Jeff Immelt

“Following a very successful leader, but tripping into a completely different time. So it wasn't that he was bad or good. He was great in the time that he lived in. But the time that I was leading the company was so dramatically different. It was more global. I…”

“By the time the financial crisis hit, not having GE Capital be smaller, you know, clearly was a mistake, right?”

“What Jack did as a masterclass was how to lead at scale. He created an aura. He had a voice for 300,000 people. He had a voice for 500 people. He had a voice for 20 people. He had a voice for one person. He could change octaves in how he spoke. He knew how to …”

“Every time we had a very tough decision to make, I would always call him. Even after we'd had bad relations and bad words, when I had something really difficult that I wanted to think my way through, I would pick up the phone and call him and pick his brain.”

“You know, everybody likes to dump on government, but, you know, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, they did a great job. You know, I'd say without that kind of sure-handed leadership we would have had a real challenge to kind of making it through.”

“I called Warren because he had done a similar deal with Goldman Sachs. Not so much that we needed his money, but we needed his seal of approval. And we added him to the raise and we were able to go out on Wednesday of that week and raise I think it was sixteen…”

“Actually, knowing what to do isn't that hard. Knowing how to do it isn't that hard. Knowing when to do it is really hard.”

“The second you start canceling meetings, particularly in a big company, you worry 300,000 people. You say to them, man, we aren't, you know, we are really in trouble.”

“After nine, 11, our biggest shareholders sold half their stake when the markets opened after nine, 11. And the reason they told me is they didn't realize how big we were in the insurance business.”

“I think in a crisis, maybe the time we live in today, maybe it's always been true, but I actually think it's a bigger mode of failure when people don't know, won't make a decision than when they make decisions and some of them are wrong. I weigh those two unev…”

“There's a difference between being complex and being complicated. And there's a difference between being simple and simplistic. You know, I would say Amazon is complex, but it's not complicated. It's a software company, right? They have certain things they sta…”

“I went chain to a factory in Peterborough in Canada one time where we made large motors, traction motors, and they were doing terribly. And I was traveling through Canada and I said, let's stop at Peterborough because they really are struggling. And I sat in a…”

“Every time you say that, look, I don't care what the investors think, and then you don't own the company and an activist investor shows up, you end up backpedaling on all the things you said, like, I don't care what investors think. And you end up spending, yo…”

“And I think that there is a role for generalists, but it's harder to be successful in the world today, unless you're kind of deep domain, particularly technically”

“You know, if you look at the basic GE toolkit that I grew up with, it was almost the perfect match for private equity where You took a company, you had five years to turn it around. You didn't have to make big bets on products and technology. And so I think to…”

“During the financial crisis, We were at rock bottom, and I helped cause that, and my board knew that, but my team was always with me.”

“So there were five CEOs in the New York City area. It was me and Ken Chenault from American Express, Sam Palmisano, and then Jenny Romney from IBM, Steve Reimann, and then Indra Newey from Pepsi, and Bill Weldon, and then Alex Gorski from J&J. And we had dinne…”

“I'm on the board of Twilio, a software company in California, and they make all the board members build an app. I think that's brilliant, right? Cause you, they assign you a developer.”

“Where I failed was I couldn't change the culture fast enough to grab, you know, kind of the next wave of digital technologies.”

“Here's what I would have done differently, you know, Harry, in all honesty, I've had four years to think about it, is I would have either bought a part of a startup company or done a joint venture with maybe salesforce.com or Microsoft and created a new co, cr…”

“What legacy companies don't realize is they have the keys to the kingdom and that you own the use case really, which is, you know, like I sit with startups and they're saying, you know, I want to add 10 salespeople. And I say, you know, guys, really back in th…”

“They teach them, like, listen to everybody. Everybody's right, you know, and if you listen to everybody, things are going to be great. That's not true, right? What's true is you can get as much trouble by listening, also in the same way trouble by listening to…”

“I always say to the CEO when they're bringing in board people, don't picture them today. Picture them on the worst day. Picture them, you've missed a quarter, an activist shows up, the technology doesn't work, your best person left. Picture how your board's go…”

“You want a board that is able to transfer their credibility, whether there is an investor or as an operator, to the leader, to the CEO, in the very worst day. And that's what a good board member should be able to do.”

“Really when you're in the middle of a crisis, I think the first thing is you want people that absorb fear. So you want people that don't become fear accelerators. They become fear absorbers.”

“You never know anything about anybody in a good day. You can only sense them, like, at five minutes to midnight. That's when you see what's the character, the person around you. You never can see it when the sun's up.”

“Like to me, trust is not loyalty. People confuse trust and loyalty. I never expected people to be loyal to me. I expected them to be loyal to the company, right? To be loyal, put the company first.”

“The other pieces I say is this is something that people, everybody lies about. Everybody lies and says, I've got thick skin. Nobody has thick skin. Sorry, nobody has thick skin.”

“In other words, if you're starting a company, you're really only allowed to be afraid of one thing, product market fit. That's it. We can help fill in the people. We can help fill in, you know, the funding. We can help fill in all those other things. But be af…”

“That's absolutely true. I got in 2006 and I told Jeff Lawson that when Twilio gets to be five billion dollars in revenue, I'm going to get a tattoo of the owl, which is the kind of the Twilio symbol.”

“There's so many people that think they were self-made, but most rich people started with a big head start. On everybody else, and they need to remember that.”