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Inside GE’s Transformation

From the September–October 2017 Issue of The Harvard Business Review - Inside GE’s Transformation

READ 3 PIECES IN THIS PACKAGE

How I Remade GE - Jeffrey R. Immelt will be the chairman of General Electric until the end of 2017. He served as its CEO and chairman from September 2001 to August 2017.

GE’s Global Growth Experiment - Ranjay Gulati is the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration, the head of the organizational behavior unit, and the chair of the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.

Reinventing Talent Management - Steven Prokesch is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.



A selected section of the text:

We also went all in with our move into additive manufacturing, or 3-D printing—which I see as part of the digital industrial transformation. We had been working on additive manufacturing for applications inside the company for five or six years—maybe 10 years in terms of developing materials for it. We’re a big user of it in our aviation, transportation, energy, and health care businesses, maybe the biggest on the metallics side. In the spring of 2016 we started to talk about making additive manufacturing a stand-alone business: providing machines, materials, and expertise to a range of industries, even beyond the ones we compete in.

We could see a way to automate it. We could see it being very disruptive—making what we want, where we want, with workers who are more productive and more valuable. We gave a presentation to our board last summer. Because I was so close to the initiative, it was helpful to see members’ high level of engagement and to hear their reflections on how disruptive it could be. Within 30 days of that meeting we acquired two companies for a billion and a half dollars: Arcam, which specializes in electron-beam melting systems, and Concept Laser, which specializes in powder-bed-based laser metal printing. Both print metal parts for aircraft and other industrial components. They gave GE a market share of about 20% in the additive-equipment market.

Even for a company our size, once you make a move like that, you’re committed. You’re investing serious money. You’re driving it across the company. You have a sales force. You have products. You’re willing to change your business model by doing business with competitors and opening up the system to your customers. That is change.

Finally, total commitment means insisting that people get with the program. The good thing about the GE culture is that nine times out of 10, people are going to say, “Hey, let’s try it. Let’s see where it goes.” But inevitably a handful will resist. That’s why it’s important to be jogging—to have momentum—when you meet opposition and inertia.


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"We could see a way to automate it." I wonder what he means by this statement? Best guess is that it's literal about how to improve the component throughput but we haven't heard anything about that from most of the AM machine manufacturers.

If anyone would like to offer an opinion (or even a wild-axxed-guess), I'd like to hear it.