David i dont consider myself a journalist. And nobody else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer, even though i have a day job of running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebody tick . David after 16 years as the ceo of ge, you have stepped down. Is a big burden off your shoulders now . Jeffrey i do think if you are doing the job well, you feel ownership over everyone in the constituency, and you wear that 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Look, 16 years is a long time, i am starting to feel a little bit of decompression. David do you think it is too long to run a publicly traded company for someone like you . Jeffery that is a good question, david. I think there is a right time and wrong time in terms of doing it. Accompany our size, you need to run it long enough to make a strategy. , shape it has always been our philosophy to give a ceo tenure, but at the same time, it is good to get a new set of eyes on these things. As things change, you develop habits. Are you listening as closely as you need to do . Personally 16 years is the outer , edge of how long somebody should be running a company like ge. David you succeeded a legendary business figure. Was that more of a challenge when you succeed somebody as well alone is your predecessor well known as your predecessor . Jeffrey yes, if i was going to give anyone advice, it would be to follow a bum. It is a lot easier. Fortune did a retrospective of the 20th century, and the best manager of the previous 100 years was jack welch, so you better have some confidence if you are going to take this job, because those are pretty big shoes. But i loved working with jack. I was proud to follow him. David before you got the job, you grew up in the cincinnati area. Your father was at ge, is that correct . What was his job . Jeffrey my dad worked in the aircraft engines business for his whole career, almost 40 years. I grew up around factories, the technology business. I had the classic kind of middleclass education, Public High School in one of the most missed western midwestern cities you can have cincinnati, ohio. , david you were a football star, right . Jeffrey i was a good athlete. In high school if you asked me what are you going to do, i would have said i would be a professional football player. David i said that until i was eight years old or nine years old and realized it wasnt going to work, but you were older than me. Jeffrey i remember playing against a guy who got a scholarship to ohio state. I was in offensive lineman, and i did not block him once all night. Nfl is not going to work out, my math skills might be more important. David you chose to go to dartmouth, an Ivy League School, and played football for four years at dartmouth. Jeffrey i played football for four years at dartmouth. I did not imagine going to an Ivy League School i got to see , it playing football. That was my entree into going to college. David were you good enough to be in the nfl . Jeffrey maybe as a sideline reporter. If you like that. David after you graduated, you went to proctor and gamble. David yes 2 firsty i show up in my day, and sitting at the desk next to me is steve ballmer. Steve ballmer for microsoft, we have been friends since we were 22 years old. We were horrible employees, i would say. We were like a dilbert cartoon. We were incorrigible, we would stay up too late at night, all that stuff. David did he tell you to go to work for this company in seattle . Jeffrey steve tried to describe to me what he was doing. I said, do you have a backup plan in case it doesnt work . Desktop software, what could that possibly who could ever want that . David after Harvard Business school, you went to general electric. Jeffery yes. David why did you pick ge . Jeffery there was no connection to my dad or anything like that but i knew ge was a good place to learn and train. I said i will go there and stay five years and see what happens. I joined the plastics business when i joined ge. I kind of just i was in field sales, marketing, things like that. That was really how my career started. They sayl people how do you put up with the , stress . My first job was selling plastics in detroit, and i would sit in the shoneys restaurant at breakfast having dry heaves getting ready to sell a pricing price increase, go across the street and like god, i hope i dont die today. On those experiences david it worked out. Jeffery yeah, it did. I did classic ge appliances, ge plastics, ge health care. David you are announced as ceo and took the job, and then 9 11 happens. What did you think . What is going to happen to ge and your career . Jeffery oh, gosh david. It was an amazing time. Every year when we go through 9 11, i think of the tragedy for the country, which was so very real. At that moment in time, we owned 1200 aircraft, nbc, the biggest in 2001 wasge insurance. People dont know that. We had reinsurance on the world trade center. It was a panic. We went dark on nbc for three days. We had to take more than 1 billion write off. David meeting you had no advertising . Jeffrey no advertising. The most important thing would be what happened in aviation. We would have nightly calls, the vice chairman was a guy you know, dennis, he was a great guy and i love him. We would have a teleconference at 9 00 at night. Guys would call in and say, airline x is going to go bankrupt tomorrow. This unless we buy 1 billion of wtc. I would say, dennis, what is that . He would try to explain it to me. I said, what would you do . He said we have to do it. Ok, lets go. It was night after night of this airline bailouts. , we were shutting down airlines around the world because the country had not passed terrorism insurance. So we were making these decisions. That was like 30 days. And then im finally thinking im in fairfield thinking the sun will rise again, phone rings. Bob bright is on the phone. He says i need to speak to you right away. He said tom brokaw just received anthrax in the mail. Another infection, this time at nbc news in rockefeller plaza. Jeffrey Rudy Giuliani is in the elevator, they shut down 16 square blocks. This is all around 30 rock what , do you want me to do . Jeffery i said bob, let me put you on hold for just a second. [laughter] jeffery that was my first month. David you got through that. Ultimately a number of years later, another crisis arose, that is the financial crisis in 2007, 2008. It was very severe. Jeffrey i went to work in 1982. If you were an American Business person during that period, you had never seen the terrorists coming. You had seen recessions, but you had never seen something that was unimaginable. 