Kathy Warden, Chair, Chief Executive Officer, and President of Northrop Grumman Corporation.

[Music] we're very fortunate to have kathy warden who is the chairman ceo and president of northrop grumman here um briefly uh her background she is from i'm from a native of maryland but i've never heard of be honest her hometown of smithberg maryland anybody know where smithberg is it's surrounding at least somebody it's here near hagerstown right okay she's from smithberg and uh from there she went to james madison university and got her mba at george washington she started her career at general electric then went viridian then her general dynamics and then in 2008 she joined northrop grumman and she worked her way up to be uh president chief operating officer and in january of 2019 she became the ceo and in january and in july of 2019 also added the title of chairman and since she and all of you will wish you had bought the stock when she became the ceo because the stock is up 84 since she became the ceo and the market capitalization is up about 65 company has about uh market capitalization about 70 billion dollars and about 90 000 employees and headquartered in falls church so how many people when they heard she was going to be the ceo bought the stock how many people wish they had bought the stock i told david it's not too late right okay so um recently um you were banned from traveling to russia has that upset you very much and have you lost a lot of sleep out of that or were you going to russia a lot well after having to replan my vacation for this summer just kidding uh no i had not planned any travel to russia and it hasn't upset me as a matter of fact it's made me proud because the reason i am banned from travel to russia is because of the work northrop grumman does and we are providing capabilities that the us and our allies use to deter conflict and when that's not successful as it hasn't been in ukraine to protect people's human rights and their freedoms and way of life so that's something to be very proud of and are you surprised that you were on the list or i i was surprised because the sanctions against me don't really accomplish anything but it's part of the job okay so uh let's talk about russia ukraine i assume that northrop grumman is providing some equipment to the ukrainians is that true it is true and how does that work where do the ukrainians call you directly and say this is what we need or do the pentagon call you and say what do you have that we could use or how does that work well the ukrainians don't have my cell phone number so no they don't call direct we go through the u.s government and the pentagon largely is procuring on behalf of ukraine what is being provided in aid and that's how we do most of our foreign business through the us government right but the the government knows all the things you already have but like do you ever call them up and say we have this new thing that's even better than what we had before and try to get them to buy some new things or is that how it works we do they set requirements but we also offer ideas on technologies that they may not be contemplating that we think would be useful to solve their challenges okay so for the ukrainians um is there any price negotiation that do you say the pentagon well this is what it costs but we'll give you a discount because it's a good cause or how does that work no usually prices are set well in advance of when the capabilities are used and so those negotiations are rigorous and uh the government operates on behalf of the taxpayer to make sure they get the best deal but that's not relative to what's happening in the environment at the moment okay so um let's suppose that the ukrainians need certain types of weapons and you do you actually have those weapons sitting in a warehouse somewhere and you ship them over there or how do they get over there and where do you have to make them specifically for the ukrainians or you already have them sitting somewhere well my cfo's here so i would not admit to carrying a lot of inventory that would be a bad business move but the us government does carry inventory and for most of what's being provided to ukraine right now it is coming out of u.s stockpiles okay so are there any things that you can talk about that maybe are being used by the ukrainians that have done well well you read the news as i do in terms of what the ukrainians are using and how well they're doing i would say the most important weapon they have is the spirit and determination of the ukrainian people even more so than the arms that are being provided by the us and their allies okay now you are not banned from you going to ukraine it seems like everybody wants to be in ukraine these days i feel there should be a bumper sticker that says honk if you haven't been to ukraine yet but uh but um have you been to ukraine i have not okay now's not the time to go though not to go okay so right now um what was your assessment you're obviously not in the military but you must talk to people in it what is your assessment of the likelihood that this war or special military operation is going to continue for quite some time i don't know if i'm the best person to suggest what's going to happen next i wouldn't have thought that russia would invade ukraine once it happened i would have thought that it would have been weeks before some peaceful resolution would have been reached it does look like now this conflict is going to endure unfortunately and it largely is being driven by again the will of the ukraine people to protect their freedoms now the defense contractors and you and if you're a defense