All right. 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 . 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 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 . Jeffrey i think there is a right time and wrong time in terms of doing it. A company of our size, you have to do it long enough to make a difference, shape strategy. 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 . I think 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 a challenge . Jeffrey yes, if i was going to give anyone advice, it would be to follow a bum. 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 his job, because those are pretty big shoes. I loved working with jack. I was proud to follow him. David before you got the job, you grew up in cincinnati. Your father was at ge, was the correct . What was his job . Jeffrey my dad worked in the aircraft engines business. I grew up around factories, the technology business. I had the classic kind of middleclass education, Public High School in one of the most midwestern cities you can have, cincinnati, ohio. David you were a football star, right . Jeffrey i was a good athlete. In high school 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. That i realized it wasnt going to work. Jeffrey i remember playing against a guy who got a scholarship to ohio state. I was an offense of lineman. I did not block him once all night. The nfl career might be out. I better take care of my math skills. David you chose to go to dartmouth. Jeffrey i played football for four years at dartmouth. That is how i got there. I didnt plan on 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. David after you graduated, you went to proctor and gamble. Jeffrey sitting at the desk sitting next to me is steve ballmer. Steve ballmer for microsoft, we have been friends since we were 22 years old. We were horrible employees. We would like a dilbert cartoon. We were incorrigable, 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 . Software, who could ever want that . David after Harvard Business school, you went to general electric. Why did you pick ge . Jeffrey 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 was in field sales, marketing, things like that. That was how my career started. I always tell people come they say how do you put up with the stress . My first job was selling plastics in detroit, and i would sit in a restaurant at breakfast having dry heaves getting ready to sell a pricing increase. On those experiences, big careers are born. David it worked out. Jeffrey i did a classic ge appliances, plastics, 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 . Jeffrey it was an amazing time. Every year when we go through 9 11, i think of the tragedy for the country. That is still very real. At that moment in time, we owned 1200 aircraft, nbc, the biggest business in ge was 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 meaning no advertising . Jeffrey no advertising. The most important thing was what happened in aviation. We would have nightly calls, the vice chairman, we would have a teleconference at 9 00 at night. Guys would call in and say, airline x is going to go bankrupt tomorrow. I would say, dennis, what is that . He would try to explain it to me. I said, what would you do . It was night after night of this, airline bailouts. We were shutting down airlines around the world because the country had terrorism insurance. We were making these decisions. That was like 30 days. Im in fairfield thinking the sun will rise again, phone rings. Bob bright is on the phone. 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. What do you want me to do . Jeffrey i sent that may put you on hold for a second. That was my first month. David you got through that. Ultimately a number of years later, another crisis arose, that is the financial crisis it was very severe. Jeffrey i went to work in 1982. If you were an American Business person during that period, you had seen recessions, but you had never seen something that was unimaginable. 9 11 was unimaginable. Global financial crisis was unimaginable. It made us all smarter about risk. The day Lehman Brothers went bankrupt wasnt the worst day of the financial crisis. The worst day of the financial crisis was the day Washington Mutual went down because all the bondholders got wiped out. David usually the bondholder get something. 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 we would do 15 billion on monday. This was friday. We have a teleconference with the board saturday morning. Nobody is there. All the Board Members are calling in. Hey, guys, we are going to go raise some equity. You just hear silence on the other end of the line. Roger penske, who i love, first guy in says, lets get the money. This was the weekend washington was voting on tarp. They were trying to find a buyer 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 . The massive emergency economic rescue plan. Jeffrey tarp fails, the market is down 1000 points. We waited 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. Jeffrey exactly. David when you go to universal parks, you can get in free . Jeffrey 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. David you inherited a very Large Industrial conglomerate. Maybe the largest. Then you began to reshape it. You sold things that were part of ges history. Jeffrey we were really a conglomerate. We went from nbc to pet insurance, jet engines, plastics. We were a classic conglomerate. In our business, a little bit different, we are in the permanent hold business. 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 return and build competitive advantage. We were the biggest provider of longterm care, of reinsurance. 