(FORTUNE Magazine) – Now that Westinghouse has agreed to take over CBS, the inevitable comparisons are being made between CEO Michael Jordan and the CEO of another manufacturing company that owns a television network, Jack Welch of General Electric. The two companies, once mirror images, took different paths in the Eighties. GE thrived, while Westinghouse was on the road to disaster when Jordan took over in 1993.

The conventional wisdom goes that Jordan is no Jack Welch, the latter being a poster boy of the CEO fraternity--tough, focused, and a value creator. Ah, but Wall Street forgets that at times in his 14-year reign at General Electric, Welch was no hero, either.

Welch started with some enormous advantages. For one thing, GE in 1981 was already a smooth-running profit machine, nothing like the grab bag of faltering businesses Paul Lego bequeathed to Jordan at Westinghouse 12 years later. In fact, GE had been a well-managed company when Welch was still in short pants. For their book Built to Last, authors James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras compared pretax return on equity during Welch's first decade with that of his predecessors since 1915. The results: 26.3% for Welch, vs. an average of 28.3% under those who came before him.

In every era the GE bosses, Welch included, outperformed their counterparts at Westinghouse. One telling difference: GE's debt-to-capital ratio when Welch arrived was a lean, mean 19%. At Westinghouse, when Jordan stepped in, it was 77% (currently 64%). No wonder Jack was nimbler.

Martin Sankey, who follows both companies for CS First Boston, notes that while Welch has been tending GE, Westinghouse has endured five different CEOs. And Jordan's an outsider. Says Sankey: "He didn't even know anybody, or see what, in that hidebound, complacent culture, would finally get things moving. He is still learning all that."

Amid the sniping from Wall Street and the press, Jordan may find a crumb of comfort in recalling that even Golden Boy Welch has had his share of detractors. Remember when he sold off GE's housewares division in 1984? Wall Street had conniptions about lost toaster-oven sales. But Welch used those proceeds and other asset sales to buy RCA, and with it NBC, for $6 billion. He sold some pieces for billions and built NBC into a network that is today worth more than the initial price of the whole shebang.

Critics back then sniffed that Welch had never run a network before, and the uproar got louder when he put Robert Wright in charge of NBC. Wright, a former cable television executive, was then running what is now called GE Capital. Wright's style was summed up by a screaming 1987 headline in the New York Post: NETWORK NICKEL & DIMED BY EX-APPLIANCE HUCKSTER. But he created a global superchannel that now reaches 68 million homes in 44 countries.

Jordan has offended CBS staffers by declining to tell them who their new boss will be, and the network folk aren't much mollified by an apologetic announcement last week that a ten-man transition team, headed by Jordan himself, will be running things. Most insiders, and many Wall Street analysts, doubt that Jordan has any coherent strategy for CBS. Says he: "It's like the old joke about the recipe for elephant soup. First, you bag the elephant."

Indeed, CBS late-night star David Letterman fired away on August 1, the day the merger was announced. His "Top Ten Ways CBS Will Be Different When It's Owned by Westinghouse" included No. 3: "I get to use slightly rewritten GE jokes from the late Eighties."

GE's share price went nowhere in Welch's first full year as CEO, slipping from $65.62 to $64.12. By mid-1983, the end of Welch's second year as boss, it hit $111.82--and then took off. (The stock has split three times since then.) By that logic, Jordan has until year-end to turn Westinghouse.

- Anne B. Fisher