contractor some people would call you that some would say aerospace defense company whatever what's the preferred terminology aerospace and defense is our industry but northrop grumman is predominantly defense okay so the defense companies the other ones lockheed martin and general dynamics do you get together and say these are the weapons we ought to try to have the ukrainians use or you you can't for anti-trust reasons get together so each of you deal with the pentagon separately we absolutely collaborate under the direction often of the u.s government and there are forums where we come together with the government to talk about how we can work together to either scale right now it's a question of how do we scale production to backfill stock piles we also work together on new technology development it's a rare industry in that competitors often team together because no one company has all the skills and technologies available to them to deliver on the government's tough requirements so quite a bit of collaboration in our industry so congress very often uh promotes certain aerospace defense projects and so forth in this particular case is congress promoting certain weapons or certain products you have or do they just coming from the pentagon in terms of what you're going to be selling the ukrainians well i wouldn't say they promote as much as they support through appropriations and making prioritization decisions about what systems are most necessary for national security means in the case of our international partners our congress also engages in codels that help to promote u.s industry as a source because we'd always like our allies to have systems that can interoperate with the us and that we are providing so when the pentagon says we need certain systems and weapons for the ukrainians do they and it's an emergency do they pay you before you actually deliver the systems or do you have to you insist on getting paid first or you can trust the government's credit we trust the government's credit we rarely in the u.s get paid first oh you don't get paid first and and so are they pretty reliable they pay you in three months or you pay us on time on time okay [Applause] usually usually except during continuing resolutions okay so uh right now i for a while there were three of the largest uh aerospace defense companies who are led by women marilyn houston was running lockheed martin uh phoebe novakovic was running um general dynamics and you're running northrop grumman so is there a discrimination against men that try to run these companies or what about affirmative action for men well i think in all of our cases we were the first woman right in company histories of nearly 100 years so we have some catching up to do still okay and uh do you get tired of getting asked every day what's it like to be a woman heading an aerospace defense company and if not can i ask that question what's it like to be a woman heading up an aerospace defense company i had a feeling you'd ask anyway you know i don't think of myself as a woman running the company i think of myself as a leader with a tremendous amount of responsibility to the people that i support okay all right well let's talk about how you became a leader uh i didn't want to make fun of smithberg i assume it's a great city but um i've actually never found town um where is it actually it's just outside of hagerstown in the the hills i would not call them mountains uh that you cross over as you head into western maryland and how did your family get there not that it's not a good place to be but uh well my father came from an even smaller town called middletown because it's positioned between frederick and hagerstown and my mother came from an even smaller town called clear spring maryland so they love small towns they love small towns all right so you uh what did your father and mother do in smithsburg so neither of them had a college degree so my mother worked in a sewing factory and my father was a surveyor for the county government okay and so you grew up there and you went to high school there and were you president of student government or are you the head of the aerospace defense club i don't think we knew how to spell aerospace and defense in smithsburg uh i was active in my school both in sports and extracurricular activities but nothing that would prepare me for my career all right so um if you're a student if you grew up in maryland your parents are not wealthy you can get a i guess some state discount if you go to college in maryland but you went to college in virginia um so why did you pick virginia and why did you pick james madison did you admire his work on the constitution or how did you happen to pick james madison university well it was pre-internet so i was somewhat limited not having parents who knew the college scene and coming from a small school where the guidance counselor didn't send many people to college at all to get a four-year degree so i had just done my own research and found james madison to be the kind of culture that i wanted in a university it was very oriented toward teaching and still is today and i value the education i got there because the organization was not focused on research and corporate partnerships it was focused on the student okay so after you graduated did you work right away or did you get your mba later i went to work and about two years into my career went to get my mba so you went to general electric initially i did and did you ever think that your company be more valuable than general electric would be no i did not think that so okay so you work for general electric and then how did you wind