marc marc
marc		 marc marc
blog about books journalism speaking contact

Posts Tagged ‘General Electric’

GE: Good citizen, but where’s the payoff?

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

“Responsible business,” says Bob Corcoran, “is good business.”

And what’s responsible business? “Make money, make it ethically and make a difference.”

Bob Corcoran

Bob is vice president for corporate citizenship at GE, a 30-year company veteran, and a good guy. We met in 2o04 when we traveled together in Ghana while I was reporting a story on GE’s values for FORTUNE. (See Money and Morals at GE.)  Recently we spoke about GE’s 2009 citizenship report, and about what GE has learned in the past five years from its corporate citizenship efforts, including its high-profile campaign around Ecomagination, which focuses the company, and its marketing, on products and services that help solve the world’s big environment problems.

Inside GE, Ecomagination is deemed a success, so much so that it has spawned a sister initiative (if you can spawn a sister) called Healthymagination, focused on profitably creating better health for more people. GE says that it expects Ecomagination product revenues to grow at twice the rate of GE’s overall revenue between now and 2015.

The logic behind both initiatives is simple, Bob noted. Big global problems demand big solutions from big companies. GE prides itself on “tackling the world’s most complex and pressing problems,” as chief executive Jeff Immelt writes in the report.

The trouble is, the payoff for GE’s shareholders have been disappointing. I didn’t realize just how disappointing until I put together this chart comparing GE’s stock-price performance to the S&P500 and to a couple of its conglomerate competitors, Siemens and United Technologies. (more…)

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Business Ethics, CSR, Leadership, Sustainability, Transparency | 2 Comments »

GE and Washington: Too cozy?

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Since 2004, when I wrote a story for FORTUNE called Money and Morals at GE , I have been an admirer of General Electric and its CEO, Jeff Immelt. My admiration deepened when GE unveiled EcoMagination, its effort to solve important environmental problems. Immelt and GE also led the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an alliance of big business and big NGOs committed to getting the government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Jeffrey Immelt

Jeffrey Immelt

But–and you knew there’d be a but, didn’t you?–I’ve got a couple of questions about GE and Immelt that have been nagging at me. First, has GE become overly focused on Washington? Second, when will Immelt deliver for GE shareholders?

The first question was prompted by an aside in John Harwood’s column in The Times a week ago, about the Obama administration’s all-out effort to get Ben Bernanke confirmed as Fed chief. He wrote:

The investor Warren Buffett and Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chairman of General Electric, helped contact senators, a senior official said.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course; Immelt has the right to ask senators to support Bernanke. But it reminded me that this registered Republican and his company have closely aligned their interests with the administration. Immelt serves on the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Newly-released figures show that among big companies or unions, GE was second only to Exxon Mobil in lobbying expenses during 2009, spending $21.4 million. (Other sources put the figure higher.) This isn’t a surprise–GE is a huge company (2009 revenues were $156 billion) and it has a myriad of Washington interests, including taxes, trade, energy policy and financial regulation.

But there’s more. GE’s Washington operation is a case study in Washington’s revolving door. Nancy Dorn, who runs the office, (more…)

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Economics, Energy, Environment, Politics | 4 Comments »

GE’s Immelt: I thought wind was a “hula hoop”

Friday, November 13th, 2009

ge-logoGE’s chief executive, Jeff Immelt, opened the Net Impact 2009 conference this morning at Cornell University and, as usual, he was thoughtful and provocative. He was bullish on GE, of course, but, after this tough year for the U.S. economy, he sounded more pessimistic than usual  about where the country and its economy are going.

The American consumer, the financial services industry and the construction industry were the major drivers of America’s long boom, going back to the 1980s. None is likely to drive  economic growth in the future, Immelt said.

Instead, he noted, growth will be most robust in the developing world–places like China, India and Brazil that have bounced back more quicly than the U.S. from the global downturn–and it’s by no means clear that U.S. industry is positioned to capitalize on that growth.

Immelt said:

There’s more growth outside the United States than there is inside the United States. We have to recognize that our destiny is connected to the emerging world. We have to repurpose ourselves as an exporter.

