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

“I think the things that are always true are the leaders' necessity to absorb fear, to hold two truths, to make timely decisions, and to be a good communicator, even if what you're communicating is you don't know.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was in Australia when it happened, I was traveling and I had my assistant send me the contract that was from the 1960s that we had signed with TEPCO, who is the big Japanese utility, just to kind of read what it said and read what our liabilities might be and things like that. And I was so impressed by the work that our lawyers and engineers had done in the 1960s to envision all kinds of natural disasters and all kinds of contingencies. And, you know, I would say unlike the other tail risk events in the case of Fukushima, there just was a very robust risk management process that even foresaw a horrible natural disaster like one at Fukushima. So every crisis is different. I think a little bit about COVID today and what's similar and what's different.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of the company. So you really learned that you have to stay flexible and you have to absorb fear. And then when I moved to Fukushima, what I learned in Fukushima is the importance of risk management. So Fukushima was a tsunami in Japan and it impacted seven nuclear reactors.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“there's just no describing how every day brought a new challenge every day brought fear and it was just you just really had to be on your toes kind of twenty four hours a day. And what I learned in that crisis was that you needed to have contingencies. You needed to have like, I'm going to try this one day. I'm going to do something else the next day doesn't work. And so you just had to take wave after wave of contingencies. You learn that leaders have to absorb fear. I mean, one of the things that's unique about GE in that time is that half our company was in financial services, but the other half was doing fine. It was in healthcare and aviation and a whole series of different businesses. So, you know, it was incumbent on me not to allow anything that was going on in financial services to spill over into the other parts of”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dreamliner, which was a revolutionary new aircraft that was going to take a billion dollars to make the engine. And we won that order and that commitment. So we made a billion dollar decision at the absolute worst time in the history of the industry. And so you need to hold two truce at the same time. I think the other one is just the need for communication. I think so much changed around 9-11 and what you really find is that in a crisis, you have to be willing to talk about what you know and what you don't know. And people just want to hear your voice. So those were the two things I learned. During the financial crisis, the financial crisis, I think, if you're in financial services, probably the three months after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt,”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think Barry, maybe we'll take three of them. Let's take nine eleven, then let's take the global financial crisis, and then we'll take Fukushima because I had all of those, let's say between two thousand one and twenty eleven. I think in nine eleven, what you learned is really two things. I would say one was that during a crisis, you have to hold two truths, and one is that the worst thing that can happen. And the other thing is that you shouldn't give up hope that a better future is out there once you make it to the other side. We had to restructure our commercial aviation business because clearly airlines are going to be traveling less. But in 2002, Alan Malali, who was at Boeing at the time, he launched the idea of”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quickly in that context. Like most crises do, you just don't have a chance. It's kind of like life gets lived forward, not backward. And so I was experiencing that in real time, that I had the kind of, you know, there was no way to kind of say, okay, I'm going to sit this one out. You were just living life as a king.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sudden, I'm running $100 whatever billion dollar conglomerate. And a day into my job, I had to start making decisions. There was no honeymoon. There was no prep time. I had to start making important decisions like do we lend airlines money? Do we restructure our aviation business? How should we think about insurance? And I'm doing that in real time in the first, second, third, fourth week on the job. I had to communicate now to several hundred thousand people who kind of looked in horror at what was going on in New York City. I had two employees that died tragically in the event. So there was just no warm-up and no prep to get ready for making billion-dollar decisions late at night that had to be made under pressure. And I just grew up.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So you have to kind of understand the era a little bit. The nineties were just a moment of tranquility in the US economy. The economy was growing. The US was the dominant player in the world. The world was at peace. And so that was kind of the, let's say, the environment in which I grew my career, at least the last part of my career before I became CEO. And so September 11th happened. And it was just a horrible tragedy. And to a certain extent, even though we didn't know it at the time, it really marked a change in the world, right? It marked a change in globalization, how companies were viewed, what tail risk was. So there's a bunch of stuff that actually happened. But from a practical standpoint, here I was. I'd run, let's say, a $7 billion healthcare business.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To your point and so that from three billion became a twenty one billion dollar business by the time I retired and yet today it's still there's plenty of opportunities in healthcare. So it played to my strengths. I would say in my career I was A good product manager, I was good at kind of I knew how to strategically think my way through a business problem. And all of those things kind of came to the forefront when I was in G's healthcare business.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so again, I had been really in the appliances and plastics and I went there in nineteen ninety five and I remember I had been there for about two months and I was talking to Jack on the phone and I said, you know, Jack, this is a huge industry. You know, trillions of dollars. It seems to me like we've got a pretty good footprint. A lot of people respect us. But our business is a peanut. It's $3 billion. We need to be more adventurous. We need to be taking more risk. And I think it just resonated with him. It was kind of the right comment at the right time. And he became quite encouraging right after that to both do acquisitions, but also to help grow globally and invest in organic growth and technology.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Career went back to the plastics business. And then right before I became CEO in 1995, I went to our healthcare business, and that was just a perfect fit. It was a relatively small business, but it was very technical, very global. It played to a lot of my strengths, and that was the platform that ultimately I moved from to become CEO of the company in 2001.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the plastics business really commercially, selling in Detroit and in the western half of the US, and that was really interesting and fun. I learned so much by selling to big companies like General Motors and Ford, which at that time were kind of the giants of American industry, and they were really a challenge. And then I had my first real break when I was in my early 30s. I was moved to our appliance business to run the service business during a major product recall. And so I was at a very high-profile job at a very young age that was extremely difficult. I had lots of exposure to Jack Welsh early in his CEO tenure. And I think getting noticed at an early age is actually one of the things that helps people push them along in their career.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, Barry. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. My dad was a career kind of manufacturing guy in our aviation business. So I kind of grew up in the shadow of the company, if you will. One away to school and went to business school and I graduated in 1982. And it wasn't necessarily that my father had worked there, but what I thought I'd do is go someplace where I could learn to be a manager, you know, kind of learn what journal management was like. Gee, you had a great reputation. So I went to work in 1982 in the plastics business. I thought I'd stay five years and I ended up staying 35 years. So, you know, I would say careers are based on performance and luck. And my career had both of those.”
2021-03-12 · Masters in Business · Jeff Immelt on Crisis Management and Leadership (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source