David if a president were to say to you, come in as a cabinet officer, what would you say . Jeffrey im not sure businepeople make great public servants. Ieman would you fix yourplease . David well, people wouldnt recognize me if my tie was fixed, but ok. Just leave it this way. All right. I dont consider myself a journalist. And nobody else would cons 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 . After 16 years as the ceo of ge, you have just stepped down. Is a big burden off yo shoulders now . Jeffrey i do think if youre doing the job well, you feel ownership over everybody who is a constituency, and you wear that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So, look, k 16 years is a long time to run one of these coanies, and im kind oke im starting to feel a little bit of decompression, lets say. David so do you think its too long to run a Publiclytraded Company for someone like you, or anybody . Jeffrey thats a grt question, david. I think theres aright e and wrong time, in terms of doing it. So a company our size, you need to run it long enough to make a difference, to be ableo ape strategy. And its always been our philosophy but at the same time, you know, its good to get a new set of 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 how long somebody should be runninga com. David so you succeeded a legendary business figure. Was thatof a challenge when you succeed somebody as well known as your predecessor . Injeffrey yeah, if i was to give anybody advice, it would be to flow a bum. Its a lot its a lot easier. I remember in 2000, fortune did a retrospective of the 20th century and 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 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. And it was very puhsic, i think, for 6 momaybe a year, and then you were selected. Did you know that you were likely to win . And did you think you were gonna win . And when you were told you were gonna win, were you surprised and did you think you were ready to do the job . Jeffrey you know, so i had been wking for ge for about 20 years by the time at came up. And anybody who works for the company that thinks theyra be ceo of the company, thats weird. You shouldnt feel that wa right . Theres so much luck involved. Theres so much chance and things like that. So i never really was captivated by that, you know, getting that title. And i remember jack brought each one of us in and said, if you get the job, you have to leave. And i said, youre kiing. You know, come on, man. Its like, id stay, you kn, its ok. And sobut it wasyou have to recapture that moment in time, you know, david. In other words, i think what you would say, what i would say is 2016, 2017 is so different than 2000. We were at the peak of the bubble economy angs like that. Im not sure anybody since then has done it in quite as puic a way. David before you got the job, you grew up in cincinnati area. E. And your father was atwas tha . What was his job . Jeffrey so my dadinorked in the aircraft e business for his whole career, almost 40 years. So i kind of grew up aroun factories, and i grew up around the technology business. I had the clkind of middleclass education, high schoolpublic high school in one of the most midwestern cities that you can havecincinnati, ohio. W david all right. So ye a football star there. Is that right . Jeffrey i was a good athlete. I was reallyyo, when i was in high school, if you said, what are you gonna do . I would have said, im gonna be a professional football player. David i said that, oro, until i was about years old, then i realized it wasnt gonna work. Jeffrey i played with a guy jeffrey i remember in high school playing against a guy that got aatschol and i was an offensive neman. 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 more important. David did the big ten come after you or Something Like that . Jeffrey maybe like so i wasood enough to play for the worst team in a big league. So i could have gone to northwestern or vanderbilt or Something Like th. You know, i was a. I was on the upper end of mediocre, lets say. So that was kind of my karma, if you will. David all right, u chose to go to dartmouth, an ivy league school. And you played football at dartmouth. Ba jeffrey i played fo for 4 years at 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 gog to see it through playotball. And that was really my entree into going to college. David so you went to dartmout re you good enough to be in the nfl after dartmouth . Jeffrey maybe as a sideline reporter, Something Like that. David after you graduated, you went to proctor and gamble. Jeatrey uhhuh. I show up roctor and gamble on my first day, duncan hines cake mix, td sitting at the desk rinext. So steve steve and i have been friends since we were 22 years old. And we ere horrible employees. You know, we were like a dilbert cartoon. We werewe werencorrigible, we would stay up too late at night, all that stuff. David e tell you he had an offer to go work for this Small Company in seattle . Jeffrey steve to describe to me what he was doing. And i said, you know, do you have a backup plan j wt in case this doesnk out . Outlook, Desktop Software what could that possibly who could ever want that, you know . David so you o Harvard Business school. After Harvard Business school, you went to general