Word: ge
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...whiz who played football at Dartmouth, he's not apt to tramp about the wilderness or have Zen moments atop majestic mountain peaks. Immelt bestrides the summit of General Electric--a $152 billion conglomerate supplying everything from home appliances to jet engines to entertainment, via NBC Universal. When the GE CEO isn't globetrotting in his role as chief salesman, he unwinds with an activity that Earth Day types typically abhor: golf. "What gets me pumped is hitting a six-iron 160 yards on top of a hill," he says unabashedly, speaking at GE's bucolic headquarters in Fairfield, Conn...
...what also gets Immelt pumped is talking about the environment in a way no GE chief has before, certainly not his predecessor, "Neutron Jack" Welch, who ran the company with a brass-knuckles approach to the bottom line. Welch had a testy relationship with greens, notably over cleaning the Hudson River of PCBs, a toxic chemical GE dumped, legally, for decades before the practice was banned in 1977. Since Welch retired in 2001, however, Immelt has been remaking GE. He recently announced a restructuring, paring 11 operating divisions to six. He has pruned slow-growth businesses like insurance and loaded...
...guilty corporate conscience? Nope. He's seizing a blossoming opportunity: Green is where the green is. Eyeing the hot market for eco-friendly technologies like wind turbines, Immelt says he aims to double revenues in green products from $10 billion to $20 billion by 2010. He promises to improve GE's energy efficiency 30% and cut greenhouse-gas emissions 1% by 2012 as the company grows at a projected 8% average annual rate (emissions would rise 40% if left unchecked). GE will issue annual "citizenship" reports on its environmental progress. With a new ad campaign and new slogan, "ecomagination," Immelt...
...GE generating such positive buzz with its green initiative while Exxon generally looks like sludge? Look to the top. Lee Raymond, Exxon's chairman and CEO, is a verbal gusher of anti-global-warming rhetoric who opposes mandatory caps on greenhouse-gas emissions. Environmentalists accuse Exxon of being the "No. 1 climate criminal," responsible for the Bush Administration's refusal to sign on to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets for reducing pollution that causes global warming. "We do think there is a risk of climate change, but there are much better approaches to making progress than mandatory caps...
...GE wrong, then, about its bet on going green? Exxon is a fuel company, while GE makes "devices," says Stuewer. And therein lies the crux of their differences. Exxon did toy with alternative-energy technologies--most notably with solar in the 1970s--but failed miserably. "Who was brought in to clean it up? Lee Raymond. He sold it all off," says Ed Ahnert, who retired last December as president of the ExxonMobil Foundation. "He learned you stick to what you know best...