your way to get to northrop grumman so i left ge a little less than a decade into my career there to go to a small startup and it was around the time of the internet boom and i wanted to use my technology skills to help companies figure out how to monetize the internet and that's what we were doing 911 hit and i had a team working in new york city in the financial district and really our whole company was touched by that experience we fortunately didn't lose anyone in the 911 terrorist attacks but our world was turned upside down and so i was asked if i would in the company that i was working for go work with the intelligence community for a short period of time on information sharing and i said absolutely i want to do my part and i thought i'd do it for 18 months two years and then go back to what i was doing what i knew and the rest is history 20 years later i'm still in the industry because i believe and i have a passion for the work we do okay so to have the job well let's finish up so you you joined northrop grumman and did you say i'm going to be the ceo of this company someday or no i never set i set goals for myself i wanted to have increasingly significant impact in the companies in which i worked but i never said i need to be ceo one day all right so but you weren't surprised when you were picked as president and chief operating officer the writing was on the wall at that point okay all right so when you became the ceo um and then all of a sudden you have to get all these security clearances right you have all the clearances you can possibly get i guess by now right i had a lot before i became ceo but yes it does feel like they just keep coming and the government goes back and investigates everybody you've known since the third grade and all that yes and there were no scandals no skeletons it was perfect not that they could find none that i'm aware of okay all right so um let's talk about your company it has four segments you would call them right yes though first is aeronautics what is aeronautics what is it what is your aeronautics segment it's pretty simple we build aircraft both unmanned unmanned aircraft unmanned is that like a drone or and the unique aspect of what we do there are many remotely piloted unmanned aircraft ours are completely autonomous meaning they fly themselves so sometimes i've read that autonomous kind of planes like this they actually have people that could be in any city just directing them so what is to stop uh a foreign country from doing the same to us they could send their equivalent drones over our airspace is is our technology so much better that nobody else can do that right now or somebody could do that well that's where we need good defensive systems and so that's another part of the business that detects and can deter or intercept if needed so what's the future of drones i mean we already know what they kind of can do but what can they do in the future that you would say would be amazing i think what we'll see more of in the future is unmanned and man-teaming meaning unmanned aircraft where you don't want to put humans in harm's way we'll do missions that clear the path for or collect intelligence for manned aircraft that will follow okay now another one of your segments is defense since the whole company is defense but what is the segment of defense it's largely our weapons business as well as our command and control business that does the detection to support the intercept with kinetic weapons so is that like another way of saying cyber or that's not no that business isn't cyber it's more kinetic so the physical weapon systems that we build all right now you make the b2 bomber we do and what segment is that in arrow that's arrow okay but you were talking about so it's more it's manned flight as well as okay it's an airplane that is both conventional and nuclear arm now the b2 bomber is famous for being a stealth it is so but you can see it when you go look at it right here and now you have a contract to build a new one i think it's a new stealthier plane i guess better something when is that going to be ready soon we just moved the first test aircraft out of production and into test and we have five more on the manufacturing floor and without violating national secrets what's it going to do that the other one can't do it'll just be more stealthy and more capable and i can't go into details of what capable means but if you have ever seen a b2 you actually don't see it you hear it when it does a flyover it was at the super bowl two years ago and the media coverage tried to capture the b2 flyover but you really couldn't see a thing uh and so that's what you'd expect with the v21 now the b2 bomber was pretty expensive per copy this is this the b21 or what what is it the b21 is the new one okay the b21 oh as how much is that going to cost like 50 million dollars a piece a little more than that more than that maybe but it's meeting its cost target okay but uh and the government united states has already authorized enough for them to make it worthwhile to do it the program of record is a hundred one of the challenges with the b2 is it went into production in the late 1980s and of course the us government decided to buy far fewer when the berlin wall came down and so it did increase the cost on a per quantity basis of the b2 we don't expect that to happen with b21 okay so you're going to make 100 of them more or less at least and where do you manufacture them in palmdale california okay all right so another one of your divisions is your missions segment what is that that business is cyber communications and sensing so i think radars and detection