How do you effect revolutionary change like that?

I sometimes say that the first line of my job description is sales, and that’s what I actually do every day, all day. And whether I’m selling stock to investors, products to customers, employment to young people, or new ideas to existing employees, it’s all the same thing: I’m always doing sales. And what you look for, benchmarks are a really good way to sell. That is, when you can see where you are today as compared to somebody else who is there, that’s a very effective means of selling. When you have a hard discipline, like the process revolution, you can sell that effectively as well. I spend a lot of my life looking for gee-whiz examples—things that are real and persuasive—that people can buy into and say, “Okay, I believe that.” It’s much better than the sloganeering that you get sometimes, the motivational talk like we’ve got to try harder and so forth—stuff that’s absolutely useless, and, in fact, it reminds me of all my time going through the former Soviet Union. You look at all these slogans plastered all across the walls of these Soviet factories. Work harder, work better, work smarter, do this, try harder. And the answer, of course, is that it doesn’t work. I mean, try harder is not normally an effective means of improvement. What does actually work is having a specific discipline, and I spend a lot of my time with United Technologies Corporation (UTC) people trying to persuade people about the specific disciplines.