General Electric Matrix
The GE Matrix is the same nine-box tool as the GE-McKinsey Matrix under its other common name: developed at General Electric with McKinsey in the early 1970s, it scores each business against market attractiveness and competitive strength so a board has one shared reason for where money goes next.
Nine boxes sit in a three-by-three grid: market attractiveness up one side, business unit strength along the other, each box naming how hard to invest there.
Reach for this when…
- The board wants a portfolio review that isn't just last year's numbers again.
- A unit is profitable today but everyone privately doubts it has five years left.
- You're consolidating after acquisitions and need one shared view of the whole portfolio.
How to run it
- List every unit or line in the portfolio, however small.
- Rate each on market attractiveness using a small set of agreed criteria.
- Rate each on competitive strength using the same discipline.
- Plot the grid and size each circle by revenue so scale is visible.
- Set a different resourcing rule for each zone and stick to it at budget time.
A worked example
Situation. Kadri Tamm ran Tamm Kaevandusteenused, a mining-services contractor based in Tallinn, Estonia, offering equipment maintenance, logistics, and a newer environmental-monitoring line.
Applied. Plotted on the grid, maintenance was strong but in a market growing slowly as mines automated; logistics was both attractive and strong; environmental monitoring was in a fast-growing market where Kadri's team had barely started building a reputation.
Result. She protected logistics' funding untouched, held maintenance flat while it kept cash flowing, and moved two senior engineers onto environmental monitoring for the year to build the strength score up, not just the revenue.
The catch
It shares the BCG Matrix's core weakness dressed up in more dimensions: attractiveness and strength are still judgement calls, now spread across more criteria that can hide the same bias. A 3x3 grid gives more nuance than four boxes, but more boxes also means more places to argue about where the line sits.
If the same unit would land in a different box depending on who's scoring it, fix the criteria before you fund anything off the plot.
Origin: General Electric; McKinsey & Company