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March 01, 2011
Don’t Blame Green For GE’s Problems
A fellow contributor on Forbes, Aman Singh, has an insightful spotting of some Jack Welch pronouncements, starting with the startling headline, “GE May Be Going Too Green”.
Her article interprets Welch’s latest message delivered at The Tulsa Business Forum hosted by Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business as: “The main social responsibility for a company is to win.”
Apparently, Welch is not impressed with the bevy of new alternative-energy products offered by GE [GE], which have generated some $18 billion in annual revenue. As reported by the Tulsa World, Welch said, “If it doesn’t turn green into green, it doesn’t turn out to be a helluva good business. The whole idea is to grow jobs,” adding, “The main social responsibility for a company is to win.”
“We played business like it was a sport,” Welch said of his philosophy heading up GE from 1981 to 2001. “You make a game of it; you field the best team and weed out the weakest. The weeds you’ve got to pull out if you’re going to build a beautiful garden.”
The clear implication from Welch’s talk is that if he was still running GE, the Ecomagination projects that CEO Jeff Immelt vaunts, and President Obama praises, would be high on his list of “weeds” to be pulled, because they don’t make money fast enough.
Does this make any sense?
GE has a problem
First, let’s face it. GE has a problem. Its share value is now roughly 50% of what it was ten years ago, when Jack Welch retired. He is right to point this