systems so is our cyber capability as good as the russians i'd like to think so okay and um can you give us any secrets about what we do on cyber or something no you might end up on that sanctions list if you keep asking me questions so but um so that's largely cyber and cyber is is um offensive and defensive and you do both we do okay and your other segment is your um i guess it's the defense segment what is that well defense i talked about the last one is space space and that one also is pretty self-explanatory we do national security space for the us department of defense in the new space force we also work for nasa as we continue to explore the universe we just launched a space telescope that is now a million miles from earth and it's going to look back at the first light around the time of the big bang really exciting and that one is called the web the james webb space telescope and is it operable yet is it open it is it's still calibrating to be able to see back in time basically that distance requires it to be cooled to very low temperatures and so we're still calibrating it and we expect to see first light in the may june time frame so really soon all right so why don't should we care what the universe looked like five billion years ago how's that going to make our life better well some scientists have dedicated their life to understanding the origins of our universe and exploring whether there are life-sustaining exoplanets other than our universe let's suppose there are because that why do we care we're going to make a difference because we're not going to really be able to communicate with them presumably but you studied history and right not science but if you studied science these are the questions that will help us rewrite textbooks about science all right discovery all right so um now do you work with spacex we do and you remember met elon musk i have and what was that experience like he's a brilliant man wow okay um okay so are you surprised that a kind of startup company like spacex became so big so quickly in the space business i'm not surprised there's a tremendous amount of opportunity in space and we're just scratching the surface of it and of course spacex is very much focused on commercial exploration of space and that part of the market is in its infancy so in your space business you bought a company in the washington area called orbital yes do you usually buy those kind of companies or you build things uh internally we do both but when we have the opportunity to do high quality acquisition as orbital atk was that's a faster way to accelerate our progress in key markets like space let's see let's talk about covid for a moment so when covet hit were you running your company from home or how did you deal with that very briefly we asked our senior leadership team and anyone who didn't need to be in the offices to stay home so that we could take the time to put in place safety protocols more distancing but the work we do really does require us to be in our facilities either because it's classified or we have people building product and for national security purposes we had not only an exemption but a request by the us government to continue doing our work so we very rapidly within a matter of weeks had our senior leadership team back in the office i have been in the office consistently since april of 2020 and have you did you get covered i have oh really yes how did you get it if you were precaution i don't know how i got it i've had probably you know two dozen close contact situations that i'm sure many in this audience have had over time and i had very mild symptoms and of course i quarantined and stayed home okay so going back to the workforce is it are you having troubles and others in the aerospace defense industry getting employees to come in and work at the jobs of the pa the wages you're paying is that a problem in terms of labor availability the labor market is very tight right now for all skills whether it be technicians which for us is largely high school graduates that we put through training through engineers who have advanced degrees and what we are finding is that our attrition is only up slightly from pre-pandemic levels and we're able to hire but there is wage pressure and who are the better young employees women or men well we look for a very diverse workforce so we want to have our company look like our communities okay and so today um are you asking your employees to come back to work five days a week in the office or three days or four days what is your system the majority are back five days because they need to be to effectively do their work but we do provide flexibility to people who have circumstances that make that difficult or whose work allow them to have maximum flexibility so you have insights i presume on the us economy because you're selling things throughout the country out the world so what is your assessment of the us economy at the moment well i expect growth will continue to slow whether we'll technically go into recession and if so when i won't try to predict what i will say is that in our industry we see a steady and increasing demand signal so our challenges are more on the supply side inflation supply chain availability and labor so a little bit of slowing in the economy to get the supply and demand and balance is not a bad thing uh your supply chain is that extend to countries like china do you buy things from china part of your supply chain we do not most of our contracts prohibit us from sourcing from countries and you can't sell anything to china i guess without the us government giving you permission right so today