GE's Ecomagination Is a Muddle

With revenue of $17 billion, General Electric's (GE) clean-tech business sounds like serious stuff.

Though if aircraft engines that pollute a bit less than they used to can be considered clean tech, the number suddenly makes a whole lot more sense.

"Green is kind of what you want it to be nowadays," says Bill Batcheller, chief investment officer of Tower Wealth Management in Cleveland, who manages several accounts that own GE shares.

Maybe that explains why Eric Butterfield, GE's head of technology, was the executive trotted out to speak on the company's behalf at the Deutsche Bank Alternative Energy/Clean Tech Conference last week, even though his title does not contain the words "eco" or "clean" in it. If everything GE does is clean, then the head of technology is, by default, the head of clean technology.

At any rate, Butterfield seems to have big responsibilities, so I attempted to wade through a transcript of the speech and question and answer session he gave, and above all what he says is, well, nothing.

Executives are in general good at saying nothing, but GE has turned it into an art form -- talking about what they're going to talk about, describing how some segment of GE is organized without ever providing a sense of how it fits into the whole, referring to meaningless acronyms and the like.

My favorite part of Butterfield's presentation was this: "It was a rallying cry for all our employees to get behind this vision and develop eco products to serve the marketplace. 'Green is Green.' It was a business strategy as well as an internal strategy." OK!