It has been just over a year since General Electric splintered into three distinct companies, one of them being the energy-focused GE Vernova. In late March, the now independent company announced a $50 million commitment to MIT as part of a strategic alliance bolstering energy research, education, and career pathways.
But setting up and managing these types of partnerships come with a lot of responsibilities. “You’ve got to run these partnerships like businesses,” said Roger Martella, GE Vernova’s Chief Corporate Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer, who also heads up government affairs, policy, and partnerships.
GE Vernova is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. It was officially spun off from General Electric in April 2024, becoming a publicly- traded company with its own management. The company combines GE’s former power, renewable energy, digital, and energy financial services businesses, and its installed technology helps generate about 25 percent of the world’s electricity.
We recently connected with Martella to talk about what makes for a strong strategic alliance, and how to ensure they actually succeed.
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Take me through how you came up with this idea to partner with MIT and the steps required to make it happen.
The theory of a partnership with MIT is older than the company of GE Vernova, and MIT actually played a really important role in why we picked Cambridge as our headquarters. Our CEO, Scott Strazik, has the belief that when you choose your home, you really have to focus on your neighbors, and he wanted to pick the best neighbor a company like GE Vernova could possibly have.
We wanted to combine two of the world’s greatest and most historic innovators that are focused on the same purpose. How do you use research and innovation to improve the lives of people and deliver a sense of optimism? We have access to the great faculty and research there. We want to be the employer of first choice for those coming out of college programs and wanting to have a positive impact. We want to be competing with the best jobs in Silicon Valley and all around the world.
We want to work on joint research projects together. There are things that MIT excels at that are cutting edge in the space we operate, like nuclear energy. They have very complementary programs — renewable energy, grid equipment, decarbonizing power.
You’ve got to run these partnerships like businesses.
Over the course of your career, what have you learned from exploring partnerships and alliances, and how have you changed how you approach them?
Almost anything I do now, I always start with partnership. The presumption should be: Any time you’re taking on a challenge that you start with, who are you bringing in as your partners?
The notion of partnership itself isn’t necessarily novel, but what’s become more novel is public-private partnerships. There’s a history of the private sector banding together. There’s a history of the public sector banding together, but the notion that the private sector and the public sector are going to work shoulder to shoulder towards the same goals is quite novel. It’s only in the last few years that’s become a catalyst.
I’ll share an example with you. As we were forming General Electric Vernova, we were developing our sustainability framework, and we knew one of the things we wanted to do was address the people who are underserved by electricity in the world. Even as big as we are — as a company that provides 25 percent of the world’s energy — we cannot tackle this on our own, so we created something called the Mendoza Collective Action Summit based in Argentina. Back in April, we convened 15 global world leaders from the public and private sectors for three days to brainstorm how we create partnerships together across the public and private sectors to deliver on the underserved need for electricity.
There’s lots of public sector institutions out there that are focused on this, but they don’t run it with the private sector rigor, and the private sector side doesn’t really understand it in the way that the public sector experts do. We walked away with such a different but stronger understanding of what we have to tackle, and now an action plan going forward.
I get a sense of humility when you’re talking about the need for partnerships. You understand you can’t do it alone, or maybe you could at least do it better with the help of another institution.
Thank you for picking up on that. It’s something we talk about a lot. We have to be humble if we’re going to succeed. Our investors are very important, but our sustainability framework translates what we do from serving our business goals to serving a broader purpose for the planet, the people of the planet, whether that’s electrification or decarbonization, or being better stewards of the planet’s resources or helping people to thrive. And that takes a lot of humility, because we may know how to do certain things really well. We can build nuclear technology, gas turbines, renewable energy.
Going back to the Mendoza example, we were presented with stories of, say, mothers in London who have to make a decision between, do they turn the lights on so their kids can do their homework, or so they can do their laundry for the family? That’s a perspective we had not considered. If we hadn’t approached it with a sense of humility and being willing to listen, it would have been a waste of time. The purpose of the partnership is: How do you align all these goals together so that each of these diverse stakeholders is contributing but also helping realize their goals?
Almost anything I do now, I always start with partnership.
I want to dig into the nuts and bolts of how these strategic alliances work. Let’s take the MIT partnership as an example. Within GE Vernova, which internal teams are in communication, how much of their workload goes towards managing the initiative’s success and can you give me some examples of what that might look like?
With a $50 million investment in MIT across so many different work chains, we are effectively running this partnership like a business unit. I wouldn’t say we have anybody full time on it today, but we are taking talent from various functions who are adopting this as part of their business accountabilities, their performance objectives.
