"Responsible business," says Bob Corcoran, "is good business."

And what's responsible business? "Make money, make it ethically and make a difference."

Corcoran is vice president for corporate citizenship at General Electric (GE), a 30-year company veteran, and a good guy. We met in 2004 when we traveled together in Ghana while I was reporting a story on GE's values for FORTUNE. Recently we spoke about GE's 2009 citizenship report, and about what GE has learned in the past five years from its corporate citizenship efforts, including its high-profile campaign around ecomagination, which focuses the company, and its marketing, on products and services that help solve the world's big environment problems.

Inside GE, ecomagination is deemed a success, so much so that it has spawned a sister initiative (if you can spawn a sister) called Healthymagination, focused on profitably creating better health for more people. GE says that it expects ecomagination product revenues to grow at twice the rate of GE's overall revenue between now and 2015.

The logic behind both initiatives is simple, Corcoran noted. Big global problems demand big solutions from big companies. GE prides itself on "tackling the world's most complex and pressing problems," as Chief Executive Jeff Immelt writes in the report.

The trouble is, the payoff for GE's shareholders has been disappointing. I didn't realize just how disappointing until I put together this chart comparing GE's stock-price performance to the S&P500 and to a couple of its conglomerate competitors, Siemens and United Technologies.

In the past five years, here's how the numbers look:

GE: -54 percent

S&P500: -10 percent

Siemens: +25.3 percent

United Technologies: +39 percent

Yikes.

Now, there are a lot of explanations for this. Perhaps the biggest is that GE, unlike its peers, has been in a couple of businesses that have suffered in the last five years, such as GE Capital, its finance operation, and NBC Universal, its TV, cable and Hollywood unit, which is now being spun off into a joint venture with Comcast. Their problems mean that GE's fundamentals look only a bit better than its stock price: Revenues have grown from $72 billion (2004) to $157 billion (2009), profits have slid from $16.3 billion (2004) to $11 billion (2009). Profits are back up again this year, and Corcoran says the company is poised to grow.

In any event, there's no doubt that GE takes its corporate responsibilities seriously. This citizenship report is thoughtful and detailed, reporting on everything from the company's greenhouse gas emissions (down by 22 percent from 2004) and water usage (down by 30 percent from 2006) to its illness and injury rate (down by 16 percent in a year) to the number of employees fired (118) as a result of ethics complaints filed with about 700 GE ombudspersons (their word, not mine) around the world. There's much, much more here.