Jeff Immelt - The Hotseat: Leading GE through controversy and crisis

Thanks, Julie. Good to be here.

Yeah, so it's both, but I would say it's the subject of class. You know, most people look at the US as Republican and Democrat, but most things that divide us today are really class. And by that I mean, I live on both coasts, both East Coast and West Coast, and I teach a class at Stanford. And I was going from East Coast to West Coast and I stopped in Wichita, Kansas, which is the aviation capital of the US. And there are two companies there run by ex-GE guys, and I spent a day touring two factories in the Midwest. And then I flew out to Stanford to California, where I do my venture work and teach at Stanford. And what I realized is that my students at Stanford, in their aspiration career, are never going to intersect with the people I saw in Wichita working in the aviation sector. And it just was... and I don't say that judgmentally, I see that as just, you know, they want to do venture, they want to do tech, they want to do consulting, but they don't want to do kind of hardcore manufacturing, engineering. And so I think a lot today about how in the next generation we're going to bring together different industries, different regions. Because you know, people can talk about Trump and people can talk about Republicans and Democrats and all that stuff, but what really is dividing us is just class, basic Charles Dickens kinds of things. And I don't think that's unique to the US necessarily, I think this is really something that's going on. So that's maybe it's old, maybe it's new, but that's something, you know, as I've taught and as I do my work, something I've thought about. You know, in my career I worked with maybe a million people who were different than I was, right? But my students are all entering their career, all working with people that are just like they are. And I don't know if that's good or bad, I love my students, but it's different. It's causing me to think.

I think it's not only inside organizations, right? So I always, you know, my dad was kind of a frontline manager at GE, so I always knew how to converse with really everybody at GE because I lived with everybody at GE, you know, I grew up with everybody and I could see the company through their eyes. But also on macro ideas, I'll give you something that's near and dear, I'm sure, to your heart as an Australian, which is climate. You know, like, I believe that climate change is existential, but I would really like to drive change, right? But you know, I was watching a panel from Davos last week, right? And somebody's on a panel and they're saying, 'Well, you know, the only maybe good news of the Ukrainian war is it's made energy prices higher, so that's going to force us to drive the change to green energy sooner.' And I want to say, you know, like, fuck on you, really. If you think seven-dollar gas to a middle-class American is going to drive clean technology faster, you arrogant sob. You know, it's just like, what is wrong with you? So we... the language bridge and the notion of seeing, you know, and that's why we're not making more progress on things like climate change, just because everybody at the top, all the elites, can see something some way, but it's not a top-down initiative, it's a bottoms-up initiative. It's a statewide, state and power plant by power plant, and our language doesn't encompass those people that need to drive change. And so, you know, one of the things I teach in my class, which is like, leadership is about convincing the people that don't agree with you, not the people that agree with you. That's actually easy. It's the people that don't agree with you, that's the hard part. So anyhow, that's kind of the... so that's what's been on my mind.

100%, 100% true. It's one of the things that I actually learned from Jack Welch that I try to teach my entrepreneurs. And I also talk about class, like every leader needs three voices, right? You need a total company voice, like in my case it was a 300,000-person voice, right? And that's got a certain set of vocabulary. You need a 20-person voice, right? How do you run a meeting? And you need a one-on-one voice. 'You're fired,' okay, you know, like, 'You're doing great, you're fired, do this better, do less of this, do that.' And each one is a different vocabulary, each one is a different set of verbs, each one is a different aspiration. You know, and he was really good at it. I tried to be good at it. I've seen leaders fail at it. You know, sometimes entrepreneurs are really good at, you know, here's the total company scheme, but you put them one-on-one with somebody and they're like, 'I can't do it, Jeff, you don't understand.'

Yeah, there you go. Maybe you can... So climate is something I've worked on since the early 2000s. I would say, I would say climate, the reason why climate is failing or is not doing as well as we were like, vocabulary is really in the center of it. We talked past each other. We don't understand that you need both, you know, decarbonization message but also an economic message. Um, we just are terrible at it. And so I quite think that's a great, uh, it's a great concept for a book.

