GE scales back its ambitions in Boston

Since GE announced plans to move from suburban Connecticut to urban Boston ("Corporate headquarters relocating to the center city: GE chooses Boston," 2016), the corporation has totally and completely tanked and significantly changed its focus, obviating the need for a larger headquarters campus with lots of space so people could work on digital initiatives that the company has now abandoned.

In less than two years, CEO Jeffrey Immelt was fired, and so was his successor, John Flannery, who has been replaced by Larry Culp, who had worked for the DC-based holding company, Danaher.

-- "What incoming CEO Larry Culp brings to GE," CNBC
-- "Larry Culp's long to-do list to fix GE," Washington Post

The Boston Globe reports ("GE says it will pay back Mass. $87m in incentives") that they've dropped the project, are returning $87 million in incentives they've already received, and are marketing the property where the campus was to be built.

Now, in line with the previous post on Amazon and NYC, I would have said that betting on GE was if not a sure thing, a good decision. So what do I know? (I had suspicions that GE did a lot of financial engineering and bad decision making, given the corporation's history with environmental contamination and various business disasters at GE Appliance, but who knew the extent?)

At the time, Strategy & Business had made a good point ("Corporate HQ and the Magnetic Pull of Cities"). As GE shifted away from financial services (and tv) they no longer had a reason to be so tightly connected to NYC. With their intent to refocus on manufacturing, Boston was a good choice because of the universities and Rte. 128 technology companies.

Other posts on the general topic of corporations moving back to the city include:

-- "A lesson that seeing is believing: Panasonic's new building in Newark, NJ as an example, positive and negative, in businesses coming back to the city center," 2015
-- "Businesses moving back to the center: not a universal trend," 2015