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Amid tariff whiplash and the rejuggling of global trade, GE Vernovas CEO Scott Strazik is finding a way to stay relentlessly optimistic. Strazik returns to the Rapid Response podcast to share how the company plans to continue its success as one of Wall Streets top-performing stocks, despite looming supply chain disruption and market unpredictability. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. GE Vernova is now one year into life as an independent public company, much to celebrateyour revenue rose to $35 billion. In 2024, GE Vernova was the year’s fourth best performing stock. Again, a lot to celebrate. But in 2025, the external environment hasn’t been as friendly. The Trump tariffs have everyone scrambling. How do you think about this moment? How do you think about it compared to a year ago at this time? Well, our end markets really haven’t changed very much, Bob. I would start there. I mean, we continue to see very strong end markets in our larger core businesses and gas power, in our electrification and grid businesses. So, frankly, there’s going to be moments of dislocation between the stock market and our end markets. It doesn’t mean that depending on where the tariffs go, that doesn’t create an opportunity for us to prove out our nimbleness and managing our global supply chain, and we’re going to have to do that. But I think it’s frankly an opportunity for us to demonstrate how much we’ve grown in our first year as a public company to be able to operate in this kind of environment. How do the tariffs practically impact your business? I mean, you’re a global business, so changes in global relationships and reputation, all of that requires some adjustment. Yeah, I think even if you take a step back and think about some of the stuff I’ve talked to our investors about on where we want to make investments, we want to invest in our business where we can improve the durability or the resiliency of our supply chain, and that’s simply because we have a lot of organic growth that’s coming in our businesses, irrespective of any policy changes. Now, policies are going to change, they’re going to evolve. This is going to force us to relook at where we source certain things. It’ll force us to revisit our terms with some of our suppliers in different locations, but we know how to do that. So, we don’t want to be too fast to respond as we’re kind of trying to make sense of everything. But I’d also rather be a company that is quick on its feet. In this environment, President Trump announced the tariffs on a Wednesday afternoon after the market closed. Rest assured by Friday afternoon, our teams were actively working evaluation plans of what our alternatives are. Now, it doesn’t mean within 40 hours you pull the trigger in a dynamic period of time. So, we’re working it pretty hard right now to figure out what our alternatives are, and with a growing backlog, to the extent our backlog is growing so substantially, that also puts us in a privileged position with our supply base to come and say, “Listen, this is what it’s going to take to keep serving GE Vernova.” It’s almost like there’s been a pullback around the very idea of globalization that maybe it’s not good to be a global organization. Do you think about that? Well, when I think about my first four months of the year. I mean, my first trip of the year was to Singapore and Japan, the first week of January. I had a great trip in the Middle East in February visiting Saudi, Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi. These are all important markets for us. I think we’ve got opportunities to serve these markets throughout, and we’re going to work really hard to earn those opportunities. At the same time, long before announcements with tariffs, the reality is there has been an evolving shift with globalization. There’s certainly been a lot of strategic moves towards concepts of decoupling from the Chinese supply chain explicitly. So, we’ve been working that over a long period of time. Now, the last week certainly has been broader than any one country, and with it, it forces you to really revisit it in an even more intimate way, what you do and where you do it, but we can do that. We’re capable of taking that on, and I’m highly confident we can use this moment to make ourselves a better company for the long term. You have announced investing $600 million in U.S. factories yourself creating over 1,500 jobs. Yes. How much does GE Vernova need to be an American company? I would say more we need to be a local company for our local markets. I think in your bigger markets, you’re going to have a local supply chain to serve that market, local teams to serve that market. We’re a global company where, at this moment, one of our most important local markets certainly is the U.S., and that’s why we’re investing into that market. But we’re not going to not invest in some of these other countries that are attractive and markets too to be local there. There’s been some speculation that the speed with which U.S. manufacturing can ramp up to replace things that might have come from abroad, that that’s going to take a while and there’s going to be disruption. Is that something for your business that you see that you worry about, or is that part of the nimbleness, I guess, that you’re talking about on the part of your team? We do have a fair amount of industrial footprint in the U.S. that allows us to build on existing assets. So, the $600 million investment is reinvesting in existing assets, 1,500 jobs to locations that already have the concrete poured. They already have the cranes. They already have the logistics with the railroad adjacent to the factory. So, we can move reasonably quickly. Now, to the extent the policy environment drives us towards greenfield investments to reindustrialize parts of our supply chain, that would take longer, truth be told. And that’s a multiyear journey that, at this point, we aren’t necessarily evaluating, but we will keep looking in that regard. But first and foremost, we’re going to keep trying to eliminate waste in our existing processes and build upon the assets we have, and we feel like that can carry us for a eriod of time. Now, where we don’t have it, as an example, we announced and closed an acquisition of a supply chain footprint from Woodward. That was a vertical supply chain integration of a small part of Woodward’s business, but for our gas business, an important part of our supply chain where we thought it made more sense to just have that internal. How much do you tune your long-term decision-making when there’s noise and change and pressure in the near term? We need to scrutinize how long the status quo is, for sure. And that can be hard to do in a volatile moment that we’re in. But if nothing else, it gives us a chance to really challenge ourselves on what we have been doing, whether there’s a different way to do it. And that’s the way we talk about it internally is: “This is an opportunity for us to really revisit past assumptions and think about how we can be better.” Now, in some cases, we may gain conviction with exactly the play we’ve been running. In others, there may be a better alternative. I mean, do you have, sort of, I don’t know, leadership principles or lessons that you use as a touchstone when things do get volatile? Well, we’re not going to suck our thumbs and cry on our beer as things kind of change. We want to use change as an opportunity to improve. In that regard, this moment when we’re just reaching our one-year anniversary as a public company is a moment when I feel pretty confident we’ve got our feet on the ground, and we can play into this and use this moment of change to play offense on not just how we want 2025 to go, because we won’t change 2025 in any material way certainly from a supply chain strategy, but we can use 2025 to challenge ourselves for the next decade, and that’s very much what we’re doing.
