Ted Colbert

That is what we do. What an exciting video. Good morning everyone. How's everyone doing this morning? Awesome, awesome. It's great to see all your smiling faces. It's beautiful here in Colorado. It was 75 in Washington D.C. when I left yesterday. It's a little bit of change in environment, but indeed exciting to be here. Cadet First Class Holly, thank you for the kind introduction and thank you all for the opportunity to speak today. General Clark, it's great to be in your house and I'm happy to see you and looking forward to spending some more time with you today. It is definitely special for me as this is my first opportunity to be here and spend a little time with the cadets. I'm looking forward to speaking with you and talking to you about leadership and culture and lessons that I've learned through my career so far. I hope you all enjoyed the video. Did you guys enjoy the video, ladies and gentlemen? Yes, it's a great video. Many of you will spend time in those products at some point in time in your career, so you pay attention and I'll tell you more about my experience in those later.

It's also exciting to have my teammate here with me, Lieutenant General Sam Cox. Where is General Sam Cox? Where are you? Your runner somewhere? Is he? Where is he? Where's Darius? Lieutenant General Sam Cox, class of 1984. He leads our Air Force team at Boeing and earlier today he told me that 15 years ago he was actually the Commandant of the Cadets. So when you see him, salute him the right way and give him all the respect he deserves. So we treat him the same way in Boeing and he's a great, great member of our team. He loves being here. Keep an eye on him, General Clark, because I think he may try to get back into your office and take the seat back. So make sure you keep him out. He loves, loves, loves the Academy.

So, an excellent day ahead for you all and I'm sure you've had some great speakers. And I also want to say on behalf of the Boeing Company, our 150,000 employees around the world, 35,000 of them that are part of my team and build and service the amazing products you saw in the video, it is an honor to serve you. We are grateful for the partnership that we've had over the last 75 years with the U.S. Air Force and now the U.S. Space Force. You all have entrusted us with the most important missions and we look forward to doing even more in the future. So I'm going to start off sharing with you a little bit about my own personal journey.

Both my father and let me test the mic. Michael, can you hear me? Can you hear me? No, there we go. Mic's on. There we go, off the podium. Both my father and grandfather served in the United States military. My dad served in Vietnam. My grandfather served in Korea and World War II. And through those experiences, they learned values of the military. My dad values the Air Force and shared those and instilled them into me. They are the foundation from which I grew up as a young man and the things that still hold true to me and the things that make me the leader that I am today. And I want to share some of those with you because I just think they're so important as you're in the most formative stages as young people and as professionals in whatever field that you pursue. And the lessons that you learn today will shape how you show up and how you perform as leaders as you move through your careers. So I'll start with sharing with you some stories that reflect upon my time as a leader.

I grew up in Baltimore. One of the cadets asked me that earlier. Any people from Baltimore, Maryland in the area? Yes, a couple Baltimore folks. I grew up in Baltimore in, we'll call it the 80s. I'm getting a little old so it sounds like a long time ago. And I had great experiences in school. I actually thought I wanted to be a lawyer at one point and my physics teacher in 11th grade said to me, 'You're not going to be a lawyer, you're going to be an engineer.' And that's that. And so we started applying for engineering programs and I ended up going down to Atlanta to Morehouse College and the Georgia Institute of Technology into a dual degree engineering program. The reason why that was important to me is because it balanced out a really exciting liberal arts institution in Morehouse and a great technical institution in Georgia Tech. And that combination proved to be very important to my future as I pursued industrial engineering, went on from there to go to the Ford Motor Company. I worked there for 11 years. I had the gift of living in the United Kingdom for about three years, then came back. Then I worked in New York City for Citigroup in the banking industry and then about 13 years ago got a call to come to the Boeing Company from an old friend and what an opportunity to join an amazing, amazing company that makes the products that you just saw in that video.