The trouble is, the U.S. isn’t educating as many engineers as it should be, he said. Nor are the U.S. government and U.S. companies investing as much as China, say, in energy researchjeffrey_immelt_preview and development. Public policy. also remains a big question mark when it comes to energy because, so far at least, Congress has been unable to pass regulation of global warming pollutants. Other countries are moving faster.

“There’s going to be 10 million jobs created in clean energy,” Immelt said. The question is, will those jobs be in the U.S., in China, or elsewhere?

In the audience for Immelt were more than 2,000 members of Net Impact, a great organization whose purpose is “to inspire, educate, and equip individuals to use the power of business to create a more socially and environmentally sustainable world.” (Disclosure: I’m a new member of the Net Impact board.) Immelt has made GE’s “ecomagination” campaign a hallmark of his tenure as CEO and he said his focus at the company has been to marry capitalism and sustainability. (more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Economics, Energy, Environment, Politics, Sustainability | No Comments »

GE, clean tech and your tax dollars

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

271_home_img1_ge_ecomagLet me state my bias upfront: I’m am admirer of GE and its chief executive, Jeff Immelt, and the company’s ecomagination initiative. GE and Wal-Mart are, as I have written, the most influential companies in America, and it’s great that they are serious about becoming more sustainable, and working with their customers and suppliers to do so as well.

But I can’t help but be struck by the extent to which GE’s clean-energy businesses depend on federal and state tax and regulatory policy, along with grants and loans from the government. Wind energy, solar energy, nuclear power, cleaner coal, smart-grid initiatives, energy-efficient appliances, compact fluorescent light bulbs—all of these either benefit from current policy, get stimulus money or Department of Energy grants, or stand to benefit if the climate-change legislation strongly supported by GE is enacted into law, or all of the above.

This is fairly obvious, admittedly, to anyone paying attention to the energy and climate debate, but it was brought home to me vividly last week, at a GE Ecomagination Forum (more…)

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Economics, Energy, Politics, Sustainability | 2 Comments »

GE, biomimicry, wind and nanopants

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Earlier this week, I visited GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York, near Albany. Cool place, the home base for about 1,900 scientists, and one of four GE research centers around the world. The others are in Bangalore, Munich and Shanghai.

I wrote a column for FORTUNE’s website about GE’s venture investments (GE brings good things to startups), about which I’ll blog a little more next week. But for today, a look at how GE’s research into how nanotechnology, which is the study of matter on a molecular and atomic scale, could help drive the wind turbine industry. This technology is inspired, in part, by lotus plants leaves that are able to repel water–an example of biomimicry, which studies nature’s best ideas and using them to solve human problems. GE’s goal, as the video below shows, is to come up with nano-coatings on wind blades or aircraft engines that repel water. This technology is inspired, in part, by lotus plants leaves that are able to repel water–an example of biomimicry, which studies nature’s best ideas and using them to solve human problems.

Materials that do a great job of repelling water are called superhydrophobic. An example would be nanopants–spill a soda on them, and the liquid would roll right off. Check out this video to see how it works–the water droplets below really, really don’t like the nanocoating. My only critique: GE should have set this video to music.

You can read a blogpost from GE engineer Joseph Vinciquerra about superhydrophobic technology, “Creating anti-icing surfaces,” on GE’s global research blog.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Energy, Environment | No Comments »

GE’s smart (and subsidized) appliances

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

New smart appliances from GE will do great things. They will save energy, reduce greenhouse gases, curb  demand for power on the utility grid, generate “green jobs” in America and—oh, I almost forgot—clean your clothes, wash your dishes and keep your ice cream from melting.

GE's smart best-in-class hybrid water heater

GE's smart best-in-class hybrid water heater

They will also be financed, in part, with your tax dollars, if, as seems likely, the company has its way. Incentives for manufacturers like GE that make super-efficient appliances are already part of the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill awaiting action in the U.S. Senate. As GE explained it, the government would provide “awards” to best-in-class appliances of $75 per dishwasher, $200 per refrigerator and $300 per water heater, paid directly to the manufacturers. As I read Section 214 of the bill (and I could be wrong, since it’s not easy reading), the government would also pay retailers who sell best-in-class appliances.

Did you know that the government was going to subsidize appliance manufacturers? Me neither.

