Page 271 -

254 Chapter 7

Box 7.4
An example: General Electric

Sharing best practices is a “ way of life ” at GE — employees live and breathe it every day
( Stewart 2000 ). A culture of what the company calls “ boundarylessness ” ensures that at
GE, whatever one person knows, everyone knows. GE demonstrates how this process
works. Beyond competence, community, and commitment, trust needs communication,
both positive and negative, and both best practices and lessons learned. GE is riddled
with CoPs — manufacturing councils, fi nance councils, technology councils — literally hun-
dreds of interdisciplinary and inter-business groups. Here GE ’ s younger employees bring
their ideas to share at meetings, where other members test them, improve upon them,
and take them home to be implemented in their own businesses. Individual performance
reviews stress the skills that contribute to the culture. Executive evaluations cover two
major areas: performance and personal values. Performance is a quantitative measure, but
when it comes to the qualitative measure of an executive ’ s personal values, the only
category that supersedes boundarylessness is integrity. At GE, employees are at least as
well regarded for borrowing a best practice across business lines as they are for inventing
a best practice.
Face time is only one way GE shares best practices and other intellectual assets. MS
exchange is standard on 50,000 desktops. In addition, GE has an intranet with the goal
of making the right information available at the right place and at the right time. The
intranet is an important vehicle for dynamic publishing and sharing of best practices. In
all divisions, executives put even their undeveloped ideas online. Others use, and then
modify those ideas using collaborative tools. For example, executives from all twelve GE
divisions discuss benchmarking for computer usage via GE ’ s intranet. Another discussion
site is devoted to enterprise resource planning. GE ’ s Technological Leadership Program is
an online multimedia just-in-time training program, which is also available live on the
intranet.
Jack Welch, who was the CEO from 1981 to 2001, committed GE to a Six Sigma
Program where the goal is to allow fewer than 3.4 customer-perceived defects per 1 million
opportunities to err. The linchpin to the knowledge sharing necessary to achieve that goal
is an intranet-accessible data warehouse dedicated to knowledge about quality that is
shared. How important is knowledge sharing at GE? If you are a CEO at GE and you
mention that you have developed a great new business procedure, the fi rst question the
chairman will ask is, “ Whom have you shared this with? ” People who hoard an idea for
personal glory simply do not do well at GE.