Jeff Immelt gets it
July 13th, 2006
General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, who is now in his fifth year after succeeding Jack Welch in 2001, understands that it is no longer sufficient to talk about “change.” Here is how he describes it instead in the July 24 issue of FORTUNE:
From the day he took over as CEO, [Immelt] says, he knew the company would need to be “much more forward-facing in the future than we ever were in the past.” He explains: “It’s not about change. It’s about sudden and abrupt and uncontrollable change. If you’re not externally focused in this world, you can really lose your edge.”
Sudden. Abrupt. Uncontrollable.
While not precisely the same, Immelt’s words are completely consistent with the phrase I like to use to characterize our shared experience of the shift playing out in the organizational operating environment and in society as a whole: profound, intensifying and accelerating disruption and discontinuity. With great simplicity, Immelt makes the case for anticipating the future, engaging customers and vigorously pursuing innovation, all of which is he doing at GE. Immelt has launched “dreaming sessions” so the company can brainstorm new possibilities with customers. He has identified some 100 “imagination breakthroughs,” i.e., hard-to-do ideas with significant upside potential that are protected from budget cuts. Immelt is investing heavily in innovation through R&D and by building a capacity for innovation throughout the company. Jeff Immelt’s approach may be a short-term gamble from a stock price perspective but, in the long run, it is a very smart bet on building a stronger future for one of the world’s great companies.
If you’re leading an association today, it is critical that you pay close attention to Jeff Immelt’s example. And please don’t make excuses to yourself about how big GE is and how much money it has. Leaders don’t make excuses and, besides, those issues aren’t the point. The point is that Jeff Immelt recognizes GE’s vulnerabilities in a brand new marketplace and he is acting to address them directly and with great creativity. There is absolutely no reason why you can’t do the same and, in fact, it is your responsibility to make it happen. So, for right now, there is only one question remaining: do YOU get it?
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Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, What's New?, Social Media, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover, The Association Innovator, Simplicity
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