electric. Jeffrey yep. David now, why did you picke . Jeffrey you know, there was no connection to my dad or anything like that, but i knew ge wa ta good place to learn arain. And i said, hey, im gonna go there and stay 5 years, right, and see what happens. I joined the plastics business when i joined ge and that kind of just i was in field sales and marketing and thgs like that, and that was really how my career started. I always tell people, like they say, o you put up with stress . And i say, well, you know, my first job was selling plastics in plike detroit, and i would sit in a shoneys restaurant at breakfast having dry helves, getting ready toa pricing increase. Walk across the street,say, i hope i dont die today. You know, on those experiences, big careers arborn. David all right, well, it worked out, and you went to a series of positions. Jeffrey i did classic ge appliances, ge plastics, ge health care. David so yoannound as the ceo, and, in fact, you took the job, and then a 1ouple of days later,happens. So what did you think was g to happen to ge and your career . Ffrey oh, gosh, david. So, you know, it was an amazing time, you know, and every 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. So we had retrnsurance on the worle 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 morthan 1 billion write off. David dark meaning you had no advertising . Jeffrey no advertising, right. But wae most important thing 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. , hes since passed awbut i. We would have a teleconference at, lets say, 9 00 at night. And guys would call in and say, ok, yeah, airline 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 . d say, we got to do itok, le. 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 youre making these decisions. So that wa 30 days, right. And then im finally thinking im in fld, and im thinking, ok, the suns gonna rise again. Phone rings. Bob wrights onhe phone. He needs to speak to you right away. And he said tom brokaw just received anthrax in the mail. Tom another infection, this time at nbc news in rockefeer plaza. Jeffrey Rudy Giuliani is in the elevator. They shut down 16 square blocks around 30 rock. What do you want me to 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 knat was. David well, you got through that. And ultimately, though, a number of years 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 ceo in 2001. If you were an american businessperson during that period of time, you had never seen a terrorist event. You know, youd seen recessions and stuff like tha but youd never seen something that was unimaginable. 9 11 was unimaginable. Global financial crisis was unimaginable. And i think e all of us smarter about risk. E 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. David usually when somebody goes bankrupt, the equity gets wiped out, the bondholder get something. Jeffrey the bondholders get something. David there, the bondholders got nothing as well. Jeffrey sfo came in that day and said, hey, we are going to go raise equity, right, amuch as we can get. We called Goldman Sachs 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, were gonna go 15 billion. re gonna do it moay. Is w. We have a teleconference with our board on saturday morning. You know, nobodys there, just my cfo and i, but all the Board Members are calling in. Hey, guys, ony we are going to go raise some equity. You know, you could just hear silence, ok, on the other end oline. And roger penske, who i love, was on the board for a long time. Roger, guy in says, lets get the money. So then david this was the weekend washington was voting otarp, they were desperately trying to find a buyer at wachovia, an7 banks went bankrupt inrop. And i had toalk from my office to get to 50 people to make the call. Do we go the next day . And it was the single most stressful can i phone a friend . N so i walk in and say were not going tomorrow. Man defeat in the house for the massive emergency economic rescue plan. Jeffrey tarp 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. Jeffrey no. David ok. Jeffrey and i think, you know, lookthg back, david, i thinlesson for everybody in any crisis is 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 exactly. Vid you inherited a very Large Industrial conglomerate, you could call it, maybe thomlargest industrial conerate. And then you began to reshape it and you sold things that were part of ges history. Je yeah, so if you just go back, we were really a conglomerate. So we went fronbc to pet insurance, jet engines, plastics. We were kind of a classic conglomerate. And i thinkyou know, in our business, a little bit different tn 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 retu, where we could build competitive advantage. We were the biggest provider of rangterm care, of reinsue. I lookes at those and said, are not, you know a, i dont like the industries theyre in, gob, were not very at it, and we run it the wrong way, lets go. So i started chopping away. David ge appliances. Was that hard to sell . Jeffrey so again, i always feel like its good if youre your own activist. And its always good if you ask yourself the question, run this business better than anybody else, orould 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 big in 