In Southwest Airlines:
In A Different World and “G.E. Goes with What It Knows: Making Stuff, [1]” both
of these pieces demonstrate that there are a few key components for large,
multinational corporations to exemplify in order to remain competitive, have an
edge over other companies, and increase and retain your market share over an
extended period of time. Particularly,
as proven by the New York Times piece
on G.E., having a leader and managers encourage your company’s employees to “prize[s]
constant entrepreneurship” and help to develop your employees skills around “adaptability”
and “resiliency” as the main strategy today. This piece offers advice for how
corporations, including Southwest Airlines, establish and build their internal
and external strategies – both in the United States market and beyond. One
essential piece of this strategy comes from having an effective, insightful,
and proactive entrepreneurial leader guiding the vision of your organization/company.
According to Jameson W. Doig and Erwin C. Hargrove’s Leadership and Innovation: Entrepreneurs in Government, they argue
that there are six qualities that an entrepreneurial executive must have in
order to be successful [2]:
1)
Identify new missions and programs
2)
Build external constituencies and neutralize
opponents
3)
Create internal constituencies and eliminate
opposition
4)
Enhance organization/agency’s technical
expertise
5)
Motivate and provide training to staff
6)
Identify the problems/gaps in the organization
and address vulnerabilities
Since Jeffrey Immelt, G.E.’s current chairman and chief
executive, assumed responsibility of the company in 2001, he’s shifted the company’s
focus away from investing in debts and troubled loans and instead, back to its “heritage
of industrial innovation,” by moving the focus to “making physical products and
less on financial engineering.” Recognizing that “G.E. was seduced by GE
Capital’s financial promise” or “rapid-fire money-making,” Immelt has repositioned
G.E.’s interests around capitalizing on “fields where G.E. believes it has a
competitive advantage” and is working to promote change within G.E. and the
greater American community by building plans to increase the number of jobs in
manufacturing production and research in the U.S. At the manufacturing
production factories, Immelt has instituted a “bottom-up approach that shuns
hierarchy” where teams of six to 12 “production associates” work collectively to
make decisions, unencumbered by a chain of command to answer to.
Ultimately, Immelt is more concerned about forecasting “what’s
next,” investing in his employee’s skills, and using an outcome-based approach
to make decisions about how to use the company’s resources rather than yielding
the highest amount of capital each quarter. Immelt’s intentional, long-term visioning
and leadership style demonstrate that his entrepreneurial strategy meets almost
all of Doig and Hargrove’s qualities, with a particular emphasis on #4, #5, and
#6. While the article discusses Immelt’s relationship with competitors and challenges
faced in the international market with China, a greater focus on building a
strategy for approaching China would help to break G.E. into even more
international markets, beyond their current reach.
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