YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Immelt

lines on the record: 64
first: 2021-03-12
most recent: 2021-03-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh, I think the importance of speed. I just think sometimes when you work at a big company, you never feel the urgency the way you need to. And what I see in Silicon Valley, what they get right is they just move quickly. They make mistakes, but they don't wallow in their mistakes. They just keep moving. I wish sometimes, Barry, that I had worked for like 20 years. And before I became CEO, I took maybe a three year sabbatical in Silicon Valley and then came back and became CEO. I would have run the place differently than I did, I think.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people just give up, right? It's not because they're not smart enough. They just give up. But you also have to be willing to give back to others if you want people to follow you. So how much can you learn? How much can you take? How much will you give? Answer those three questions and you can start your career.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think stay curious is the sole attribute that every successful person I've ever met has, whether it's Jeff Bezos or Fred Smith. I could go down the list of great people I've known. I just think curiosity is such an important part of being a lifelong learner and being a lifelong learner is really critical. I say in my class when I teach at business school, I said everybody in that room has the capability to be CEO of a Fortune 500 company, right? But you have to ask yourself kind of three questions. How fast can I learn? How much can I take? And how much will I give? By how much can I take is you're going to get punched in the nose so many times.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've read over the last oh gosh, six months, a few books on the reconstruction in the US after the Civil War, just as some of the seeds of some of the racial challenges we have today, those have been good. And then I still read novels. I'm reading all of, there's a guy named CJ Box that writes about a game warden in Wyoming called Joe Pickett. So I mix history and novels and try to learn, but I'm an avid reader and like to, you know, I love to read.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's see my all time favorite is Truman by McCullough because of it's kind of this great American story that any person could be president. And I thought that was remarkable. I love that one. I read a lot of military history because I think it's the best corollary to business because military history is a subject of failure. Like whoever fails the least wins and sometimes business feels like that.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I had two mentors. The first one was the leader of the plastics business when I was a young manager. It was a gentleman named Glenn Heiner. And he was, you know, what it showed me, what Glenn showed me was that a leader could be respectful and tough at the same time. And it was good to see in him. And then later in my career, one of the vice chairmen was a gentleman named John Opie. And John was really operationally really sharp. And I love both those guys and learned so much from them. On the board, I always liked Shelly Lazarus was a board member for a long time. And I always very much enjoyed talking with her. And if I had a problem or something on my mind.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so we're doing Amazon Prime show called Tell Me Your Secrets. My wife and I like mysteries, and this is really a mystery. And it's a fun watch for about halfway through, but that's kind of what we do on podcasts. You know, I like Stan McCrystal's podcast, no turning back. I did free economics. I've always been kind of, I've always liked the different angle of free economics takes place. And I think in the course of launching the book, I've found some new podcasts that I'm going to go back and listen to. So yeah, but to your point, there's probably nobody that's benefited more from the pandemic than Netflix has.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. And again, that's what I try to do is just tell this story. In other words, what I wanted to do is just start on day one and end the day I walked out the door and talk about my colleagues, the decisions we made, and let people just have a full set of facts. Look, there's not a day that doesn't go by that I don't think about the company. I know some people feel like I let them down. I get that. But by the same token, look, I work with some great people. We always did our best. And what I try to do in the book is just tell a complete story and let other people judge who was good, who was bad. And just let it speak for itself. That's really what I try to do with the book.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the succession didn't work away any of us wanted. So I guess what I wanted to do with the book is show that we got more right than we got wrong. We did a lot of good work as a team, and I didn't want that to get lost. And at the same time I think in this generation, all leadership is crisis leadership. And Lord knows, we work through more than our fair share. So I felt like other readers and other leaders could get something out of the book”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, look I mean, I think what I wanted to do again in the book was to provide context. So over sixteen years, we've generated more earnings and cash flow than the previous one hundred ten years combined. We were leaders in the industries we were in. We developed good team. There's probably more than 30 people that work for me that went on to run Fortune 500 companies, public companies. And we had good initiatives, whether it's globalization or digitization. I could go down the list. On the flip side, our price earnings ratio went from 50 to 15. So the stock didn't work the way any of us wanted. We didn't get value as we went through the transition of G capital.