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General Electric Company

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Case 11- 6
General Electric Company
The General Electric Company is a large multilocation corporation engaged in the manufacture and marketing of a wide variety of electrical and allied prod-ucts. In 1964, there were almost 400 separate product lines and over three mil-lion catalog items. Sales volume in that year totaled $4,941 million, and net income was $237 million. Total employment was about 262,000.
Early in the 1950s, General Electric initiated an extensive decentralization of authority and responsibility for the operations of the company. The basic unit of organization became the product department. AB of 1964, there were over 100 of these departments.
The company recognized that if this decentralization was to be fully effective it would need an improved system of management control. It also recognized that any improved system of control would require better measures of per¬formance. To meet this need, the company established a measurements project and created a special organizational unit to carry out this project. This case summarizes the main features of this project, with particular emphasis on measuring performance of the operating (i.e., product) departments.
The Measurements Project
The measurements project was established in 1952. Responsibility for the proj¬ect was assigned to accounting services, one of the corporate functional services divisions. A permanent organizational unit, initially called measurement ser¬vice, was set up to carry out this project.
An early step in the measurements project was the development of a set of principles by which the project was to be governed. Five such principles were formulated:
1. Measurements were to be designed to measure the performance of organi- zational components, rather than of managers.
2. Measurements were to involve common indexes of performance, but not common standards of performance.

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