As Larry Culp revealed his plan to break GE into three on Tuesday, he closed a defining chapter in US corporate history, signalling how far from favour the conglomerate business model has fallen.

With Japan’s best-known industrial group Toshiba also considering splitting into three under pressure from activist investors and IBM getting out of its services business, all are following a path taken by the likes of United Technologies, DowDuPont, ABB and Siemens: distancing themselves further from the time four or five decades ago when conglomerates defined corporate best practice.

“I’m going to leave the look back, the retrospectives, to the academics and the historians, frankly. I’ve spent my entire career with these models and there are different answers for different businesses at different points of time,” Culp told the Financial Times.