Jeff Immelt isn't your garden-variety environmental apostle. A math whiz who played football at Dartmouth, he's not apt to tramp about the wilderness or have Zen moments atop majestic mountain peaks. Immelt bestrides the summit of General Electric--a $152 billion conglomerate supplying everything from home appliances to jet engines to entertainment, via NBC Universal. When the GE CEO isn't globetrotting in his role as chief salesman, he unwinds with an activity that Earth Day types typically abhor: golf. "What gets me pumped is hitting a six-iron 160 yards on top of a hill," he says unabashedly, speaking at GE's bucolic headquarters in Fairfield, Conn.
Yet what also gets Immelt pumped is talking about the environment in a way no GE chief has before, certainly not his predecessor, "Neutron Jack" Welch, who ran the company with a brass-knuckles approach to the bottom line. Welch had a testy relationship with greens, notably over cleaning the Hudson River of PCBs, a toxic chemical GE dumped, legally, for decades before the practice was banned in 1977. Since Welch retired in 2001, however, Immelt has been remaking GE. He recently announced a restructuring, paring 11 operating divisions to six. He has pruned slow-growth businesses like insurance and loaded up on enterprises with brighter prospects, such as media and medical devices. Now, he's giving environmental products a starring role--pledging to invest in green technologies, clean up company operations and promote GE as a conglomerate even Sierra Clubbers might like.
Is Immelt responding to a guilty corporate conscience? Nope. He's seizing a blossoming opportunity: Green is where the green is. Eyeing the hot market for eco-friendly technologies like wind turbines, Immelt says he aims to double revenues in green products from $10 billion to $20 billion by 2010. He promises to improve GE's energy efficiency 30% and cut greenhouse-gas emissions 1% by 2012 as the company grows at a projected 8% average annual rate (emissions would rise 40% if left unchecked). GE will issue annual "citizenship" reports on its environmental progress. With a new ad campaign and new slogan, "ecomagination," Immelt seems intent on shedding Welch's combative stance on environmental issues. One TV ad shows alluring young women in a coal mine. Even a dirty fossil fuel, the ad suggests, can be sexy if cleaned up the GE way. "When it comes to energy efficiency, environmental technology, water solutions, I want to lead forever," says Immelt, who at 49 will probably run GE for many more years.
It's fashionable to talk a good green game. In the S&P 100 index of large firms, 39 companies issue "corporate sustainability" reports, disclosing information on their environmental and social performance and in some cases setting targets for which they may be held accountable. Pressure from activists has led Wall Street firms like J.P. Morgan Chase to assess environmental risks when deciding whether to finance projects such as gas pipelines in ecologically fragile regions. In the industrial sector, GE comes tardy to the green party, following firms such as Alcoa, BP, DuPont and Shell, which several years ago set targets for cuts in greenhouse gases and promised greater reductions than GE.