It was appropriate that General Electric Co.'s annual shareholders meeting occurred Wednesday in the Aronoff Center for the Arts.
The session, GE's first shareholders' meeting here since 1968, didn't generate a lot of news. However, it offered moments of drama and humor during a more than two-hour run. The session was attended by about 1,400.
Center stage was John F. Welch, GE's chairman and chief executive of the parent to Evendale-based GE Aircraft Engines, signing autographs for a crush of shareholders in the lobby before the meeting and outlining the company's achievements and plans in formal remarks.
It is Mr. Welch who has led the transformation of the 120-year-old industrial company into one of the world's most widely watched growth companies -- America's most-admired in a recent Fortune magazine poll.
Mr. Welch said three initiatives -- globalization of GE's businesses, expanding GE's service businesses and Six Sigma, a corporatewide quality program -- will accelerate the company's double-digit growth.
"How successfully we capitalize on them will depend on the type of leadership that will take this company into the era ahead," said Mr. Welch, 62, who retires in 2000.
"This company cannot be "managed' to perpetual double-digit growth," he said. "Management implies stewardship of an asset. . . . With leadership, the question at the beginning and at the end of the day is "How far can we take this . . . how big can we grow it . . . how fast can we get there?"'
The real show began when Mr. Welch opened the meeting to eight separate shareholder proposals. All were rejected by wide margins.
The proposals ranged from limits on executive salaries to two Earth Day-related environmental proposals, one from a group of religious orders calling on GE to adopt a public education program to warn residents of the Hudson and Housatonic river valleys to the dangers of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from GE plants.
Mr. Welch said that although GE has spent more than $150 million to clean up PCB releases around its plants, more than two dozen studies have found no correlation between PCBs and health problems.
"We don't believe there are any significant health effects from PCBs," he said.
Sister Patricia Daley, executive director of a New Jersey-based coalition supporting the PCB proposal, compared GE's position with that of tobacco companies' claiming smoking was harmless. "That's an outrageous comparison," Mr. Welch said.
"You owe it to God to be on the side of truth here," he told the nun.
Kevin Mahar, a retired union executive from GEAE's Lynn, Mass., plant, drew laughs as he urged GE to adopt a pension cost-of-living adjustment, which he called an "annual Welch adjustment."
A group called United for a Fair Economy urged a policy that would establish a ratio between GE's lowest paid worker and its highest paid. Mr. Welch last year received salary and bonuses exceeding $8 million.
Mr. Welch said he wouldn't defend his salary but argued that limiting salaries would deprive the company of executive talent. "I didn't have two nickels to rub together when I started here, and now I'm a very wealthy man," he said. "It's part of what makes this country great."