I wanted to tell the story for two reasons. You know, one is I knew that it was an extremely complicated story, that there were good things and bad things, and unless it was told transparently and completely and openly, it would appear to be defensive and a whitewash. And I didn't want that. I didn't need that, and I didn't want that, and it couldn't be that, right? And the second thing is like most business books really stink. And it really stinks because whoever's writing it is like, 'Look at me, I'm a genius, you know, everything was great, and I invented, you know, I'm God, I invented everything and everything was perfect.' And I just got to tell you, that's like, you know, it's a lonely job, it's an insecure job. All the shit comes to you every day, all the fun stuff happens elsewhere, all the crap comes to you. Um, you know, and today, like, I had it easy compared to what the CEOs deal with today. You know, it's only gotten tougher as time goes on. So that's really why I wrote it. I hired a woman who I didn't know, but a woman who was an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair and the LA Times, and she was really brutal and really tough on me and others. She interviewed, you know, more than 80 people of every kind. And so she, you know, did her work. And so I think, Julie, the more complicated the story is, the more fulsome it has to be. You know, it's kind of one of those things. And so I knew it was wading into, you know, a really, let's say, complicated space. And so it was important to me that it would be as complete as it could possibly be. And part of the defense mechanism of the human being's mind is that you remember the 90% of every story where you're good and not bad. And you need other people to tell you, 'Well, that's not the way it really happened, there was these kind of crappy things that you did that I want you to remember as well.' And so that's what the book really tried to do. You know, I'm at peace with it. There were some good things, there were some not good things. I think, you know, as a business person or just any leader in general, it's okay to be criticized. You know, if you want to lead, you're going to be criticized, and that's okay. I think it's also sometimes okay to be lied about, right? But if you're lied about and it actually hurts other people and not just you, you have a right to defend the context, right? If it's not just hurting you, and if you're lied about and it hurts other people, but it also makes people make bad decisions because of the lies, you probably should, you know, get a more fulsome story out there, right? And that's really the background with which I wrote the book.

Yeah, like, so, like, in some ways, you know, it was heartbreaking. You know, in other words, this was kind of a huge part of my life. You know, I have a great wife and daughter, but in 2017, you know, when it ended, I was just heartbroken. I was broken, really. And I, you know, we had lived all over the place, but I wanted to do venture and I convinced my wife to move to California. You know, I needed space to heal. And you know, in California, like, nobody cares about anything but themselves, you know, basically.

Exactly, it's the best place to go. So I didn't want to hide, but I wanted to heal, right? I needed some space and time. And again, it was like I said, criticism is fair, you know, and there are things I deserve to be criticized for. Um, there were things that just weren't true. But you know, I'm sitting around in probably 2018 and you could see like areas around the company where based on the criticism things were being done that actually weren't very smart, you know, or were leading down a path that just wasn't good for the company or just the people that worked there, right? And that's probably when I decided to write the book, that I basically said, 'Look, not only is the context gone missing, but it's gone missing in a dangerous way. Good people are leaving, bad decisions are being made, the wrong people are winning, and there just needs to be a different narrative about this great company, right?' And let people make the judgments they make, but, you know, this is... and you know, for me, I gave all the money to my high school, so it wasn't about making money or anything like that. It was just about putting a more complete picture to what had been a big part of my life, but also would have been a big part of, you know, kind of the American business scene for a long time, and with a lot of good leaders, a lot of good people, and products that mattered, a company that mattered.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think you've got to keep going. You know, in other words, I talked to a lot of friends, and I'd say the first thing is you need, you know, Julie, everybody has friends. And when you're CEO of GE, you have a lot of friends, right? But you need extraordinary friends. You know, and you have not the friends that just tell you it's going to be fine, just exactly, you'll be right as we say in Australia. And like, you know, maybe you go into a down cycle and you have 1,200 friends, but you find you have like 17 extraordinary friends, if you're lucky.

