GE Case Study

1. While most companies have difficulty producing sufficient quality candidates for top management succession, how has GE been able to create a surplus? What philosophy, policies, and practices have made it a “CEO factory” as Fortune called it, and “easily the world’s best machine for churning out corporate talent” as The Economist described it?
GE leveraged best in class HR practices the level of sophistication in their polices gave them the opportunity to adopt practices that which in turn lead to the growth of leaders form within the company. The culture within GE was known for the development of leaders within, which helped drive a continuous improvement model for managers. The vision of the continuous improvement for managers was to become a expert in every field, or least in most of them. GE also provided job training to its employees through a university that was established through GE. They invested 10% of pre tax income to the development of its employees.

2. How generalizable are GE’s management development policies and practices? How transferable across cultures? Across industries? Across companies?
GE is very successful in step-by-step development of their employees and management team. This allowed them to merge new employees with the culture that existed within the company with little push back as new employees adopted the culture quickly. GE also spent time in their recruitment process, which focused on graduates out of Universities that had been pre selected. 3. As Jeff Immelt, is it time to tune up or even overhaul GE’s management development policies and practices? Specifically, how would you deal with proposals to change the vitality curve, MBA and international recruitment, and the executive bands?
I would look for candidates with marketing and management backgrounds in their education. Building a network with