the biggest challenge that you think the united states faces in the um global arena is it what is it cyber is it traditional military type of attacks what do you think are the biggest challenges the the country faces militarily certainly the speed at which technology is advancing i think of us less than an arms race today and more in a technology race so as other nations develop capability more so than capacity our ability to stay advanced beyond their technology is first and foremost and that's in domains that are less advanced cyber being one of them space being another and also working under norms that the us government would want to operate under but that all nations do not operate under and we see that with the russian invasion of ukraine so i would say that's our largest challenge is technology race and then standards and policies and norms that govern behavior now in your current position uh you have to deal with the us government the us government is your biggest customer right is it more than 70 of your sales it's actually more than 80. more than 80 so i guess you have to be nice to the customer right yes so how often do you have to see the secretary of defense or the head of procurement you go there every week and say here i am and here's our new products we have it's not every week but it's frequent and particularly since the crisis in ukraine we've had more engagement with the pentagon around their strategy and how we as an industrial base can be ready and supportive andy what about do you deal with members of congress do you find that uplifting or how does that i do engage with congress and i will say that i appreciate members willingness to serve we need good leaders in congress and i appreciate that it is a hard job and that we do our best to support and inform the decisions they need to make some people say that aerospace are not the aerospace the defense budget's very high and maybe it's too high i assume you don't agree with that well i don't because if you look at historical trends the percentage of gdp that we're spending on defense has actually come down significantly over the last several decades and in particular the amount that government spends on research and development in this country is about half of what it used to be now fortunately companies are being part of that but tech companies and other aerospace and defense companies have made up the gap by increasing r d spending during that time but it's important that our government be behind research and development that provides the asymmetric capability that we need to stay ahead of competitors i suppose the president united states called you and said we've never had a woman serve as secretary of defense and at some point i'd like to appoint a woman to be secretary offense and i'd like you to be that person what would you say i would applaud his efforts give him some suggestions and let him know that i'm busy right now and you wouldn't be interested okay and um why do you think it is that you know there's some industries that are not that popular some might say pharmaceutical is not that popular some might say my industry private equity is not that popular but some people also say aerospace defense is not that popular why is that i think it's a misunderstanding of the industry when you look at an aerospace and defense company if you want to see a company that would profit off of conflict i can see where that would be a negative perception it's not at all what our company seeks to do we and the countries we work with are seeking to deter conflict and projecting strength is necessary to deter aggressive behavior and so i'm very proud of the work that we do in that regard and i think if more people understood that they'd have a different point of view on the necessity the intent and the nobility of our industry and our work okay so as you um look at your product base or you would like to sell more more products i assume to people overseas that are friends of the united states is that a major effort to try to sell products to other uh friendly countries or is that hard to do it is because it's important for other countries to do their part in the collective defense globally and securing democracies but it's also important that they are able to defend themselves and so we see that as an important part of our work we often though in northrop grumman are working on some of the more classified more sophisticated capabilities that the us government does not allow export so we're not going to have 30 plus percent of our portfolio exported we're at about 15 and that's probably where we'll stay for the foreseeable future it doesn't mean that we aren't supportive of our allies we absolutely are and there's a good bit of our product that can benefit them but we also want to make sure that the us has capabilities that are unique to our country so can you tell us about some um future futuristic kind of defense capabilities we might have for example will we actually develop a uh hypersonic missile ourselves i guess the chinese have one and maybe the russians have one and maybe even the north koreans have one so uh how come we don't have one and is that something we should be having well we are working toward hypersonic capability and i think it's a difference in concept of operation more so than a technology limiter we have the technology to build a hypersonic weapon and to the extent that the us determines that that's going to be a priority we will have the ability to scale and build more of them sometimes people say that the aerospace defense industry makes products but they're taking a long time to actually get those