Dear Mr. Culp...

Dear Mr. Culp,

Congratulations on the 3rd quarter numbers. It is heartening to finally read / hear good things about GE again after an unkind lull.

In the context of this letter, it doesn’t matter who I am. I could be an existing or an ex-employee of GE, a 60-hour /week workman who owes a major portion of his professional identity to this organization, and who has seen GE in all its glory before witnessing this temporary mess. I say temporary because people like me could never really write GE off in our hearts , no matter what the biz media insisted. That's because GE had long ceased being a mere source of a salary cheque for us and had become home - an extension of who we are , the way we look at ourselves, how we conduct ourselves out there and where we head back to . I am nowhere near the learned executives you have around you, sharp men and women with the right ticks in the right boxes, and who are working with you relentlessly as you rebuild GE . Like I said before, I am the GE everyman (or the GE lady) and someone who would like to offer his view from below to give you a bottom-up perspective to help you make this great company great again. Greater, actually.

 I won’t attempt articulating any insights on the best combination for the existing GE portfolio, on whether you should choose to spin off a certain business, or shed equity in another to raise cash. I am not qualified or experienced enough for that. But yes, observing your moves over the past one year and as many old schoolers of GE agree during our private conversations, GE seems to be headed in the right direction under you & which is definitely in sync with the times we are in. So thanks for that.

To start with, we acknowledge the enormity of the job you have taken on yourself. And it’s not just GE, but the general conglomerate model that is under assault . We understand that it is not easy to manage boardroom expectations that fluctuate with the stock price, by way of hedging your risks between diverse businesses that have different cycles & utilizing it for balancing unprecedented asymmetries and unique market shocks in each business, while simultaneously correcting past strategic errors in real time without the luxury of a reset button that allows you to miss a few quarters as you turn this around. Thankfully but, unlike many of its peers, GE has, over the years, avoided the usual trappings of too much of bureaucracy and repetitive / non-productive layers of management, opaque accounting practices, a top-heavy general management with low domain expertise at HQ, etc - all of which have led to the values of many conglomerates to shrink below the sum of their parts. You surely have a head start there. And when we see the track record you bring from Danaher to GE , we get super excited . Hence this letter. A wish-list from the barracks. For the General.

1. Give them a tomorrow – As you would agree, leadership at the top in today’s disruptive world is not just about managing the present, but it is also about inventing the future. Somewhere in the mayhem of the past few years, when the leadership was busy fighting the sharks off, the regular GE man was sometimes disillusioned on where he is headed. In an age where communication channels have multiplied ( as has the chatter & the jargon) , the messaging has unfortunately gotten spread thin. These are extraordinary times. Your troops need to see what they are shooting for . Tell them about tomorrow. Simplify the ask, quantify the accountability & show them the goal post. They will deliver.
2. Bring back the workhorse – As the leadership factory among its Fortune 100 peers till the early 21st century, the GE we grew up in was like a university. Every leader we met had earned his / her stripes in the real field and not in some PPT contest. From Scientists & accountants to lawyers, engineers to HR leaders to salesmen – GE hired the best and brought out the best in each. These were men and women who were not just extremely humble and hardworking, but also specialists in their domains & functions, who were revered and feared by competition and who would stand guard like sentinels during lean cycles. In order to attract and retain the young workforce of today , we need to give them a learning curve. And we need to put forth the right mentors & role models for them who can command, instead of demanding respect.
3. Give them a battlefield – Unlike the ‘Absent landlord’ (uninvolved ) , the ‘Clan Leader’(over-intrusive) or the ‘Venture capitalist’ (strategic consulting) approaches followed by most conglomerates in defining their HQ role, you could possibly look at the ‘Evangelical Architect’ model followed by successful Indian conglomerates where structure is separated from strategy and which will allow your businesses & regions to deliver shareholder value at an affiliate level while preserving the strategic value at a group level. Believe me, your average GE man on the street is hungry for a fair fight to earn his trophies and scars in his personal battle in the larger war . Give him his battlefield.
4. Encourage your rule breakers – No Sir, I don’t mean breaking laws here . No GE employee would ever do that. By rules, I mean conventional boxes of thinking. Over the past few years, thanks to all the disruption, your average employee has become defensive and risk averse. Numbed by all the bad press he reads and all the restructuring activities he witnesses , he is playing to not lose, instead of playing to win. Trust me, this is not his style. He is used to swinging hard. Yes, he might occasionally miss a shot or two , but more often than not, he will hit the ball out of the park. He is the wild one. Please don't tame him !
5. Can we go old school again ? – Sir, this is GE ! When it comes to GE, genres do not matter, simply because GE is a genre. In recent years, thanks to populist management initiatives across industries, we have also transformed our workplace, but with lackluster results. While our offices look swankier and neater nowadays, they also look a lot emptier. Your employees rarely meet at the bar on Fridays and are seldom friends beyond work. Can we please do something beyond cosmetic fads to get the old school GE camaraderie back ? Reasearch has finally proven that Flexi-seating indeed damages employee engagement & deep work , while working from home doesn’t necessarily increase productivity. Trying something just because it works for a Facebook or a Google, is like asking Marlon Brando to follow Justin Bieber.
6. Nurture your bench – In each era, GE has had the brightest and the coolest men & women working for it. In recent years, with all the strategic realignment that came by, the great GE human capital mix has suffered . We lost considerable bench strength. By default , and sometimes by unfortunate design. And while we lost precious assets, we also inadvertently inherited some unwelcome liabilities – B and C players who cramped meritocracy in their silos. Your move of calling some GE stalwarts out of retirement might have made some media purists scoff, but we loved you for it. We need to do more of that. Trace out our A players, inside or outside our workforce , and encourage them to nurture the next gen of A players. Then set them loose on competition !
7. Pat the entrepreneurs – Like I said in my first point, one of the things your average employee seeks your leadership on, is how you, beyond managing the present, invent the future for GE. In a day and age where shelf lives of business models are less than that of perishable products in the refrigerator, it is important to not only reimagine new business lines in terms of products and services, but to have back up business models as Option Bs and Cs for ourselves. In recent years, like most large organizations, we have been leaning heavily on fancy B school frameworks to define our strategy in a top-down touristy style . Noble and aesthetic as they might be, we perhaps need more small-shop thinkers – the tinkerers and flaneurs, folks with earthy horse sense to tell us what works and what doesn’t.

Like thousands of other everymen who have been associated with this amazing organization , I too have been sad to see GE go through what it has been going through – and also, angry at the non-stop chatter of minnows making fun of an icon, which reminds me of scavengers circling an injured giant from a distance, as if settling scores for accumulated angst & envy against one of the most admired organizations of all times. But like someone had once told us – Through good cycles and bad, GE keeps doing what the rest wish they could. Maybe that makes GE what it is – a star even when it is down, with every eye on it, as it slugs it out there in a way only a GE can.

The GE everyman wishes more power to you as you steer GE to glory again. Give him his crusade. He will give you your decade.

Yours faithfully,

A GE Fan 

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