Last week, GE executives came to Washington to talk with government officials and reporters about their smart appliances. When combined with a smart electricity meter, a smart grid and distributed renewable energy, GE’s water heaters, washers, dryers, dishwashers, refrigerators and stoves would help enable the company to provide zero net energy homes by 2015. That’s very cool. (Here are details from GE.)

While appliances are not the most exciting or profitable of GE’s businesses—the company tried, without success, to sell off its appliance business a couple of years ago—GE does have a history of innovation in the business. GE gave us the first self-cleaning oven, the first fully automatic clothes washer and the first refrigerator that dispensed ice and water through the door (which saves energy along with wear and tear on the biceps muscle).

(more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Climate Change, Consumption, Economics, Energy, Environment, Politics, Sustainability | 3 Comments »

A greener–and more open–GE

Monday, July 20th, 2009

General Electric and Wal-Mart are the two most important companies in America, for different reasons: GE’s reputation for management excellence means that its ideas spread widely, while Wal-Mart’s size and clout put it at the center of the consumer economy. Last week Wal-Mart announced its plans for a sustainability index, generating lots of excitement, and today GE releases a citizenship report that demonstrates that the $183-billion company is becoming not just cleaner and greener, but more open.

“We just crushed our energy consumption goals,” Bob Corcoran, GE’s vice president for corporate citizenship, told me when we talked recently about the report. “We have crushed our greenhouse gas emission goals. I feel very good about that.”

He added: “I’m sitting in a building right now” – GE’s corporate HQ in Fairfield, Connecticut – “that has solar panels on the roof.”

As you’d expect from the company that popularized the precision-driven Six Sigma approach to quality, GE’s citizenship report, its fifth, has no shortage of facts, numbers and metrics. But what struck me most about the report were the insights it offers into the changing GE culture.

GE is the No. 1 U.S. wind turbine maker

GE is the No. 1 U.S. wind turbine maker

(more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in CSR, Climate Change, Energy, Environment, NGOs, Sustainability, Transparency, Workplace | 3 Comments »

GE & Google say: Get Smart

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Imagine driving into a gas station, filling the tank and not knowing how much the gas cost–until a bill arrives at the end of the month. That’s how most of us buy electricity, it’s a crazy way to do business and, if all goes well, it won’t last.

Why? Because momentum is building behind the so-called smart grid, which, among other things, will make buying electricity more transparent. The $787-billion stimulus package signed into law today by President Obama includes $4.5 billion for a smart grid, along with tax incentives to promote solar and wind power.

This afternoon, an event called “Plug In to the Smart Grid” organized by General Electric and Google attracted a standing-room only crowd of more than 500 people to Google’s New York Avenue offices in Washington. Among the speakers were such power players as Carol Browner, the president’s climate czar (although she didn’t say anything), John Podesta, the head of Obama’s transition team and leader of the Center for American Progress think thank, and Chris Miller, a senior aide to Senate leader Harry Reid.

Washington’s renewable-energy crowd is downright giddy about the president’s push for clean energy.

“Look where President Obama has chosen to be today,” said Dan Reicher, a Google executive and former Clinton administration official who was co-host of the event, along with Bob Gilligan of GE. “He could be standing by a bridge or a highway. But he’s at the Denver Museum of Science, looking at a solar panel.”

Gilligan ticked off the advantages of the smart grid: “It enables higher penetration of renewables. It allows the utilities to operate in a more efficient manner. Most importantly, it empowers and enables consumers by giving them more information.”

Because a smart grid is essentially the application of information technology to the electricity business, Google (an IT company) and GE (an energy company) have joined together to push for better federal and state policy to enable the grid. This was their first outreach event in DC. Here are a few things I learned:

Information is power. Power over power, in this case. A smart grid will tell consumers how much their electricity costs at any given time of day, how much each appliance draws down from the grid, how their usage compares with their neighbor’s, perhaps even whether they are using clean or “dirty” power. So, for example, if consumers know that it’s cheaper to run the dishwasher or washing machine at night, many will do so. Can you think of a better way to promote energy efficiency in homes?

