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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...
...social performance and in some cases setting targets for which they may be held accountable. Pressure from activists has led Wall Street firms like J.P. Morgan Chase to assess environmental risks when deciding whether to finance projects such as gas pipelines in ecologically fragile regions. In the industrial sector, GE comes tardy to the green party, following firms such as Alcoa, BP, DuPont and Shell, which several years ago set targets for cuts in greenhouse gases and promised greater reductions than GE...
...could say Ford execs are just protecting investors, whose interests they are legally required to represent. No CEO wants to stand up at a shareholders' meeting and announce that going green hurt profits. "Guys in my job can't have hobbies," Immelt says, explaining that he's not greening GE to earn plaudits from environmentalists, eco-minded consumers or even young GE employees, who liked the idea according to internal focus groups. "You can't do things because you had a vision while you were in bed one night and someone whispered in your ear 'Go green...