TO: Jeff Immelt, chairman and chief executive, General Electric.

RE: A small fight with big implications

I know CNBC is a tiny part of your overall math, and the early reviews on Fox Business Network are predictably bleak. But the visibility of the battle means that the outcome will have a disproportionate affect on G.E.'s ability to maintain its mystique as an invincible operator of No. 1 businesses.

And for you personally, it will bring a new angle of scrutiny on your leadership style. You are considered worldlier, wiser, and more strategic than Welch, a style that was essential in the early years of your tenure. But the stock performance is starting to dampen all the good karma you have created, and you should not underestimate the negative symbolism if CNBC falls into a true struggle. As the calls get louder for you to break up the company, a new theme will ultimately emerge: "Where's the boldness?"

And if Ailes gives your boys the same kind of skinning he gave CNN, it will be widely assumed that Welch would never have let that happen. That's why I'm writing you instead of Jeff Zucker or Mark Hoffman. This a major plot point in the G.E. story, and you must attend to it as such.

So, here are six essential courses of action for your consideration.

1. Define the real endgame. The world now knows that Murdoch's strategy is to assemble the pieces needed to establish a business-news death star, and no piece is more critical than a strong presence in American business-news television. The world also assumes that NBC Universal needs to be the first unit to go when you start breaking up the company.

The business-news audience is lucrative but finite. The pie will never get much bigger, so you will be playing a largely zero-sum game with an opponent that will not likely retreat from the category. So assume that the only way to prevent Murdoch from spoiling the business over the years is to sell it to him and that the best long-term returns will come from divesting.

Your objective is to sell it to Murdoch from a complete position of strength. Because it will be worth more to him than it will ever be worth to you, you should be able to extract a remarkable return for your shareholders-if you make sure that FBN fails and that CNBC is his only real alternative.

Thus, you cannot allow FBN to ever reach real profitability. So you must widen three gaps: reach, CPMs, and content. You must expand the number of homes you reach to more than 100 million, and you must keep theirs below 35 million so that national advertising remains dodgy for them. You must widen the current CPM gap, making sure FBN's ad rates look much more like those of Fox News than CNBC. And you must ensure that they lose their best talent if they try to maintain their current cost structure.

Murdoch will show patience, but he is also unlikely to tolerate another permanent nonprofit like the New York Post. Ailes offered a revealing clue when he told reporters that if CNBC did not kill FBN early, then the new network would ultimately grind its way to victory. He's likely right, so you must strike hard now.

2.Make Ailes' FBN strategy clear throughout CNBC. Roger doesn't care about Rupert's global strategy. He simply wants to win in executing the task that's been forced on him. He's pursuing a classically Ailesian strategy for winning, and your guys should know it better than the FBN guys do. There's really only one way to succeed against it. You must ...