9 11 was unimaginable. Global financial crisis was unimaginable. And i think it made all of us smarter about risk. Today Lehman Brothers went bankrupt was not the worst day of the financial crisis. It was actually the day Washington Mutual went down because all the bondholders got wiped out. David usually when somebody goes down the equity gets wiped out and usually the bondholder get something. But this time the bondholders got nothing as well. Jeffrey my cfo said we are going to raise equity, as much as we can get. We called Goldman Sachs and said what is the largest secondary in the history of the world, in those days maybe 15 billion. I said ok, we are going to go 15 billion, were going to do it monday. This was friday. We have a teleconference with the board saturday morning. Nobody is there, my cfo and i, but all the Board Members are calling in. Hey guys, on we are going to go monday raise some equity. You could just hear silence on the other end of the line. And roger penske, who i love, he was on the board for the longtime does a long time. He was the first guy in, says lets get the money. This was the weekend washington was voting on tarp. They were trying to buy what cobia 7 what wachovia and seven banks went bankrupt in europe that morning. I had to walk to my office to make the call. It was the single most stressful i kind of just want to say, i want my mommy, you know . Can i phone a friend . [laughter] jeffery so i walk in and say we are not going tomorrow. The seat in the house for the massive emergency economic rescue plan. Jeffrey tarp fails, the market is down 1000 points that monday. We wait 48 hours, we raised 16 billion. That was the moment in time when we were totally safe. David you were never worried that ge would die . Jeffrey no, the lesson for everybody in any crisis is that the people who move first in uncertainty, at least in that crisis, that is how you became safe. David or call your mother if you can. [laughs] jeffrey exactly. David when you go to universal parks, you can get in free . Jeffery i called the guy who ran it and said lets eat a walking tour, i want to see how you ran it. We go up and there is a three hour line. I break in the line. I am in the first seat. They dont let anybody sit with me. I thought, oh my gosh, i am jerk of the year. You know . One permanent jerk of the year. David you inherited a very Large Industrial conglomerate. May be the largest industrial conglomerate. Then you began to reshape it. You sold things that were part of ges history. Jeffery lets just go back. We were really a conglomerate. We went from nbc to pet insurance, jet engines, plastics. We were kind of a classic conglomerate. And i think in our business, a little bit different, we are in the permanent hold business. So at the end of the day, what i wanted to do was construct around the things we viewed as our core competencies, where we can generate good return and build competitive advantage. We were the biggest provider of longterm care, of reinsurance. I look at those and said a, i dont like the industries we are in b, we are not very good at it , and run it the wrong way, so i start chopping away. David ge appliances, is that hard to sell . Jeffery again, i always feel like it is good if you are your own activist, and it is always good if you ask yourself the question, do we run this business better than anyone else or can someone run it better than we could . In the case of appliances, it was a classical Capital Allocation because we were not going to globalize the platform. We did not want to spend the money to be big in china or africa. I worked in appliances. I would not have been ceo if i had not spent four years in the appliances business. I have great affection and i loved the brand, so i had great affection for it, but we were just chopping wood. We were not on a path to greatness. We could take that capital and put it in our energy business. Our Aviation Business. David what about Nbc Universal . Your predecessor bought that business and it was profitable. Didnt you like hanging out with tv stars and movie stars . You didnt like that . Jeffery good industry, good team. We generated a good return for the company and the time we had it, here was my value added with nbc. Make better shows. David just tell them to make better shows. Jeffery as a company we were , not adding a lot of value. Number two, you could see the industry was going through this kind of change. Board,ys did, as a strategic reviews at nbc. One of our theories in 2010 when we sold it is we believe the ability to preserve Pricing Power can only be captured by those people that both own the pipes and content. We had no interest in owning the pipes. Three, i would say unless you are in an existential way willing to go into digital delivery, you will get trumped. Other i miss point completely was the theme park business. A new ride, the mummy, costs 100 million. I missed it completely. It turned out to be the only business in media that has sustainable competitive advantage is the theme park business, because it takes capital. That was the one i got wrong. David when you go to universal parks now, you can get in for free still . Jeffrey maybe. [laughter] jeffery you know when we bought , it, i called the guy who ran it and said, lets just do a walking tour. I want to see how it works. We get to the mummy ride. This is he says, you want to 2003. Ride on the mummy ride . I said yeah, that would be great. We go up. There is a three hour line. They put me i break in the line. I am in the first seat. They dont let anybody sit with me. I am saying, oh my god, i am jerk