competent’s posterous

By PAUL GLADER

Many companies have offices in Washington D.C. for lobbying purposes, have employee-funded political-action committees to donate and influence politicians and belong to industry trade associations that lobby for their interests. General Electric Co., in recent years, has developed another way of engaging its business units with policy makers in Washington and other global capitols. It helps explain how President Barrack Obama has become GE's customer in chief.

With a program called "Growth and Government" that started in the late 1990s and was more formalized around 2003, the company moved government policy experts into its largest business units to school GE executives on how to align GE goals with national goals. "It was actually, first and foremost, about getting 'policy' talent in headquarters to work on strategy with business people, not more government relations people in capitols to work with public officials," said Ben Heineman, former general counsel at GE, who crafted the initiative. "The fundamental idea was that government actions impacted GE businesses in a major way and that this needed to be understood when businesses were working on their annual or three-year business strategies."

Mr. Heineman said the initiative took on greater importance after Jeffrey Immelt replaced Jack Welch as GE's CEO in 2001. "Jeff was more interested in this set of issues than Jack -- and more openly supportive," Mr. Heineman said. "Also, this decade is far different than the 90s in the importance of business and society issues."  The practice, he suggests, has helped GE on issues such as renewable energy, taxes and financial regulation.

At a public breakfast interview in February hosted by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Immelt told former U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio, R-N.Y. that GE tracks government policies in 23 countries. He said the initiative focuses on issues like energy and health care, looking for "What's going to happen? What will the investments be? Things like that." Mr. Immelt said he thinks public policy on energy and health care will be more important than ever for the next decade or so.

"I'm a lifelong Republican, right. So I can sit here and say this is horrible, this is terrible. Let the market reign. Blah, Blah, blah. It's just not going to be that way," said Mr. Immelt. "So the board and I spend a lot of time thinking about how do we engage. Where is this going to go? How do we evolve over time?"

Mr. Heineman now teaches at business schools and writes books on management issues. He says the "Growth and Government" initiative started on the belief that GE staff had to do serious, substantive policy analysis. "You couldn't just walk in there and thump your chest and say, 'We're GE, we want to do this and that.' You had to have sound facts and detailed analysis -- to have real credibility."

He said GE worked hard in recent years to understand Washington, public policy and complex interests so it could be shrewder in its approach and interactions with Washington. "You had to be credible in saying this was good for the economy or competition," he said. "We wanted them to make strong, smart arguments."

The K-Street crowd  - Washington's lobbying community - tends to agree.  GE is one of the biggest and "most sophisticated" players in Washington, said Alex Brill, CEO of political consulting firm Matrix Global Advisors LLC. Mr. Brill, formerly a policy director and chief economist to the House Ways and Means Committee under California Republican Bill Thomas, said GE is masterful at trotting out its top executives, engineers and scientists to meet legislators in their offices and to give testimony in Congress. "They become a reliable source of good information," says Mr. Brill. "They can become a source people are dependent on for good information."

Write to Paul Glader at paul.glader@wsj.com