products to market is that a fair criticism or you think it's just a misunderstanding of how difficult it is we can move quickly when we need to i am reminded of our history in world war ii we went from design of an aircraft to production for the f6 in 18 months so yes today that process would take seven to eight years but if we had the will to accelerate we absolutely have the capability of an industry to do so so if some young person is coming out of college and they have a choice to go into let's say private equity or aerospace defense why would you recommend aerospace defense well while private equity is a very noble calling i do think that the work you were in it weren't you weren't you in the venture business at one point for a short period you were a little bit i didn't i wasn't as successful as you so i had to worry about but i thought you were emails you were in venture i don't know i was brilliant and so you support carried interest i said i do yeah pretty much so okay all right so why should somebody want to be in the aerospace defense industry well i'll tell you why i'm in it and i wasn't for the first you know ten plus years of my career but when i came into this industry i realized that there was more to my work than working for returns and it was about doing work that would make a difference in the world and i'm not naive i know that the difference may be small and particularly when i first started in this industry the impact that i was able to have but i wanted to leave this world a better place for my children and thought if i can do that through my work not just through philanthropy or work that i can do in the community that would really be meaningful to me so that's why i'm in the industry okay so uh you're a role model for many women and maybe others as well men as well but certainly women would say you wrote you've risen up to be the ceo of one of the biggest companies united states do you take that responsibility seriously and you you speak to young women's groups try to encourage them to come into your industry and and what's the challenge of being a role model you can't make any mistakes and you can't uh you know curse at somebody or something like that well there is a lot of responsibility and i'm humbled and honored to be thought of as a role model i don't think of myself in that way but if i can inspire someone to believe in themselves and pursue a dream i'm you know just thrilled that i can have that impact on someone i think it's important for all of us to realize that we can through small acts really have an impact on the world and so i do try to be a role model but to your point you're going to make mistakes along the way you can't be afraid to make mistakes along the way and i think that too is part of being a role model how you respond when you do and pick yourself up and move forward okay so in your spare time when you're no longer able to travel to russia and you therefore have more time um what do you do do you are you an exerciser are you a golfer or a tennis player what do you do well i'm trying to brush off my golf game after i had kids i put that on the back burner but my husband's playing more golf and i love to do that with them i also like to cook and i've found it's important to instill that skill into my family my husband is learning to cook and he's improving every day it's not something he ever spent time doing but he actually enjoys it now so it's something we can also do together have you ever heard of ubereats or something you know i have i have and honestly my cooking happens usually on sunday afternoons but it's just a nice distraction isn't it getting late for him to learn how to cook for i mean i mean after all these years he learned how to cook he's enjoying it okay and so are you a scratch don't deter him okay i won't so are you a scratch golfer or are you anything like that no no maybe once i retire and i can play every day right now i'm you know playing twice a month so it's not like my skills there's there's some people that say the lower the handicap of the ceo the lower the stock price well then that's not a goal is right right okay so keep your handicap high it's high trust me so um your company was based in uh los angeles for a long time after it merged with uh grumman and then you moved to the washington area like a lot of other aerospace defense companies what's the advantage of being here well you spend far less time on an airplane because our customer is here in the pentagon on the hill and i value spending time with them and you need to be here in this community and washington is a fantastic community so to the extent that we're working with customers who are based here i think it's important that we be here and be immersed in the community as well so you live in northern virginia i do so when you um um you don't go back to visit smithberg that much no but i mean i assume you're like the most famous graduate of smithsburg high or something like that i'm guessing but i don't know that they keep those records okay so when you go you go shop can you have time to go shopping if you go to uh tyson's corner shopping that people know who you are do you have a big phalanx of security people trailing you or you just show up at the whole foods and buy and stand in line with everybody else yeah i do bladder and low profile really i mean nobody does anybody come up to you and ask for a job or a weapon or something every once in a while a job or a photograph but no never a weapon we're not exactly a household name because no one buys our product other than the government um okay you don't want to make any consumer products right for