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later. So I own my share of the blame and all those. And it's hard to get it right, particularly given kind of the complicated world we live in today.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, look, I mean my transition clearly didn't go the way any of us had planned. It was it was a little bit rushed, I would say. There were certainly problems in markets that I left behind. But I take two other things kind of hurt that process. One was my successor, who's a good guy, a guy that I supported and really thought could do the job. He had to come in and make a lot of fast decisions, and that didn't play to his strength. And I would say the board was in a little bit of disarray as well. So if you add in tough markets, not playing to somebody's strengths and a little bit of disarray on the board, that's a chemistry that just doesn't work. I go back to when I took over, look, I had fast decisions to make for sure. I was probably a little bit more skilled or more willing to make those decisions, but I had a really stable and mature board, and that wasn't the case probably 17 years ago.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But again, I think external perspectives are always good. And firms like McKinsey they just have good people and they can bring good perspectives to your decision making.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think we used our fair share. I always think it's good to get an external perspective. They shouldn't be here to operate the company. They're here to give you a perspective. I never like to rely on one group or another. I like to mix of different perspectives. But I think there's always room to get an outside view. My sense today is the largest clients for consultants are really private equity. And some of the people that are in kind of the serial acquisition business, and I think that's a place where consultants can be of most use, where you basically have a financial firm that has capital, that wants to make an investment, they want to get market data and insight and consultants can really provide tremendous value there. So their business model has evolved as”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“hydrocarbons to renewables that takes place over decades. It's not going to take place in a year or two. And GE should participate in that.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, look, I agree. I still think our power business is a good business. I think it's being well run today, but it wasn't well run. We had some of the wrong leaders in place for a while, and I own that. But my sense is they're it's a good team now. With wind energy, they built in excess of a $15 billion business with gas turbines. They still have a very strong position as well as new grid technologies. I think the challenging place in the power space today is solar because the equipment makers in solar lose money and the only people that earn money are kind of in the project finance side. And so I think in order to be more successful there, G has to kind of invest more on the project finance side and solar. But look, a third of the world's still... Don't have electricity and there's going to be a real transition from”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In other words, they're going to continue to be a country on the move. The European Union does more trade in China than they do in the US. You know, there's just all kinds of statistics you can look at. So my hope is for the Biden administration to be very forceful on creating a level playing field. But my hope is that we don't disengage.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I think there's everything to be said that in the past, certainly, intellectual property was critical and there are challenges that are put in front of you for sure. But Barry, G had a $4 billion healthcare business in China. There was more profitable than it was in the US. We had higher market share in turbines in China than we had in Germany. We had 75% market share of aircraft engines in the country where more planes are being purchased than any other country in the world. So I'm not saying to be naive and I'm not saying not to be careful. This is going to be a different place in 10 or 15 or 20 years than it is right now.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'd just say again there's a military context that's important that I'm not necessarily the best to speak about. But from an economic standpoint, there's no going back. China is going to be as big as the US. Their economic influence is huge. Our allies trade with them as much as they trade with us. The market is vast for most things American companies do. And we had to learn how to compete there or we learn how to compete against them, but they're a factor. And one of the things that worries me is that when I see my students at Stanford or I see young people, they feel like they don't have to compete in China. They feel like that the American government can protect them or China doesn't play by the right rules and all this conversation. I think that's bad, right? My generation had to learn how to”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so global leaders had to be changing in order to make progress. And one of the parts of that chapter is the discussion on China”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I try to describe this in the sense of a big change initiative, but a change initiative that basically was one where we had to kind of rewire our frame of thinking. And this is a place where size and scale actually can be helpful, but only if you're empowering the front line. And so we went through a real change process inside the company to empower frontline leaders around the world gave them capability and investment to win in the countries that they're in. And I also talk in that chapter just about the way globalization was changed, that in 2000, everybody talked about doing trade deals. By 2010, there was no more discussion about trade deals. Protectionism was everywhere. I always tell people that President Trump didn't invent protectionism. He just Americanized it.