The time that I spent at Ford made a difference. The first supervisor that I had at the end of my rotation with him pulled me to the side after giving me my performance review and gave me a pen. He pulled this pen out of his pocket and it was a Cross pen. I don't even know if Cross pens are popular anymore, but it was a branded Cross pen. And on the pen was inscribed 'Theodore Colbert III, V.P.' Now I'm about 23 years old at the time. I have no idea what V.P. means. So I asked Tom, I say, 'Tom, what does that mean? What does V.P. mean?' He says, 'That means Vice President.' I'm like, 'Okay, what does that mean? What's a Vice President? What's that in the context of?' And he looked at me and he said, 'Ted, I've given out three of these pins in my 30-year career as a leader and I give them to people that I believe will become big leaders. I give them to people that I believe have the core values and the work ethic and the will to sacrifice and lead and I know that they are going to do big things one day.' And so I said, 'Tom,' I said, 'thank you. I'm not sure why you believed that in me, but I appreciate it.' And he said, 'Ted, the reason why I believe it in you is because you come up to work every day and you work hard and most importantly, you share with your colleagues. I noticed over the last year that you spend time learning from the people around you and sharing the things you know to make everyone better every single day.' And he said, 'That is a unique trait.' And I said to him, 'You know, I'm just doing what my parents taught me to do. It's really simple. I don't think it's that hard.' And so I carried that pen along with me for many, many years and remembered that conversation with Tom and remembered that he inspired me to think much bigger than I ever thought about myself about the opportunities ahead and the importance of sharing and showing up and working hard and contributing every day. So those moments matter. You will have those moments with people that you work with and people will receive those moments from you and know that there are times when it allows you to think differently about yourself and allows you to see the opportunities in front of you. So mentorship matters.

And there's a ton of things that I've learned from my mentors over the years. Share some of those with you. One is you have to field your team. You have to field your team. The people that are around you. I share with young people that I talk to all the time, you are only as good as the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Now you all are in a situation where you don't control completely who you spend time with, but there are times when you do control it. You're only as good as the people that you spend time with, the average of them. And so you ought to think about that. Do you spend your time with people that are smarter than you, that drag you into places that you don't want to be in? As I said to you, I grew up in Baltimore in the 80s. My first job was in a movie theater. In a movie theater. And back then, guess how much we could go to the movies for? You won't believe it. A dollar. I worked at a dollar movie theater and it was a lot of fun. But I also figured out about six months into the job that I'll just say there was a lot of nefarious activity going on in the movie theater. Let's just say. Right? And the people I worked with in the movie theater thought that they should draft me into some of this nefarious activity and I decided maybe that was just not the right thing to do and those are not the types of people that I really need to spend time with. And today, fortunately, unfortunately, some of those folks that I spent time with back in that day, some of them are no longer with us and some of them are in places that none of us ever want to be. And so making that choice about how you spend your time and who you spend it with is so, so important.

Time is the second thing. We all have to manage our time. Time is precious. We don't get it back. And so every single day we've got to determine how are we spending our time. Another thing I share with young people, and I know none of you fit in this category, the answers to all of your problems in the world are not in Instagram and on TikTok. They just aren't. They may seem like they are, but they're not. And you know, I encourage you to spend time again with people who will nurture you and help you and pour into you as people that are growing and learning how to be great individuals and leaders. I have to manage time down to the minute now and it is very hard at times and I get a lot of help doing it. And as you're growing and learning, you have to do the same thing. When I was in my 20s, a lot of us in our 20s, we were all so ambitious. We all wanted to be great. We wanted to be big leaders. We wanted to be wealthy. We wanted to be independently wealthy. So in that time, instead of just focusing on the job at hand, many of us try to do all kinds of other things. 'I'm gonna go try real estate. I'm gonna go try to sell this thing.' I have back in the day, and this is going to age me, that we have VHS tapes and CD-ROMs and things like that. You would go online late at night or watch TV late at night and someone would try to convince you that you could become a millionaire flipping houses. And people would buy these VHS tapes and they'd spend time and waste their time focusing on things that were distractions from their core mission. And so I encourage you all to focus on what is your core mission. What do you want to pour into? What do you want to learn about? How do you want to succeed? And put your energy toward that. And if you think about that as you look to your left and your right, you spend time with people every day and develop as leaders.

