February 14, 2008
At Home in the World
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
As soon as Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric’s chairman, became chief executive in 2001, his foreign-based managers began pressing him to move some major operations overseas.
“They’d say, ‘G.E. will never be really global until you do,’ ” Mr. Immelt recalled. For years, his reaction was, “That’s really stupid; no need to do that.”
But his managers kept up the pressure, and Mr. Immelt figured that “with so much smoke, there must be a fire.”
So in 2004, he moved G.E. Healthcare from Wisconsin to outside London, the home of Amersham, a company G.E. had just bought.
Clearly, he liked the results. G.E. now has research centers in Munich, Shanghai and Bangalore, India. The unit that sells equipment and services to oil and gas companies is based in Florence, Italy.
And this month, G.E. promoted an American executive, William H. Cary, to lead G.E. Money. The company also said that it would move the group’s headquarters to London from Stamford, Conn., to be closer to customers in Europe and Asia.
The European operations are helping G.E. rebuild its image in Europe, where hard feelings still linger from G.E.’s aborted effort to acquire Honeywell in 2001. The centers in Asia help build new relationships with governments of developing countries, both as showcases for technology and as sources for jobs.
Sales of engines, turbines and other so-called infrastructure items are not only the biggest contributors to G.E.’s profits these days, but also the greatest source of its growth.
“Everyone talks about outsourcing manufacturing, but it is the high-level R.& D. jobs that are the great marketing tools,” Mr. Immelt said. “And I’m a salesman, remember. I know that you don’t get to sell things for long unless you are part of the culture into which you are selling.”
Much is at stake. Last year, for the first time, G.E.’s overseas revenue surpassed domestic sales. But more important, overseas sales are growing even though the slowing American economy is damping sales back home.
That is true of many companies, of course. But for G.E., the result has been more than a shifting of revenue. The company’s once-rigid hierarchy and vaunted training programs are going through a huge overhaul, as American executives learn to treat foreign-born colleagues as equals, not subordinates. “They are managing their worldwide organization as a network, not a centralized hub with foreign appendages,” said Christopher A. Bartlett, a professor at the Harvard Business School who has written a case study on G.E.
This year, in a highly symbolic gesture, G.E. Transportation, which is based in Erie, Pa., moved its annual sales meeting to Sorrento, Italy, from Florida. “It was time the Americans learned what it’s like to deal with jet lag,” said John Dineen, who leads the unit.
In a sense, G.E. is returning to its past. When John F. Welch Jr. became its chief in 1981, G.E. was organized geographically, with powerful country heads — usually American-born — running different regions. He reorganized the company around businesses. Now, Mr. Immelt is creating a hybrid of the two approaches.
“Jeff recognizes that the center of gravity is shifting,” said Noel M. Tichy, a management professor at the University of Michigan who has written about G.E.
That is true outside G.E. as well.
International Business Machines, which now derives 65 percent of its revenue from overseas, operates most of its software and services business from India. It has moved its global procurement center, as well as most of its voice recognition technology work, to China.
Last year, for the first time, I.B.M. brought 23 Chinese employees to its headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., for nearly two weeks to learn about I.B.M.’s ethics and culture. In September, the same 23 workers went through training in Shanghai, to learn how to apply those principles. I.B.M. also has begun to send American executives to training sessions in Asia, both to teach and to learn.
“The people in Armonk can’t just say, ‘grow earnings 30 percent,’ ” said Denis Fred Simon, provost of the Neil D. Levin Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce, which helped I.B.M. devise the new training program. “They have to understand what it means to operate on the ground in China.”
But G.E.’s size — $173 billion in revenue last year — and product diversity make the task of imparting such understanding especially formidable.
So G.E.’s American managers now travel overseas for management training almost as often as European executives come to G.E.’s management center in Crotonville, N.Y.
Today, G.E. researchers in Shanghai or Bangalore have the kind of autonomy that used to exist only in Niskayuna, N.Y., where the G.E. Global Research Center long reigned supreme.
Mr. Immelt is thinking about replicating Crotonville in China, and building a residential lodge at the Munich research center, similar to the one in Niskayuna.
And foreign accents are heard at higher rungs of the management ladder. G.E.’s country managers, who act as liaisons between G.E. businesses and customers in their territories, increasingly hail from the regions they manage and are growing in internal stature as G.E.’s overseas sales continue to soar.
“In places like China, governments are big customers, and it’s the country heads who have the relationships with the governments,” said Deane M. Dray, the G.E. analyst at Goldman Sachs.
Most business heads are still based in the United States. And because they control the bottom lines of their respective units, they still have the most clout.
But foreign-born nationals are rising through the businesses. The executive roster at G.E. Transportation includes Pierre Comte, a Frenchman who runs Global Signaling from Paris, and Rafael Santana, a Brazilian who manages G.E. Transportation-Americas from Brazil.