I'd say first and foremost, you need extraordinary friends. And I had some extraordinary friends, both in the business world and personally, who stood by me, and that helps. And the second thing is you've got to keep moving. You can't curl up in a ball. And you've got to keep making a contribution. You've got to show up in public, even when you think you're going to be embarrassed or things like that. And you just have to keep moving. You've got to find the ways that you can make a relevant contribution, whether that's to small companies or founders or startups or teaching. And then you just, you've got to think small again. You know, get out of the limelight, go brick by brick, rebuild a house foundation, brick by brick by brick. And you know, I sit here five years later, I did a speaking event in Canada over the weekend, and what you find is just like, you know, you're now a different story. You know, you're a turnaround, right? Or you're a survivor, you're some kind of different story. And there's such a residual goodwill because they remember GE in 2006 or 2012 or 1992 or something like that. And they don't think about the last five years or other things. But the most important thing is you have to find it inside yourself to keep moving. You know, I tell my students, and I've said this for many, many years, which is in your career, you basically answer three questions in your career. It's how fast you can learn, and you just have to learn every day. And I lived a life where I could get smarter every day. Some days I got smarter than others, right? But I could get smarter every day. How much you can give to others, right? Are you really good at picking people, coaching people, making people better, collecting people, connecting, that kind of thing. And then how much shit can you take? Like, can you take a punch? Can you persevere? And you know, I say to my students, like, I can't even tell you how many nights I went to bed a complete failure, right? And just felt like I was just devastated with my own incompetence. And I would wake up the next morning and I'd look in the mirror and I would say, 'You're the best person in the world, I can't believe how good you are,' you know? And you just have to be able to renew yourself. You know, and you have to have this perpetual learning, renewal, perseverance. And typically, people give up before their capability limits them. And those are the three questions you have to answer.

And I think the other thing I talk about, you know, Julie, is just absorbing fear. You know, another word I always have a hard time with, not that I don't agree with it, but I don't know exactly what it means, is transparency. You know, I remember I was in Perth during the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and they were all GE reactors, right, in Fukushima. So I was doing an all-employee meeting with a thousand oil and gas executives. And so I'd been up all night doing a crisis call, and I'm watching CNN, and the scroll on CNN, so there's a helicopter above Fukushima, and the scroll is, you know, 'All GE reactors, GE's in trouble, you know, probably going to have to evacuate Tokyo, maybe even Los Angeles,' blah, blah, blah. Had to end that call to go do an all-employee meeting, right? So would transparency have been to walk into the all-employee meeting and say, 'Hey, you know what, team, we are really screwed, we're in deep trouble, you know, this is really horrible, I haven't slept, you know, if you should have seen CNN, I know, if anyone has any ideas come to the front, but you may want to resign because man, I don't know.' Or is it to say, 'You know, a lot of you have been following what's going on, we've got our best people working on it. Um, yeah, you know, here's the way to think about it, but let's talk about your business, which is working on oil and gas and things like that.' So it's, you know, I always talk about transparency in the context of let's talk about the way things are, and also the way things could be if they were really well run. Like, in other words, let's treat transparency as a complete thought and not just blurting out.

You know, in other words, here's the way things are. Like, as you guys can all see, there's a nuclear disaster in Fukushima. But there's an incredibly technically strong team that's looking at it. The reactor was built in 1967. Our general counsel has gone through the contract that was written at that time, it's incredibly well-structured. We're going to give TEPCO whatever resources we can. You know, there's a lot still to be known, blah, blah, blah. You know, complete the thought versus just blurting out. You know, just to... a lot of people think transparency is taking my burden and giving it to Julie. That's transparency, right?

To complete that thought, the opposite of that is to show up intentionally, which is, here are the facts as we know them, and then, you know, my intention is here, is to discuss this, is to move us forward.