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E-Commerce
Given all the recent bad news on the world stage, from tariffs wars to the war in Ukraine, it’s no wonder Swedes are seeking a moment of zen by watching a livestream of “The Great Moose Migration” (loosely translated from the Swedish, “Den stora älgvandringen“). The 24-hour event, which runs for 20 days straight, kicked off on Tuesday. Since it first aired in 2019, it’s been providing soothing entertainment for millions of Swedes each year around this time. That first year, nearly a million Swedes tuned in to literally watch moose walk through forests and swim across the ngerman River, all captured by remote cameras and drones, the Associated Press reported. By last year, the sleeper hit had a whopping 9 million viewers, who followed along on Sweden’s national public television’s streaming platform, SVT Play. This year, the livestream started airing a week earlier, as the moose got an early start due to warmer weather. From now until May 4, viewers can watch dozens of moose migrate to their favorite pastures located about 187 miles northwest of Stockholm, the country’s capital. Sure, there’s not much happening, but that’s why so many people find it relaxing. So much so, that more than 78,000 Swedes have joined a Facebook group with fans sharing photos of their TV screens when moose appear, according to NBC News. In fact, The Great Moose Migration is part of a larger global trend of relaxing, nature-oriented livestreams with not too much going on, which began in 2009 when NRK, Norway’s public broadcaster, aired a seven-hour train trip across the southern part of the country. That trend has even extended to the U.S., where thousands of captivated viewers have tuned in to watch a couple of wild eagles, Jackie and Shadow, and their growing family via the bald eagle nest cam in California.
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E-Commerce
OpenAI has named labor leader Dolores Huerta and three others to a temporary advisory board that will help guide the artificial intelligence company’s philanthropy as it attempts to shift itself into a for-profit business. Huerta, who turned 95 last week, formed the first farmworkers union with Cesar Chavez in the early 1960s and will now have a say on the direction of philanthropic initiatives that OpenAI says will consider both the promise and risks of AI. The group will have just 90 days to make their suggestions. She recognizes the significance of AI in todays world and anybody whos been paying attention for the last 50 years knows she will be a force in this conversation, said Daniel Zingale, the convener of OpenAI’s new nonprofit commission and a former adviser to three California governors. Huertas advice wont be binding but the presence of a social activist icon could be influential as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attempts a costly restructuring of the San Francisco company’s corporate governance, which requires the approval of California’s attorney general and others. Another coalition of labor leaders and nonprofits recently petitioned state Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, to investigate OpenAI, halt the proposed conversion and protect billions of dollars that are under threat as profit-driven hunger for power yields conflicts of interest. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, started out in 2015 as a nonprofit research laboratory dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI that benefits humanity. It later formed a for-profit arm and shifted most of its staff there, but is still controlled by a nonprofit board of directors. It is now trying to convert itself more fully into a for-profit corporation but faces a number of hurdles, including getting the approval of California and Delaware attorneys general, potentially buying out the nonprofit’s pricy assets and fighting a lawsuit from co-founder and early investor Elon Musk. Backed by Japanese tech giant SoftBank, OpenAI last month said its working to raise $40 billion in funding, putting its value at $300 billion. Huerta will be joined on the new advisory commission by former Spanish-language media executive Monica Lozano; Robert Ross, the recently retired president of The California Endowment; and Jack Oliver, an attorney and longtime Republican campaign fundraiser. Zingale, the group’s convener, is a former aide to California governors including Democrat Gavin Newsom and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. Were interested in how you put the power of AI in the hands of everyday people and the community organizations that serve them, Zingale said in an interview Wednesday. Because, if AI is going to bring a renaissance, or a dark age, these are the people you want to tip the scale in favor of humanity. The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of APs text archives. Matt O’Brien, AP technology writer
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E-Commerce
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