Evren Eryurek, manager of global rail operations, works from Florida, but he is Turkish. Mr. Dineen is American, as is Tim Schweikert, president of G.E. Transportation China. But their successors, Mr. Dineen suggested, “might well be foreign-born.”
Mr. Immelt, who never did a foreign stint himself, can easily picture that. He would not name them, but he said he could think of at least three foreign-born nationals who could succeed him when he retires in a decade or so.
“The business C.E.O.’s have to be socially and politically astute and able to anticipate political risk,” Mr. Immelt said. “There are more people competing for these top jobs, but a lot fewer who qualify for them.”
Management experts say that may soon change. “Students coming out of the Indian Institute of Technology are every bit as talented as those who study in London or New York,” said Robert N. Bontempo, a professor of executive education at the Columbia Business School. “And the globalization of big companies has enabled them to get meaningful work experience without leaving their countries.”
The transition has been bumpy for American employees. They no longer have first crack at plum assignments and promotions. And they no longer get to lord it over foreign colleagues.
“Sometimes you need dogmatic leadership,” Mr. Immelt said. “You need to say, ‘I don’t care if you like this, it’s happening.’ ”
Recalcitrant executives are coming around. “It is easy to fly anywhere from London, and I’m not out of phase with anyone’s time zone,” said Joseph M. Hogan, chief executive of G.E. Healthcare. “I call China in the morning, Europe midafternoon, then the U.S. last.”
There are more tangible results as well. Mark Little, who runs the Niskayuna research center, noted that the Shanghai lab came up with a new desalination method, and researchers in India devised a less-expensive electrocardiogram.
Mr. Hogan points to a low-cost CT scanner developed in China. American versions use a hydraulic pedal to move the table up and down; in China, the table is stationary, and patients simply use a step stool. “American engineers would have tried to somehow dumb down the tables we were already using,” he said.
Mr. Comte pushed G.E. Transportation to make electric locomotives and signaling devices, while executives in China persuaded the company to put cabs at both ends so the locomotive can switch directions without turning around.
“As outsiders, they can focus on what we weren’t doing, not on what we’d done well for 100 years,” Mr. Dineen said.
G.E.’s goal is to create a generation of foreign-born insiders. It has been holding what Susan P. Peters, who leads executive development at G.E., calls “talent forums” at G.E. businesses in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, at which corporate human resources people evaluate high-potential people in their 30s, and suggest development plans.
John F. Lynch, G.E.’s senior vice president for human resources — and a Scotsman by birth — said that the number of G.E. managers on foreign assignments has long hovered around 1,800 a year. But until a few years ago, probably 80 percent were Americans doing overseas stints.
Today, a similarly disproportionate number are foreign nationals working outside their home countries, many of whom are en route to becoming country managers. “Someday, country manager jobs will be culture-blind, and an American can again run Japan or a Scotsman can run India,” he said. “But it will be 25 years before that happens.”

February 13, 2008
I Love You, but You Love Meat
By KATE MURPHY
SOME relationships run aground on the perilous shoals of money, sex or religion. When Shauna James’s new romance hit the rocks, the culprit was wheat.
“I went out with one guy who said I seemed really great but he liked bread too much to date me,” said Ms. James, 41, a writer in Seattle who cannot eat gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.
Sharing meals has always been an important courtship ritual and a metaphor for love. But in an age when many people define themselves by what they will eat and what they won’t, dietary differences can put a strain on a romantic relationship. The culinary camps have become so balkanized that some factions consider interdietary dating taboo.
No-holds-barred carnivores, for example, may share the view of Anthony Bourdain, who wrote in his book “Kitchen Confidential” that “vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”
Returning the compliment, many vegetarians say they cannot date anyone who eats meat. Vegans, who avoid eating not just animals but animal-derived products, take it further, shivering at the thought of kissing someone who has even sipped honey-sweetened tea.
Ben Abdalla, 42, a real estate agent in Boca Raton, Fla., said he preferred to date fellow vegetarians because meat eaters smell bad and have low energy.
Lisa Romano, 31, a vegan and school psychologist in Belleville, N.Y., said she recently ended a relationship with a man who enjoyed backyard grilling. He had no problem searing her vegan burgers alongside his beef patties, but she found the practice unenlightened and disturbing.
Her disapproval “would have become an issue later even if it wasn’t in the beginning,” Ms. Romano said. “I need someone who is ethically on the same page.”
While some eaters may elevate morality above hedonism, others are suspicious of anyone who does not give in to the pleasure principle.
June Deadrick, 40, a lobbyist in Houston, said she would have a hard time loving a man who did not share her fondness for multicourse meals including wild game and artisanal cheeses. “And I’m talking cheese from a cow, not that awful soy stuff,” she said.