Yeah, that's exactly it. It's exactly the burden swapping. And, uh, is what I've always... you know, it's again, sometimes in my business school class I unteach things that they've been taught. Like, burden swapping is a good thing, or that you have to listen to everybody. That's the other one that I try to teach them. I say, listen, when I introduced a green initiative, clean tech initiative, in GE in 2006, right? And I had 30 top executives in the room, and the vote was 28 to 2 against doing it. And we did it anyhow, right? Because everybody's, you know, people said, 'This is stupid, we're not in business to do this stupid shit,' right? Blah, blah, blah. And I said, 'Hey guys, just get in line or leave. This is time that we drive this, and by the way, we can make money doing it, right? This is not a feel-good.' And it works spectacularly well, right? I also got in trouble when I didn't, you know, Ruth Porat at Morgan Stanley told me to sell commercial real estate before the financial crisis, I didn't listen, I got in trouble. You know, so I listen. I've been on both sides of the trade. I've done great by not listening. I've gotten in trouble by not listening. But I've listened a lot, you know. So here's what I've learned: there's like five people I listen to all the time that are around me, and I never contradict these five people because I trust them, because they always put the company first, right? They always put the company first. And there's a bunch of people I hear them, but because they're selfish and they don't work that hard and they're good at what they do but they're not true hearts, right? And companies are filled with all kinds of people. And, you know, I'm not a person with a big vocabulary, but I learned the meaning of the word 'cacophony,' right? Because that's what companies are like when you're trying to make a decision. It's like all these cymbals going off around you, and, you know, it's hard to make a melody. And that's the bottom line.

100%. You should be... you shouldn't be hosting the podcast, you should be... somebody should be hosting you. You get more... you've got more than many years.

As a CEO, I've been about as brilliant as I was lucky, by which I mean too often I was neither. And that really resonated with me because, you know, as a leader, as a CEO, you have your moments of brilliance, right? There's a reason you're there. And you have your moments of brilliance, sometimes if you're lucky, there's many, sometimes a few and far between depending on the situation. And you have also, you have your moments where you just got lucky, where you listen to the right person at the right time. But it got me thinking, and you know, if we can't rely on our brilliance to show up every day, and if we can't rely on our luck to show up every day, what are the traits or the mindsets or the behaviors that we can rely upon as leaders to show up every day? I've come out here as in my second life and really become a student again, you know, Julie, really become a student again of good companies. You know, I read a lot, I watch a lot, and it's given me a chance to think. And I have to say, like, the company I've really fallen in love with, not me uniquely, but it is Apple, right? And so what's made Apple great? What's made Apple great? It's what I call a first principles company. And that is, in the beginning, they set out to make really great products foundationally. They delight their customers foundationally, right? They drive really real efficiency, like foundationally. And you don't read about them, you know, like lean manufacturing and Six Sigma and the last management idea, blah, blah, blah, you know, you just, they're just, they're just innovative product. You know what? They're not happy with the way Intel or Qualcomm makes semiconductors, they do it themselves, you know. And it's just, they're just so, that's what I call a first principles company. That's actually what Elon did at Tesla. It's actually what Gates did at Microsoft. You know, so if you look at the really great next generation companies, they're really what I call first principles companies. So I think if I was advising, you know, what is it that you can take to the bank today? It's just being really good, just, you know, just be really good at what you do and be comfortable with that, be sanguine about that. And good, you know, good days and bad, and don't fall prey to cycles and fads and other things. And you know, it's just, they don't manage the stock price, they don't watch Jim Cramer on CNBC, you know, they don't do any of those things. And again, it's easy to say, hard to do, but really, I think that's really what I would say. You know, they're just really about the essence of business. Their bureaucracy is very sparse, and they're really dedicated to the principles of technology and what they do. I love the notion of first principles. Yeah, like what are your first principles? And those are the things you can continually come back to, you know, when luck and brilliance and sometimes even courage fail. Yeah, yeah, what are the things you can come back to? Good morning, Boeing, your first principles, you got to make great planes. If you're running, you know, we have, I have 12 CEOs come through my class every year, right? And one was the Delta's kind of the best run American airline, right? He has first principles in terms of how he runs the airline, and it makes a huge difference. And you can see that compared to United or Southwest or the other airlines. So, yeah.