people like me to buy you know what about you don't make little drones for small people no no although i offered david to buy a northrop grumman aircraft because i'm quite jealous he buys gd aircraft and so i thought maybe i'd make a sale he wasn't fighting well um i don't know if i could get a pilot that could fly one of your b2 bombers uh yeah i i don't think we could put you in one of those but we have unmanned aircraft by themselves i mean what more could you ask for i could probably do that if it's unmanned i could probably do that so uh what is the greatest thrill you get out of the current job you have is it serving the country uh running a big company being a role model uh dealing with people like me when they interview you what is the biggest thrill you're getting well this interview is up there but i will say it's serving the country it's why i came into this work it's what motivated me to stay with this work and it's what will keep me moving forward and today you would say that the aerospace defense industry is is in pretty good shape relative to the needs of the country and you're not really thinking the aerospace events that is under attack or being challenged i think our industrial base is the healthiest in the world it has consolidated over time because defense spending has come down as a percent of gdp and that consolidation has been a reflection of those conditions so i think as we look forward strong bipartisan support and a recognition that national security is a constitutional right for our people is important and inflation is inflation bothering your company are you able to increase your prices a bit or you can't do that too much because you have one customer and that one customer doesn't like that we're really trying not to increase our prices because that reduces the buying power of the government and increases the burden of the taxpayers so we have tools available to keep inflationary pressures at bay but we can't uh offset all of them so there is some price increase necessary and when you're running a publicly traded company the analysts often care about only what you did the previous quarter i guess you know that phenomenon have come to learn that right so um how do you deal with that i mean you're trying to build up for the long term and you have to worry about every quarter so is that a pain to do that look it's just part of how our system works and so you have to recognize that's the case but always i keep the long-term view and i have a fantastic board that gives us the flexibility to do that we're in a long cycle industry and if we manage to the quarter we would not have the kind of performance that you outlined now you've got about 90 000 employees so how diverse is your workforce or your board or your senior management my senior management team is gender equal 50 50. my board has strong both gender and racial representation and we work on that every day within our company to make sure that our diversity representation mirrors our communities one of the challenges in technical fields is that we don't have enough women interested in pursuing careers in stem and so that's an area that our company is active in it's a area that my husband and i are passionate about we're sponsoring scholarships to really help drive more interest in stem but particularly for women and where did you meet your husband in the aerospace defense industry no in college really at james madison wow okay so today what are you doing on your company and you personally in philanthropy do you have uh the company have philanthropic interests that you pursue we do we have a foundation and obviously in recent weeks we've committed aid to ukraine to the ukrainian people through the foundation and we've also matched the gifts of our people and i find at times like this whether it's a situation of humanitarian crisis in ukraine or when we had tornadoes and hurricanes ripped through this country last year and some of our facilities and people were impacted our team is incredibly generous and so our company works to match those and as i mentioned my husband and i focus more on philanthropy related to stem education and underserved communities now your mother is um still giving you advice she does my mother lives with me and so i don't have to go far to get advice on how to raise my kids how to run the company all kinds of things she's she's fantastic a great idea person is she ever ever wrong or she's always right about what she tells you she's never she's my mother right so all right so the final i don't have to listen to her anymore okay just take it in so finally the main message that you would like to let people hear and people watching uh know about northrop grumman what is if you were to summarize northrop grumman in a paragraph what's the most important thing people should know about it other than it's got a great ceo we're a technology leader who is helping the us and our allies stay at the forefront of capability to protect uh human rights and freedoms around the globe and we're really proud of what we do and you're going to be doing this for the foreseeable future not going to return to the private equity or venture capital world anytime soon no not in the foreseeable future okay although you did quite well so i am somewhat inspired all right well look i want to thank you for what you're doing and thank you for every interesting conversation and uh appreciate it and um thank you thank you david

Channel: The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

Views: 29,843

Keywords:

Id: zJcWThbv4Zc

Length: 41min 54sec (2514 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2022