General Electric Through Jack Welch

Analyzing GE’s corporate-level strategy from 2001 – present with Jeff Immelt as CEO, GE focuses on the growth and development platforms. Technology is the key driving force for GE’s future and growth. Advancements in industries such as energy, health and aviation fueled demand for cleaner and more efficient energy production. GE identified new markets with potential high-growth that offered attractive returns through strategic mergers and acquisitions. As CEO, Jeff Immelt established a process for identifying projects that offered attractive growth potential which were then nurtured and treated as special projects or initiatives that were not subject to strict budget constraints. Immelt introduced GE’s three strategic imperatives as: (1) sustaining its strong business model, (2) strengthening the business portfolio, and (3) driving its growth initiatives. www.ge.com

Please read Case Study: The Jack Welch Era at General Electric in Chapter 5 and answer questions 1 & 3. Please submit the answers by the end of week #3. At least one page is required.

* Immelt wanted to use GE’s size and diversity as sources of strength and to drive growth by investing in places and in ways that others could not easily follow.

In three words Dismal, Denial, and Diswoned! Mr. Jack Welch’s, reigned as Chairman and CEO of GE during the years of 1981-2001, taking over from his predecessor Reginald H. Jones.

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, was one of the first CEOs to change a company so drastically and destroy policies that had been for years. When Jack Welch first entered General Electric, he was given a PPO project on plastic. Jack Welch contributed greatly. Yet, he was only given

This report’s objective is to provide analysis of the leadership challenge that General Electric (GE) is currently facing, and to recommend solutions. The primary problem is determining what kind of candidate is required to replace retiring CEO Jack Welch. This has left GE to question how much does the company want to change policy over the previous era, and where does the company want to be in future?

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.

General Electric (GE abbreviated) was started with Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb. Both Thomas Edison and JP Morgan started the Edison Lamp Company, which later became known as General Electric. The people at GE are committed to making a world that works better.

Analysis - GE has likely been so successful over the years because of its ability to foresee major trends and capitalize upon them. In the 1960s, for instance, GE was one of the eight major computer companies. Even recently, since 1986, GE has continued to acquire several organizations; portions of NBC, wind manufacturing, universe pictures, aerospace industries, international firms, software and hardware manufacturing, even oil companies abroad. The company culture describes itself as not one company, but many each unit a vast and complex enterprise in and of itself, with a corporate

Management guru Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, has been instrumental in forming today’s top business management leaders by imparting effective knowledge in leadership management; he is widely credited with transforming GE into a multibillion-dollar conglomerate.

This case study follows General Electric, and the transformation that company made over two decades of business. General Electric was founded in 1878 by Thomas Edison, and according to the case study, “[GE] grew from its early focus on the generation, distribution, and use of electric power to become, a hundred years later, one of the world’s leading diversified industrial companies” (Wozny, 2005, p.1). General Electric grew its name in business through their work in power generation, lighting, and household appliances. The case study also mentions that General Electric worked with aircraft engines, medical systems, and diesel motors. GE was a company that was constantly changing and adapting. It was in the 1950s, that the company had delegated work to hundreds of managers for different departments of the company. In 1973 a new CEO came up the ranks of the company, Reg Jones inherited the company and started a complete reorganization. According to the case study, Reg Jones started by

     When Jack Welch was named CEO of General Electric, Welch saw a company in trouble even though the business world saw GE as an intrinsically healthy corporation, secure in its position as a world industrial leader. Welch knew that the company was too large to fail yet GE was too unwieldy to adapt for further growth. The changes he instituted restructured and revolutionized GE and made Welch the most respected CEO in business today. After reading the book there were three parts that really stood out for me.

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”.

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, known for the 9 Box Matrix or McKinsey - GE Matrix for growth share strategy developed in late 70s, was continually working on improving its growth capabilities. These strategies helped GE to identify and sell off