By BLOOMBERG

NEW YORK • General Electric Co (GE) is narrowing its focus around several key markets, cutting costs and slashing the dividend. With all that shrinking going on, it’s only natural that the board would follow suit.

John Flannery, GE’s new chairman and CEO, plans to reduce the size of the 18-member board by a third. The members of the smaller slate, which will include three new directors and nine returnees, will be proposed at the April 2018 shareholder meeting.

“Smaller board, new skills, easier to debate — those are the things we were thinking,” Flannery said this week at an investor meeting. “I love different ideas. I love people coming in and saying, ‘Have you looked at it this way or that way?’”

The change is part of a broader effort to overhaul the company and stem the biggest stock decline on the Dow Jones Industrial Average this year. With problems ranging from poor cashflow to flagging power markets, GE has faced criticism from investors and analysts over management and board oversight.

While GE hasn’t detailed the new board’s exact composition, the company said in a proxy statement earlier this year that it expects that Andrea Jung, who is the longest-serving GE director, won’t be renominated in 2018.

Jung is one of two people to have joined the board when Jack Welch was CEO. Welch handed the reins in 2001 to Jeffrey Immelt, who was succeeded this August by Flannery.

The new CEO said John Brennan, the Vanguard Group Inc chairman emeritus who is GE’s lead director, isn’t going anywhere.