But while constant acquisitions and financial services boosted GE’s bottom line and stock price, they required deep cost cutting in parts of the company. In order to meet Jack’s constant tightening, GE managers cut back on R&D and stayed out of risky new sectors. The company that was famous for bringing the lightbulb, X-ray machine, and unbreakable plastic to market had come up with fewer earth-shattering products in recent years.
More troubling, from Wall Street’s point of view, was that GE Capital’s growth was basically turning GE into a bank—Barron’s called it “a hedge fund in drag” in 1998. And banks didn’t get the forty times earnings multiples that GE was getting.
The announcement of the Honeywell acquisition seemed to pierce Wall Street’s seemingly ironclad confidence in Jack. The street was wary of such a big acquisition and growing tired of the finance hamster wheel. GE’s stock began to sag. But the true coup de grâce came from Europe. It turns out that Europeans hadn’t signed up for what Jack had in mind. In one short, quiet meeting, they made it clear to Jack that GE’s merger with Honeywell wasn’t going to be approved. As GE’s stock sank and his last day in the corner office approached, the air started to come out of the GE story like a punctured balloon.
During the midst of all this change I found myself asking, Who are we? What did GE really stand for? We had a rich history that existed long before Jack appeared on the scene, seeds that had been planted a century ago. What were the things that had to change? I was still not quite 100 percent GE baked. I didn’t speak GE as my mother tongue. Because of that, I could look at things a bit more objectively, and even critically.
Finally, on September 7, 2001, Jeff Immelt took over as the ninth chairman and CEO in General Electric’s history.
The transition was one of the most widely covered events in business around the globe. There was a saying at GE Capital that “trees grow to the sky.” And it seemed true. As the company with the highest market capitalization on the planet, we were soaring and were sure we’d continue to do so. We were ready for anything, or so we thought.
Four days later, the world as we knew it ended.
Challenges
MOTHER MAY I?
I taught class every month for early-career managers at GE’s Crotonville learning center. I challenged the managers when they said they couldn’t do things because “the company” wouldn’t let them or their boss wouldn’t let them. “Is it that they won’t let you or that you are too afraid to try?” I asked.
Then I gave them a permission slip, asking them to follow through. “Give yourself permission to try just one thing that may be holding you back.” And I encouraged them to share it with someone on their team. If they were a manager, I encouraged them to give blank slips to their team.
One manager told me afterward: “I did this! We had a request for a proposal that was due last month, the first for our new product, so this would end up being the template for all future requests. The initial draft was bad. I wanted to reach out to others to make it better, but our team is siloed—we don’t ask others for help. I pulled a team together, including Legal, Regulatory, and Engineering, who never get included early. I didn’t wait for permission! We put together a great response. And…we won the deal!”
Sometimes just having a permission slip at your desk or on your phone is a good reminder to take action. I keep a stack of slips in a conference room and make a big deal of symbolically handing them over to colleagues when they are stuck.
THE PERMISSION CHALLENGE
Write out a series of things you are scared of or are putting off doing. These things could range from “talking to a complete stranger” to “screaming in public.” Write yourself a permission slip. (You may remember this from forging your mother’s signature in high school; I was too afraid then to do it.) Decide what things you are giving yourself permission to do. Choose a permission slip at random each day, and carry out the task. Hold yourself accountable by making the act public. Have someone photograph you midscream, or tell a colleague or friend about your conversation with a complete stranger. Make the challenges as simple or as grand as you want. You have permission.
CREATE A MONTHLY BUCKET LIST
Hold yourself accountable for getting out of your comfort zone by creating a monthly “I Can Do This” list. It can be as long or short as you want, but the goal is to accomplish the tasks before the end of the month. Fill it with things like: invite a colleague for coffee, pitch a new idea, take a class to improve on or learn a new skill. Rather than waiting to do grand things “someday,” a monthly list will give you a number of doable things. Start small. Start now. What can you do this month?
THE DRAGON SLAYER CHALLENGE
Whenever you feel a negative emotion related to work bubble up, take note. Get a notebook and start keeping a log. Include entries for moments of fear and negativity voiced by your colleagues and friends about their industries and jobs. Your entries don’t need to be long or detailed. A sentence or a phrase will do. At the end of the week, take a look at what you’ve written down. Do the observations and comments add up to a larger problem or trend? What are you going to do about it?
YOUR DIY JOB CRAFTING CHALLENGE
Monday morning you are going to add one new project (that you are excited about!) to your set of responsibilities. Spend the weekend developing your thesis and how you will approach the project. Think about developing skills in a new area, for example: social media, design thinking, emerging technology, coding, finance. What will be the ways you can begin to develop the project? A newsletter, trend report, brown-bag “lunch and learn” are good ways to get started.
