GE sells Crotonville, a training ground for generations of managers
For decades, it was the site where General Electric managers arrived for days of lectures, workshops and strategy sessions on manicured grounds overlooking the Hudson River.
Crotonville, GE’s famed management academy outside New York City, is now in new hands.
An entity made up of realestate investors and family offices has purchased the roughly
60-acre campus for
$22 million, according to people familiar with the matter and the deed of the sale. It will now function as a conference center able to be booked by outside groups.
GE’s decision to sell Crotonville, part of its split into three separate companies, represents an end of an era in corporate training.
“It’s a snapshot of a point in time of how companies used to motivate and reward shining stars,” said Bridget Gibbons , director of economic development in Westchester County,
Film producers and streaming platforms are adopting a new strategy to lure viewers to watch their titles at a time attention span has shrunk amid a surfeit of entertainment options.
They are increasingly releasing short clips or snippets, usually lasting between five and 10 minutes, on social media channels like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, giving away major dialogues, scenes and songs of the titles to get the viewers hooked. From introducing pivotal characters to revealing major story arcs,
N.Y., where Crotonville sits.
A number of corporate giants are now working to shed properties once used to train high-performing employees. 3M is looking for a buyer for a more than 600acre retreat center in northern Minnesota known as Wonewok. Boeing is selling its nearly 285-acre leadership center near St. Louis.
3M bought the lakeside property in the 1950s as a place “away from the office to share ideas and to dream,” according to an account in a 3M corporate history book. The manufacturer decided to sell Wonewok as it underwent a cost-cutting effort. Land conservancies, private individuals, resort operators and other corporations have all expressed interest in buying it, a person familiar with the matter said.
At Boeing, its St. Louis property has 14 classrooms, roughly 200 guest rooms, a dining room that can seat about 250 people, sand volleyball and tennis courts, plus 5 miles of nature trails, among other amenities, according to materials marketing the property . these are circulated across channels on both the studio or platform’s own accounts as well as via collaborations with content creators and entertainment portals.
While some industry experts say this is one way to build volume and generate buzz around a film or a show through means other than just the trailer and traditional marketing techniques, others say the strategy can backfire with significant chunks of the film or the show available on social media for free, diluting the need to sign up and pay to watch it either in theatres or on an OTT platform.
Illegal leakages from the film or show via pirated means can
There is also a château with a wood-paneled library and fireplaces. The marketing materials advertise that the scenic escape overlooking the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi and Illinois rivers could be redeveloped for a research facility, a trade school or even senior housing. Boeing inherited the property when it acquired rival McDonnell Douglas in 1997.
As tech companies have shed jobs in recent years and focused on efficiency, Salesforce also cut ties with a 75-acre wellness retreat, known as the Trailblazer Ranch in Scotts Valley, Calif., where employees attended training sessions and enjoyed activities such as hiking and yoga.
Executives can now easily train staffers via videoconference or through off-site events held in hotels or other venues, management specialists say. GE, in recent years, has also emphasized to employees that learning should happen closer to core operations or at production sites, such as on its factory floors.
“I think we’re long past the, ‘I can’t believe you’re going to do something with Crotonville’ moment,” Larry Culp, add to the crisis.
“Attention span of audiences on the internet is low and it takes a lot more to get someone hooked to your content, than it did before. Especially for platforms or producers that do not boast of huge budgets, more clips increase the chances of the content going viral organically, since merit is no longer the only criterion for content to catch on to viewers’ algorithms,” said Girish Dwibhashyam, vice-president, strategy and business head at DocuBay, a documentary-streaming platform.
Dwibhashyam conceded that releasing multiple clips does take away a part of the story’s reveal, but was quick to who is now the CEO of GE Aerospace , said in an interview in March. “Don’t for a moment think we are backing away from investments in the team, but there are a whole host of ways to deliver that content.”
Culp had visited Crotonville during his tenure as CEO of GE, but says a big campus didn’t make sense for the newly split-up company. “It’s beautiful, you would go there on vacation. It’s a great gathering spot, a great cultural melting pot. But it is one of those things that each of the three businesses will carry on in their own way,” Culp said.
GE opened Crotonville in 1956. The late former CEO Jack add that the bigger priority is to get noticed.
Social media is replete with clips from movies and shows, often without spoiler warnings, Avinash Mudaliar, CEO, OTT
Welch and other bosses at one time visited nearly once a month , regularly holding lectures in a sunken auditorium known as “The Pit.” Suppliers and customers mingled over dinners and on walks along gurgling streams. Residence halls scattered across campus held rooms where attendees slept.
At its peak, when employees visited Crotonville, many were often given assignments in advance and a learning agenda, with curriculum on techniques such as Six Sigma or strategies to improve GE’s operations, said Noel Tichy, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who led executive training at Crotonville in the mid-1980s.
A new-manager starter kit, given to Crotonville attendees in the late ’80s, outlines dozens of potential problems for bosses, such as: “Your budget has been cut, but the workload increases. You’ve been told to reduce staff while maintaining the current level of productivity, but receive no advice on how people are to keep up.”
Play, the recommendation and content discovery platform for streaming services launched by HT Media Labs (part of same organization as Mint) said.
These can be of three kinds:
What to do? A “TroubleShooting Guide” suggests that GE managers conduct brainstorming sessions with staff and allow negative comments, while focusing on efficiency and top priorities, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal in 1987.
Some executives say a dedicated place for learning and gathering still holds appeal. Professional services firms Deloitte and KPMG have both created large corporate training retreats in recent years as a way to bring employees and others together. Deloitte opened Deloitte University in Texas in 2011, while KPMG Lakehouse, located outside Orlando, Fla., opened in early 2020.
KPMG’s facility has 800 single-occupancy guest rooms and can train up to 1,200 people a day. The company uses it for internal learning and development, plus as a way to woo recruits or to convene clients and hold conferences, said Paul Knopp , the CEO of KPMG US. He sees parallels in promotional videos including trailers of movies and shows, celebrity interviews and songs posted by the production house or OTT platforms where content is often scripted and reviewed and thus, rarely divulge the plot or storyline of the movie. Then there is influencer-led content including clips on social media in reaction to popular or newly-released movies and shows, which do contain snippets of storylines (or more), but the majority are accompanied by spoiler warnings, he said.
But there are also illicit or bootlegged clips that are often recorded in theatres via mobile phones or other devices, distributed online via social media leadership development between KPMG’s site in Florida and GE’s longtime facility.
“Crotonville was an amazing, amazing resource for GE—or it was in the past—to build talent and we see it, too, as a real way to build talent,” Knopp said.
Officials in Ossining, N.Y., where Crotonville is located, had pushed for the GE campus to stay on the tax rolls, a reason some locally hoped it would remain a commercial site and not a nonprofit such as a school or university.
The Crotonville Conference Center, as it is now known, is managed by Pyramid Global Hospitality. The lecture halls remain, along with amenities including two restaurants, a coffee shop, outdoor fireplaces and an on-site helipad.
Executives at Pyramid say they are already hearing from clients interested in setting up meetings on the site, given its historical significance. “The velvet rope has been lifted here,” said Dan Paradiso , regional vice president of sales and marketing for Pyramid. “It has been a birthplace for training and leadership for so many years.”
In recent years, GE emphasized to staff that learning should happen closer to core operations or production sites