Yeah, so 9/11, the tragedy happened. So at the board meeting on Friday, I was elected CEO and Chairman. On Monday, I did an all-employee meeting to kind of introduce myself. I flew to Seattle Monday night, and then Tuesday morning, 9/11 happened. And so we owned 1,200 aircraft at GE Capital. We had about 50% market share of the aviation sector of aircraft engines. 50%. We insured a big chunk of the World Trade Center through our insurance business. We owned NBC, right? So we owned the biggest network in the U.S. And so we televised without commercials for a week. We had a big write-off on the insurance of the World Trade Center. We had to worry about all the U.S. airlines going into bankruptcy. We had to worry about would people ever fly again, really, all kinds of things. So I mean, it was just like a whirlwind of disaster, right? In addition to two of our employees died. We worried about kind of the safety of our buildings and things like that. There's all kinds of concerns, let's say, that you wouldn't even have thought about beforehand, about physical safety and would there be other attacks and things like that. So yeah, no, it was just kind of like crisis management 101 from like day one. I mean, it really was day one.

So we had like, we had all these like exposure to the airlines because we leased them aircraft. And so every night we would have kind of like these deal reviews to go through, you know, because if the airlines went into bankruptcy, then we would take big write-offs on the airplanes and things like that. So you know, one night it would be, you know, American needs a billion dollars. We needed to buy some of their bonds, which are called EETCs, and we had 48 hours to make a decision, right? So otherwise they were going to go bust. They needed a billion dollars of cash, and we had maybe a dozen people in the room. And I'm there and I said, you know, the only problem is I don't know what an EETC is, right? So there was a vice chairman who was a guy named Dennis Dammerman, who I really loved. And but the guy who ran GE Capital, like I was slowing everything down and he was getting kind of irritable and pissed off. But Dennis, God love him, he would stop and say, okay, we're going to explain this to Jeff, even if it takes another hour. And so Dennis would go up on the board and say, okay, here's what the capital structure looks like, things like that. And then Dennis was really a gruff, he was just a grumpy, gruff, but really super shrewd and smart. And so the other thing that happened, Julie, was because nobody knew that a plane could be used as a missile, right, until 9/11, all the countries in the world had to pass a liability waiver so that we couldn't get sued if there are new terrorists. And so we grounded airplanes until all the countries passed this liability regime. So airplanes around the world were all grounded until this particular liability. Australia was one of the last ones. And so every night we would have to call like the president of the airline or even like the minister of aviation or something like that and say, look, you have 14 of our business, called GCAS, airplanes, you can't fly them tomorrow until you pass this liability regime, right? And so we made calls. And so Dennis would call and he would call like the president of Poland, right? And he said, okay, you have 14 aircraft, you can't fly them tomorrow. You could hear the guy screaming on the other line, you know. And they'll say, you can't fly the planes. And the guy would be screaming, then Dennis would say, hey, [__] you, you can't fly the planes, shut up, you know, blah, blah, blah, hang up. And then the next one was me. I needed to call like the president of Qantas or something like that. But I said, you know, Dennis, you're so good at that, why don't you do the next call? So you take my call because you've got a special skill, you've got a special skill here, special sledgehammer skill going on there. So that's like four days into the job, I'm calling prime ministers of countries, you know, saying that your plane's grounded until you pass an insurance regime that says we won't get sued in case terrorists are in your country ready to fly aircraft into buildings.

