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Q: How did you follow up on Jack Welch's call to e-arms? A: Jack and his staff spent a fair amount of time in March, at the quarterly meeting, really driving into the mechanics of the kind of commitment we had to put into this thing. Marching out of the March meeting, we said we would hire 500 people, dedicate an extraordinary amount of money, and dedicate our lives. March was the "change your budgets, change your lives [time].'' Q: Is it the biggest change you've faced during your career at GE? A: The only thing close to it was Six Sigma [the massive and comprehensive quality-control program]. Both have the ability to dramatically change our relationship with customers. That's No. 1 in change, cost structure is No 2. And those things are huge objectives as you compete in competitive markets. E-biz will be a bigger change than Six Sigma because it changes the way you work dramatically -- the tools you use, the technology you have to be comfortable with, the structure you don't need anymore. It's a bigger change in the culture than anything we've done before. This is massive. Q: How are your employees handling it? Are you facing resistance? A: It's less resistance than rising to a challenge. I think if you talk to people in our organization, they'd be daunted by what has to be done. A third of the organization is not familiar with personal computerization in a major way. They would be asking for training, which we're trying to provide. Fortunately, we've developed a culture where we expect big initiatives, where you realize the payoff is huge if you implement more aggressively than competitors. This is a tough one. It does change your life. Leadership is involved, too. We have to live it ourselves. We can't ask people to change if we don't change first. Q: In e-biz, are you competing more with other GE units or your traditional competitors? A: Very good question. We have friendly competition within GE and that's one reason GE gets there a little quicker. We do compete with one another. We each want to show we're embracing a value initiative faster than the other guy and have friendly competition, help each other. It's a spark, it's fun, and creates enthusiasm. But the real competition is Pratt & Whitney and Rolls Royce. And serving our customers is really what I'm all about. That's where we'll keep the GE stock price where we are. Q. Does the Web offer mainly a one-time gain? A: No. I see enormous cost opportunity internally as the Web can help you take out layers and take out functions that can be easily done electronically, merge together databases now managed by multiple functions. There's a productivity promise but also a serving-our-customer promise here that enables you to do that with less cost, and the customer has less cost dealing with you. Technical publications is one example. Every engine we have with a customer has a million pages of technical data associated with it refreshed on a monthly basis. And before, our customers had to read this stuff, file it, understand it. Webifying that pile, digitizing it not only greatly enhances our ability to serve customers -- they can access it quickly and it's more organized -- [but] you don't need people managing these bureaucracies and paper databases. It's a big productivity gain. So we see over the next five years an increasing opportunity to increase sales and decrease costs. |
