Throughout its businesses, GE Vernova benefits from the leadership qualities and problem-solving skills of its many veteran employees. As the country celebrates Veterans Day, we shine a spotlight on two bright stars.
Jamie France, Striving for Quality
Jamie France comes from a long line of military people, with grandfathers on both sides part of the World War II generation who impressed on their children the value of service. Her first break from tradition was joining up as a woman. “Yep, first one to join the family business,” she says with a chuckle. Her second was deciding to enter West Point. “I felt like, if I’m going to be the first woman in our family to be in the military, I want to do it better.”
France entered the elite military academy in 1985, nine years after they accepted their first female “plebes,” joining the 10% of cadets who were women “when there were still a lot of people who didn’t believe we should be there.” She was an outlier in other ways too: artsy, literary, and comfortable in German after formative years on a military base in that country. And while her bachelor’s of science grounded her in the basics of engineering, she had what she describes as “a Renaissance education. My ability to understand engineering but communicate like a liberal arts person allows me to bridge gaps. That’s something that’s served me extremely well at GE Vernova.”
As supplier quality engineer for logistics at GE Vernova’s Onshore Wind and Renewable Energy business in Greenville, South Carolina, France manages the safety and quality of the chain that connects manufacturing to delivery, and has developed more than 50 documents specifying protocols for lifting, handling, securing, and every other related procedure involved in transporting high-risk, oversize cargo. After two tragic fatalities of transportation personnel, France began work on what became the Wind Industry Transportation Professional Advanced Certification (WITPAC), a training program that ensures that the complex practices of handling and transporting wind components — the massive towers, nacelles, and blades that go into a wind turbine — are standardized down to the smallest detail. In a groundbreaking alliance, GE Vernova brought competitors Vestas and Siemens Gamesa into the WITPAC program, which launched in 2021 and has resulted in a significant reduction in damage and injuries.
Today, France is happy to occupy the same role that she assumed in 2010, which hadn’t existed before she arrived, and which she came to after years working in logistics in the automotive industry and having more formative experience near the front lines of armed conflict.
Serving on the battalion staff as a West Point senior, France developed an interest in what you might call the military version of logistics — supply, services, and troop support — and was initially stationed in Germany to run a medical warehouse in the 3rd Armored Division. When the Gulf War broke out in 1990 and this division was mobilized to Iraq, France had a firsthand glimpse of the human costs of poor logistics support.
“As we rolled forward, we kept encountering Iraqi soldiers surrendering,” she says. “We’d come across bombed-out shelters and blown-up tanks, and seeing the living conditions of this bootless, foodless army,” she recalls. “We started taking the medical supplies we’d brought for our soldiers to the POW camps. It was really heartbreaking.”
This experience, along with 10 years as an officer, stayed with France when she left the military in 1995, as a captain, and sought other uses for her values and skill set. One thing she decided early on was to not take the tack of a hard-edged military commander. But, she reflects, “I did want to be a leader.” What that’s looked like in practice is a willingness to listen: “I’ve always found what works best is to get consensus, and train your team through experience that accommodating doesn’t mean that you lose.”
Darren Friot, Hands-On Leader
Darren Friot learned much the same lesson with the Army Reserve, in which he enlisted as an engineering student at Clarkson University, in Potsdam, New York, graduating a little before September 11, 2001. “That’s when the Army became very real and very, very now,” recalls Friot, senior quality leader for GE Vernova’s Schenectady, New York, plant. “All the tactics, techniques, and procedures employed in Iraq and Afghanistan were being developed right then. We all had to transition our training and gear into something brand-new.”
Raised in a small New York town near the Canadian border, he’d grown up with military ambitions. Unlike France’s, Friot’s 21 years of military service were largely contemporaneous with his work at GE Vernova, though he found life-changing lessons in leadership and adaptation in both. Two years into his role as operations leader in Schenectady’s generator department, he was called to Iraq as part of the armed forces’ 2006–2007 “surge.” Taking an 18-month leave of absence from GE, he commanded the 150-odd troops of U.S. Army Headquarters Company, 411th Engineer Brigade, at Balad Air Base, just north of Baghdad, supporting the local community and helping shore up its infrastructure.
“Schools, hospitals, freshwater, waste,” he says. “The kind of stuff you and I take for granted.” After they repaired the Al Bakir freshwater treatment plant, it was able to provide an extra 450,000 gallons of potable water and 350,000 gallons of irrigation water to the village’s 5,000 residents daily.
Ever since then, Friot has known “that sitting at my desk would not be fun for me,” he says. “I always wanted to be in operations. I like to go down to the shop floor every day — touch parts, use equipment. I like solving problems, hands-on, with a team.”
During his long tenure at the Schenectady plant, Friot has played a wide range of roles in the generator space: advanced manufacturing engineer, new product introduction (NPI) manager, and cell leader in charge of the manufacturing cell’s 200-odd members, including supervisors, manufacturing engineers, quality engineers, planners, and buyers. In his current role as quality leader for Cores and Castings, Friot oversees the core manufacturing that produces the blades of GE Vernova’s 7HA gas turbines — executing the exquisite geometry at the heart of mighty, house-size power plants used around the world. While this meant learning an entirely new product and new processes, Friot’s variety of roles in the Army Reserve — from logistics officer to combat engineer — had taught him how to adapt.
But as military life recedes in his rearview mirror, Friot has come to discern important through lines that run between military service and life at GE Vernova. “The Army is full of great people and, really, so is GE Vernova,” he says. “They do a great job of hiring really great people.” And both look for similar key qualities in their personnel. “Engineers make good leaders in almost any department, because they have that problem-solving mentality trained into them,” he says.
Advocating for Fellow Vets
Today, both France and Friot strive to be valuable resources for those navigating between military life and Vernova. Friot was recently appointed the Schenectady site’s leader for the GE Vernova Veterans Network, where he runs programs to support and promote veterans within the company, develop camaraderie, guide them to resources, and run programs that range from an annual ski trip in Massachusetts to a temporary residence for family members of patients at a local VA hospital. France, too, has been active in the GE Vernova Veterans Network, since shortly after its first chapter launched at her home site in Greenville, and strives to educate others about the often-overlooked qualities veterans bring to place like GE Vernova.
“I’d like more people to understand that veteran candidates bring things that may not fit the prerequisites published in a job listing,” she says. “Junior officers and enlisted in particular are excellent candidates to transition to a desk job in logistics, because they understand the larger operation from the bottom up.” And perhaps above all, they bring a veteran’s flexibility to any new challenge.
“Because that’s the one thing every military person knows in their bones,” says France. “That the only constant is change.”