It got better over time, but at that moment, I just felt like there were days during that period that I just felt like I couldn't do it. There was just so much, but I kept showing up, you know, I kept a straight face. But I said, you know, Gigi, I need help, you know, I need to know that you guys are with me. And do you have any advice? Can I be doing anything better? And Gigi had like two things, piece of advice. She said, first of all, you're the best, you're awesome, all the things you're doing so far, it's great. She said, second of all, don't call Jack. She said, second of all, you can do this on your own. This is a great test for you. You just keep going. You can do this by yourself. You don't need any help. Just keep going. And that kind of like, you can do it, was exactly what I needed. And she was awesome, right? My early board, they were great and they were very helpful.

I called him a lot over the, particularly in the early years. But it's one of those things where it's an interesting thing about leaders and successors and advice, you know, like some people, you know, my lead director for a lot of years was the ex-CEO of Johnson & Johnson, Ralph Larsen. And Ralph was able to give advice saying, here's what I would do if I were you, right? Jack was incapable of that. Jack's advice was, here's what you should do. Here's what you should do, right? And I knew that about Jack. So if you were going to ask him for advice, he was going to give it to you in a way that was like context-free. It was just do it my way, but not your way, right? He was never able to see life quite that way. Not a positive or negative, that was just not in his wheelhouse. It's just his style, you know. So some people are able to give advice in a way that you can tailor it for somebody in their lifestyle, right, in their frame of view, in their moment, in their time. That wasn't the way he could do it.

Yeah, I think when you look, it's always easy to replace a bum. So first and foremost, you know, it's much easier to be the hero. It's always easier to be the hero, or your listeners. But I think that the key thing is you've got to make it about the environment and not about personalities. You know, you've got to make it about here's what's going on in the world. And because of these changes going on in the world, we've got to change. We've got to do things differently. We've got to do things better. We've got to do things faster. We've got to do this in this way. And it's not about Jeff versus Jack, or it's not about Jack at all. In fact, in many ways, he's irrelevant. This is about, you know, China's growing, or digital's growing, or the environment is more of a concern, or things like that. So I think, Julie, you've got to be willing to peg everything has to be about the changes that are going on in the world. And if you want to stay relevant in the 21st century, and even if you do that, it's still hard, right? Even if you do that, it's still incredibly hard. I see a ton of legacy companies in Silicon Valley that are coming out trying to drive digital transformation, and it's still, they're still way behind, right? And they know the technology is coming, they know they need to change, they know how hard it is. But even with all that, you know, getting the right people, getting the right culture, getting the right environment, getting the right business model is still incredibly difficult. Change is hard. In big companies, change is really hard.

I think it's a great question. I would say I tended to do it more, you know, a little, I would say I leaned 60/40 on fiat versus consensus. So, you know, with 300,000 people, you need a little bit of consensus, but if you did totally consensus, you were screwed, right? So in 2010, we did a huge global initiative that was spectacularly successful and really changed the shape of the company. And it was mainly tops down but had lots of momentum inside the company. And it was a little bit of fiat and a little bit of consensus, but a lot of fiat, right? But it worked. And then I tried to do it with digital, and it didn't work, you know, it didn't work. And it just was just so freaking hard, right? And I think to a certain extent what happens in digital is so many things need to change, right? You need, there's a technical change, there's a mindset change, there's an organizational change, there's a cultural change. But it's so critical to survival. So I think to a certain extent what you have to do is actually reorganize the totality of the company. You can't have big pockets of resistance. You have to break the resistance into smaller. If I had to do over again, I would have kind of decoupled the, I would have actually broken the company down into smaller pockets so I didn't have big pockets of resistance. I would have really broken it down into smaller, smaller organizations so that no one organization could have stopped the momentum. But it's, you know, the question you ask is really, it's actually quite a relevant question for every change initiative that goes on. And at the end of the day, I think the, you know, after years of kind of getting bureaucracies out of the system, I see way too much bureaucracy back into, you know, again, I sit in the U.S. and look, you know, our president's unpopular, politicians are unpopular, you know, we have a baby formula issue in the U.S. Who would have thought, you know, you'd sit here that the, you know, maybe the most successful country in the world over time can't get enough baby formula on the shelves. And we blame the president, United States, you know, we don't blame the companies for not having enough baby formula, but it's the company's fault, right? So it's crazy. So go figure.

