Plane Conversations

During the past three years, Corporate Flight Management and the business aviation community in general have been locked in a legislative struggle with the Air Transport Association. At issue: Which group of users will bear the primary burden for funding development and ongoing operations of the NextGen air traffic control system?

At Corporate Flight our strategy has included several visits to Tennessee’s congressional delegation and working with customers and vendors to build grassroots support for our industry’s position. We do not want to be burdened with more than our fair share of the funding. Of course ATA was equally determined in their efforts to portray business aviation as “fat cats” freeloading off airline passengers and snarling air traffic.

Having grown up around politics and worked in it, I understand the value of advocacy for one’s chosen side or issue. However, in some cases seeing an issue from one side to the exclusion of the greater public good often degrades both sides. In this case, FAA funding was locked in continuing resolutions which, depending on whom you believe, slowed development on much needed ATC upgrades.

In the heat of battle lobbying becomes a rhetorical state of war.

And then there is General Electric’s approach.

The title of this post is also General Electric’s current tagline. It could also refer to the corporation’s innovative approach to legislative advocacy. The Wall Street Journal profiled this strategy in an article titled, “How General Electric Engineered Its Presence on Capitol Hill.” An excerpt follows:

“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.”

In a quote later in the article, Alex Brill, CEO of political consulting firm Matrix Global Advisors LLC and formerly a policy director and chief economist to the House Ways and Means Committee said that “they (GE) become a reliable source of good information,” says Mr. Brill. “They can become a source people are dependent on for good information.” (WSJ, November 16, 2009.)

Make no mistake; GE is a powerful multinational corporation. They are quite willing to protect their interests through any means possible.

By choosing to build a reputation as “a source people (i.e. Congress, press) are dependent on for good information,” they have placed themselves above the fray, aligned with the common good.

It is, more often than not, the winning position.