Comments on: GE vs. Microsoft: killer apps meet app killers

By: Tom Guarriello

Tom Guarriello — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 11:10:27 +0000

I think Brian’s point is crucial: can GE have a culture that embraces both Six Sigma AND innovation? These are difficult mental models to integrate, usually leading to the creation of “Skunkworks” and other such deviant outposts in which to incubate innovation. This kind of “creative ghetto” then presents other problems of idea acceptance, product integration, and just plain jealousy. I think Immelt’s on the right track, but balancing these two cultural streams will be a significant management challenge.

By: steve

steve — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 19:34:28 +0000

Hey, I’m all for corporate dynamism. Creative destruction is the only way to have progress. But let’s not pretend that people weren’t pretty freaked out about having their entire social structure transformed, whole ways of life disappearing, etc. over a very short time period. A great thing about the United States was that despite some serious political and social convulsions, including plenty of violence, progress wasn’t choked off by the losing factions.

My point was that it isn’t wise to assume that large corporations are status quo players, and I don’t think Jeff Immelt tossing another corporate initiative on the stack is comparable to the 19th century level of turmoil and change.

By: Grant

Grant — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 16:46:24 +0000

Brian, well said, sir; right on both counts. Best, Grant

By: brian

brian — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 16:35:44 +0000

For anthropological purposes, I always thought government bureaucracies and anthropology departments were the dragging anchors of a dynamic society.

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 13:09:15 +0000

“And this tells us that corporations when they create new dynamism through Immeltian innovation will have to respond to it with a new dynamism on the strategic side. Innovation will take Levitts imagination in the first instance (as cause) and the last (as effect). It will take new intellectual nimbleness to create and to survive.”

Well, sure. But. However.

There are some corporations – or at least bits of them – that I want to retain Six Sigma quality. GE makes and repairs jet engines. I rather like the thought that the people that make jet engines are devotees of six sigma.

Can the folks inside GE that make jet engines survive in an environment where the leaders don’t want Six Sigma quality but “imagination breakthrough”?

I can only imagine the schizzy management desicisions resulting.

By: gary

gary — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 13:04:00 +0000

I seem to have stumbled into Luddite Central. The industrial revolution, demise of buggy whips, emergence of department stores was “scar[y]“?

And do we really want to “kill” Microsoft?

What’s the phrase…..ah, yes.

“Nostalgie de la boue” — ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered “lower” than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home.

Go back to bed, Beth, it’s only postmodernism.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 05:28:47 +0000

When you’re on top of the world, there’s nowhere to go but down.

Microsoft’s big, #1 success secret was the avoidance of hubris. In their case, it was very much an attempt to burn the ladder they’d climbed up on…if IBM hadn’t thought of themselves as _immovably_ dominant in the industry, Microsoft never could have stolen that dominance from them. And so Microsoft’s executive team, in full knowledge of how they’d gotten to where they were, strove to create a culture that didn’t foster a belief in the inevitability of its own success.

This domination of the corporate culture by fear of hubris occasionally pushed the business into behavior that was downright paranoid…and some of the consequences of that paranoia eventually led to their legal troubles.

But in spite of their massive campaign of intentional paranoia, they’ve now finally started to get soft. We may yet be able to kill them.

By: steve

steve — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 20:21:28 +0000

Historically, big corporations were the most dynamic things around–scarily so. In 19th century America, they applied innovative manufacturing technologies that destroyed hundreds of years of craft tradition, undermined the social structure of towns across the nation, and made a class of entrepreneurs, financiers, managers, and operators richer than any non-emperor in history. Whole new systems of accounting, distribution, control, etc. were needed to accommodate the awesome productive power they liberated. Whole new classes of people–managers–had to be recruited, trained, socialized on the fly. The railroads even invented time zones!

I am skeptical that Immelt’s innovation thrust will have comparable results. I see his initiative here as being one more in the Welch mode–an attempt to diffuse a best practice throughout a fairly diverse set of businesses. One of my students this semester works at GE and is participating in an innovative technology/finance venture the company is spawning. The hard part for such ventures is to be big enough to quickly have a perceptible impact on GE’s gargantuan income statement.