General Electric: Lessons in Strategic Management

P.R. Bhatt

Vision, 2000, vol. 4, issue 2, 50-57

Abstract: GE is the ninth biggest and second most profitable company in the world. The company was revitalised by inducing self-confidence and adopting tools like workout and Change Acceleration Process (CAP) to multiple business units in different industries. GE was the first corporate to systematically apply a number of management concepts. Its success is rooted in its movements of ideas and management talent around the group. The strong performance of GE is its successful corporate portfolio management. Many of the large business units of GE differentiate their output with high quality while they simultaneously maintain low per unit cost operation. It adopted three company-wide growth initiatives: globalisation, services and Six Sigma Quality. The intensity of globalisation is reflected from the fact that GE revenues have grown 6% per year in the U.S. and 17% globally. GE dramatically adopted Six Sigma Quality in its products, which radically changed overall measures of operating efficiency. GE wants its every product and service designed for six sigma. Six Sigma for GE is embedding quality thinking, process thinking across every level and in every operation around the globe. Jack Welch, CEO of GE restructured the company through integration, diversification, mergers, strategic alliances and retrenchment. He imposed higher productivity at all levels, trimmed inventories using just-in-time technique and dismantled bureaucracies. Under him, GE is engrossed in stretch and quality performance. The future strategies of GE are globalisation, the move from manufacturing to services and the internet.

Date: 2000
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/097226290000400207 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:vision:v:4:y:2000:i:2:p:50-57

DOI: 10.1177/097226290000400207

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Vision
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().