I think that can work, you know, I think that can work. I was taking kind of a different approach really, which is, you know, kind of when we were trying to drive the digital initiative, we had a bunch of, let's say, 10 or 20 billion dollar revenue divisions, so they were big. I would have broken them back down into being three or four billion dollar divisions. I would have instead of having, let's say, 10 billion dollar divisions, I would have had 25 billion dollar divisions. And in each one, I would have had their own digital frame, you know, so that you had less bureaucracy, more generation of ideas, and fewer kind of antibodies, you know, antibodies grow in bigger bureaucracies. More ideas, more speed, more capability, you know, being able to do that. So that's what I think, it's just size breeds bureaucracy, bureaucracy breeds antibodies. It's too important to get this right, and you've got to be able to do it. So I'm kind of like on a boat now of like just big organizations have to kind of get after this anti-bureaucracy mode yet again. However you need to take it on, you've got to take it on again and again. I've seen this 20 years ago, I see it again today.

Yeah, no, it's, I think that's, I again, I go back to we've now had like a complete generation of management theory, whereas it has been positive, you know, look, I'm a product of it, right? So I'm not here because of like I have any right to be critical because I'm a product of it. But it's gone too far, right? So I'm into like first principles, anti-complexity, anti-bureaucracy, digital transformation, right? That's kind of what I would get everybody back into, right? If you're running an airline, on-time delivery, premium fare, you know, those are, that's what, not capital allocation and blah, blah, you know, if you're in the aviation business, you're really not in the capital allocation, you know, like I don't think Tim Cook has ever talked about capital allocation. He's talking about great products, great service, you know, that's what he talks about. So I just think, I think we've had a whole generation of professional management, professional investing, private equity, blah, blah, blah. Okay, great. Great. There's something new that's coming. It's going to come in big companies and small. I don't think this is a big company, small company thing. And really sitting in the Valley, I don't think tech's gonna, I don't, you know, it's too much of a bubble here, right? Like I don't sit here and say software's gonna take over the world because people here like California too much. They're too lazy in some ways to take over Alabama or Virginia or something like that. So I still think there's gonna be another wave, industrial wave out there yet to be had, but it's going to be in a different structure than where it is right now.

Yeah, I think that, again, you've got a circle of people that you're listening to views from, so it's kind of like you pick your own board of directors, right? You do the best you can on what I would call risk-reward, right? So you get the best information and data you can on risk-reward. I think a good leader always walks around with a point of view, right? My point of view was market share, markets rule, you know, technology, but when in doubt, go with the market. And then you make a decision and live with the decision that you make, right? And learn from it, but be willing to make it, right? So having a clear north star there that you just mentioned, you know, when in doubt, go with the market. Yeah, I think it's like, I think, you know, sometimes people think their north star will be, okay, we'll see. You're not going to run anything if 'we'll see' is your north star, right? You've got to have some kind of point of view, right? You just have to walk around, and everybody knew that my point of view was like, if we're in a crisis and we get a chance to come out of the crisis with higher market share, we were going to do that. We were going to do that. My CFO knew that, my sales people knew that, my manufacturing people knew that, and we did that. We acted on that, right? Even if it meant taking a little bit more risk, even if it meant kind of, you know, doing things that made some people uncomfortable every now and then, we would do that. So that was the point of view with which we ran the place. My CFO, Keith Sherin, you know, I never made one decision that I didn't ask his opinion on or that I didn't listen to kind of what his perspective was. So there was always kind of a co-pilot that had this voice that was like, you know, he was like the village priest, you know, there was somebody that you would always. And I think it was just, I never panicked. You know, Julie, it's like knowing what to do is kind of like easy, but knowing when to do it is always hard. So it's being deliberative about, you know, kind of like, you know, if you're too late, it's bad, if you're too early, it's bad, but kind of that sense of, okay, we've got 24 hours to make this decision, we've got a month to make this decision, we've got a year to make this decision. In a crisis, you typically have 12 hours to make a decision. And knowing when those 12 hours are, so, you know, those are the ways that you kind of make a decision. And you kind of, you know, I would go entire weeks without reading newspapers sometimes, because like when you know the truth, you don't need to read an interpretation of the truth. I would go home, and I was trying to keep a separation with my family and work, but I could tell that my wife had read like a really crappy article about me. And I'd go home and she just wanted to like go, and I'd say, I don't want to, she'd want to like say that [__] this said this, I should, I don't want to hear it. Just don't say, don't tell me, don't tell me what they said, don't talk about the roads, I just don't want to hear it, you know. And it's just, you just need this kind of sanguine, you need the ability, this peace of mind that sometimes if you're reading about it in real time, you can't keep your wits about you to kind of do the things you need to do to make a clear decision.