As Ed Lu, a Google executive (and former space shuttle astronaut for NASA), put it: “All of our work in this area is based on the premise that consumers ought to be able to see how much energy they are using.” Google’s working on a software, called the Google PowerMeter, to show consumers their consumption in real time.

Andy Karsner, the smart and outspoken former Bush administration energy official, said: “This is about full transparency and disclosure and empowerment of every consumer and small business in America. People ought to know how the biggest investment they make in their life performs, on the day they buy a new home.”

How that information will be delivered is no simple matter. It raises issues of privacy, intellectual property and security, among others.

The grid needs to get bigger and stronger, as well as smarter. Right now, there’s not enough transmission capacity to move wind power from the Great Plains to Chicago or solar power from the southwest to urban centers like Los Angeles.

“That’s going to require literally thousands and thousands of miles of new transmission, and we’ve seen very little (recently) in this country,” said Reicher.

To get major transmission lines built, the federal government will need more authority to site them, even over objections from state and local officials.

“Siting continues to be a problem,” Podesta said. It’s a lot easier to move oil and gas around this country than it is to move electricity, in part because the federal government exercises its power to get gas pipelines built.

Turning to Chris Miller, the Senate aide, Reicher asked: “Is the federal government going to end up with significantly more authority to site transmission lines?”

“Yes,” Miller replied. He said enhanced federal clout could be part of an energy bill that the Senate will take up this spring.

Karsner added: “This is not a question of the opportunity to bring solar from the southwest or wind from the Midwest. I would say it’s a necessity…If the planet could talk, it would say, stop choking me.”

Highlights from the Plug Into the Smart Grid event will be posted on Google’s DotOrg channel on YouTube (a Google property), where there’s also an interesting video about the Google PowerMeter gadget. We’ll also be looking at the smart grid during FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference, with a panel that includes the CEOs of smart-grid firms GridPoint and Silver Spring Networks as well as venture capitalist and grid guru Chuck McDermott.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Economics, Energy, Environment, Politics, Sustainability, Transparency | 1 Comment »

“An emotional, social, economic reset”

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

“This economic crisis doesn’t represent a cycle. It represents a reset,” Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, said today. “It’s an emotional, social, economic reset.”

And the biggest impact of this “reset” will be greater government involvement in the economy, and in the affairs of business, for better or worse.

“People who understand that will prosper,” Immelt said. “Those who don’t will be left behind.”

Immelt spoke to the annual conference of Business for Social Responsibility, an association of about 250 companies that are looking for more sustainable ways to do business. About 1,200 people from companies, NGOs, consulting firms, PR shops and government agencies are here for the group’s powwow in New York.

The GE chief executive didn’t put it exactly this way, but he made clear that the meltdown on Wall Street and the election of Barack Obama will bring an end to a couple of decades of nearly blind faith in free markets and deregulation. (Heck, even Alan Greenspan has admitted that.) Going forward, stronger government intervention will be a fact of life, here in the U.S. and around the world.

The question, of course, is how deep and how wide the government involvement will be. You can be sure that the Obama administration will regulate the financial industry. But will Washington bail out the automakers? Freeze foreclosures? Tax fossil fuels? Make it easier for workers to join unions? All of the above?

Adjusting to this new reality will take some doing, Immelt said. “I’m a free market guy and fundamentally a Republican,” he told BSR. (That put him in a distinct minority in this crowd, which is packed with Obama fans. A BSR survey released today found that nine in 10 of the conference participants believe Obama will have a positive impact on advancing the agenda of corporate responsibility.) But while he may be a free market guy, Immelt’s no ideologue. He acknowledged that the government has always been deeply involved in the economy; research funded by the defense department helped spur the technology revolution of the 1990s, for example. What’s more, he said, prosperity depends on what he called four “pillars” of education, energy, health care and a financial services sector that promotes innovation. Education is a government obligation, of course, and the other three sectors he cited–energy, health care and financial services–have always been heavily regulated.

Interestingly, Immelt suggested that President-elect Barack Obama make clean energy a top priority when he takes office. Energy’s a big problem, he said, but unlike, say, health care, it is a problem that can be solved relatively easily, and with substantial benefits for the economy and the environment. Not incidentally, GE, a big player in wind energy and nuclear power, and a wanna-be provider of “clean coal” plants, stands to gain from an aggressive government push for clean energy.