I'd also encourage you to be empathetic leaders. Empathy is so powerful. Empathy is about trying to understand how the people that you work with see the world. We are only the behaviors that we exhibit, the actions that we demonstrate every day are all formed through the lens through which we have seen the world and experienced the world, all the wins and all the traumas that we've had. And sometimes people around you have experiences that you cannot identify with and you don't understand and you don't know why they behave the way that they do. By being empathetic, it allows you to take a step back and ask questions about people's experiences, understand the wins and losses and traumas that they've been through so that you can work together better. So you can find common ground. So you can fight over the hills of, you know, discord and misunderstanding about why someone looks the way they do or talks the way they do or sounds and behaves the way they do when you're working on a team. You have to bring to the team all of the superpowers that we all have and the only way to get at those superpowers is to understand each other better. And I encourage you to use all the principles around empathy to get to know each other better so that you can be a better team working together toward whatever goal you are trying to achieve. Empathy is so powerful from a leadership perspective. I can't even explain to you how much it means to me. I have a team today of amazing leaders and they're all very different and they're all very critical of each other all the time. And my job is to figure out what the superpowers are amongst this team and bring them together and make them work so that one plus one always equals about 10. Really, that's what the power of empathy does when you're dealing with a diverse and powerful team.

The next thing I'd encourage you to do, once you have established empathy for the people around you, you understand where they're coming from, that you have to lead and focus on being accountable. We are all accountable every day for what we do. We either create, promote, or accept the things that happen to us. That's how we work as masters of our lives versus victims of the things that happen in our lives. Does anyone know what it means to be a victim of your circumstance? Has anyone ever felt that way before? The way that you get out of a victim mentality or a place of victimization is by taking control of what is happening, accepting what's happening and knowing that you've either created it yourself, you're promoting something that you don't like, or you've got to decide that you're not going to do that, right? Or you're not going to accept it and make a different decision. And I have to do this every single day. It's the hardest thing sometimes to do as a leader. I have people on my team that have wonderful careers, that have built reputations in our industry and sometimes it's time for folks to move on. It's time to do something a little bit different. And providing feedback to them as a leader is a form of accountability for me instead of allowing them to sometimes not perform in the way that brings the most value to the team or to our customers. I share with them, 'Here's another way of thinking about the next stages of your career and see, here's how you can add value.' That's what being accountable is about. It's about sharing expectations and holding ourselves and the people around us to those expectations and what we can't, doing something different before things go all wrong.

And so once we understand our people, once we understand how to be accountable, we've got to stay focused on results every single day. Focused on getting things done. And that to me is the most important thing. You've got to get to outcomes. There's a great book that I encourage people to read called 'The Oz Principle.' And 'The Oz Principle' teaches us about rising above the noise, rising above the noise and focusing on the goal at hand. A lot of my teammates sometimes don't understand why I can tolerate a lot of noise sometimes because I'm actually not listening to it. I'm not paying attention to it. You have people that want to distract you when you're trying to get things done. Their egos get in front of them. They don't admit that they don't know something. It creates all kinds of challenges. As a leader, you keep the team focused on the goal at hand and you keep questioning and asking yourself, 'What is the goal that we're focused on and are we taking the steps to get there every single day? And do we need to pivot if it's not working?' This is part of leadership. It's what we've got to do every single day. All these lessons I've learned over the years through getting experiences.

I had a senior leader tell me early in my leadership career that I was moving too fast. I've had the benefit, you all, of just an amazing career and people in a village that have poured into me over the years. I've always been way ahead of the curve for one reason or another. Haven't quite figured it out, but it's been fun over the years. And early on, a leader pulled me aside and said, 'You know, Ted, I don't agree with the fact that you just got promoted. You're getting promoted too quick and I just don't agree with it. I think you're a great person. I think you're smart, but they're moving you too fast.' And I said, 'Well, say more.' And he said to me, and he was about the funny part is I think it was about my age and now talking to me when I was probably my mid-20s, and he said, 'The reason is because I have had a lot more experiences than you have and my intuition is much better tuned than yours.' He said, 'Yeah, you're really smart, but I got a lot more experience than you do and those experiences allow me to use my intuition and gut better and better judgment and make better decisions.' He's like, 'You're going to make a whole lot of mistakes because you don't have the experiences I do.' He said, 'But I will tell you this, even though I don't agree with how fast you are moving, get the reps in.' He's like, 'Get the reps in. Get the practice in. Just like a professional athlete, you practice every day and you learn from the mistakes that you have. You learn from the things that you didn't do so well the day before.' He said, 'If you just do that, you'll be fine.' He said, 'But if you don't create situations where you can get reps in and learn from your mistakes,' he said, 'you won't be successful.' And so I listened to him and I encourage my teammates as they develop their careers, especially in the early years, it's about getting reps in and learning different things and building muscle memory in the leadership path that you want to be on. And those are the people that I observe do the best. And you get a lot of reps on different experiences, different technologies, different problems to solve, and they win over time.

