Ge imagination breakthrough

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Summary essay

The Morphing Continues: The New Regional Strategy

As the locomotive contract negotiations were being finalized, they provided a convenient market entrée to other parts of GE’s transportation business. In particular, the sales and marketing peo- ple from the Services and Signaling P&Ls began using the Locomotive team’s contacts to introduce their own products and services. For example, Transportation’s Service P&L planned to link any new locomotive sales with a service contract to renew and refurbish worn components locally rather than replacing them with imported new parts. Not only could they promise to save the cus- tomer money, they could offer to transfer technol- ogy and bring employment to the country.

As initiatives such as this became the norm in markets where locomotive contracts had been signed, the management team of the Locomotive P&L began to explore whether an integrated regional approach to growth might be a more effective business model than the product-based Global Families approach. It was an approach that Comte believed had great value. As he grew the Transportation marketing staff from 14 people to 32, he began moving a sig- nificant number of them out of Erie and into the field where they could be closer to the customer. As part of a new geographic-based capability, he

deployed seven Regional Marketing Strategists, each of whom built his own local capabilities to support Transportation’s regional general managers. (See Exhibit 8 for Transportation’s marketing organization.)

In December 2006, when the message came down that the Commercial Council would like to see businesses submitting more IB proposals for new emerging countries, it gave support to the growing notion that there was a need to reconfigure the global locomotive IB project once again. One proposal was to morph the major thrust of the GLF project into three integrated regional IBs—one for China, one for Russia/CIS, and one for India—each respon- sible for driving growth by developing its market for an integrated package of GE locomotives, signals, services, etc. It was an intriguing idea with the po- tential to roll out to other regions, but would mark he third iteration of this IB in its young, less than 18 month life. Some were concerned that it might seem like project churning.