Over the past year a quiet revolution has been underway at General Electric (GE), enabling the firm to shave years off production cycles and sell its customers products and services that meet their needs.
And it's all centred on empowering GE employees – from scientists to designers to sales and finance managers – to think and act like entrepreneurs.
In FastWorks, GE professionals from different stages of a product cycle team up for sessions which are guided by an entrepreneur-in-residence or by one of the 250 GE employees who are trained FastWorks coaches.
The sessions are focused on gaining a deep understanding of customers and the problem that GE is trying to solve for them.
“We don't assume that we know what features create the best solution,” says Viv Goldstein, director of innovation acceleration at GE Corporate, who leads FastWorks. “We start speaking to customers much earlier in the cycle so we can test solutions quickly and inexpensively… It’s about achieving customer outcomes, as opposed to selling products.”
FastWorks began life in 2012 when Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of acclaimed book The Lean Start-up, was invited to present to GE's senior leadership. After listening to Eric describe how even a high-tech manufacturing multinational like GE could become as nimble and customer-centred as a software start-up, GE CEO Jeff Immelt felt that there was an opportunity to leverage some of this approach.
The principles of Eric’s lean start-up include hypothesis-driven experimentation (asking questions to understand your customers' needs), iterative product releases (releasing early versions of products to customers and adapting them as they respond), and validated learning (measuring results at each step).
Asking the right questions is critical to the FastWorks process, and Viv believes that MBA graduates recruited through GE’s Experienced Commercial Leadership program (ECLP) have a natural talent for this. “There is something about ECLPs that makes me believe they are cut out to be our internal coaches,” she says.
Recently Viv was in Dubai working with project teams in the Middle East. Two of the teams were led by ECLPs – one from Africa and one from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – and she noticed they were doing a great job of coaching the teams, even though they were not trained FastWorks coaches.
“The more we talked, the more we realised it's just the way they [ECLPs] do stuff,” she says. “They hadn’t been in the organisation long enough to worry about the traditional way GE does things… They wanted to get to the right outcome.”
While FastWorks is informed by learnings from Silicon Valley, Viv is quick to point out that the approach is adapted for GE's specific offerings and customers. “If Google went down for a day it would be a huge inconvenience,” she says. “If an aircraft engine or a gas turbine doesn't work, the impact is catastrophic… It was important to customize the approach and make it work in our environment.”
FastWorks has helped a team which works on designing and selling more efficient gas turbines to reduce the development time from five years to two years, says Viv.
Another success came when GE was approached by the Iraqi Ministry of Health to supply 60,000 new hospital beds. After discussions with the customer, GE provided many other services including training for clinicians, teaching hospital managers how to run a sourcing department, and working with local distributors to ensure that they stocked the right products.
FastWorks was rolled out across GE in April this year, and so far 40,000 GE employees have participated in the process. Their experiences are shared with their colleagues via a FastWorks web platform, where any GE employee can find out about FastWorks tools, and access case studies, stories and videos posted by their peers.
Viv says that FastWorks has raised the level of motivation across the organisation: “People do it because it makes their job better; it empowers them and gives them more accountability.”
Changing the culture of 300,000 employees who work in industries from healthcare to energy is an ambitious goal. “We want our people to focus on the customer and to feel safe in a testing environment,” she adds. “They don't have to be right; they need to know how to find the right answers.”
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