All those leadership lessons and more kind of make me who I am today. It's how I think about the world every day and that's how I go and solve really big, big challenges. One of the products that you saw in the video is the T-7A trainer. Does everyone know what that is? Yes, the T-7A trainer. I'm told that about half of you at some point will end up flying in that trainer and I am so excited about that. I actually had the opportunity earlier this year to fly with one of our test pilots. His name's Bo, so you can imagine what kind of flight that was. He took me up in the T-7 and that full stick aileron spin about took me out. That was exciting. Those planes are amazing. They are the next generation of great capability. From a leadership perspective, I have a lot invested in the T-7A. Several jobs ago, I ran information technology for the company. I was the Chief Information Officer for Boeing for six years before my current and last role. And the T-7A was the opportunity for us to do what we call 'break the norm,' do something different. And it was one of the first platforms that was designed from a digital basis from the beginning using model-based engineering. All these technical terms may or may not mean anything to you, but let me just tell you, it was revolutionary. We designed this plane from the beginning using model-based digital product definition that will yield benefits to us as we design, as we engineer, as we leverage our supply chain, and then as we service this plane for the next many, many decades. This took work from a diverse group of people. It took leaders taking risks. It took a leader so focused on doing something different that now is going to yield benefits for us. A couple weeks ago, we had another sled test of the T-7 which was successful and we are excited about getting it into the hands of the Air Force to fly and continue testing. And one day, this T-7A and the entire system around it will be yours to learn how to fly and you'll learn how to fly on any plane on the T-7.

The reason I bring that up is because it is an example of all the things that I just described. It's an example of a team that had to learn from one another. When I was a CIO, I pressed the product team to use these digital techniques. I was the expert in one area, they're the experts in building planes. And bringing together the diversity of both digital leaders and physical, what I call Newtonian-based engineers, is how we got this great plane flying and it will be how it sustains for a very, very long time. So that's how we'll innovate. And one of the things about it that I'm also excited about is it's about both innovating on a platform but also brings in digital to help us with operational excellence in the long time and sustainability. The digital work that we do helps us build a sustainable platform. It helps with fuel hours. It helps with the way that we build it. We build that plane very quickly and we don't take a big footprint and add to our environmental challenges in the manufacturing environment. So we can do both great product development, great operations, and sustainable capability all at the same time. And that's what the T-7A reflects. So one of the platforms I'm really proud of. I'm hoping you all remember this day when I showed you the video and you step foot in that T-7A and you learn how to fly. It'll be a great, great day for you. I had one go at it and that was enough. So good luck.

And then so the last thing I'll just leave with you with is a couple more things. You know, as you go through your career, I'd encourage everyone to first go work on the hardest job that you can find. I mentioned to you before I worked in the UK for about three years. On the way back from the UK, for whatever reason, it was hard for me to find a job back in Detroit. And I got a call from a supervisor about a role that I really didn't want because it was a very operational technical role. For the computer people out there, they asked me to be responsible for the Unix platform for the entire company. And Unix is a very complex platform. It's not as user-friendly as some of the things that are used today. So I had 30 of the most technical people in the company working directly for me. So I went after that job anyway. I went to go and do this hard job and I learned so much about the technology we were putting in the company, the way that we build cars, and fundamentally how to lead people. When you have 30 people working directly for you, you have to figure out how to do all the things I talked about before. How to have empathy for them, how to have great expectations for them, how to lead a great and diverse team, and how to deliver results. And it was a time that tested me the most. I ran to a hard, hard job and it yielded a ton of benefit for me and the company.