GET A COACH
If you worked for me and were struggling in an area of your professional life, I would likely tell you to get a coach. It’s not about what’s wrong with you; it’s about how to become a better you. Some coaches help you make better presentations. Others help you develop more confidence. Others still focus on leadership skills. Many companies provide budgets for coaching opportunities, from classes to development advisors. But I’ve also paid for coaching myself in instances when I felt it was important. In hiring a coach, decide what you are hoping to accomplish. Set goals and a realistic time frame for the coaching assignment. If the coach is being paid for by your company, plan to follow up with your boss to discuss the outcome. It may be helpful to have a boss and other colleagues speak to a coach to provide input before the coaching begins. If you don’t have funds to hire someone, enlist a trusted colleague for regular coaching sessions. Ask them to help you get better and hold you accountable for changing.
We all have areas to improve, whether we’re line managers or CEOs. Get a handle on the areas you need to improve before a problem or weakness derails you in the future. Remember, seeking professional help is not an indictment—it is about taking a positive step forward to be a better version of you.
SECTION II
Discovery
CHAPTER 3
EDISON’S MARINES
Chaos Rewards the Bold
On September 7, 2001, Jeff Immelt took over as the ninth chairman and CEO in General Electric’s history.
A few days later, on the almost cloudless morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I and the rest of the communications department were all positioned in front of our office TVs waiting for Jack’s live appearance on the Today Show, where he was launching his soon-to-be-bestselling memoir, Straight from the Gut. Jeff Immelt was in Seattle at the time, trudging on a hotel StairMaster.
Just after 8:00 a.m., the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Within a minute, it became clear that it was an intentional attack, and all our plans and assumptions and hopes for the future evaporated.
Immediately we shifted into crisis mode, as most companies did: making sure employees were okay,* connecting with customers. For GE, the attacks had a major impact on our aviation and financing divisions, which manufactur
e jet engines and finance airplanes for airlines. Aircraft across the country were grounded for several days, and questions arose around airline security, insurance liabilities, and credit ratings.
It was only four days into Jeff’s tenure, and already we were in uncharted territory. In times of chaos, it’s natural to feel you should hunker down. Almost everything may seem out of your control—but your imagination and ability to take action are not among them. You have to resist the urge to think it’s up to others; you have to take initiative.
While we were trying to offer solace in the face of 9/11—we moved necessary mobile units to the triage hospitals in New York, gave transformers to Consolidated Edison, and Jeff called New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani to pledge $10 million of GE money to the first responders—I decided that GE had to let the world know that while we would never forget, we were also ready to fight back and rebuild. People were lost and disengaged, and we had to show them a guiding light.
This was an incredibly awkward moment to be doing any sort of advertising or marketing. Companies were avoiding doing anything that seemed like an attempt to turn tragedy into profit. But I was sure people would find comfort in an expression of undaunted strength, so I went to Jeff and told him that we needed to put ourselves out there. With no lead time for radio and TV, that left us with print ads. That was still a big risk, but one well worth it, I believed. “We need a print ad that rallies our employees and customers and says ‘We are strong,’ ” I told Jeff. “People are afraid. They need to hear it’s going to be all right.”
Jeff Immelt was a forty-five-year-old unknown to most people, a mix of Ohio-bred football player, Harvard MBA, and son of a lifetime GE engineer, who had just taken over from the CEO of the century. Jeff wasn’t as polished then—he’d walk around with a button too far undone on his shirt, and everybody (except me for some reason) had to have a nickname—Jim was Jimmy, Bill was Billy, as if GE were a locker room. But he has always been the most comfortable-in-his-skin guy you’ll ever meet.
Investors and half of Wall Street were asking whether he was up to the task. But I—and everybody else who worked closely with him—knew that he had both that calculating Six Sigma mental toughness (Jack Welch would have never let him close to the corner office without it) as well as an appreciation for the “softer skills”—including empathy, storytelling, and connecting with people, especially customers—that he seemed to have picked up while he was in marketing and sales earlier in his career. And he believed strongly in the power of communications, in story, as a transformative leadership tool.
When I told him I wanted to do an ad—“something iconic”—he asked me if I was willing to accept the consequences of what happened with it. And when I said, “Yes,” he told me, “Go for it,” like a football coach okaying a Hail Mary pass.
Our ad agency, BBDO, was a bigger obstacle than Jeff. They had been GE’s agency for over eighty years, and they felt their past performance entitled them to decide what GE needed. They didn’t like—okay, they flat-out resented—that this insufficiently reverent woman (me) was now, in effect, their boss. When I called Phil Dusenberry’s team to tell them that we needed to put together a print ad that showed strength and solidarity, they wielded their apathy like a cudgel. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you some mock-ups tomorrow,” the account rep told me, before failing to do so. When BBDO finally gave me some ideas, it was obvious that they were phoning it in.
