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- Honeywell, it's a name we all recognize.
- Most people still associate us with,
"Oh you're the thermostat company."
- That's because Honeywell makes
a long list of products we know.
That N95 mask worn by
our healthcare workers,
barcode scanners at cash registers,
and air safety systems helping
pilots avoid collision.
- It just brings joy to
my heart to see the kinds
of impact we can have on the world.
- And Honeywell is everywhere
from our own homes,
to the world's tallest
skyscrapers, to, well, the moon.
- You can do all these things
in one company called Honeywell.
- But Honeywell's making a dramatic shift.
From an industrial manufacturing giant,
into a technology company.
- What's different is we innovated and pivoted,
And that's what I'm proud of.
- It's a pleasure to have
Darius Adamczyk the CEO behind
this transformation with us today.
Hi Darius, it's wonderful
to have you join us today.
- Well thank you Monica
am thrilled to be here.
- This Show is called
The Inflection Point.
So my first question to you is,
is there a key inflection
point in your life
when everything changed for you?
- I think Monica For me
there's probably more than one
and it's hard for me to point to just one.
It certainly when I joined
Honeywell was acquired
by Honeywell's on when I went
to Harvard business school
and really changed my career path,
but probably a big one and
maybe the one that really
changed my whole lifetime
was one I immigrated
from Poland to the U.S. when I was 11.
Dropped into a whole new
society, a whole new country
not speaking the language
and trying to adjust
to that culturally, as an 11 year old
not really having that background
and a language skills to do that
and was certainly a big one.
I like to look back on that
time with mixed emotions,
because on one hand it was exciting and...
but it was also difficult
particularly for the first several months.
- Only knew 100 or 200 words of English,
and you were plopped into school.
What grade did you start in?
- I actually skipped a grade.
So I went right into seven.
- Oh my goodness.
- Which that worked out
okay for Math and Science,
not so great for English.
So that was an opportunity and
a challenge at the same time.
- And so here you are, you're in America,
and you loved all the new things,
but as kids can be, they
were mean to the new kid.
- Well obviously when you
come from a different culture
when you can't speak the
language, you can't communicate,
you can't understand people,
you don't understand
the sports, the culture.
Then, then kids can tend to pick on you.
And frankly my first
few years in the country
weren't particularly fun.
I mean there were some great
kids I've met that helped me
but there were quite a few
that actually picked on
me as well and back then,
sort of the Polish jokes
were very, very popular.
And I think I've heard every one of them
and every variety.
But like anything else you've got
to kind of persevere and move on.
- So you had to learn a lot
about perseverance as a boy, really?
And at some point did it make you wish
you had not even come to America?
Did it get that tough?
- I think very early on I
would say the first few months
I really felt like maybe we
made a mistake by coming here
'cause I was miserable,
my mother was miserable,
my father really
was the one that really
drove us to come to this country.
And frankly we weren't
particularly well prepared,
because we didn't speak the language,
and they had to shift careers,
and they have to work extraordinarily
hard to make a living.
And the first few months
were really, really hard.
- The polish jokes a
lot of them were about
you're not smart.
I mean, that's kind of a
lot of the Polish jokes
but you actually showed those mean kids
because look at you, you
got two engineering degrees,
you got an MBA from Harvard,
then you Rose the ranks at GE,
and Booz Allen Ingersoll Rand,
and then in 2008, you
were the CEO of a company
that was acquired by Honeywell.
So did you feel like,
"Hey I'm doing pretty well in the U.S. of A"
- Yeah it seems like I am.
And it's kinda fun to achieve what I have
particularly get given kind
of that humble beginnings.
But I really believe in
sort of the American dream.
I still think it's possible,
and certainly my father believed in it,
and that's why he came here and hard work,
perseverance can pay off.
And I think I exhibited that.
- Now when Honeywell bought
your company Metro Logic,
were you super excited?
Oh my God I've arrived!
- When we got bought by
Honeywell, I frankly thought,
"Oh, here we go."