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 . Jeffrey it is always good if you ask yourself the question, do we run this business better than anyone else . Could somebody 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 be ceo if i had not spent four years in the appliances business. I loved the brand and have great affection for it, but we were chopping wood. We were not on a path to greatness. We can take that capital and put it in our energy 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 . Jeffrey good industry. Good team. We generated a good return for the company. Here was my value added with nbc. Make better shows. David just tell them to make better shows. Jeffrey we were not adding a lot of value. Number two, you could see the industry was going through this change. We always did strategic reviews. 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 own the pipes and content. We had no interest in owning the pipes. Three, unless you are in an existential way willing to go into digital delivery, you will get trumped. The one i miss 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 come at the theme parks business come up because it takes capital. Can build a good spirit and the people. That was the one i got wrong. David when you go to universal parks now, you can get in for free still . Jeffrey maybe. When we bought it, i called the guy who ran it and said, lets just do a walking tour. We get to the mummy ride and he says, you want to ride on the mummy ride . I said that would be great. We go up. 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 am saying, oh my god, i am jerk of the year david what you tried to do as ceo was globalize the business. Wasnt it already a Global Company . Jeffrey 1992, we were 80 in the united states. The decade of the 1990s was the quintessential american decade. This place was booming. It was easy to grow your companies, so 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 multinational. We are 70 outside the united states. We have a very strong footprint. David why were emerging markets so important . Jeffrey arithmetic. You have to globalize. You can go to washington, d. C. For deals. You can go to davos and think you can get a deal. The other way is to hire 10,000 people and say, lets go and win the customer. That is the approach we have taken. We are good in china because we understand the fiveyear plans. We built a strong team. We go outside of shanghai and beijing into the country. We see that every country we are in from the bottom up. David one of the things you tried to do was change the culture of ge. What was the culture you inherited 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. Inherently size means bureaucracy. There are no two ways to get around it. The company i grew up in was process driven and 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 become more riskbased. In other words you ask 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 among 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 lose, you lose 7 trillion, so you 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 are the most important lessons you got out of being 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 because our executives lived in greenwich and the taxes were zero. For 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 to walk out the door, see a customer, see an investor, see once going on, the vibrance y 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, ideally, beautiful, but 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 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. Boston is a great place. David you are very happy with it . Jeffrey high tech, good schools, great community, but the thing about boston that people dont understand is that it has a chip on its shoulder. Its a townie town. Good sports teams, competitive, in your face attitude in boston that i think is quite healthy for our company. David you chaired a task force for president obama and later for president trump. Did these 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 that 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, come in as a cabinet officer, what would you say . Jeffrey i would make this comment 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. Guys like you and me are used to saying, 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, what do you do to relax . Jeffrey i really feel blessed in that i basically love my family. I love my wife. David do you find that unusual in the Business World . I said i realized that is not the french way. Simple life. Ad a 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 helicopter feed. If something happened to the reactor, this is horrible. I am in perth, australia click. I have to do a town hall with 1000 people. I have to walk 20 steps. I go from the world we know it is sending to, hey guys, i am feeling good today. Everything is groovy. Everything is cool. We will get through this. I think good leaders know how to be in the moment, intense, but compartmentalized. Ive always been able to do that in my personal life as well. David one of the one to lessons you got out of being ceo of ge . Jeffrey the future comes, so the notion that i hope this does not happen, that is a bad, you know, nervous laughter is a bad strategy, so this notion that the future always comes, live in markets. If youre in the Health Care Business and Aviation Business in 2000 if you are a business person today and turn your back on china, you are crazy. You are fooling yourself. Every person that works for you is their own story. They have a family. They have their own aspirations. Give fully of yourself everybody you meet, and those are just a couple of things ive learned. Baidu, one of the worlds biggest internet companies, is going through a revolution, switching focus from its Search Engine to intelligent machines, and if it succeeds, it could revolutionize sectors from auto to health care. If it fails, it will cost the company billions of dollars. I sat down with the ceo and cofounder, robin li, to talk about the risks and rewards of this new strategy. Lets start with a focus of baidu on ai