Jeffrey we werent on a path to greatness. David if a president were to say to you, come in as a cabinet officer, what would you say . Jeffrey im n make great public servants. Woman wou fix your tie, please . David well, people wouldnt recognize me if my tie was fid, but ok. Just leave it this way. All right. 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 onning a private equity firm. How do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebodyick . After 16 years as the ceo of ge, you have just stepped down. Is a big burden off your shoulders now . Jeffrey i do if youre doing the job well, you feel oership over everybody who is a constituency, and you wear that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So, look, i think 16 years is a long time to r one of these companies,d im starting to feel a little bit of decompression, lets say. David so do you think its too long to run a publiclyaded company for someone like you, or anybody . Jeffrey thats a great question, david. I think theres a right time and wrong time, interms of. So a company our size, you need to run it long enough to make a difference, to be able to shape strategy. And its always been our philosophy to gceo tenure. But at the same time, you know, its good to get a new set of eyes onese t. You know, as things change, you develop habits. Are you listening as closely as you need to do . I thinkpersonally, i think 16 years is probably on the outer edge of hong somebody should be running a company like ge. David so you succee fd a legendary busineigure. Was that more of a challenge when you succeed somebody as well known as your predecessor . Jeffreh, if i was going to give anybody advice, buit would be to follow its a lot its a lot easier. I remembern 2000, fortune did a retrospective of the 20th century, the best manager of the previous 100 years was jack welch, right, so you better have some confidence if youre gonna take his job because those are pretty big shoes to fall into. But i loved working with jack, and i was proud to follow him. David when you got the job, it was the result of a 3way process. Jack welch had narrowed it down to you, bob nardelli, and jim mcnerney. Ind it was very public, i for 6 months, maybe a year, and then you were selected. Did you know that you were likely to win . And did you think you were gon win . And when you were told you were gonna win, were you surprised jeffrey you know, so i had been working for ge for about 20 yeae by the time that cam. And anybody who works for the company hinks theyre gonna be ceo of the company, thats weird. You shoughnt feel that way, theres so much luck involved. Theres so much chance and thin like that. So i never reall captivated by that, you know, getting that title. And i remember jack brought each one of us in and said, if you dont get the job, you have to lee. And you know, come on, man. Its like, oid stay, you know, it and sobut it wasyou have to recapture that moment in time, you know, david. In other words, i think what you would say, whould say is 2016, 2017 is so different than 2000. We were at the peak of the bubble economy and things like that. In quite as public a way. David before you got the job, you grew up in cincinnati area. And ather was at ge. Was that correct . What was his job . Tffrey so my dad worked aircraft engines business for his whole career, almost 40 years. So i kinof grew up around faies, and i grew up around the technology business. I had the classic kind of middleclass education, midwestern cities that you can havecincinnati, ohio. Davi right. So you were a football star there. Is that right . Jeffrey i was a good athlete. S reallyyou know, when i was in high school, if you said, what are you gonna do . I would have said, im gonna b david i said that, too, until i was about 8 or 9 years old, then i realized it wasnt gonna work. But you were older than me. Jeffrey i played with a guy jeffrey i remember in high school playing against a guy that got a scholarship to ohio state. And i was an offensive lineman. I didnt block him once all night. And i said, ok, the nfl career may be out. I better take care of my math my math skills may be mo important. David did the big ten come after you or Something Like that . Jeffrey maybe like so i was good enough to play for the worst team in a big league. So i could have gone to northwestern or vanderbilt or sething like that. Yoknow, i was a. I was on the upper end of mediocre, lets say. So that was kind of my karma, if you wil david all right, but you chose to go to dartmouth, an ivy leahool. And you played football at dartmouth. Jeffrey i played football for 4 yearat dartmouth. And that was really how i got there. I was a recruit. I hadnt really thought about going to an ivy league school. I got to seerough playing football. And that was really my entree into going to college. David so you went to dartmouth. Were you good enough to be in the nfl after dartmouth . Jeffrey maybe as a sideline reporter, Something Like that. After you graduated, you went to proctor and gamble. Jeffrey uhhuh. I show up at proctor and gamble on my first day, duncan hines cake mix, and sitt the desk right next to me is Steve Ballmer. Ok. So Steve Ballmer micros, steve and i have been friends since we were 22 years old. And we were ho employees, i would say. You know, we were like a dilbert cartoon. We werewe were incorrigible, at we would stay up tooat night, all that stuff. David did he tell you he had an offer to go work in for this small compaeattle . Jeffrey steve tried to describe to me what he was doing. And i said, you know, do you ha c a backup plan just e this doesnt work out . Outlook, Desktop Software what could tt possibly who could ever want that, you know . Vid so you want to Harvard Business school. After Harvard Business school, you went to general electric. Jeffrey yep. David now, why did you pick ge . Jeffrey you know, there was no conction to my dad or anything like that, but i knew ge was a good place to learn and train. And i said, hey, im gonna go there and stay 5 years, right, and see what happens. I joined the plastics business wh i joined ge and that kind of just i was in field sales and