The second thing I'd say you need to do while you run after these hard jobs is bring someone along with you. Bringing people along with you matters. Finding mentees, people you want to advocate for, people that need help, and sometimes you just don't know they need it, makes a difference. It'll pay back to you 5, 10, 20 fold. And we all need help as we go through this journey of life, both personally and professionally. So I'd always encourage you to bring someone along with you. And the last thing I'll leave you with before I take some questions is don't be afraid of yourself. Get over your fear. We all, if I only knew in my 20s, people always say, 'What would you tell yourself in your 20s?' I'd say don't be afraid of myself. Don't be afraid of the ideas that I have. Speak up. You know, get those reps in even more. When you have an idea in a meeting, speak up. You might not be right today, but you may be right tomorrow and that time may be the time that really matters for everyone else. Overcome those fears and engage in every challenge that you have every single day and you will learn at a pace that will even amaze yourself. And that is what I've learned over the last 20 or so years. So I will stop there and say thank you again for the opportunity to share with you all. It is just phenomenal being here and I'm looking forward to some wonderful questions from you all in the time that we have left. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Thanks for the feedback. Thank you. You know, she just reminded me another thing that I often share, that you know, feedback is a gift. You all, good or bad, it's a gift. And that feedback was very powerful to me and means a lot because time spent with our team in roundtables, I mean, so much, you do learn a lot. Even as an experienced person, you can ask some of your seniors, we learn in every interaction something new about people. People think that just because I'm African-American or I'm a leader that I sort of know everything about everything and diversity. I don't. I learn every day about something new about the people around me and it helps to enrich my ability to be a great leader. So thank you for that and thank you for your service to Boeing as well. Good to see you.

Oh, absolutely. We are all in on improving the condition of our environment around the world and it's both on the commercial and defense side of our business. So today I talked to you a lot about the defense side of the business. We have a very large commercial, this is what you all know of, you fly on the 737 and the 787 and maybe and hopefully you had the opportunity to fly on the 747 before it completely retires, the queen of the skies and the most amazing planes ever. And so our focus going forward is about creating the most sustainable future as possible. We are spending a lot of time on sustainable aviation fuel as an alternative fuel to what we use today. Our commitment to our customers and the world is that our commercial fleet will be 100% sustainable aviation fuel ready by 2030. And so that will make a difference in the world. It'll make a difference to how we affect the environment. In addition to that, we're working on a ton of other technologies that improve the capabilities of our airplanes. So the 787 is one that is a step in the right direction. The next big airplane that we come up with in the future will have capabilities that improve the way that we fly, the amount of fuel that we use, and how we impact the environment. The other things that we're doing today that I'll share with you from my last job, I had a very large digital portfolio and in that portfolio was some really cool stuff that our airlines, both commercial and frankly we port over to the defense business, use today. And that is about optimizing flight patterns and flight plans that saves fuel and we've got great tools that do that. We also have tools that help with fuel optimization which saves fuel and other digital technologies that take data from the plane, take data from flight plans, take data from crew schedules and optimize the way that we operate our products. And so SAF is the fuel approach that we're taking. We have technologies that we're working on in every aspect of the plane and we have digital and software capabilities toward that end. And we're going to partner with the Air Force and the Navy and the rest of the military to continue to drive all those capabilities and those products, you know, as we work together. So it's a commitment that we've all made. We have a Chief Sustainability Officer that we put in place who has a great team that flies all around the world building partnerships. And if you get a moment, we have a tool called Cascade that we launched that's an application that helps you see in the aerospace industry how the decisions that we make can actually affect the environment. And we use that with our partners on Capitol Hill and frankly in the Pentagon to make, you know, great decisions about our future. So we're all in and hopefully you start to see these great technologies come to bear in the next several years. Thank you for the question.

Thank you. And thank you for reinforcing from my colleagues. I tell my colleagues all the time, wherever I go to speak, especially with our emerging talent, the question of sustainability is always one of the first five questions. So we have got to stay focused on our efforts to improve the world that we live in and it is a priority for us and we won't stop until we deliver on some of the things I talked about. All right, next question.

