Question 1: In what ways has Jeff Immelt redirected the strategy of GE?
In 2001, shortly after Jeff Immelt became the CEO of GE, a series of events changed and impacted the corporate landscape. The immediate challenges that he faced included 9/11, and a subsequent series of high profile corporate scandals (Enron, WorldCom). In 2008, the financial crisis hit and had a severe impact on GE’s primary growth source, GE Capital causing it to accumulate bad debts and asset write-downs. These events caused slow domestic economic growth, crisis of confidence among investors and more global competitors.
Due to the change in environment and the need to adapt Immelt shifted the focus of GE from cost cutting and deal making to new products, services
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At the heart of Immelt’s growth strategy for General Electric’s was the development of new Growth Platforms, which could be either extensions of the existing businesses or entire new commercial areas. Even though Immelts core focus was on organic growth, repositioning to take advantage of the emerging market trends and opportunities would require acquisition. Then once a new Growth Platform was identified, GE would build a leading position in those sectors through small strategic acquisitions and the deployment of its financial, technical and managerial resources.
GE was entering a new generational era, one where technology is at the forefront of growth and adaptation. Immelt identified Technology as one of GE’s major drivers for future growth which was signaled by his expansion of GE’s R&D budgets. He shifted the importance of Technology within GE by focusing on the R&D projects that offered large scale market potential, reffered to as “Imagination breakthroughs”.
Within this new business environment that GE was facing, customers needs, wants and expectations of what products can offer them is forever changing. Immelt saw and understood this from the amount of time spent with customers, and implemented this idea within GE through the IT
Services, Customer focus, Growth platforms, and Globalization. Immelt implemented a six part growth process, shown in Figure 3 below.
On Friday, September 7, 2001, 43-year-old Jeff Immelt became GE’s ninth CEO in its 109-year
It also takes us in the quest of understanding and analyzing one of the main bets of the new CEO Jeff Immelt, which were the Imagination Breakthroughs, best known as IB’s looking at one example in an specific division of the company, the Transportation branch; one of the many complex and
Also; Citigroup, Inc. another competitor for the GE Company made a total of $64.95 billion in 2011, and when we compare it with GE and SI its earnings where even less in the same year, making General Electric a leader in the industry. With this valuable information GE management can analyze its competitor’s financial statements results and from there they can evaluate their faults and create new ways to increase their annuals earnings and secure their place as one of leading companies in their industry. Another way GE can go forward in the industry is by adapting its services and products to other countries that need them.
GE has to examine what strategy the firm is going to follow. Will the firm’s
In late June when General Electric Company Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt announced that GE would
Despite the fact that the company could grow by doing more and more acquisitions, it was vital for the company to invest in its own organic growth. The company aims to grow organically two to three times higher than the global GDP of 80% (Immelt, 2005).
Q : 2 Is Immelt betting on the right things to drive growth in GE ? Can he hope to change a company whose growth was driven by acquisitions and productivity improvement into an organic growth company dependent on innovation, entrepreneurship and risk taking particularly in such a large complex performance driven corporation?
According to Bateman and Snell (2009), “Strategies developed around the cutting edge of technological advances create a competitive advantage; strategies that ignore or lag behind competitors’ technology lead to obsolescence and extinction” (p. 56). Using breakthrough technology is essential to General Electric’s success. The ground-breaking ideas of General Electric’s employees uses the advances in technology to improve existing products, create new products, and develop safe and efficient products in the future.
Jack Welch’s vision of what GE was possible of gave the company a vision for twenty years while he was the CEO and chairman. He states, “leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.” (Winning, pg 67) He not only allowed for employees to stretch, but demanded it. In teaching workers to stretch Welch knew that workers “may fail. In fact, they probably will fail. But stretching, and stretching the business, is going to improve performance results.” (Jack Welch on Leadership, pg 105) He also states that “only by setting the performance bar high did it become possible to discover people’s capabilities.” Jack Welch’s emphasis on candor and breaking the bureaucracy of modern business separated him from his contemporaries. He excited others of the possibility of being the biggest and best company in the world and rewarding his best employees that shared the values of GE. According to FORTUNE Editorial Director Geoffrey Colvin In "The Ultimate Manager, Welch leads the annals of management history not for anticipating the new world's changes ahead, but for acting on them: "His great achievement is that having seen it, he faced up to the huge, painful changes it demanded, and made them faster and more emphatically than anyone else in business. He led managers into this new world, which we still inhabit, and just as important, he showed business
General Electric is a well-known company in many regions of the world, but what people aren’t particularly aware of are the steps that General Electric has taken to get to where it is at today. When I think of General Electric the first thing that comes to mind is the role that the company plays in the production of household appliances, but General Electric is a much bigger contributor to people’s lives than is most people realize. People aren’t familiar with the internal business decisions that General Electric makes to ensure that the company continues to grow and run as smoothly as possible, allowing the company to continue to provide people with the services that they have grown to recognize as being a trademark of General Electric.
• Immelt believed that GE needed to reposition itself to maximize growth opportunities and to achieve growth targets through sound acquisitions.
The distinctive seven staircases of growth strategies have been adopted by many successful companies, such as Walt Disney, Gillette, Johnson & Johnson, Home Depot, and many more. While one single strategy may not yield a significant growth effect, implementing them concurrently and consecutively can provide a powerful roadmap for near-term and long-term growth (Baghai, Coley, & White, 1996). Below is an analysis of Raytheon’s seven staircases to continuous growth.
This facilitated the entry of cheaper products into the market thus eating up into GE’s market share. GE then focused on its new growth platform where they would roll out extensions to existing products or new products only. Immelt wanted to distinguish the company from a normal run of the mill conglomerate. He emphasized that before 1986 GE was the company which brought out most patents in the US market annually. But that the position was not even 20th in the current
The management developments that GE has formulated over the past century appear to reflect the same sequential pattern that has been suggested by the management theory. GE’s first organizational innovation was the establishment of their corporate research and development lab in 1900. I believe this innovation directly germinated out of the advancements that where being made in managerial theory at the time. Frederick Taylor a pioneer of scientific management conducted studies that demonstrated that paying employees with a piecework pay system helps achieve a higher quality and quantity of output from workers, along with improved moral among the groups of workers. Soon after these studies GE in 1930 became the first U.S firm to offer pension and profit sharing plans to their workers.