Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Mar 21, 2016 (II)

choi

(2) Devin Leonard and Rick Clough, Move Fast and Break Things; Jeff Immelt's plan to turn around GE is finally working. (this is one of the three feature stories in the issue)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/ar ... 24-year-old-startup

Quote:

"Jack Welch, who ran GE in the 1980s and '90s [1981 - 2001, to be exact], would arrive by helicopter. He'd make his way to a windowless auditorium known as the Pit where a group of managers waited. They used to call him 'Neutron Jack,' because he was known for firing so many people that only the buildings were left standing. Neutron Jack and his executives would engage in an aggressive form of corporate group therapy, raising their voices as they aired their frustrations with the company and each other. Later, they would have drinks at the White House, the campus bar.

"Today, GE executives—sorry, team members—take classes in yoga and meditation and suminagashi, the Japanese art of painting on still water. The White House has become a low-key place where visitors can sip artisanal coffee rather than martinis. The Pit has a window through which the sun shines.

"The company [General Electric] was officially founded in 1892 when Thomas Edison merged his operation with a rival electric light manufacturer [Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Co].

"As a sloganeer, no one matched Neutron Jack's ferocity. He was an evangelist for Six Sigma, a numbers-driven quality-control method that he didn't originate but grabbed hold of and turned into a boardroom craze. He wanted GE to be a 'learning enterprise' with 'a boundaryless culture.' He also called it 'the greatest people factory in the world,' one that welded together managers who could run anything from the plastics division to a television network.

before 2008: "its GE Capital division morphed into one of the world's largest providers of commercial real estate debt and aircraft leases. During the financial crisis of 2008, [Jeffrey R] Immelt was forced to seek the protection of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which guaranteed about $60 billion of GE Capital's debt.

"By then [did not give a specific year], Immelt had seen the share price fall from $60 in 2000 below $6.

"He's [Immelt's] 60, 6 feet 4 inches with wavy white hair

"His own knowledge of the software business was limited. * * * at Dartmouth, he graduated with a dual degree in economics and applied math in 1978. After getting his MBA at Harvard, he turned down a job at Morgan Stanley to work at GE.

"If GE was going to set up shop in Silicon Valley, Immelt wanted a local to run the operation. He went after William Ruh, then a vice president at Cisco Systems. Ruh was astonished to get a call from a recruiter * * * Despite those qualms, he [Ruh] traveled to Fairfield in January 2011 to meet with Immelt. Ruh says he was impressed by Immelt’s vision and his willingness to admit that he didn't fully know what he was doing. 'Basically, Jeff said, "Look, we're on Step 1 of a 50-step process, and I just need you to help me figure out what to do because I can only see out one or two steps," '  Ruh says. He took the job, and several weeks later his new boss promised to invest $1 billion in a software operation in San Ramon, Calif.

"GE is moving its headquarters from suburban Fairfield, Conn, land of golf and bonuses, where it’s been since 1974, to Boston, the Athens of America.

"In January, GE announced the move to Boston, where the deer are few and the software developers plentiful. * * * It could also help GE attract more young employees with technology backgrounds, which remains a struggle because most people still don't associate GE with software.

"Head count at the San Ramon office is 1,300, including some refugees from Google and Facebook.

"his [Immelt's] goal of making GE a top 10 software company in 2020. That’s not a random deadline. Traditionally, GE chief executives have served 20 years, so his time will be just about up by then. He says the company already has a succession plan in place. If he can complete his digital reinvention of the company, he could depart in glory, the way Welch did.

"but GE faces competition from all sides. Amazon and Google are getting into the Internet of Things along with IBM and Microsoft. There are dozens of small startups with similar ambitions that don't need Eric Ries[, a tech entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup, a book,] to tell them what to do.


My comment:
(a) The essence of this report is GE is moving to software to make its hardware work more efficiently, though it sCEO knows little about software and so admits. In case you want to know a little more, the part that Immelt turned to Ruh is interesting. Mr Ruh is white.  
(b) There is no need to read the rest. However, if you do, the following hopefully may be helpful.

(c) "Overlooking the Hudson River in Ossining, NY, there's a grassy, 59-acre campus owned by General Electric. It's an executive training center where the company holds management and leadership classes, some of them led by the chief executive himself. "
(i) Ossining (town), New York
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossining_(town),_New_York
(in Westchester County;  location of Sing Sing maximum-security prison; "A local Indian authority suggested the town be named Ossinsing, a different form of the name Sing Sing. One year later the last 's' was removed for ease in pronunciation
(ii) For two more years, GE's headquarters will remain in Fairfield, Connecticut.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfield,_Connecticut
(a town; view map)

The town's website says: "Only 50 miles from New York City."

(d) suminagashi
(i) Japanese English dictionary:
* suminagashi 墨流し 【すみながし】 (n): "marbling print; paper marbling"
   ^ sumi 墨 【すみ】 (n)" "(1) India ink; Chinese ink; ink stick; ink-cake; (2) squid ink; octopus ink"
   ^ nagasu 流す 【ながす】 (verb): "(See 涙を流す) to drain; to pour; to spill; to shed (blood, tears)"  (The "nagashi" is a noun.)
(ii) paper marbling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_marbling
(蘇易簡 Su Yijian (957–995 CE) [宋朝 960–1279])

(e) San Ramon, California
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Ramon,_California
(meaning Saint Raymond)