Yeah, it's, the last thing I'd say, Julie, is this notion of having conviction. This is another real trick of leadership, which is a good leader's got to have conviction. And you've got to like hear things at the same time, you know, in other words, you got to be able to be like, particularly when you run a big company of hundreds of thousands of people, if they see weakness at all, you lose 50,000 people right away, okay? So you've got to walk into a room and say, we're gonna do China, right, we're gonna do digital. And if you don't, if you show any, if you could walk in the room and say, we're going to do digital, I think, you've lost 50,000 people. So you've gotta say, we're gonna do digital, but you have to like have a little bit of sensory perception with the 15 people that say, but here's how you can do it better, you know, you can do it. And so you've got to be able to have a maximum amount of conviction while still allowing a few new ideas or self-correction in the side door. And that's a real trick that is really hard to do. I'm not sure I always did it well, I always tried to do it well, but it's hard to do, especially in big, big distributed organizations.

That's another good book. And it's really, you know, again, like, you know, what makes Elon Musk great? What makes Elon Musk great, you know, he's so, you know, so think about when he did Tesla, like every electric vehicle was a piece of crap, and he was the only person that really saw that it could be a great car, could be a luxury car, amazing what he did, and it could be a power generating unit, things like that. Personally, I think he's great, by the way, I think he's amazing, and good for everything. You know, look, personally, I wish he wouldn't do Twitter, you know, and I bet he's got 80% of the people that work at Tesla is probably secretly saying, don't do Twitter, you know. But, you know, somebody remove his phone, remove the app, you know, he's Elon Musk, right? So does he keep going forward, does he listen, you know, what does he do? So it's just this incredible point of leadership, which is you really need to have conviction to get anything important done. Leaders who say 'we'll see' fail. I've seen it, I've seen them fail time after time after time. And leaders that can't make a decision fail time after time after time. But if you don't allow a few voices in, you also fail, right? So this notion of acting and listening is kind of a trick.

I'd say a couple things. Like one is, in some way, shape or form, so I'm 66 years old now, you know, in some way, shape or form, I probably thought about leadership every day for the last 40 years, every day. What am I learning? What am I doing? How can I reflect? Every day, you know, so it's such an evergreen kind of learning process. And I think if you want to be good at it, you've got to be willing to inspect it and think about it and dwell on it and stuff like that. And then I would say to your listeners, I'd say like sometimes even when you try and your intentions are good and you work your ass off and you've done everything you know how to do, it just doesn't work the way you want it to, right? Sometimes you can give it a thousand percent effort and do it with love, and it just doesn't work, it doesn't work the way you want it to. And then you hit a fork in the road and you can either, you know, suck your thumb, or you get off your ass and keep going. Keep showing up. Keep showing up. Keep showing up, however big or small.