I'm going back into a large company again
which I was part of another
large company before then.
And frankly that's not
what I was looking for.
I was looking for independence
and I liked being the
CEO of my own company.
And frankly, I enjoyed that culture.
So in my point of view was,
I'll stay in Honeywell for a little while
and then I'll probably move on
and I wasn't particularly
excited when that happened
and practically since
I was required to stay
a year or two with that.
- Exactly so they put on
those golden handcuffs,
which made you be there
for at least a year or two.
And then to your surprise though
the competitive spirit took over right?
Is it true you went to Dave Cote,
whom I know from years past
the previous CEO of Honeywell?
Did you go to him and say,
"Hey, give me the hardest
job in this company,
and let me handle it?"
- Oh, that's very true.
As a matter of fact at
first I kinda thought,
"Well just kind of sit on the sidelines,
"I'll pass the time, I'll
move on to something else."
But that only worked for a
couple of weeks 'cause...
- (laughs)
- If you're in the game then
you might as well play it well.
And so kind of my competitive
spirits took over.
And then a little bit
later on I went to Dave,
And kind of said I
really need a bigger challenge
and he kind of looked at me and smiled,
and said "so what are you looking for?"
I said, "Well, give me the
most broken thing you have,
"the biggest challenge
you have in a company,
"that's what I'd like to go off and run."
(laughing)
And he obliged and gave
me a division that frankly
wasn't doing particularly well,
it was extraordinarily complex
and he told me he said,
"Okay, let's see what you got,
"if you can turn this thing around,
"then a lot of things are
possible for you in the future."
And that's what happened.
- And so you obviously turned it around.
He later said that you know more
about technology than he could
study for 10 straight years
and still not understand it.
So do you apply that kind
of grit from your childhood,
and your engineering background,
is that the approach you take?
- Well first of I think Dave
is being extraordinarily kind,
but I do think particularly
when facing tough challenges,
grit and perseverance are required.
Because, especially when you
take over a challenged business
the bad news substantially
outweighs the good news.
And if you let that weigh you down,
and you become incapacitated,
you make others make decisions,
and we don't have a
direction and a compass.
Very quickly that completely
derail you in burgers.
I do kind of look back on my childhood,
and some of the experiences I had
and I kind of looked back and said,
"Okay I've faced tougher
challenges than this."
We can overcome and there's been
a few like that in my career.
- And now you ultimately succeeded
Dave, as the CEO in 2017.
But, you did have a setback along the way
as you were climbing
the ladder at Honeywell.
You were passed over for promotion
that you thought you deserved.
How did you handle that?
- So yeah you kind of go through
the full range of emotions
all the way from self-doubt,
to anger, to blame,
that every range of emotion was there.
And, but then you kinda settled down,
and what I usually do and then say,
"Well okay but what's within my control.".
That's really what I did.
I said, "Well what could
I have done better?"
And I didn't do that right
away, I wasn't happy.
And I think it's fine not to be happy
but you got to get over.
You gotta get over it and
you gotta get over it fairly quickly,
and setbacks are part of life.
And the key is...
and this is a bit of a cliche,
but it's certainly been true for me.
Which is I've learned so
much more from my setbacks,
than my success.
- Wow.
- Because successes, you
don't really learn that much
'cause you achieve you're objective
and you kinda get this,
"Oh, congratulations
you achieve X, Y, and Z."
Well great I guess I must've
done a lot of things right.
But from your setbacks,
you look back and say,
"Well, what didn't I do well?
"What could I have done differently?"
And you've got to have a
little bit of self reflection.
And self adjustments to really
be a bit better in the future.
And I think that that's been something
that I've tried to regain, and by the way,
and even today as CEO, you
get less and less feedback.
And then you have to become
very, very small cues.
You gotta be sensitive enough to say,
"I'm not heading in the right direction."
And it's important, right?
- So are you telling us that being a CEO
is not all cushy and great?
It's not wonderful?
And how does anybody keep you in check?
- Yeah, well that's true Monica.