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 years in the appliance business. So i had great afftion and i loved the brand, so i had great affection for it, but we were justing wood. We werent on a path to greatness. And we could take that capital and put it in our energy essiness or aviation bus 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 . Jeffrey so good iustry, good team. And we generated a good return for the company in the time we had it. T here was my value added with nbc. Make better shows. David so just tell them to make better shows. Jeffrey make betteryou know. As a company, we werent adding a lot ofalue, number one. Number two, you could see the industry nds going through this f change. We always did, as a board, strategic reviews of nbc. I think one of our theories of the case in 2010 when we sold it, that really is true today was, can only be captured by those peop 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 make, david, is one i missed completely is the theme park business. A new ride, the mummy, costs 100 million bucks. You say, how could one ride cost 100 million bucks . I missed it completely. It turned ouusto be maybe the onlyess in media that has sustainable competitive advantage is the theme park business because it takes capital, you can build a good spirit of the people, and things like that. That was the one i gotrong. David when you go to universal parks now, you can get in for free still . Jeffrey you know, maybe so. When we boht it, i called the guy that ran it, a guy named tom williams, great executive, and i said, lets just do a walking tour at universal. I want to see how it works. This is 2003. He says, you want to ride on theummy ride . I said, yeatd be great. So we go up. Theres a 3hour line. Ey put me i break in the line. Im in the first seat. They dont let anybody sit with me. And i am saying, oh, my god, i am jerk of the year. You know, ive just been voted the permanent jerk of the year. Davi d now, what you tried 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 . Jeffreh, no. Actually, in 1982, we were 80 in the united states. By 2001, we were still 70 inside the united states. And what people forget, david, i mean, i think you see it, but, you know, the decade of the nineties kind of the quintessential american decade. I mean, this place was booming. And really, it was easy to kind of grow your companies. So we really werent despite the fact we were an old company, erent 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 multinationals, in terms of were 70 outside the united states. We have a very strong footprint in any country that matters. Jeffrey again, arithmetic. I think theres two ways to globalize. One is to go to washington dc and are 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 go 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 an c beijing to go into tntry. And we very much see every country were in from the botm up. Davi of the things you tried to do was change the culture of ge. What was the culture that you arinherited and you were pof and how did you try to change it and hoansuccessful was it to the culture . Jeffrey a company like ge is a study in how do you make scale. How do you make size an advantage and not a disadvantage, ght. Because inherently, size means bureaucracy. Theres just nothing therewo 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 really cant have people in boston ma ng a decision for brazi. So we had to become more decentralized, anwhen you become more decentralized, u have to become more riskbased. So in other words, you ask me to invest in a gas turbine power plant nigeria i say yes, not because its safe, but because were right, we make this much money, and if were wroon, we lose this much m. 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 velop managers that are more riskbased, you put bigger leaders into the field, and i think thats the only way you can survive 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, connecticut because our executives lived in greenwich and the taxes were zero. For about 10 years, i wanted to be in a city. I just think. Theres somethin 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 on, the vibrancy of a city that you dont have you know, when i would be infice in fairfield and i would look out the window, i could see the merit parkway 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 big as the first house i owned. And i could reallyusrawl in that office andsit there for like 3 1 2 years and nobody would ever kind o is he in there . I dont know. I thought it wortant to be in the city, to modernize the company, to be in the flow of ideas. Bostons been awesome. I think bostons a great place. David so youre very happy with it . Jeffrey yeah. No, look, i likei think. High tech, good schools, great community, but the thing about boston that people dont understand, uls got a chip on its shor. Its a townie town, you know. Good sports teams. And theres competitive, inyourface attitude in boston that i also think is quite healthy for our company. David lets talk about government. You chaired a task force forpresident ial task force for president obama, and you were later on one for president trump. So do these president ial task force ally do very much that anydy can observe . Jeff y you know, i