Absolutely. Thank you for the question. So first of all, the worst days are when planes have problems. And the saddest days as a leader in our company in recent years were obviously the 737 MAX crashes several years ago. We continue to mourn for the families that were on those planes and we continue to work as a team to make our company better. And over the last several years, we've done a number of things to improve the way that we deliver our products. Our engineering organization, we did a lot of work to core up and put some new practices in place to make sure that we are consistent every single day from a quality perspective. We put in the company a new Safety Management System that is unbelievable. It connects the entire company, it connects us to the industry. It is a reflection of what our customers use to manage safety and will help us in the long run. And you know, frankly, we have re-established and refocused on our core values around quality and safety of our products as a team everywhere in the company, whether that's on the commercial or the defense side of the business. And you know, our reputation will recover as it recovers and it'll be about delivering the next airplane every single day. And if you look at the commercial products, they perform, they're performing well in the market. If you look at our products in the defense business, they're doing well too. And I'll just tell you that not a day goes by where our leaders and our talented teammates, from our mechanics to our finance professionals, think about making sure that we are fielding the safest products in the world every single day. It is a focus as a team. So you will, I believe, that we compete really well. I'm not going to mention any of our competitors. We call them 'competimates' actually because we actually partner with them a lot. But safety and quality are the most important values to all of us. So thank you for the question. Appreciate it.

Yeah, it's hard. I mean, you look at 35,000 teammates and obviously I can't call them every day because that's kind of hard to do. But we have things that we do on a sort of weekly, daily, monthly, quarterly basis. From a leadership perspective, every day, and some of my team's here with me, they know I do this every day, I call someone, one or two or three people just to check on them for no reason, just to see how is your day going, what's going well, what's not going so well. And those are not just my direct reports, they are people down in the organization, just to check on them. As was described earlier, I hold roundtables with teammates and they are all different levels in the organization. They're in our factories, they're in our offices. It's kind of fun because I start the meeting off telling them that this is an open discussion, we can talk about anything. I'll tell them or share with them anything that as long as I can't get fired or in jail for. So we have very open discussions about what's going on and allows them to be very transparent with me about everything from the bathrooms in the office to the leadership that either exists or is not existing really well. And then we have webcasts and town halls and we engage in different ways. We use surveys to get a sense for how people are feeling about their jobs and leadership and all those things come together to inform again my intuition as a leader as to how things are really going. Do we have the culture that we want to have? Do we have this transparent culture, a place where people do feel psychologically safe in every conference room and every factory to share when we have problems? This goes back to the last question that I had. That is so important to me and I spend a lot of time every day with my team making sure that we are reaching out to people, listening to them, understanding where they have challenges, and then working to remove the constraints for them to do their jobs. So it is an everyday challenge. It is the most gratifying part of the job, frankly, is reaching out and talking to people because that's how we get work done and it's really important to do that. So as a leader, you will find your own way of doing this, but you have to have a way of doing it because it does matter. And the last thing I'll say about this is where you started with your question is really important and to the leaders, you have to remember this. When you become a really senior leader, you know, 35,000 people, there's tens and tens of thousands of people doing work every day and it's so easy to lose touch from the realities of their day-to-day activities. And it's your job to get as much of a dose of that reality as you can on an ongoing basis so the decisions that you make are actually of value to them. And I've seen it over and over again where leaders get disconnected from what is really happening in the organization and they make terrible decisions because they don't know what is of value to the people that work for them. So this activity and the question you ask is so important. So as leaders, build your method, put the reps in on how you engage with people and learn from them and follow up on their asks and you will see a difference in the culture of your organization. So thank you for that question. It's fun.

