across as indefatigably optimistic, admits that contest was “the hardest year of my life, by far”.

The toughest thing, Immelt says, was that “I’m a private person, kind of, and it was so gosh darn public.” He’s right about the private part – various feints designed to get Immelt to talk about his life outside GE (dad? wife? daughter? even golf?) get me nowhere. But given Immelt’s public grace, I’m surprised that he found it so hard to be scrutinised.

He points out that the spotlight on today’s generation of CEOs is a relatively new phenomenon: “It’s not like any of us really trained ourselves for it.” Indeed, as recently as 2004, Immelt recalls, “people would say, ’Hey, if you just hit your numbers you can tell everybody else to shut up.’” Immelt believes hitting the numbers is “still what counts” – “if I’m not doing those things, look, I deserve to get fired”. But he also thinks that nowadays bosses “really have to have a sense of the broader impact on things”.

This awareness of what Immelt repeatedly refers to as “context” has been one of the distinguishing aspects of his leadership of GE, and is often contrasted with the more imperial style of his predecessor, who is proudly described on the book jacket of his autobiography as “the world’s toughest boss”. But, in a rare break in his affable manner, Immelt gets a bit heated at the idea that his own approach is sharply different from his mentor’s. “The Jack Welch that I worked for ... had so much more texture than gets written about,” he insists. He “was not a madman, a Neutron Jack and all that stuff. He was a guy that really got the sense that performance wasn’t enough and that you had to have a good sense of context.”

One area in which “context” has been a problem for many of America’s chief executives has been their pay cheques. Immelt starts by saying his country’s big concern should be the “trillion-dollar trade deficit”. American entrepreneurs, not unions or politicians, are the solution to their nation’s competitiveness problem, “so I don’t think you want to make these people feel like dirt”. But he also believes executives need to take personal responsibility for how much they get paid: “This notion that a CEO can make a boatload of money and turn around and say the comp committee made me take it, that’s rubbish.”

Immelt is, of course, “a globalist” – he could hardly run GE otherwise. And he agrees that America’s business people these days are more internationally minded than the country’s politicians: in fact, he says, when his friends in government “want to know what’s going on in the world, they call guys like me or Sam Palmisano [of IBM]”.

But lately Immelt has come to believe that it is essential to characterise GE as being rooted in America, even as it pursues global opportunities. I don’t think this is populist pandering, although Immelt admits “if you put globalisation up for a popular vote in the US, we’d lose”. His point, instead, is that “it is just too ominous” when chief executives talk about running global companies. “Nobody really wants to think that any company is above the law, that they can float above everything.” That is why he has come to think that the best way to talk about GE, at home and abroad, is to “say ’we’re an American company, but, in order to be successful we’ve got to win in every corner of the world...’ I actually think it resonates better.”

I inquire what kind of manager he is. He admits to sometimes getting angry, because “you have to”. He is so publicly unflappable that I’m not sure I believe him. But when I press him to describe Immeltian fury he instantly offers some pretty credible signs: “Tone of voice and loudness and maybe the quality of the vocabulary slips just a touch.” Lots of things make Immelt resort to the kind of language he says we might not print in the FT, including “lack of dedication ... lack of courage”. And he hates rudeness, including the use of BlackBerries (a device he otherwise loves) during meetings.

But my favourite Immeltian crime is “deviousness”. According to Immelt: “Deviousness is the death penalty 100 per cent of the time.” Even deviousness by omission is forbidden: “If I have to ask the perfect question to get the answer, you can’t work for me.”

Yet, as our conversation continues, I find I am being a bit devious myself. Without the cues of appetiser, main course and dessert there is no obvious conclusion to our encounter. To keep things going, I subject Immelt to a steady barrage of questions, hoping if I don’t pause he will have a hard time breaking things off. It works for nearly two hours. I am about to launch into one more query when, courteously but firmly, Immelt stands up, asks me a final question about my own projects, and goes back to work.

Chrystia Freeland is the FT’s US managing editor.

53rd Floor Conference Room, GE, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Manhattan

1 x Diet Coke

1 x Perrier water

Pretzels

No charge