think italways , but i think era were in right now, its difficult group of Business Leaders to impact, you know, much. So, look, i wod say basically when was on president obamas jobs council, we gave him 4 or 5 recommendations. We said work on traitung, work on infrastruc, do regulatory reform, help small business, do things that nurture investment. Those 5 things. Now, i would say, david you know, as you would say, those 5 things are pretty obvious. Theres not like a sixth one or a fourth one. Those are the 5. Everybody in Congress Knows theyre the 5. So its not like you need another council to say you shouplify regulations, right. David but its fun to go to the white house usually. Jeffrey its or to be in the white house. It truly is an honor. David if a president , president obama, or the current or future president were to say to you, 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 like trepidation to say im not sure businesspeople make great public servants. I said that before president trump. But i was honored to serve president obama. And i would watch my colleagues, and i think, you know, guys like you and me, were used to saying, heres what you should do. Do this. The nature of that process is, here is what i would do if i were you, right. I would do it if i were you. And were not always that good at context. And unless you get context, all the dynamics of public service. So what do you do to relax . Jeffrey i really feellessed in that i basically like my family. I like my wifeyou know. I always say. David you find that unusual in the Business World . Jeffrey i say, ive ledsimple, you know, one wife, one daughter, one compy, right. And i use that line when we acquired alstom, e i was in paris, and i at line to describe myself. I lead a se ple lifeone wife, ughter, one company. I said, i realize thats not the french way, but thatsits worked for me. But i like to read. I like playing golf. I like to read. I actually like hiking. But i think one of the things that i trained myself is ive always been able to lead in the moment. So ive always been able to kind of separate different things, even though theres pressure. In 2011, the Fukushima Nuclear disaster tk place, and a couple of the reactors were ours. It was terrifying, i would say. So i was on a twohour teleconference on like, hey, we know whats going on. All we can see is the cnn helicopter feed. But if something happens to the reactor, this is horrible. Twohour teleconference. Im in perth, australia. Click. I have to go do a town hall with 1,000 people. So i have to walk 20 steps. And im going from the world as we know it is ending to kind of walk in and say, hey, guys, im feeling good today. Everything is groovy, right, everything is co. Were gonna get through this and things like that. Anink good leaders know how to be in the moment, intezee, but compartmenta and ive always been able to do that in my personal life as well. David would you say are the one or two st important lessons that you got out of being the ceo of ge . Jeffrey the future always comes, right, so the notion that i hope this doesnt happen, thats a badyou know, kind of nervous laughters a d strategy. So i think this notion that the future always comes, live in markets. If youre a businessperson today turn your back on china, youre crazy. Never odnfuse tailwind with anagement, right. I would say ive made that mistake a few times. Then maybe the fourth one would be give fully of yourself, giveevery person that works for you is their own story. They have a family. They have their own aspirations. Give fully of yourself to everybody you meet. And those are just a couple of things ive learned. David well, thank you for a very interesting conversation, and thank you for the great job you did at ge. As a shareholder of ge, i appreciate many things you did. Thank you. Jeffrey thanks, david. Good to be with you. David thank you very much. Nouncer support for the pbs presentation of this program was provided by general motors. Man see a future. Woman i see a good future. N i see a future filled with roads and no rage. Both we future. Man with zero crashes. Woman i see a future where fossil fuels. Man are a thing of the past. All wsee a future with zero emissions. Man i see a future where traffic. Second man keeps perft time. Third man where intelligence is always by design. Fourth man we see a future with zero congestion. Woman zero congestion. Man we are. Second man we are. Both we are. All general motors. At youre wing pbs. Hes dedicated his life to fighting for the condemned this week, on firing line. I mean, we have a system of justice in this country uiat treats you much better if yourrich andy than if youre poor and innocent. His story could be straight out of hollywood. As a boy, Bryan Stevenson went to a segregated school in southern delaware. At harvard law school, he found his calling fightingic for ju. [ crowd cheering ] they had every intention of executing me for something i didnt do. And helping americans confront the most difficult parts of our hisry. His fight for mercy is so remarkable. Ladies and gentlemen, Bryan Stevenson. Taapplause ]. Hollywood haken notice. Youre the lawyer . Yes, maam. Thank you so much for driving all the way out here. Whaes Bryan Stevenson say inw . Fi with Margaret Hoover is made possible by