We have a council. Scott leads the engagement with the president and with the dean. We have a leader from our Advanced Research Center. We have a leader from the human resources team who’s leading the talent development part, both for MIT and the training they’re developing for us. We have someone leading all the relationships. Part of our steering committee is an MIT graduate. She speaks the language and can help us translate some of the cultural differences from time to time. And we have a lot of employees who are raising their hands. This has been a big source of positive energy for our employee base. A lot of employees are asking how they can get engaged and how they can support, so we’re creating teams beneath each of these frameworks, but it’s primarily a research framework, a human capital framework and a relationship consortium framework, and then the overall administration and management of it.
We have a weekly external call with MIT. It’s a pretty high bar, and it reinforces the importance of it. We have a weekly internal call, and we have a monthly report to our CEO, who also is very directly engaged in Cambridge and other opportunities.
Do you feel like this company is especially suited to benefit from these kinds of alliances or do you find them to be industry agnostic?
I’d say it’s a little bit of both. The alliances we create are ones that are not necessarily there to promote the specific interest of an industry. I think that’s what trade associations are intended to do. Our alliances are intended to take what’s good about each of our companies, and how do we translate that into a higher purpose, or how can we do more together than we could do alone? Mendoza is a good example of that.
There’s an opportunity for each industry to create partnerships like this that are focused on how the sum of the parts equals more than the parts themselves. I don’t see why that’s especially tied to the energy industry. Now, the energy industry is front and center in a lot of the geopolitical challenges the world has, so I think there’s a lot of receptivity to hearing about these types of partnerships.
On the other hand, there’s a downside to that too, because if I’m being transparent, there’s a lot of partnerships in this space. And one of the first questions we have to answer every single time we either want to create a partnership like Mendoza is we have to differentiate ourselves from what other people are doing. That’s the first question you get when you call people up and say, “Hey, come join my partnership.” Well, how is this different from the other things we’re doing, and why is this worth an investment of my time?
You spoke about partnerships between the public and private sector. I know that you have a background in the public sector. What does it take to advance key organizational initiatives at a company like GE Vernova compared to pushing similar initiatives in, say, government?
I think the difference is entrepreneurship. When you’re in the public sector, you’re given direction. The question is, how do you implement the direction? Frequently, the right answer is a partnership.
In the private sector, you have a lot more freedom to be entrepreneurial on your own. You have the ability to propose and shape the nature of that partnership. And you go to the leadership team and say, “I’m hearing what your priorities are. I have an idea here that I think is aligned to your priorities.” You have a lot more flexibility, a lot more initiative. It’s very entrepreneurial. The key is you don’t want to be shy in the private sector. Pick up the phone and test an idea. Ninety percent of the time, the idea is not going to get shut down. It’s going to be more like an iteration. How do we iterate to make this a win-win? How do we iterate it so we make it successful and pull the right people in?
Pick up the phone and test an idea. Ninety percent of the time, the idea is not going to get shut down. It’s going to be more like an iteration.
You mentioned earlier that the partnership with MIT predates GE Vernova’s spinoff. A lot of businesses are not that lucky. They’re already well underway with their organization. For business leaders new to these types of joint initiatives, how would you logistically recommend starting out for success?
Note the point about not being shy. Think of partnerships at the outset of a challenge. It can be complimentary among other things you’re doing, but it should be part of that first set of tools in the toolbox you’re thinking about. Pick up the phone and test the idea. Take someone to lunch from a group you’re interested in partnering with that you think might embrace it and see if you can find some allies at the outset. If you can find one or two allies, have them test the hard questions. That becomes a force multiplier, because then each of you can take on three or four more people, and it becomes a magnifying effect.
You want to start with modest expectations. You always want to begin with consensus. Don’t try to do too much too soon. This point about differentiation is really key, because the first pushback is people are very busy. If we’re being honest, a partnership involves more calls, more meetings, getting on airplanes and things like that. We have not set up partnerships where we’re asking people to contribute money, but we are asking people to contribute their time and their capital and travel.
You have to really differentiate why this is value added. There’s always going to be skepticism, because we’re bombarded with ideas and partnerships from all over the place. How is this bringing value and doing something different that’s not only good for your company, but enables better results for broader stakeholders? And at the end of the day, what is it that you want to say two to three years from now that you achieved? It’s really important to have that definition at the outset, because the bar is high to add that additional monthly column to the calendar.
You’ve got to run these partnerships like businesses. With MIT, we have deliverables, we have KPIs, we have bolder charts. We hold ourselves to deadlines. Our CEO holds us to deadlines, and we take all of that very seriously. If it’s going to be effective, you’ve got to run it like a business and hold yourself to the same level of accountability. Otherwise it will fizzle out, and that just hurts everybody’s credibility. You’re taking a risk when you’re creating partnerships. It might look like you’re doing it for alternative reasons, trying to get some credit or get some goodwill or even greenwashing. You have to really show how authentic you are in being accountable, transparent and deliverable in the goals.
Featured image courtesy of GE Vernova.
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