marketing and things likat, and that was really how my career stted. I always tell people, like they say, how do you put up with stress . And i say, well, ys know, my first job lling plastics in places like detroit, and i would sit a a shoneys restaurabreakfast having dry heaves, getting ready to sell a pricing increase. Walk aooss the street, saying god, i hope i dont die today. You know, on those experiences, david all rht, well, it worked out, and you went to a series of positns. Jeffrey i did classic ge appliances, ge plastics, ge health care. David so you are announced as the ceo, and, in fact, you took the job, and then a couple of days later, 9 11 happens. So what did you think was going to happen to ge and your career . Jeffrey oh, gosh, david. So, you know, it was an amazing time, you know, and year when we go through 9 11, i think of the tragedy for the country, which is still very real. At that moment in time, we owned 1,200 aircraft, we owned nbc. We werethe biggest business in ge in 2001 was insurance. People dont know that. O so we had reinsuranthe world trade center. And it was just it was a panic, really. So, you know, we went dark on nbc for 3 days. We had to take more than 1 billion write off. David dark meaning you had nodvertising . But the most important thing was what happened in aviation with the leased aircraft. So we would have like nightly calls. And the vice chairman at that time was a guy you know, dennis dammerman, whos a great guy. Hece passed away, but i loved dennis. We would have a teleconference at, lets sa 9 00 at night. And guys would call in and say, ok, yeah, e x is going to go bankrupt tomorrow unless we buy a billion dollars of doublee tcs. Ok. And i would say, dennis, whats a doublee tc . And hed try to explain it to me. And id say, well, what would you do . Hed saygot to do it. Ok, lets go, you know. And it was night after night of this airline bailouts. So we were shutting down airlines around the world because the country had passed terrorism insurance. And so youreking the. So that was like 30 days, right. And then im finally thinking im in fairfield, and im thinking, ok, the suns gonna rise again. Phone rings. Nebob wrights on the p he needs to speak to you right away. David bob wri it was jeffrey ran nthose times. And he said tom brokaw just received anthrax in the mail. Tom another infection, this time at nbc news in rockefeller plaza. They shut down 16 square blocks around 30 rock. What do you want me do . I said, bob, let me put you on hold just for a second. Im just ahh you know, just like. So that was my first that was my first month. You know, that was. David well, you got through that. And ultimately, though, a number of yea later, another crisis arose, and that is the financial crisis of 2007, 2008. And it was very severe. Jeffrey i went to work in 1982. I became c in 2001. If you were an american businessperson during that period of time, you had neenr seen a terrorist you know, youd seen recessions and stuff like that, but youd neve useen something that wmaginable. 9 11 was unimaginable. Global financial crisis was unimaginable. And i think it made all of us smarter about risk. The day Lehman Brothers went bankrupt actually wasnt the worst day of the financial crisis. It was actually the day Washington Mutual went down because all the bondholders got wiped out. The equity gets wiped out, the bondholder get something. Jeffrey the bondholders get something. Vid there, the bondholders got nothing as well. Jeffrey so my cfo came in that day and gid, hey, we are going raise equity, right, as much as we can get. We called goldman s up, we said, ok, whats the largest secondary in the history of the world . And they saidin those days, maybe 15 billion. I said, ok, wer were gonna do it monday. This was on a friday. We havleconference with our board on saturday morning. You know, nobodys there, just my cfo d i, but all the Board Members are calling in. Hey, guys, on monday we are going to go raise some equity. You know, you could just hear silence, ok, other end of the line. And roger penske, who i love, was on the board for a ng time. Roger, first guy in says, lets get the money. So then david this was the weekend washington was voting on tarp, they were desperatying to find a buyer at wachovia, and 7 banks went bankrupt in europe that sunday morning. And i had to walk from my office to get to 50 people to make the call. Do we go t next day . And it was the single most stressful you know, i kind of just wanted to say, iant my mommy, you kn, right now. Can ican i phone can i phone a friend . So i walk in and say were not going tomorrow. Man defeain the house for the massive emergency economic rescue plan. Jeffrearp fails, the markets down 1,000 points that monday. We waited 48 hours, we raised 16 billion. And that was the moment in time that we were totally safe. David so you were never worried that ge would die . O jeffrey no. Davi jeffrey and i think, you know, looking back, david, i think the lesson for everybody in any crisis the people that move first in uncertainty, you know, thats how at least in that crisis, thats how you became safe. David or call your mother if you can. Jeffrey xactly. David you inherited a very Large Industrial conglomerate, you could call it, maybe the largesdustria. And then you began to reshape it jeffrey yeah, so if you just go back, we werly a conglomerate. So we went from nbc to pet insurance, jet engines, plastics. We were kind of a classic conglomerate. And i thinkyou know, in our business, a littleit different then were kind of in the permanent hold business, right. So at the end of the day, what i wanted to do was construct around the things we really viewed as being our Core Competencies as time goes on, where we can generate a good return, wherivwe could build competadvantage. We were the biggest provider of longterm care, of reinsurance. I looked at thd said, these are not, you know a, i dont like the industries theyre in, b, not very good at it, and we run it the wrong way, lets go. So i started chopping away. David ge appliances. Was that hard to sell . Lw jeffrey so again, is feel like its good if youre your own activist. And