E-Business

E-Business, which entered the operating system at the January Managers Meeting little more than a year ago, is already so big and transformational that it has almost outgrown the bounds of the word “initiative.” While we are already generating billions in Web-based revenues, the contribution of e-Business to GE has been so much more. It is changing this Company to its core.

One thing that the truly great companies of the world have in common, regardless of the diversity of their industries, is a total business focus on servicing customers. With Six Sigma as the enabler, we intend to meet that standard.

For 20 years, we’ve been driving to get the soul of a small company into this sometimes muscle-bound, big-company body. We described the contribution of Work-Out, and there was more. We de-layered in the ’80s, eliminating many of the filters and gatekeepers. We got faster by reducing corporate staff. We launched venture units, in imitation of start-ups. We made close to 30,000 people stock optionees in a Company that used to have under 500. And we ridiculed and removed bureaucrats until they became as rare around GE as whooping cranes.

Every year we got better, faster, hungrier and more customer-focused — until the day this elixir, this tonic, this e-Business came along and changed the DNA of GE forever by energizing and revitalizing every corner of this Company.

The first effect of e-Business was to further energize and refresh our other three initiatives. For one, it enabled us to put to customer advantage the enormous databases we had compiled on customer processes as part of Six Sigma projects.

What we are rapidly moving toward is the day when “Dr. Jones,” in radiology, can go to her home page in the morning and find a comparison of the number, and clarity, of scans her CT machines performed in the last day, or week, to more than 10,000 other machines across the world. She will then be able to click and order software solutions that will bring her performance up to world-class levels. And the performance of her machines might have been improved, online, the previous night, by a GE engineer in Milwaukee, Tokyo, Paris or Bangalore.

The day is almost here when the chief engineer at the local utility may check the heat rate and fuel burn of his turbines — before he has coffee in the morning — to learn how he stacks up with 100 other utilities. Again, with a click to a home page, he can look at what GE services can provide to increase his competitiveness. Here, a number of GE’s service packages are offered that will take him quickly to world-class levels.

The efficient harvesting of intellectual capital, which is the state-of-the-art of the globalization initiative, is impossible without the Internet, and GE products are today being designed collaboratively online around the globe 24 hours a day — as our Industrial Systems business does with its “Web City.”

But the transformation e-Business is bringing about at GE is more pervasive than even this growing magic.

When you think about this e-Business revolution that is transforming the world, an obvious question comes to mind: Why wasn’t the e-revolution launched by big, highly resourced, high-technology companies rather than the small start-ups that led it? The answer may lie, as perhaps is true in GE’s case, in the mystery associated with the Internet — the perception that creating and operating Web sites was Nobel Prize work — the realm of the young and wild-eyed. In our case, we once again used a best practice from one of our businesses to overcome this discomfort. We took the top 1,000 managers in the Company and asked them to become “mentees” of 1,000 “with it”, very bright e-Business mentors — many brand new to GE — and to work with them three to four hours a week, traveling the Web, evaluating competitor sites, and learning to organize their computers, and their minds, for work on the Internet. It was this mentor-mentee interaction — which in some cases resembled that of “Stuart” and his boss in the Ameritrade commercial — that helped overcome the only real hurdle some of us had — fear of the unknown. Having overcome that fear, and experienced the transformational effects of e-Business, we find that digitizing a company and developing e-Business models is a lot easier — not harder — than we had ever imagined.

Start-ups have energized the business landscape, supported by a strong venture capital environment and healthy IPO market; however, much of their resources must go to establish brand, develop real content and achieve fulfillment capability. We already have that! We already have the hard stuff — over 100 years of a well-recognized brand, leading-edge technology in both product and financial services, and a Six Sigma-based fulfillment capability. The opportunities e-Business creates for large companies like GE are unlimited.

But digitizing a company does more than just create unlimited business opportunities; it puts a small company soul into that big company body and gives it the transparency, excitement and buzz of a start-up. It is truly the elixir for GE and others who relish excitement and change.

E-Business is the final nail in the coffin for bureaucracy at GE. The utter transparency it brings about is a perfect fit for our boundaryless culture and means everyone in the organization has total access to everything worth knowing.

The speed that is the essence of “e” has accelerated the metabolism of the Company, with people laughing out loud at presentations of business plans for “the third quarter of next year” and other tortoise-like projections of action. Time in GE today is measured in days and weeks.

E-Business was made for GE, and the “E” in GE now has a whole new meaning. We get it — we all get it.

The accelerating pace of our success in this initiative is leading to a lot of spontaneous celebrating — something big companies, including GE, have always had trouble doing as well as small companies. It generates more fun across a business than anything we’ve ever seen. The informality, joy of work and endless celebration that comes with “e” life is something on which we are thriving.

E-Business was made for GE, and the “E” in GE now has a whole new meaning. We get it — we all get it.

We begin this century with a GE totally focused on the customer, utterly energized and rejuvenated by e-Business, and driven by the relentless beat of a unique operating system and social architecture. This Company is poised to move forward to levels of performance, growth and excitement undreamed of in the past.

We thank you all for your support in helping make this future so bright.