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“we retooled a lot of our training programs and systems and the ways we communicated just to focus on connection. And really what we were trying to do was beef up the let's say the software around the company so that we felt like we were getting more fluid communication, that people were attached to each other. And so that's, I think, what's Chapter six in the book, which is really talking about at the core of any culture is connection and the extent to which people feel connected to their leaders or feel connected to each other. That's how you make a big company small. You make a big company small by having people see other people and not org charts or financial metrics or advertisements or other things. And that's what we Try to describe in chapter six”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So right after the financial crisis, I was really kind of burnout and I was trying to remotivate myself. And one of the things I decided to do was just been more time connecting with people. So I began kind of a weekend, one weekend every month I would fly a leader in and we would have dinner on a Friday night and then spend five or six hours on a Saturday without phones ringing. And I did this for eight years. And it was just a way to connect.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we basically did the chapter titles last after really seeing here are all the stories and what I try to do Barry for the reader was kind of put them in my shoes on how we made the decisions we made, what decisions we made, but also how I felt. When I was uncertain, when I was certain, when I was wrong, those kinds of things. I think we basically told a story and then we sat back and said, okay, here's what people can benefit from. Here's what people can learn.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, so I decided to write a book in the second half of twenty eighteen. I hired a co writer, a woman named Amy Wallace. She spoke to 75 people. We decided to write the book more or less chronological. And I had a few of my colleagues kind of writing it side by side contemporaneously. So I took kind of an outside end view. And what it basically is, if you read the book, is a series of stories that happened more or less chronologically from 2000, you know, really from 1982, but really from 2001 to 2017. And then we sat back and said, okay, what's the message in each one of these stories? So, you know, 9-11 leaders show up, right? My career leaders learn every day. Early on, leaders invest in growth. At the end, leaders are optimists.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that I gave my board too many things to work on. And I wish I had said I don't know more. And I talk about that in chapters eleven and twelve. So I really wanted to focus on my role and just let the story play out around Jack and let readers draw whatever conclusions they want.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actually in Chapter twelve, I kind of go through the four or five things that I clearly would have done differently had I thought about them differently or had more time to reflect. And what I talk about in that chapter is I would have more dramatically changed the shape of the company right after 9-11. I think anytime a crisis takes place, a leader has an opportunity to really reshape the situation that they're in. I talked about the lack or our inability to get more value out of GE capital. I said I would have run the company differently to produce a different kind of leader.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again Barry, I wanted this to be really my story, if you will, and the ability that I would have to put more context around the company that I love. And so I really focused on the issues I had and wanted to put, let's say a finer point on. One of the reasons why I wrote the book is that I spent three or four years after I retired kind of watching the way this story was covered. And I just felt like it had lacked any perspective and any context.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh this was something that was put in place by security. It was really particularly for global travel, it was really a bad practice. To be honest, I never spent one minute talking to the people that ran our corporate travel. I should have. But there's no way to explain it other than say it was a bad practice and I wish we hadn't done it.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opportunities. So the book that Jack wrote and the expression he used while he was CEO is control your destiny, right? Control your destiny. And I think his feeling about kind of the entrepreneurial Systems in California was that you could never control them, right? And this was kind of a nineties perspective. You see here today, if you're a CEO of any kind of company, you really recognize you can't control much of anything. And that what you really need to be talking about is what are the right investments, what are the right risks to take, how do you grab the future, those kinds of things are more operational than controlling your destiny. So I remember the discussion that he and I had, this was in very early 2000, and I was in the G boardroom pitching this deal, and I thought I had it done. And he said, you can't do it because it's in California. And I just looked across the table at him and said, you've got to be kidding me, really. California's part of the world. In fact, it's an important part of the world.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And again, I loved working for the guy, but he was a complicated leader to follow. He was a great leader to work for. And maybe your listeners in their own workplace have had similar experiences where sometimes people are great to be a colleague with or great to learn from, but they're not as much fun to follow. And that was kind of the experience I have with Jack.