Earlier this year I blogged about manufacturing innovations. This is a topic I’m so passionate about that I can’t hardly stand it! As I recently watched this 60 Minutes feature on GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, I was amazed at how Mr. Immelt said so many things that I’ve been thinking, but put it in a much more eloquent way.
GE is decidedly and emphatically an American company. As Immelt says in the interview, “…I am a complete globalist, I think like a global CEO, but I am an American. I run an American company, but in order for GE to be successful in the coming years, I’ve got to sell my products in every corner of the world.”
He later goes on to say “Companies should invest in the United States, it’s still the world’s biggest economy. If companies just are going to sit on cash, they’re going to lose. They’re going to lose. Because only the people who are going to invest their way through this crisis are going to win.”
Those two excerpts are so powerful to me. In the first quote Immelt emphasizes a fact that Walt Disney tried to get us to see decades ago. It’s a small world afterall, and never has that been more true than in today’s economy with today’s technology. Take a look at your business and ask yourself – over the last decade, how has your domestic growth compared to your international growth? Clearly that’s rhetorical, but hopefully it will give you pause to consider the possibilities of expanding your market.
The second quote hits me really close to home. If you’re reading this blog, I assume you know that EWI is a membership based engineering consulting firm with particular strengths in joining technologies and helping industry with manufacturing innovations, but what you may not know is that we’re a 501 c 3 entity. What’s that? Well, it means we’re a not-for-profit entity, and we have a duty to advance the technologies we love. And what is our collective passion? It’s helping you, our customers, WIN. Win through investing smartly in your products, in your manufacturing processes, in your own technologies to develop solutions.
I have no real vested interest in GE. As I’m sure you could guess, I’ve never met Mr. Immelt, and we certainly don’t run in the same social circles. I do, however, appreciate the passion and commitment he portrayed in the interview. If more of us took his attitude, maybe we’d all be winning, err… sorry, I meant winning.