You are right to highlight the influence that GE has on the way others manage their businesses. And it is fitting that you praise GE for its comprehensive and extremely well-crafted citizenship report. It is especially rewarding to see how well GE deals with the bigger issues of the day, and how hard the reporting team worked to get outside voices into the report.

But I feel you are doing yourself and your readers a disservice by failing to point out that GE provides very few quantitative environmental performance goals. These are considered fundamental to good management. You don’t have to scrutinize the numbers, just read the statement from GE’s stakeholder panel.

“[The Panel] encourages GE to identify more specific and quantitative performance metrics and targets and to report how its performance measures up to relevant external benchmarks and standards…we encourage GE to consider identifying a set of waste reduction targets…”

This is pretty fundamental stuff and it is surprising that GE is so far behind the competition in setting targets and then reporting its performance.