of the year. You know . I have just been voted the permanent jerk of the year. What you try to do is the ceo of ge was globalize the business. Wasnt already a very Global Company . Jeffery no. 1992, we were 80 in the united states. By 2001, we were 70 in the united states. I think you see it, but the decade of the 1990s was the quintessential american decade. This place was booming. Really it was easy to grow your company. So we really were not, despite the fact we were an old company, we were not as global as we needed to be. That was one of the Central Missions of the Leadership Team over the past 15 years. I would argue today we are the best Global Company of any multinationals. We are 70 outside the united states. We have a very strong footprint. David why were emerging markets so important to you. Jeffrey arithmetic. There are two ways to globalize. You can go to washington, d. C. And argue for trade deals, try to cut a deal. The other way is to hire 10,000 people and say, lets go and win the customer. That has always been the approach we have taken. I would say we are good in china because we understand the fiveyear plans. We built a strong team. We go outside of shanghai and beijing to go into the country. We very much see that every country we are in from the bottoms up. David one of the things you tried to do was change the culture of ge. What was the culture you inherited and you were part of, and how did you try to change it. How successful was it to change the culture . Jeffrey a company like ge is a study in how you make scale, size and advantage, not a disadvantage. Because inherently, size means bureaucracy. There is just nothing and there are no two ways to get around it. The company i grew up in was very process driven and very centralized. You could do that because we are basically an american company, but when you are vastly more global, you cant have people in boston making a decision for brazil, you just cant. So we had to become more decentralized, and when you have to do that you become more riskbased. So in other words, you asked me to invest in a gas turbine power plant in nigeria and i say yes, not because it is safe, but because we are right, we make this much money, and if we are wrong, we lose this much money. You ask me to invest in a Nuclear Facility in india and i say no, because if youre right you make 7 million, and if you are wrong, you lose 7 trillion, you know . So you learn to develop managers that are more riskbased and put leaders into the field and that is the only way you can survive in the moment in time we live in today. David what would you say are the one or two most important lessons you got out of being the ceo of ge . Jeffrey the future always comes, nervous laughter is a bad strategy. So i think this notion that the future always comes. David why did you want to move your headquarters and how did you pick boston . Jeffrey we were on lexington avenue for 40 years, then we moved to fairfield, connecticut. We moved there, really because , our executives lived in greenwich and the taxes were zero. For about 10 years, i wanted to be in the city. I just think there is something, and not that i am in the office that much, but there is something about being able to walk out the door see a , customer, see an investor, the vibrancy of the city. When i would be in my office in fairfield and i would look out the window, i could see the merit parkway and deer running for their lives. It was idyllic, it was beautiful, but there was nothing going on. I had an office that was probably as big as the first house i owned. I could crawl in that office and sit there for 3. 5 years and nobody whatever kind of is he in there . I dont know. I thought it was important to be in the city, modernize the company, be in the flow of ideas and in a place where we are important. And boston has been awesome. Boston is a great place. David you are very happy with it . Jeffery yeah. Look high tech, good schools, great community, but the thing about boston that people dont understand is that it has a chip on its shoulder. It is a talented town. Good sports teams, competitive, in your face attitude in boston that i also think is quite healthy for our company. David lets talk about government. You chaired eight president ial task force for president obama and later for president trump. Do these president ial task forces do much that anybody can observe . Jeffrey i think it is always important to serve, but i think in the era we are in right now , it is difficult for a group of Business Leaders to impact much. David if the president , president obama, the current or future president were to say you have a terrific career behind you, now you should serve your country. Come in as a cabinet officer. What would you say . Jeffrey i would make this comment with trepidation, say i am not sure Business People make great public servants. [applause] jeffrey i said that before president trump, but i was honored to serve president obama. I would watch my colleagues, and i think guys like you and me are used to saying here is what you should do do this. The nature of that process is here is what i would do if i were you, here is the way i would do it if i were you, and we are not always that good at context. Unless you get context, it is hard to understand the dynamics of public service. David when you are the ceo of ge, it is very intense. What do you do to relax . Jeffrey i really feel blessed in that i basically love my family. I love my wife. I always say david do you find that unusual in the Business World . Jeffery one daughter, one line to and i used that describe it. Wife,ghter, one one company. I said i realized that is not the french way. [laughter] jeffrey i like playing golf. I like to read. I like hiking. One of the things i trained myself as i have always been able to lead in the moment. I have been able to separate different things, even though there is pressure. In 2011, the Fukushima Nuclear disaster took place, and a couple of the reactors were ours. It was terrifying. I was on a teleconference, we dont know what is going on. All we could see was the cnn helicop