Talking about our innovation
At a lunch for 200 of WA’s top executives, from marketers, miners and media magnates—including Wesfarmers chief executive Richard Goyder, Seven West Media chairman Kerry Stokes, Shell Australia chair Andrew Smith, and GE Australia, NZ and PNG chief executive and president Geoff Culbert, and regional director of Oil & Gas. Mary Hackett—Jeff Immelt was making the most of it, too.
Journalist Ben Harvey, from GE’s Empowering Innovation series partners The West Australian, was charged with conducting the one-on-one interview with Immelt—edited highlights are in this video.
Asked about China, Immelt was frank and optimistic as he urged executives to get out more and see for themselves. “Business leaders lose touch,” said Immelt. “Not when they don’t listen to people, but when they don’t have their own world views, or their own perspectives. I always encourage people to have their own opinions on things ... to have their own sense of what’s really going on.” Immelt pointed out that, with GE’s 20,000 employees in China, he gets his information from the ground and with his own eyes during his visits there. “[In] a lot of industries in China, there’s very robust growth,” he said. “It’s a very sophisticated government, a reasonably strong balance sheet … so over the long term I think China’s going to continue to be a very relevant player on the global stage.”x
Immelt, who has been with GE since graduating with an MBA from Harvard in 1982, joked that keeping a straightforward private life is a good tip for any executive: “I’ve kept my life relatively simple: one wife, one daughter, one company! I say to my family, if I’m not with you, I’m at work, and if I’m not at work, I’m with you.”
As to that work, Immelt explained how the Industrial Internet, with connected and constantly communicating machinery, is transforming the way the world works, with his own company proudly at the heart of the revolution. “A locomotive now is kind of a rolling data centre,” he said, citing transportation as just one of the industries where GE is setting the pace. “The Industrial Internet is going to be the single biggest driver of productivity in the future … by far.”
We can all do better job of productivity and information is going to be a part of this.
Having last visited Perth in 2011, when the mining boom was in full flight, he also had some advice on how businesses should tackle the inevitable cycles of booms and downturns: the latter is the time to take stock and purge the bad habits than can creep into an industry when the money is flowing. “We need to buckle down … Productivity averaged 4 per cent between between 1990 and 2010, [but] from 2010 to today it’s been 1%,” said Immelt. And it comes back to the Industrial Internet: “We can all do better job of productivity, and information is going to be a part of this.”
“You never can tell anything about a leader when things are good,” reflected GE’s own leader. “It’s only when times are really tough that you can tell who the best leaders are, who’s making the right decisions, which decisions count.”