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, so Barry, the way you think about the book is kind of for twenty years, I've more or less kept my mouth shut. And I generally felt like the reason to do that was that nobody at GE would benefit by me squabbling. with Jack. What I try to do in this book was be truthful was to talk about the things I learned from, the things I loved being around him for, but some of the places where the company had blind spots that needed to be fixed, like the ones we talked about earlier was kind of lack of investment in technology, lack of globalization, not a good track record on diversity, things like that, right, as it pertains to where GE was. So I wanted the book to be kind of an accurate perception of what it felt like to follow a guy who is a really great leader, but in a time that was very different. And that's really what I tried to do.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did a great job of creating the right kind of instrumentation, the right kind of metrics that drove good behavior. He prioritized. And the last thing is and this is going to sound funny today, but I think he was the first manager of his era that really understood the power of people. He treated human resource leaders with respect. He spent a lot of time on people. You know, if you go back in the, let's say, 70s, 80s, 90s, even 90s, most of the human resource professionals had come out of union relations based on where the U.S. was at that moment in time. He kind of recognized it was all about the professional workforce, and he spent a lot of time in that. So I really think I've never seen a CEO before or after that could manage its size the way. Jack could. He was just awesome at that.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which he knew how to manage scale. He knew how to manage at size. And he was incredibly skilled at that. So he created an aura. So let's say in a company of 300,000 people, everybody thought they worked for Jack. Everybody felt like he could intersect in their world at any moment of the day. He was a great communicator. He knew how to communicate to hundreds of thousands of people, to a thousand people, to 500 people, to 20 people to one person. And almost every size he knew how to communicate. He built horizontal cohorts, what I talked about earlier, he knew how to kind of segment organizations and how to motivate different groups of people.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so when I in the year two thousand, Jack was named the best manager by fortune of the previous century. So that's a pretty tall shadow. I'd say what Jack did better than anybody I've seen before after.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I'd say the third thing was to find a way to bring our investors with us. One of the things that Jack and I did a few transition meetings with investors while he was still chairman and I was coming in. And I just felt like investors didn't really understand the company. He just had such command, such charisma, such presence. There just wasn't a lot of questioning and depth. And, you know, when you're the new guy, you're not going to be accorded the same level of trust, if you will. So I'd say those are the three challenges that face me taking over the company. You know, the good part is we had a strong background. And we had good leaders, even though those leaders were going to have to change for what I felt like the company was going to face in the 21st century.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, I think the challenges were to reframe the company's portfolio and rejuvenate the industrial businesses for the twenty first century. And so I think that was kind of job number one Job number two was to maintain, sustain as many of the key leaders inside the company as we could. There's always going to be a moment of time when people have a certain comfort with how one CEO did it and they're going to kind of wait and see are they on the new guys team.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a funny story. So I'm in the locker room and I just met him and I would ask him for directions. And he says, well, what do you do? I said, I'm playing with some friends, but I work at GE. And he said, GE, huh? Boy, I feel sorry for that poor son of a bitch that's going to follow Jack Wynnals. So I went out to the first T and we just spent the day laughing. But when you replace that famous guy, you're always going to have kind of a complicated path. And I would say the main difference barrier is just the era of the 2000s were just so different than the era of the 90s. The company had to change.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“150 people in the company that are called vice presidents or officers, only three were engineering leaders, right? So if you think about the size of GE, and that's kind of symbolic of what was valued in terms of the organization and the functions, that's kind of where we were in 2000. So we had a strong balance sheet. We had many good things. We just hadn't spent enough time thinking about how to be an innovator in the 21st century”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I took over for a really good CEO who was extremely well known and who was, I would say in the decade of the 90s, Was really kind of leveraging that decade where I would say financial services and management practices were valued and what most journal managers worked on were those two things. And so when we got to the end of the 1990s, GE was a company that had, let's say, a relatively stale industrial portfolio, a very vibrant and fast-growth financial services set of businesses and a market multiple that exceeded a tech company. So we were just in balanced. You know, it wasn't that our, you know, our industrial businesses all had high market share, but they weren't necessarily technical leaders. And we had not been investing as robustly in R&D and in Innovation as we should have. And if you looked at, let's say, the top”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly when I compare 2021 with, let's say, 2001, the intersection between companies and society has government has never been greater than it is today, right? Government is a big actor in every industry, and that's not going to change. So investors are key. Government and society, hugely important today versus the past. And then having led through a couple, three or four crises, in a crisis, the people that matter most are your employees. So in other words, like when you're taking incoming every day, the only way to get out of a problem, the only way to get out of a mess is if your team is aligned and if you can help bring them help you solve the problem. It's complicated. It's more complicated, to be honest with you today, than it was twenty years ago, but there's never going to be a nice, simple, easy answer to your question.