There's the way I described being a CEO
is you're on this very, very small Island.
And I'm very, very lucky 'cause
I have a tremendous team.
But at the end of the day,
you own the decisions as CEO
and it can be a very lonely place,
and you have to be both confident
and humble the same time.
You have to be confident
enough to make the decisions,
that lead the company the right direction.
But humble enough to listen
to others and admit mistakes.
'Cause every CEO makes mistakes.
The great ones admit them
and adjust direction.
- That's interesting,
and you have a hundred thousand
employees counting on you.
What is it like then
day-to-day being the CEO?
Do you find that it's
fun to get up every day?
Or do you find that
every day you're hit with
these problems, problem after problem?
- It's both.
I mean there are tough
days and there are days
that are just exhilarating
and it can go from a day where
you're just kind of finding problem
after problem after problem,
to days where you really feel great
because you're either helping the world,
the business is doing well,
and your initiative is working,
you're helping the medical community,
you're helping the world with COVID.
Yet at the same time there are some downs,
and generally when
people come see the CEO,
it's usually not to share great news.
- What's your ratio of
good news to bad news?
Let's take a typical day, is it 50/50?
- More like 90/10. (laughs)
- 90 bad news or 90 good news?
- 90 bad news, 10% good news.
- Wow, how do you stay so up?
- Because most of the
problems can be solved.
And I tell my staff this which is,
I wanna know bad news early,
because usually problems don't go away.
They just grow bigger and they get
more and more difficult to solve.
So if we know bad news
early and we share it,
then when we can fix these issues.
That's why I don't get too down over them
because they're fixable.
- Honeywell was doing just fine.
But you decided we're gonna
move from doing just fine
and being an industrial
giant to actually becoming
more of a technology company,
serving the industrial sector.
What did that take of you
to make such a major pivot?
You are transforming this big company.
- That was challenging.
Because frankly when I took over it was
just don't break anything just
keep doing what you're doing.
And I knew then that I didn't wanna
just keep doing what he's been doing.
And although Dave did a
tremendous job in running
Honeywell for essentially
a decade and a half,
I also knew that we had to
evolve and change and so on.
And I really strongly
believe that if people
could take over very broken
companies and make them good,
get a lot of accolades and
awards and deserving results
because it's difficult,
stressful and so on.
But I actually believe it's much harder to
pick a company that's good,
like Honeywell was when I took over,
and trying to make it great.
That's much more difficult.
I knew that we were outstanding
in terms of productivity
and process and so on,
but we had opportunity for growth
and becoming a company
that provides technologies
for the industrial side.
And that's kind of that journey we've been on
for the last decade that I've been CEO.
Now we still have a long way to go
but we're making great progress.
- These new technologies
that you're getting into
are there two or three
that you can tell us about,
that we could understand?
- Well I'll try Monica.
Two or three is not fair,
but I'll give you...
I'll try to name two or three.
- Otherwise we'll be here
for the rest of the day.
'Cause I know you've got
that many you're working on.
- Let's start with a quantum computer.
This isn't like a digital computer,
this looks more like a science lab.
And that's the physical appearance of this
its something that's very
embryonic at this stage,
but something that's going
to be very, very important
in terms of next generation
of computing power
that's simply not available today.
The other thing that I'm
particularly proud of is,
this whole vision about
transforming a company
moving at more of a software solution,
from protecting the industrial workers,
through flying planes more safely.
And that's kind of that point of the spear
in terms of driving the
new Honeywell strategy.
That probably and a couple
of other quick examples is
some of our sustainable technologies.
I mean you we're gonna try to
help change the energy industry
and really helping some of
the big oil and gas companies
evolve from who they
are today, to the future.
Because we know the future is gonna have
much more renewable and sustainable energy.
- Okay so the quantum computing,
is like so crazy town I barely grasp it?
I do grasp the systems that
you're putting in place,
and then on the sustainable
technology aspect,
that is gonna actually
help the climate right?
- Fully.
