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[charlie T colton]

At GE, Transparency Comes in Fits and Starts

At washingtonpost.com - At GE, Transparency Comes in Fits and Starts - Bloomberg - May 16

The introduction:

"General Electric Co. still has things to learn about transparency. I’ve long held that a true recovery for the struggling industrial giant must entail a restoration of credibility and a reckoning with the tendency toward obfuscation that allowed its cash-flow and balance-sheet challenges to lurk beneath the surface for so long. GE has made some progress on this front – including overhauling its board, hiring a new head of investor relations and opening the door to hiring a new auditor – but it’s also made some missteps that have left me wondering what the company was thinking. The latest of these came to light on Wednesday when Chief Financial Officer Jamie Miller acknowledged that one of the ways GE presented orders booked at its power business in the first quarter may have created some “confusion.”"


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"According to Tusa, the company hadn’t typically highlighted the McCoy measure of demand on a quarterly basis for its power division and had only disclosed orders in units, which paints a clearer picture. Miller seemed to agree that this number risked being misleading, saying Wednesday that McCoy’s reporting guidelines and the manner in which GE actually books orders for its earnings are “apples and oranges.” "

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"Overhauling a culture isn’t easy, but it just seems like GE sometimes can’t get out of its own way and given the history, it’s hard to give the company the benefit of the doubt. It’s healthy for the management team to get pressed on the things that it says. Hopefully in the long run that leads GE to a better place."


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General Electric's CFO says the first quarter report uses “apples and oranges” figures rather than how they actually book orders for its earnings?

Now that's some transparency.