Now, I’m not a screamer—I get quiet, cold, and stern when I’m angry—but when they turned in garbage, the register of my voice went up. “People are scared. They want a reason to feel hopeful. What you are giving me is too corporate, too clichéd.”
I finally told Phil, “Just send me everything you’ve done.” This is a standard practice of mine: ask people what they didn’t show you, the questions they didn’t ask. The files they sent me were more of the same: pretty images and soft slogans. But as I pawed through the work with increasing despair, I came across a simply etched pencil sketch that made me look twice. My mouth creased into the first smile in what seemed like a year. This is hope, I thought. This is strength.
I grabbed the drawing and practically ran to Jeff’s office. I smacked the image down on his desk. “This is it,” I said. “This is the way to say what everyone is feeling.”
It was a sketch of Lady Liberty, square-jawed, iron-willed, rolling up her sleeves, stepping off her pedestal, striding toward the viewer, about to open a can of American bravery on anyone who would stand in the way of her manifest destiny. A simple message ran beneath the image: “We will roll up our sleeves. We will move forward together. We will overcome. We will never forget.” The only reference to us as a company was a single sentence at the bottom of the page: “A message from” and the GE logo.
Almost everyone at the company hated the idea, from our internal ad team to the account executives at BBDO. One of GE’s business heads said to me it made us look like angry punks: “What is this, Lady John Wayne?” Our account rep at BBDO said we risked trivializing America’s pain with a “cartoon.” Even my closest friend on the internal ad team said it made her nervous because it just “isn’t us.”
We listened to everyone. But in the end, we overruled them. Jeff showed faith in me, and he took some heat for it, including a cascade of calls from the leaders of the business units telling him in no uncertain terms that they thought it sent the wrong message.
Just ten days after the attack, the full-page ad appeared in nearly every major newspaper in the country: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post. The night before, I was up half the night, sweating it out, turning over every possible outcome in my head—public rejection, me fired.
I am a worrier. In part my runaway imagination is a way to prepare for every possible outcome. And partly it’s just my anxiety going unchecked. I’ve since learned to channel this anxiety into scenario-planning; it is one way I’ve been able to feel so comfortable dreaming up the most outlandish, crazy scenarios for the future.
I habitually get to the office before my colleagues to get a head start on my day. It’s one of my favorite times, when I plan for the day, think expansively, and tackle the biggest concerns on my mind from the night before. The day the ad was published, I arrived even earlier, just as the first light was breaking over the horizon. As I waited in my office, I could barely concentrate. What did people think of the ad? Of GE?
It wasn’t long before the e-mails began to pour in from proud GE employees across the country. And our ad was a lead story on nearly every morning news show.
I only discovered the true extent to which the ad had succeeded several days later, when Jeff and I went to visit Ground Zero and the New York Stock Exchange. The smoke and dust from the twin towers choked our throats as we stared at the utter destruction of the World Trade Center site.
When we walked onto the floor of the NYSE, there was the ad, Scotch-taped to the wall of almost every trader’s kiosk. People high-fived Jeff and me for giving them this image. They actually cheered.
Within days we saw our ad everywhere around New York: in Brooklyn barbershops, in Upper East Side bars, in New Jersey sandwich joints. People just got it. We weren’t selling lightbulbs or jet engines; we were selling leadership, optimism, America.
I was so proud of the leadership GE exhibited. For GE, or any company existing in this epoch of endless disruption, occasions require bold action—leaning into, and not away from, the unknown for the right reasons.
Stop Worrying, Start Planning
I believe in heeding the wisdom of Bill Gates: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” My “Imagine it Forward” version of this is “Change seems impossible—until it happens. At which point it seems to have always been inevitable.”
To co
mbat our tendency to be lulled into inaction, I find it’s useful in planning ahead to develop at least three or four scenarios about the future, including one that is wildly optimistic, one that is disruptive, and one that is incredibly conservative. I’ve found it’s also helpful to invite in outsiders to offer differing perspectives and then marry those with, or challenge, the perspectives of inside-company experts. Red team–blue team exercises—where teams take opposing points of view—have proven valuable as a way for teams to go deep in different directions. Part discovery, part debate, these exercises allow everyone to consider the issues together.
The Call for Discovery
By the end of Jeff’s first week in the corner office, GE shares had plunged 20 percent, cutting the company’s value by almost $80 billion. There was a palpable sense that the ground was shifting under our feet, and it extended well beyond the change in leadership at GE or the 9/11 attacks. There were forces at work that were beyond our control, beginning with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The collapse affected new technology businesses (good-bye Pets.com) and established ones alike (Cisco’s stock declined by as much as 87 percent). And then there was the giant energy conglomerate, Enron, which declared bankruptcy at the end of 2001 in a maelstrom of scandal, followed by the dissolution of one of the world’s leading accounting firms, Arthur Andersen.
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