- And is that where you're gonna
turn mustard seeds into fuel?
- That's one of the places
we guide and we can,
[indistinct] mustard seeds, oils, fats.
We can turn all of that into fuel.
We're actually one of the inventors
of green diesel, green fuels,
and unfortunately it's
only now that we're getting
substantial interest in these technologies
as everyone wants to
become more sustainable.
- Now your transformation
that you've just laid out
is so radical.
You sold off what everybody
when they think of Honeywell,
they think of the little thermostat.
You all had to actually come
up with a brand campaign,
and you say things like, "The
future is what we make it."
What did you want to do with
your new brand campaign?
- Well, a couple of things.
The first one is communicate
who Honeywell is and what we do
because most people
still associate us with,
"Oh you're the thermostat company."
So that's one and really
provide an overview,
of the key technologies that we deliver
for the aerospace industry,
or building controls,
warehouse automation, sensing and control,
industrial safety,
maybe as much as targeting
potential customers,
we really wanted to
target potential employees
because I strongly believe
there's no better place
to work in the world than Honeywell.
And here's why, because if you wanna have
a meaningful impact on the world,
and I mean the word meaningful
is critically important
because whether you wanna
provide technologies
that enable aircraft to fly,
or provide technologies to enable
commercial buildings to operate,
whether you wanna transform
the energy industry,
or you want to protect
the medical workers,
the first responders, you
can do all these things
in one company called Honeywell.
So I will also want to really portray
all these things that we do
and the future is really what we make it
because we influence so
many things for the future.
And I'll give you...
if I could just maybe just...
I'm gonna give you one more example
of something we did in this
COVID era and I'm so proud.
The world is gonna need
billions upon billions
of vials for vaccines.
Well we know that there's
gonna be glass shortage.
We just don't have
seven and a half billion
vials sitting around
if there's a shortage.
So through our materials group
and some of the expertise there,
we came up with a new viable
but different material
that's lighter, less
susceptible to damage,
it's in testing right now,
and it's gonna provide a very
good alternative to glass.
- Now did you jump on that Darius,
because this is necessary
right now for COVID?
Or did you jump on it 'cause,
this is a money-making
opportunity, or both?
- I would tell you that
we responded quickly
and effectively to the COVID crisis
not really worrying about how
much money we were gonna make.
And frankly, we didn't
make a lot of money.
But that wasn't the point.
The point is we needed to help the country
to come out of this crisis that we're in
and we needed to help out our medical.
And that's why I love working here
'cause it just brings
joy to my heart to see
the kinds of impact we
can have on the world.
- You all also ramped up
production of ventilators,
and PPE for healthcare workers.
- I think that this again
is sort of a little bit of,
we took a very sharp pivot in early 2020.
And everybody wanted to kind
of feel sorry for themselves
in March and April of 2020.
- (laughs)
- Oh no our aerospace
market is disappearing,
and some of our oil and gas
customers are struggling,
and some of those markets
are really struggling
and what we did is we said,
"Well, let's use this as an
opportunity to shift the business."
- Do you think Darius that
you all were ideally suited
to deal with COVID impart
because you had gone through 9-11,
and had to deal with that
crisis for the airlines?
- Honeywell is a company that
reacts really well to crisis,
and we've had a few...
I mean we've seen our markets
kind of disappear overnight
before, 9-11 was a
great example of that
our biggest business is aerospace
and we had to deal with
that crisis after 9-11
and for a while that market
was dramatically depressed and
we kind of had the playbook.
We knew what to do, we didn't
take weeks or months to act.
We acted immediately and
what's different is we innovated
and pivoted and that's what
I'm particularly proud of.
I actually find that Honeywell people,
operate at their best during a crisis.
And specially because there was
such a higher purpose involved,
which is to help the
world fight this pandemic
and it was thrilling to what's possible.
- You also got national attention
from your mass vaccination
effort you did in Charlotte.
Which by the way moving to Charlotte
was another one of your
major transformations.
You got out of Morristown, New Jersey,
right to Charlotte.
