CASE SUBMISSION

Re-Imaging Crotonville
Epicenter of GE’s Leadership
Culture.

Rhea Sharma (H19040) | Shriya Srivastava (H19050) | Minna Gupta (H19146)

Submitted to Prof. M Srimannaryana TRD | Term 4

1. Looking at the history of Crotonville, what factors have enabled it to adapt successfully to the
changing needs of the organization?
2.
3. Keeping up with the evolving business context
4.
5. Throughout Crotonville’s existence, there have been new and improved changes to the offerings frequently
to keep up with the evolving business context. For instance, AMC was discontinued and replaced with
GMC to emphasize on case-based learning. The adoption of the GE-McKinsey Matrix and the MDC, BMC
and EDC, emphasis on people skills, and expansion of Crotonville’s curriculum in regional and global
locations indicate a tendency to evolve according to the business environment.
6.
7. Strong Leadership
8.
9. GE has had strong leadership at the forefront which enabled GE and Crotonville to ‘lead’ rather than
‘manage’. Under Jones, the focus was on strategic planning and Crotonville responded with the creation of a
new Strategic Planning workshop. Under Welch, the focus was on enabling managers to create a “revolution
from the middle”. In alignment to this vision, Crotonville was revamped through “Session C”, NMDC,
discontinuing GE’s “blue books”, and introduction of “Work-Out”. In Immelt’s tenure, the focus was on
preparing leaders of the 21st Century. At Crotonville, the focus accordingly shifted to incorporating strategic
disciplines, introduction of LDC, programs in ‘Leadership Essentials’ and ‘LIG” among others. Therefore,
with new CEO’s came new organization strategies which brought about changes in Crotonville’s approach
to training and development.
10.
11. Why Re-imaging Crotonville?
12.
13. The findings of Peters and her team highlighted many problems in Crotonville and the response was a
unanimous support for change and “Re-imagine Crotonville”. Some of the reasons why re-imagining
Crotonville was necessary are as follows:
14.
15. Need to integrate learning content
16. Each of GE’s business divisions had its own learning content to meet its objectives. Sometimes, corporate
functions offered trainings that overlapped with those offered at Crotonville. These diverse learning
programs often caused conflict within the organization. Additionally, the learning needs of a broad global
organization like GE could not be met at one location.
17.
18. Physical Environment
19. Changes were needed in the physical environment as there were no centers to interact outside the
classrooms. Moreover, the colour scheme was not aligned with GE’s identity and there were discussions
regarding whether to replicate Crotonville in more places to gain a wider reach.
20.
21. Overall Experience
22. While the Crotonville courses were known for their rigor, the deliberate busyness left little time for
reflection. Additionally, some of the feedback was difficult to receive.
23.
24. Reflect GE’s leadership Vision
25. The content and structure of the Crotonville courses needed to be revamped to incorporate Immelt’s five
“big themes” and leadership vision. This included focusing on emerging global markets, new products at
more price points, business and geo-political impact of a resource constrained future, substantive and
strategic collaboration in a highly networked world, and the growing intersection of business and
 government. Therefore, there was a need to update the company’s growth values and incorporate macro-
economic factors in the leadership training.
26.
27. What are the elements of transformation? And how should transformation take place?
28.
29. Crotonville had long contributed to building leaders at GE and one of the pivotal reasons for the same was
its evolution with time but in terms of the academics taught and the physical space itself. Each CEO brought
with them a new vision however it was important to ensure that Crotonville remained embedded in GE
culture and value. Over the course of the years all major cultural and business changes at GE had emerged
from Crotonville.
30.
31. In line of the same, the leadership team at GE was looking to re-imagine Crotonville. As per Lewin’s force
field theory, organisational change and transformation comes about when forces of change are stronger than
forces of resistance. Throughout the course of her discussions, Peters faced little resistance when it came to
articulating and laying down an extensive list of enhancements to Crotonville’s campus and facilities.
32.
33. GE had always believed that education possessed the power to be progressive and wanted to retain that even
as they set out to transform the campus. While organisational transformation can manifest itself in various
ways including restructuring or reengineering, what the GE leadership team had envisioned was a
transformative learning experience for the participants integrating learning content and the environment.
Thus, their transformational plans (which had partly begun) involved a specific strategy along with fostering
innovation and collaboration.
34.
35. While the trigger for change can well be overpowering forces of change, as per as Lewin’s theory this
transformation and change can be implemented as a three-part process which includes unfreezing the
organization from its current state, implementing the desired change and then freezing the organization in
this new change. It is important that the changes are institutionalized and the managers actively manage this
change process. The unfreezing stage at Crotonville had already commenced with certain measures to
implement change starting as well.
36.  
37. Action Research is one such strategy generally used by managers to define the organization’s desired future
state and develop a change program for reaching that state.
38.
39. The major steps involved in the Action Research are as follows:
40.
41.  
42. Step:1 Diagnosing the organization
43. This step is where the problem is recognized and the need for change is acknowledged. In the case of
Crotonville, developing leaders for 21st century was the issue at hand. GE was becoming global by entering
new markets, external environment was dynamic and thus leaders required new skill sets to be successful in
such conditions. Apart from this, there were two other incidents that highlighted the need for change. Firstly,
in 2009, a participant brought a topic on “educated incapacity” during a multi-disciplinary leadership
dialogue. Secondly, in October 2009, during alumni meet, former executive said that nothing much as
changed in Crotonville in the past 10 years.
44.  
45. Step:2 Determining the desired future state
46. Post the visit to Crotonville on 1st December 2009, the team decided to update the mission, structure and
content provided to participants at Crotonville. The new mission was to “Inspire, Connect and Develop the
GE leaders of Today and Tomorrow”. Every change brought in should be connected to one of these tenets.
47. Step:3 Implementing Action
48. To bring about a change in Crotonville, firstly, an internal board of directors was appointed. The course
content was modified by considering the 5 major themes of world economy described by Immelt and how
these themes will affect GE and its leadership vision. Developing specific leadership abilities drove the
change and integration of the content, delivery, and structure of the program. BMC’s objective was modified
to develop “global strategists” whereas EDC’s was to develop “global entrepreneurs”
49.
50. Step:4 Evaluating the Action
51. Ability of the new leaders to handle uncertain situations and their performance evaluation in the job roles
can be few measures to evaluate the impact of changes brought in at Crotonville and can also be a good way
to find scope of improvement.
52.
53. Step:5 Institutionalizing action research
54. Bringing change in leadership development, also results in redefining “growth values” of GE. By providing
Crontoville-designed courses at other centres across the globe, inviting best professionals from all centres to
participate in programs at Crotonville and having more multi-disciplinary dialogues (both in offline and
online mode) may help in transferring the learnings to wider audience within GE.

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