The Ledger, every show

“Some of the input you're getting is really selfish by the investors from their perspective, but not good for the company.”

“We made it to shore, we saved the company, we preserved the businesses, and I would say to people, look, no other team on earth could have done what we did.”

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

“Most people think about the day Lehman Brothers went bankrupt as the worst day in the financial crisis, but it actually was the day Washington Mutual went bankrupt, which was like two weeks later on a Friday because all the bondholders got wiped out.”

“Think about the financial crisis, what did we get wrong? We were too big in aggregate size. It wasn't that we were, we had a lot of toxic assets. It wasn't that we're redlining risk and things like that. We were too big.”

“My hunch is you could go through product after product and making it in Canada or the U S is probably just about the same as making it in Mexico or China today.”

“If I sell in the US, I better have a certain amount of jobs in the US. If I sell in Germany, same thing. If I sell in China, same thing. And my generation didn't have to think that way, but the next generation is going to have to think that way.”

“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.”

“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…”

“I guarantee you that if Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Benioff ever did a review, a three 60, the people around them aren't saying they're really good listeners. There's a lot of people say, They didn't listen to it, but they are listening, right? They are li…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“If you pick up a, an annual report for any company or a 10 K or 10 Q, they'll have 45 risk factors, right? If you have 45 risk factors, you really have none. I would much rather see a company list. Here are the three biggest risk factors and make the CEO, not …”

“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…”

“President Trump didn't invent protectionism. He kind of Americanized it, but anybody that didn't see that train coming for like 10 or 15 years was crazy.”

“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”

“Back in the year, 2000, GE felt a lot like Amazon.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We're kind of using the financial service cash to help fund some of those things. You know, our investors really all they recognized was kind of like earnings per share growth. So, you know, we were doing it in a language that they understood.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Things that really required not just a new idea, but also a new culture at the same time, are really hard for legacy companies.”

“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…”

“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.”

“But we were the world's biggest finance company when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“We built a twenty billion dollar wind business.”

“In the year 2000, industrials and financial services, let's say between those two, it was 40% of the S&P 500 value. Now it's 15%, you know.”

“I think Jeff is awesome, and that he's a really good listener, but he doesn't listen all the time, and he doesn't listen to everybody, which I, behind the scenes, say to Jeff, I love that about you, really, is that you're discerning, you've got a nose for BS, …”

“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.”