In this episode of Talks at GS, David Cote discusses lessons from his time at the helm at Honeywell, as described in his new book Winning Now, Winning Later, along with his views on leading through crisis and the future of digital transformation.
On overcoming “short-termism” in management: “Success is always achieving two seemingly conflicting things at the same time. And everybody always wants to know, ‘Hey boss, what’s the one thing you want me to do?’ But the answer is always there’s these two things you have to do, and it’s not a balance. You have to figure out how to do both… Do you want people closest to the action empowered for quick decisions? Or do you want good control so nothing bad happens? Do you want good short-term results or do you want good long-term results? And in every case, the answer is you want both, so you have to figure out how to do both.”
On the future of digital transformation: “The digital transformation, we’re just at the beginning. If you were to assume the industrial revolution was let’s say 100 years, we’re 20 years into this digital revolution… And if you look at the computing capability and if you assume computing power will continue to expand double every two years, that doesn’t sound like a lot… In 20 years, we have over a thousand times the computing power we do today. Who can envision what you can do with a thousand times the computing power? None of us can do it, but it’s coming. So the changes here are just going to be huge.”
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