Oh my goodness, what a good question. This is a hard one. It's a really hard, this is like the hardest question out of all of them because it's not something that I always do really well and none of us do. But I will tell you this, you know, if you take the time to be introspective, you know when you're out of balance. You know when you haven't spent enough time with your family. I have two boys, two men, I can't keep calling them boys, they're like six foot one and six foot two. And they're 20 and 22 years old. One is a first-year dental student up in Boston at Tufts and the other is a sophomore at Morehouse College down in Atlanta. And I had the gift when in the early part of my career, I call it so the first half, to have a job where I didn't have to travel as much. So I spent, and you all are, this is a little too early for y'all, but just remember what I'm telling you, I spent all the time that I could picking up and dropping off at school and daycare, coaching baseball, helping with Boy Scouts, being present, because I knew at some point either my wife or I, something would change where we couldn't invest that time and the balance would get tipped in the wrong way. And so all I would say is I'd encourage you to know when you're out of balance and take the action to reinvest in the things that matter to you, the people that you love, the hobbies that bring you joy, the challenge that you want to go after that may not have anything to do with your professional career. But it has got to be intentional. There is no equation to this that I can give you that works. I'm an engineer, I'm a math person, I love equations. There isn't one. You have to follow your instincts to know when you're out of balance and do something about it. And sometimes it's not within you. Sometimes people around you, my wife will tell me when I'm out of balance very, she'll be very direct with me about that and then I got to do something different, right? But you know, you'll know. And so you integrate all these activities and you know, sometimes it's going to be about work. I am trying to deliver an airplane. I am trying to deliver some software. I'm going to be working 70, 80, 90 hours this week and I'm going to be all in. And then at some point you gotta stop and take inventory of how you're investing in the rest of your life. But it's so important. Encourage you all, do not let yourself get out of balance. The career, the accolades, the awards, the trips, the wealth, it doesn't go anywhere. It's always going to be there. But you can never take back lost time with people that you love and things that are important to you. You have to balance it out. So use your intuition and be intentional about how you draw balance in your life. That is my advice to you on that. It's so hard to do and I learn every single day. It's one that I'm a continuous learner on. I wish my wife was here, she'd come and grade me and tell you how this really works. Anyway, thank you for the question.

Oh, I love this question. Oh, I love it. I love it. This is why I love what I do. When I was in college, I was a scholar with AT&T Bell Laboratories. Bell Laboratories in its heyday was the preeminent place for research and development in telecommunications and communications. And I worked around some of the smartest scientists in the world. In the world. And I learned early on a couple things. One, this is about, remember I said about getting reps and getting different experiences, one, I learned that I had no desire to get a PhD. I just figured that out. It's like, it's too, just, I can't do one thing that long, you know, I'm never gonna just be that focused. I like to do a lot of different things. And the second thing I learned was that although I didn't want to get a PhD and I didn't want to be that specialized, what I did enjoy was working with really smart people and solving problems and figuring out, as I described to you before, how to make use of those superpowers, how to prevent those collisions and friction and challenges. I had a team, and I'm sure maybe they'll watch this at some point, they'll know who they are, that in a recent job where I had some really smart people where I spent most of my time kind of refereeing exactly how you just described. And what it really comes down to is, as I described to you before, focusing on the goal. What is the goal we're trying to achieve? We are trying to digitally transform the Boeing Company. This person is an expert in all the infrastructure needed to transform the enterprise. Is the person's superpower the way they communicate? Absolutely not, right? It's just not. And you guys keep trying to make him communicate. He's not. His superpower is understanding complex infrastructure. So let's pull out of this person all the things that we need to develop the best infrastructure to transform the company. This person's superpower is actually communicating and helping people understand what we're trying to do. They're not the person who understands the infrastructure, right? And so they're both really smart and the collision has just happened. And so I set up to get in the middle and say, 'Okay, you're gonna talk about infrastructure and you're gonna do it in just a good enough way that we understand it and you're gonna listen. You're gonna listen so you can help translate.' And as a leader, again, there is no equation to this. It is just a skill that you have to develop over time. But fundamentally, it starts with getting to know your people, getting to know them and understanding what they bring to the table and how to recombine all those different skills to get to a solution. And if they become disruptive and their behaviors get really bad, then you have to take, you know, a different approach. But more often than not, everyone sort of talks over each other because they're just so excited about solving a problem and you have to put some structure to that, right? You got to put some structure to it. You got to facilitate the discussion. And there are all kinds of cheesy ways to facilitate meetings and they work because sometimes it's the way that you get people to contribute in an orderly way and prevent, to your point, those issues. Now when things go wrong, you know, you have to be clear with people your expectations of how they behave and show up. That's table stakes for everyone. We always respect one another. We always treat each other, you know, with the golden rule, right? That is foundational. And if you don't have that group of people on your team, you got to find some different people. But that's the starting point. And then as a leader, you recombine all the cool stuff that they bring. So it'll be fun. Get reps in now, right? Get reps in right now in the projects you're working on, the challenges you have, all the cool stuff you do in this amazing facility. Get reps in trying to figure out how to get these diverse teams working together. And by the time you become the big leader that you're going to be, it'll be second nature. It'll be second nature to you. Thanks for the question.

Oh, we're out of time? Oh, this is so much fun. You guys are awesome.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much. Thank you all. Thanks. Have a good day.