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Ecomagination is an initiative that I helped seed at GE that I’m very proud of. And it was also a great learning experience for me because it was a very risky effort we were taking on at GE. So I take you back to around 2003. GE had just come off of a big fight against the EPA and was not well regarded by clean and green NGOs because of fighting the EPA over some chemicals in the Hudson River that had been legal decades earlier, but nonetheless, the EPA determined they needed to be removed from the Hudson. And so a big battle had ensued and time progressed and we settled that, and we saw the future coming in clean technology. And so we did the things I’ve been talking about, like putting a discovery team together and understanding where the future is going, and we put together something with a very cute name. We called it Ecomagination, our promise to customers being that we want new, clean technologies that we’re going to invent and produce to be ecologically beneficial—help save the earth—and economically beneficial—like you’re not going to go broke buying this. We did all our research, talked to customers, talked to NGOs, had a team that worked on it for 18 months. Come back to the leadership of the company and many people thought it was the worst idea they’d ever heard.
It was a risk for all the reasons I mentioned just a second ago. People didn’t see us as a clean tech company. They didn’t believe we had the right to be that. Yet with our work we found we actually were producing amazing clean technology already. And we had a pipeline of invention that we could scale faster with the right kind of prioritization. I share this story because there was a lot of reason not to do it. We as a company were putting ourselves at risk, putting ourselves out there to be criticized for good reason. And people were afraid. Luckily, the CEO, Jeff Immelt, helped seed it and was a big supporter. And so we just said we’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it with a community of people. We invited some of the naysayers and the NGOs who had criticized us in the past to be part of an advisory group. We brought our customers in and said help us map out the future together. We kind of gave them almost virtual budget, and said, what technology would you invest in if you were us? So we gave our customers a seat in building it. And so I think my lesson from that was that big things like that are risky. There are always people who will tell you for good reason that it’s not worth doing. But you have to kind of have done your homework and built a community of people that are with you in making this go forward, and it helps alleviate some of the risk. But it’s scary.
I remember Jeff Immelt saying to the New York Times—I think several years after we had launched it and it became successful, and our brand grew to the point that some people thought GE meant Green Energy, which we loved—but I remember him saying to the New York Times, “At the time we started this there were only two of us in the company who thought this was a good idea.” Meaning him and me. Well I doubt it would have happened if he wasn’t one of them. But I also know he counted on me and the team I worked with to be risk takers to make that change happen.
Validate your project
I think when you’re entering into some of these risky efforts like we did with Ecomagination and a cleantech future, you’re inviting people in to help you think with better ideas, but they want to know you’re going to do the right thing. And so we not only invited critics in, but we also said hold us accountable for milestones, for targets, and we want you to help us validate it. We hired an economic firm that helped us validate that our technology was both ecologically better and economically better for the customer and we could start to track and hold us accountable. We were signing up for reduced emissions, reduced water, and we had specific targets. And I think you can say it, but unless you can show people the steps you’re taking and have them help you validate it, you’re not going to earn their trust. In our case we were worried about greenwashing— saying we were going to do it and be accused of good intentions but no action to back it up. So for us that kind of validate to trust was very important, and to invite an outsider to help us validate it. And I think you’re seeing other companies use that approach. It means you have to be transparent, but that’s I think what good business is and I definitely know it’s what good marketing is. It’s about showing people your aspirations of what you’re trying to do. So we were also saying we’re not there yet. But we were saying here’s the roadmap we’ve got and we’re showing you our progress against it.