Jeff Immelt has entered the building, and his London branch office in Mayfair is in a bit of flap. The chief executive of the world's largest company passes through only a couple of times a year on a tour of General Electric's European outposts. He has already done Paris, Lyon, Rotterdam, Hamburg and Copenhagen and is on his way to Abu Dhabi, so persuading the 6ft 4in former college footballer to stand still for a picture presents a challenge.
When he is not pressing the flesh with 323,000 employees or behind his desk in Connecticut, Immelt is more used to negotiating with world leaders than photographers. This trip included seeing whether British ministers will fight harder than European rivals to host GE's next wind turbine factory.
Immelt likes to boast how the advantage of running a conglomerate this large is that everyone will see you once: "I saw [Chinese president] Jiang Zemin after 9/11 and, although I was there to sell gas turbines, for two hours all he wanted to do was talk about the philosophy of freedom and the mood of the American people," he says. "That was the first time I realised that the job was more than just selling aircraft engines."
The title of "world's biggest" company comes courtesy of Forbes magazine, which ranks sales, profits and stock market valuation to draw up its annual league table.
While these figures have slipped of late, and it is doubtful whether GE will stay number one this year, its place in the Guardian's series on companies likely to shape the next decade is a recognition that plenty of tomorrow's big names will be the same as yesterday's.
Though some fell during the financial crisis, the surviving multinationals are arguably more dominant than ever – with government bailouts only enhancing their grip on world affairs.
GE is perhaps the archetypal multinational. Since its founder, Thomas Edison, made his name in lightbulbs at the turn of the 19th century, GE has grown with America into almost every corner of international commerce: from trains, planes and dishwashers, to Hollywood films, banking and commercial property. Under Immelt's predecessor, Jack Welch, GE came to embody modern management philosophy, including an infamous annual cull of the company's bottom-performing 10%.
This is still a company that does not leave anything to chance (a separate interview with a manager about 10 rungs down the corporate ladder from Immelt was supervised by three public relations staff). There are 200 people based around the world in a quasi-diplomatic corps to "connect the dots for the company in the eyes of the governments" and it has the most feared team of corporate lobbyists working in Washington DC. If there was a spare seat on the UN security council, you could imagine a request might be lodged.
However, GE has had a shocking 18 months. Its once huge financial services division, GE Capital, has been pole-axed by the credit crunch and bad loans. Separately, GE has been forced to retreat from the media business, selling a controlling stake in NBC Universal to Comcast, but continues to be blamed for everything from Jay Leno's TV scheduling debacle to over-commercialisation of the Olympics.
An accounting scandal and dividend cut dented its reputation for financial reliability, and in Britain it was accused of medical censorship after it took a radiologist to court for claiming there were potentially fatal side effects to one of its healthcare products.
A decade ago such scandals would hang around GE like a bad smell. Pollution in the river Hudson made the company hated by the US environmental movement, but Immelt presents a cuddlier image than Welch. Through two marketing campaigns, "Ecomagination" and "Healthymagination", he has repositioned GE as a champion of green technology and even a partner in Barack Obama's healthcare initiatives.
During this recession, his main achievement is that GE is still standing. It may have lost its cherished AAA credit rating, but so has almost everyone else. GE Capital is back to being the junior partner to the conglomerate's staid industrial divisions, but its direct competitors – finance companies such as CIT, AIG and GMAC – face bankruptcy.
"You know what you say when you have a black eye?" quips Immelt. "You should see the other guy."
GE's problems could not have been foreseen, he insists. "We had McKinsey do a study in July 2007 and we asked them to say how long the global liquidity bubble will last and they came back and said forever, so it wasn't like we didn't ask the tough questions."
Instead, GE has made a better fist of making long-term calls about the direction of global society. Its once insatiable acquisitions machine has left it well-positioned in some of the fastest-growing developing markets while cleaning up the mess in the old world.
Big bets
"We made two big bets," says Immelt. "One is that the emerging market consumer is going to replace the American consumer as the engine of growth for the next 25 years, so we make the infrastructure and technologies that are going to help that happen: electricity, aviation, transportation, etc. The other bet is that in the developed world there are a couple of big problems to solve, global warming and clean energy, and affordable healthcare."
He remains upbeat about America's future but has become vocal about the problems too: challenging Warren Buffett for the role of corporate America's elder conscience by calling for restraint on matters such as Wall Street pay.
"A lot of these banks wouldn't be around if the government hadn't bailed AIG out, so it's hard for society to say that they should be earning the same amount in the future that they earned pre-Lehman Brothers," he says.
"On that Tuesday [after Lehman] there was a couple of hundred billion dollars of counterparty exposure; if the government had gone a different way, who knows what would have happened? There needs to be cognisance of that."
There should also be cognisance of GE's help from Washington over the years – as a major military contractor and more recently as a beneficiary of similar liquidity guarantee programmes to those received by the banks.
Immelt's embrace of the environmental movement goes little further than the order book too, and GE declined to join Apple and Nike in resigning from the US Chamber of Commerce over its lobbying against carbon emission controls. Whether it follows Google's lead in taking a tougher line with China over political repression remains to be seen. It looks unlikely, given the billions of dollars at stake. By investing in oil, gas and power infrastructure as well as green energy technologies and fuel-efficient engines, GE hopes to win, whether politicians succeed in cleaning up the environment or resource shortages drive up energy prices.
Immelt's interest in subjects such as the environment as an intellectual and engineering challenge seems genuine – he once said he slept with a stack of science journals by his bed. He regards health reform as a bigger challenge to western society than climate change: "If you told me that London wanted to reduce its carbon output by 40% by 2020, I can tell you specifically how to do it. If you told me we needed to shift the curve on healthcare, I'm not sure I could answer it – it's a more complicated, multidimensional problem."
Whether events of the past 18 months have dented his enthusiasm for the job is harder to tell behind the well-polished media drill: only when pushed about the damage to GE's reputation caused by its accounting scandal does he pause.
"There's not a lot I can say about the SEC case. People just have to look at the facts and draw their own conclusions, but I take it seriously and I take it personally."
His patience for cuddly issues also reaches limits when questioned about why GE's tax rate has been so low. While the industrial businesses can do little to escape high tax regimes, GE Capital used its international reach to the full to drive the group tax rate to among the lowest of any big American company during the long boom years.
More robust
"I think we should pay our fair share of taxes," says Immelt. "Our tax rate for GE Capital outside the US looks like our peers' outside the US. We don't have the Bermuda domicile, tax shelter and havens, but our tax rate is a function of where we've made money. We are the country's biggest exporter; that creates high-paying jobs too."
In all likelihood, General Electric will continue to outgrow America over the coming years. Already 60% of its sales are overseas, and its bridgehead into China and India looks more robust than most. Like a handful of other businesses approaching its scale, it feels more appropriate to call it a supranational than a multinational. But Immelt has seen this trap coming a long way off.
"In every way we're a global company, but I always describe us as an American company mainly because I think that if you say you are a global company, there is a sense of lawlessness that goes with that.
"If I go see the premier of China and tell him I'm a global company, he's going to think 'He doesn't care about his own country, and if he doesn't care about his own country he's not going to care about my country'."
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