Golden Oldies: Corporate responsibility
by Miki Saxon
Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Jack Welch died recently and Jeff Immelt is also gone from GE, but at the time, they were a good example of two sides of corporate responsibility — one who talked and the other who walked.
Read other Golden Oldies here.
If you’re a long-term reader you’ll know that I’m not a big fan of Jack Welch, while I am of Jeff Imelt—two guys with very different MAP.
Knowledge@Wharton made this comment as background in describing what Judy Hu, global executive director for advertising and branding, is doing to publicize the “new” GE.
Since becoming boss in 2001 — just a few days before September 11 — Immelt has aimed to make GE not only an innovator but also an environmental leader. In doing that, he has broken with his predecessor, Jack Welch, but also, in some ways, taken the company back to its roots. Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb and the phonograph, started GE in the late 1800s. More recently, under the combative, controversial Welch, it came to be known for operational excellence and a brassy pugnacity.
Welch famously declared that GE would have to be no. 1 or 2 in every line of business in which it competed and would ditch divisions where it wasn’t. And he battled state and federal regulators for years over their order that GE clean up carcinogenic waste that its factories had dumped into New York’s Hudson River. Under Immelt, the company hammered out an agreement to dredge the still-polluted river bottom. “Jeff said, ‘We’re going to fix that and move forward,’”
I find this ironically amusing after reading various articles where Welch was talking about corporate responsibility.
Corporate responsibility is a major buzzword these days, but it’s hard to tell whether it’s tied more closely to
-
- doing what’s right;
- doing what you can get away with; or
- just not getting caught.
Image credit: Willem van Bergen