“Clean energy is a combination of technology and public policy,” Immelt said. “I think this is imminently solvable. It creates jobs. There’s not a lot of downside.” GE, he said, is devoting about half of its $6 billion a year in R&D investment to clean energy and clean water technologies.

Immelt also sounded a positive note about his work with the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an alliance of GE, DuPont, Alcoa and other big companies with environmental NGOs like Environmental Defense Fund and the World Resources Institute. The GE executive is the big cahuna behind U.S. CAP, which favors mandatory regulation of greenhouse gases, a role that has taken him a long way from his days as a young GE plastics exec who had developed a “healthy dislike for environmental NGOs.” Now he’s pals with the likes of Fred Krupp of EDF and Jonathan Lash of WRI.

Having said that, Immelt made clear that neither his position on climate change, nor his belief in GE’s much-hyped EcoMagination initiative, spring from any personal love for the outdoors. “I’ve never camped,” he said. “I don’t fish.”

But the science of climate change is “pretty much irrefutable,” he said. What’s more, GE’s business of selling products that help solve environmental problems is growing, from about $5 billion when EcoMagination was launched to about $17 billion today.

Besides, big companies don’t like uncertainty and there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty right now about what a President Obama and Congress will do to regulate greenhouse gases. Even worse, Immelt noted, you could argue that the U.S. already has de facto, unspoken regulation because of the growing opposition to coal-fired power plants.

“The last 49 coal plants haven’t gotten permits,” Immelt said. “Guess what. When that happens, you do have an energy policy. You just don’t know it.”

Better to have a full-scale democratic debate about what our energy policy should be. You can be sure that when that debate unfolds next year, GE’s voice will be heard.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in CSR, Climate Change, Energy, Environment, NGOs, Sustainability | 9 Comments »

How GE gives away money

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

The easy way to do corporate philanthropy is to write a little check to everyone who asks. Many companies operate this way–$5,000 to the Boy’s Club, $5,000 to the YMCA, $5,000 to the local cancer society or heart association. This is mostly a feel-good exercise, performed, it must be said, with other people’s money.

Today’s Sustainability column at fortune.com and cnnmoney.com is about GE, and the company efforts to be strategic in its corporate giving. I met Bob Corcoran, who runs the GE Foundation, on a trip to Ghana in 2004, and had a chance to see GE’s health care initiative in action there—the company donated medical equipment, a generator, money and lots of expertise to a hospital in rural Ghana. Last week, Bob and I had a chance to catch up when he was in Washington.

Here’s how the column begins:

I’m not a big fan of corporate philanthropy. Too often, it’s a feel-good exercise, generating little value for a company’s shareholders. At its worst, it allows CEOs to use other people’s money to glorify themselves. (Tyco once pledged $5 million to Seton Hall University, which named a building or two after its then-CEO, Dennis Kozlowski.) Rarely is corporate giving both benevolent and strategic.

General Electric (GE, Fortune 500) is one company that does philanthropy right. On Monday, the company announced a new donation – a five-year $18 million grant from the GE Foundation to the New York City public schools, the largest-ever single corporate contribution to the school system. New York is the sixth city to join in what GE calls its “Developing Futures” program, which is aimed at improving schools in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Louisville, Stamford, CT and Erie, PA, all places where GE operates. GE has been working on school reform for decades.

The company’s other charitable focus – health care in poor countries – is newer. I had a chance to see it up close in 2004 when I traveled to Ghana, with Bob Corcoran, GE’s vice president for corporate citizenship and president of the GE Foundation. (See Money and Morals at GE in the Fortune archive.) Back then, GE had promised to donate $20 million of equipment and to lend its expertise to public hospitals and clinics in Africa, beginning in Ghana – a country where it does no business. Corcoran and GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt, justified the Africa initiative in several ways: They told me the company had been asked to do more in Africa by its African-American employees, that GE wanted to develop good will in a region that soon could grow into a real market, and that knowledge gained from working in poor countries might pay off in unexpected ways for GE.

You can read the rest here.

Tags: , ,
Posted in CSR, Global Poverty, Rwanda | 1 Comment »