GE’s Talent Machine

Leadership development is a heavy priority for GE. The company put a great emphasis on building leaders. Four successive CEO each made contributions to the development of management talent. The CEO Cordiner implemented a decentralization practice that broke the company into various departments. The new company structure was more manageable but required more delegation. As a result of the decentralized structure, GE put a great emphasis on developing organizational learning. GE spent a lot of money on management education to expand managers’ leadership ability and general management skills. Education is one of the three life and work experience that contribute to leadership development (P479). The first corporate university was built by Cordiner where provided programs on executive education and management training. Those learning programs focus on personal growth that help employees to improve themselves continuously in GE’s learning culture. GE had various programs for finding potential leaders and preventing brain drain. The Session C was a performance assessment process that implemented to promote “high potential” employees. It included the individual evaluations, the career forecasts, and the succession plans. Subordinates were placed on a six-point scale from “high potential” to “unsatisfactory”. This feedback-intensive program helped the potential leaders to understand their behavior patterns, and they were able to find more constructive ways of achieving their objectives (P488). Another GE’s leadership excellence named disciplined performance management analysis, also known as the “vitality curve” was added to Session C. The incentive ranking system help GE to seek the best talents and to sustain a high-performance workforce. In addition, the CEO Reg Jones initiated a more structured practice to strategic planning to make the review process more manageable- the strategic business unite (SUBs). All those programs help GE to build a results-driven