And being a southerner myself,
how are you liking the south?
- I loved it, I love Charlotte.
We love being here.
And it was a real thrill
for us to partner with
Atrium Health, the Panthers, the Speedway,
and it wasn't about the mass vaccination.
I mean we're very proud of
what we're able to accomplish
because we literally vaccinated a person
every four and a half seconds ...
- But you've used a lot
of your Honeywell systems,
to get that done, right?
- That's right we developed
some new technology
using our bar-coding
technology around our software
and so on just to process people
more quickly through the lines.
And we actually wrote a handbook,
that we distributed to every
governor in the country.
With a little bit about how to do this
- And your handbook I think
also has gone to the Biden administration.
You now have an actual how
to do this mass vaccination
that can be used by others.
- And that's precisely why we did it.
It wasn't so much about
the one or two events
which demonstrated what's possible,
but to really kind of share some
of the best practices within our country.
- One recent development for Honeywell,
is that you were re added to the Dow,
which is a big accomplishment.
You were on the Dow
years ago, you came off,
now you're back on.
Do you think this is some affirmation
of what you're trying to do at Honeywell?
- Well that was certainly a thrill.
And we're one of the few
companies that was subtracted
or deleted from the Dow and
then added back in last year
which obviously is particularly
exciting for all of us.
And we're all very proud
of that accomplishment.
I know I speak on nearly a
hundred thousand employees
in Honeywell who are
thrilled to be part of it.
And I do think it means that
we're a very relevant company,
in terms of the business world
and in terms of the
solutions and technologies.
We provide our day-to-day
people that a great job,
I'm not gonna take any credit for that,
but this is really a high honor
for all of the Honeywell employees,
and we're thrilled to be at it.
- It is a big deal so
congratulations on it.
- Thank you.
- Before we go, let's
gaze into the future.
Because you are a very
future focused company.
You're making all these
changes that are happening now
but you're also doing things
that won't even happen
in your lifetime.
It makes me think of the Jetsons.
Do you remember the Jetsons
with the flying cars?
And you all are coming up with
a flying drone taxi or something.
So what is one or two of your
very favorite way out there
things in the future that
Honeywell is looking at?
- Electric power generation for aircraft,
is something that we're working on now.
- Wow, we're thinking
electric cars is a big change
and you're thinking electric airplanes!
- Electric airplanes
and hydrogen powered aircraft of some type.
And I really believe that you
kinda have to have this horizon
that's pretty short term
because investors don't
really like it and say,
"Oh well don't worry what
happens for next five years.
"That doesn't really play well."
But if you sort of staggering these
short term, medium term and
really long-term investments,
I really only have one objective which is
to leave Honeywell much better
and in a much better position,
than when I took over.
That's what I think most
CEOs hopefully want.
- Now one thing that I saw
that you all are doing in
the future is getting it where
people can breathe on Mars.
Is that gonna happen anytime soon?
When will we be able to go
to Mars and breathe there?
- Yeah I don't know if that's
gonna happen anytime soon
but yes you can have a
role to play now as well.
- (laughs) Well listen
thank you for telling me
all the transformation that's underway
at Honeywell under your leadership
talking about the future.
And when you say your brand
campaign is to attract
not just show what the
customers you can do,
but attract new employees
I'm sure people watching
you today are going to say,
"That Honeywell, that's a
different kind of company,
"and that's a different kind of CEO."
So thank you so much for joining us today.
- Well thank you Monica it was a pleasure
to talk to you today.
Thank you so much.
- Join me next time on
the inflection point.
When I sit down with James
Quincey, CEO of Coca-Cola.
- Coke's purpose is very simple.
It's to refresh the world
and make a difference.
- You say business leaders
should shape an economy,
that works for everyone.
- You can't have a healthy
and purposeful business,
if the society that you're operating in,
is not also healthy and prosperous.
- You've got so many big plans here.
- It's very difficult to
get out of bed everyday,
if you don't love what you're doing.
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