General Electric | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

The enemy is already within. The flood gates are open. Can GE recover?

Managing cash, balancing this out with your liabilities and obligations, knowing your market dynamics, and equally, having a good understanding of where the future growth lies, are all essential for managing any healthy business.

It is then by utilizing robust research and development projects, combined with an acquisition strategy that augments growth, management creates sustainable and evolving business model.

These are the hallmarks of effective leadership. through managing your future development, mostly through research and development, that when combined with a sound acquisition strategy, that you believe will augment your present internal growth, so as to look to sustain the business, longer-term, becomes your contribution as a leader. These are the bedrock of good corporate management. It seems within GE, all of these have been forgotten or collapsed. Why, I mean how can that have happened?

For a company reputed to have a good management discipline and focus, yet this year, 2017, for GE, it seems all of these are lying in tatters, or some parts will lose out as a consequence, into the future. What has gone wrong at GE?

The last few months have been some of the most shocking ones in GE’s history. GE has been around since 1892 and was one of the corporate titans of the 20^th Century. Since the crisis of 2008, GE has been struggling to fully regain its position but all its actions were regarded very highly as “making good progress” as it maintained a relentless momentum of shedding and acquiring operations, as well as pursuing a buying back of its shares, and paying out the beloved GE dividend. This certainly provided a highly dynamic environment for managing the business. There has been a consistent muttering that this was not fast enough or clear enough. Well, GE faces a very different set of realities today.

Today, GE is in a very dark place at this moment. It is managing a full-blown set of crisis, that has investors highly spooked and demanding answers. Its share price is hovering around $17 per share, whereas, in February of this year, it was ranging in the $31- 32 price. Its market valuation, once over $400bn, is now closer to $150bn.

This is a long read, as the story itself is only just emerging and is a complex one. I simply have to step outside my own innovation comfort box to try to get to grips with the breaking GE story. It has shaken me. I assume you already have some awareness of what is happening in a company that has been held up over so many years, as a model of good management. Continue reading “The enemy is already within. The flood gates are open. Can GE recover?”

Connected Enterprise, Connected World with GE

I was delighted to be invited onto a panel with GE at their R&D centre in Munich this week forming for me a connected enterprise and a world perspective that one rarely gets without being present and engaged with companies like GE.

Dubbed “Innovation Breakthroughs – Igniting Europe’s Growth” They were celebrating 10 years of the opening of the centre and as you arrived, you saw the cranes at work to double the facility as well as further deepen their commitments within the surrounding community even further.
Continue reading “Connected Enterprise, Connected World with GE”

So what is holding innovation back? A new GE report

I always look forward to the GE Global Barometer and the 2014 report is no exception, actually it really has moved the needle on what is presently holding innovation back.

The Barometer has explored the actions or constraints that senior business executives are worrying over in their pursuit of innovation.

The fieldwork was undertaken in April and May, 2014 and covered 3,200 phone interviews to people directly involved in the innovation strategy or process. It covered 26 countries and was conducted by Edelman Berland on GE’s behalf.

The supporting website provides the GE view of how this report reflects and provides an overview, an interactive, resources and key point headings sections to explore.

I personally think GE have actually been a little too low-key on this report and frankly far too conservative on the potential takeaways in reading their ‘take’ in the overview.

It has significant implications for our organizations to grapple with but each is certainly not alone, it is a collective need to move innovation forward or you place much at risk if you don’t find solutions to the issues raised in this report.

This year the Barometer broke out of its past and steamed ahead.
Continue reading “So what is holding innovation back? A new GE report”

Shoring up the fragile innovation system, call GE

Well, the World Economic forum’s annual meeting is beckoning later this month. During the period of 25^th to 29^th January, the WEF attempts to engage business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.( http://www.weforum.org/)

Just released on 18^th January is the GE Global Innovation Barometer with the results of its second annual review on innovation. Here is the source site to check out and explore your own needs: http://www.ge.com/innovationbarometer/

The aim of the release is to use this and have this available for the meeting in Davos as well as shape GE’s innovation agenda going forward. For the Davos meeting, let’s hope our leaders have the time and inclination to review its content.

No doubt GE will be there and if Beth Comstock is going as the senior vice president and chief marketing officer of GE I’m sure she will be leading the “innovation does matter” charge. Continue reading “Shoring up the fragile innovation system, call GE”

Going behind the outside-in of imagination at GE.

In the past few months, I have become interested in GE and how it is managing innovation. Often you read a number of negative reports on GE but is this just the big guy being picked upon by more nimble observers that have limited insight into what is going on behind the walls of GE?

What is under the innovation bonnet at GE?

There does seem an awful lot going on in GE around innovation on what we can observe from the outside looking in. Of course, you would expect this in an organization the size of GE employing 300,000 people across 100 countries and generating $150 billion dollars in revenue.

In Jeffrey Immelts (Chair and CEO) own words “the toughest years of my life were 2008 to 2009”.To drop 31 billion dollars in revenue in two years is tough to manage through, and to see net earnings drop by nearly $6 billion dollars in this period to where it is today, of $11.6 billion dollars, must have been very hard.
Continue reading “Going behind the outside-in of imagination at GE.”