its always goyou ask yourself the question, do we run this business better than anybody else, or could somebody run it better than we could . In the case of appliances, it was a classic Capital Allocation because we werent going to globalize the platform. We didnt want to spend the money to be biin china. We didnt want to spend the money to be big in africa. I worked in appliances. I wouldnt have been ceo if i hadnt spent 4 yearnein the appliance busi. So i had great affecti but we were just chopping wood. We werent on a path to greatness. And we could take that capital and put itr n our energy businessiation business. David what about Nbc Universal . Your predecessor bought that business, and it wasrofitable. Didnt you like hanging out with tv stars and movie star you didnt like that . Ffrey so good industry,od team. And we generated a good return for the company in the time we had it. But here was my value added with nbc. Make better shows. David so just tell them to make better shows. Ffrey make betteryou know. As a company, we werent adding a lot of value, number one. Number two, you could seththe industry was goinugh this kind of change. We always did, as a board, strategic reviews nbc. When we sold it, that really is true today was, we believe that the ability to really preserve Pricing Power can only be captured by those people that both own the pipes and the content. And we had no interest in owning the pipes, right. So, and 3, i would say, unless youre in an existential way willing to go into digital delivery, youre gonna get trumped. Now, the one other point id ke, david, is one i missed completely is the theme park business. W ride, the mummy, costs 100 llion bucks. You say, how could one ride cost 100 million buck i missed it completely. It turned out to be maybe the only business in media that has sustainable competitive advantage is the theme park busiss because it takes capital, you can build a good spirit of the people, and things like that. That david when you go to universal parks now, you can get in for free stl . Jeffrey you know, maybe so. When we bought it, i called the guy that ran it, a guy named tom williams, great executive, and i said, lets just do a walking tour auniversal. I want to see how it works. We get to the mummy ride this is 2003. He says, myou want to ride on tmy ride . I said, yeah, thatd be great. So we go up. Theres a 3hour line. They put me i break in the line. Im in the first seat. They dont let anybody sit with me. You know, ive just been voted the permanent jerk of the year. David now, what you tried to do as ceo of ge was globalize the business, youve said. Well, why would you have to globalize ge . Wasnt it already a very Global Company . Jeffrey uh, no. Actually, in 1982, we were 80 in the united states. By 2001, we were still 70 inside the unid states. And what people forget, david, i mean, i think you see it, but, you know, the decade of the nineties was kind of the quintessential american decade. I mean, this place wasooming. And really, it was easy to kind of grow your companies. So we really werent despite the fact we were an old company, we werent as global as we needed to be. And that was really, i think, one of the Central Missions of the Leadership Team over the past 15 years. And i would argue today we are maybe the best Global Company of any multinaonals, in terms of were 70 outside the united states. We have a very strong footprint in any country ttters. David why were the emerging markets so important to you . Jeffrey again, arithmetic. I theres two ways to globalize. One is to go to washington dc and argue for trade deals, go to davos and think you can cut a deal. The other way is to hire 10,000 people in a country and say, lets g lets go win the customer. Lets go. Thats always been the approach that weve taken, you know. I would say were good in china because we understand the 5year plans. We built a strong team. We go outside of shanghai and beijing to go into the country. And we very much see every country were in from the bottom up. David one of the things you tried to do was change the culture of ge. What was the cd ture that you inherid you were part of and how did you try to change it and how succesas it to change the culture . Jeffrey a company like ge is study in how do you make scale. How do you make size an advantage and not a disadvantage, right. Because inherently, size means bureaucracy. Theres just nothing theres no two ways to get around it, right. 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 youre vastly more global, you reallyboant have people in on making a decision for brazil. You just cant. So we had to become more decentralized, you have to become more riskbased. So in other words, i say yes, not because its safe, but because were right, we make this much money, and if were wrong, we lose this much money. You ask me to invest in a Nuclear Facility in india, i say no, because if youre right, you make 7 million, and if youre wrong, you lose 7 trillion, you know. So you learn to get you put bigger leaders into the field, and i think thats the only way you can survive at the moment in time, you know, we live in today. David why did you want to move your headquarters, and how did you pick boston . Jeffrey we were on 570 lexington avenue for 40 years, and then we moved to fairfield, connecticut. And we moved to fairfield, cnecticut really because our executives lived in greenwich anthe taxes were zero. For about 10 years, i wanted to be in a city. Theres somethingand not that im in the office that much, but theres something about being able to walk out the door, see a customer, see an investor, see whats going on, the vibrancy of a city that you dont have you know, would be in my office in fairfield and i would look out the window, and deer running for their lives as they were crossing. And it was idyllic, it was beautiful, but there was nothing going on, really and i had an office that was probably as bthe first house i owned. And i could really crawl in that office and just sit there for like 3 1 2 years and nobody wld ever kind of is he in there . I dont know. Thought it was important to be in the city, to modernize th