Judging from postings at food Web sites like chowhound.com and slashfood.com, people seem more willing to date those who restrict their diet for health or religion rather than mere dislike.
Typical sentiments included: “Medical and religious issues I can work around as long as the person is sincere and consistent, but flaky, picky cheaters — no way” and “picky eaters are remarkably unsexy.”
Jennifer Esposito, 28, an image consultant who lives in Rye Brook, N.Y., lived for four years with a man who ate only pizza, noodles with butter and the occasional baked potato.
“It was really frustrating because he refused to try anything I made,” she said. They broke up. “Food is a huge part of life,” she said. “It’s something I want to be able to share.”
A year ago Ms. Esposito met and married Michael Esposito, 51, who, like her, is an adventurous and omnivorous eater. Now, she said, she could not be happier. “A relationship is about giving and receiving, and he loves what I cook, and I love to cook for him,” she said.
Food has a strong subconscious link to love, said Kathryn Zerbe, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. That is why refusing a partner’s food “can feel like rejection,” she said.
As with other differences couples face, tolerance and compromise are essential at the dinner table, marital therapists said. “If you can’t allow your partner to have latitude in what he or she eats, then maybe your problem isn’t about food,” said Susan Jaffe, a psychiatrist in Manhattan.
Dynise Balcavage, 42, an associate creative director at an advertising agency and vegan who lives in Philadelphia, said she has been happily married to her omnivorous husband, John Gatti, 53, for seven years.
“We have this little dance we’ve choreographed in the kitchen,” she said. She prepares vegan meals and averts her eyes when he adds anchovies or cheese. And she does not show disapproval when he orders meat in a restaurant.
“I’m not a vegangelical,” she said. “He’s an adult and I respect his choices just as he respects mine.”
In deference to his wife, Mr. Gatti has cut back substantially on his meat consumption and no longer eats veal. For her part, Ms. Balcavage cooks more Italian dishes, her husband’s favorite.
In New York City, Yoshie Fruchter and his girlfriend, Leah Koenig, still wrestle with their dietary differences after almost two years together. He is kosher and she is vegetarian. They eat vegetarian meals at her apartment, where he keeps his own set of dishes and utensils. When eating out they mostly go to kosher restaurants, although they “aren’t known for inspired cuisine,” said Ms. Koenig, 25, who works for a nonprofit environmental group.
Though the couple occasionally visit nonkosher restaurants, Mr. Fruchter, 26, a musician, said he has to order carefully to avoid violating kosher rules. “We’re still figuring out how this is going to work,” he said. “We’re both making sacrifices, which is what you do when you’re in love.”
Even couples who have been eating together happily for years can be thrown into disarray when one partner suddenly takes up a new diet. After 19 years of marriage, Steve Benson unsettled his wife, Jean, when he announced three years ago that he would no longer eat meat, for ethical reasons.
“It had been in my head a long time, but I could have done a better job of talking about it,” said Mr. Benson, 46, a math professor at Lesley University, in Cambridge, Mass. Ms. Benson, who is also 46, and devises grade school curriculums, said she worried her husband would judge her if she continued to eat meat, “but we talked it out and he is not proselytizing.”
Another concern was whether she would be able to cook vegetarian meals that would meet the nutritional needs of everyone in the family, including their teenage daughter. “I wanted us all to eat the same thing for pragmatic, household economy reasons, but also because that’s part of being a family,” Ms. Benson said.
So, she cooks vegetarian dinners and makes lunches for herself and her daughter that include meat. She and her daughter have “meat parties” when Mr. Benson goes out of town, she said.
“There’s this feeling that if we eat the same thing then we are the same thing, and if we don’t, we’re no longer unified,” Dr. Zerbe said. She and Dr. Jaffe said sharing food is an important ritual that enhances relationships. They advise interdietary couples to find meals they can both enjoy. “Or at least a side dish,” Dr. Zerbe said.
For people who like to cook, learning to bridge the dietary divide can be an enjoyable puzzle. Ms. James, the gluten-averse writer, eventually found a man who did not love by bread alone. On her first date with Daniel Ahern, in 2006, she told him that she was gluten-free; he saw it as a professional challenge.
“As a chef, it has given me the opportunity to experiment with new ingredients to create things she can eat,” said Mr. Ahern, 39, who works at Impromptu Wine Bar Cafe in Seattle. Ms. James said she fell in love with him after he made her a gluten-free salad of frisée, poached egg and bacon. They married in September.
Since then, Mr. Ahern has given up eating bread at home, though he still eats it when he goes out. For her part, Ms. James has begun eating offal and foie gras, which were once anathema. “We’ve changed each other,” she said.