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Look, this is I've heard this question asked in many different ways over many different eras and it's still the answers change over time. They're never totally satisfying, but that's part of the paradox of running a public company. So I would say the answer is that investors own the company. And unless you're doing something that is aligned with them, you're going to get in trouble, right? So there is a sense that if you're a public company, investors have a huge say. Increasingly,”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got to instrument the company in a way that you know whether you're doing well or doing poorly. So metrics are important. And lastly, Barry, if you go through change, there's probably two or three or four initiatives that you want to embrace across the company because your unique scale can really drive substantial change, right? So it's really about communication. It's about creating good cohorts. It's about metrics. And it's about one or two or three really good initiatives that can leverage your scale. But you work it every day because size can be an awesome advantage. It also could be a huge disadvantage. And you're always teetering right between making it an”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that you've got to think about several things when you manage its size. One is you've got to divide the company up into what I would call both vertical and horizontal cohorts, right? So in the case of a conglomerate, you've got many different businesses. And ultimately, for most of the people in the company, the businesses who they identify with. That's what I call a vertical group. You have to create a horizontal network. So you basically look at officers of the company or senior VPs or business leaders. And you want them to be part of a collective whole. You want them to drive common initiatives. You want them to be accountable for each other in terms of mission and metrics and things like that.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the other hand, whether you're going from ten employees to one hundred or one hundred to one thousand learning to scale is an important trade, is an important skill and something that every startup has to do. And that's something that I can be very helpful with. How do you hire first line managers? How do you put in performance systems? What is a good human resource leader look like? Those are a lot of the questions that many of the founders I work with are asking. And I can be extremely helpful in that regard. So what you try to do when you're in a role like mine is find what is most useful with the company you're working with and play that role. I guarantee you there's something I can be helpful with on every company. But there's some things that my skill set doesn't play as much for. And I don't try to overdo it. I try to just find my niche and play it.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, that's a really great question. In some ways, it's extremely different, right? Because at GE, we just had massive scale and massive diversity. And when you're in a startup, you're small and you really focus on one thing. I mean, most startups go narrow and deep, and that's what makes them successful. And then they begin to grow. So on one hand, those are very different.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mainly in healthcare but a little bit in tech. And I have to say between the teaching and my venture work, I really like it. I really enjoy it. I think it's a way for me to stay fresh, but it's also a way for me to give back to leaders of the future and hopefully help them through their journey.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think students, they're so smart today. They keep you young. They're very hungry for not just the theoretical, but the practical experience. And I think one of the things that when you're a business school student, you think you know it all. And one of the things that I always hearken back to them is, look, every job looks easy till you're the one doing it, right? You may have read a case and you think the CO is a dummy, but someday you're going to be that dummy. Someday you're going to be in those shoes and you're going to have to make the decisions and you can't judge them. And some will work and some won't. And so your ability to persevere through that kind of criticism is really key to who you are and what you'll do. And then I also do venture capital. I always wanted to work when I retired with small companies, with innovators, with founders.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So I teach a class at Stanford on what we call systems leadership, but it's really leading through disruption. And I'd say I always wanted this will be my fourth year. I always wanted to kind of try my hand at teaching. By the way, Barry, it's a lot harder than I ever thought it was going to be.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, again, there's a lot that gets written today about it's better to be a pessimist than an optimist. But I think you always have to understand that you have to lead people through the toughest times, but you need to show them what the future could look like if you really work well together.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source