Imagine It Forward

by Beth Comstock

  A friend of mine uses a great icebreaker for a dinner series we host. She asks: Tell us something about yourself we can’t find out from Google. Then she kicks off the round by telling a story of her high school arrest…(for a silly prank). It’s amazing how well you can get to know people when you open up, even just a little.

  Trust yourself to trust others. Don’t be a chicken.

  SECTION IV

  Storycraft

  CHAPTER 9

  REWRITING YOUR STORY

  Story Disrupts the Dark

  When I came back to GE in early 2008, I was exhausted.

  At the end of one phone call Jeff made to me to “check in,” I told him about the job offer from Steve Jobs I had turned down. “I want you to know I’m all in.” But what I really meant was, “Don’t take me for granted.”

  I had added responsibilities—in particular, sales—and I was promoted to senior vice president. But I felt undervalued. I was back to that eerily quiet third floor of GE headquarters, where I moved into what had been Bob Wright’s office. It was like some kind of reverse feng shui. There were ghostly reminders of Bob everywhere, like the now-empty glass shelves that had once been filled with celebrity-studded photos of Bob and his family.

  There was a panic button hidden at knee level in Bob’s old desk. I wondered, what kind of panic would cause one to push it? Would anyone even arrive if I did?

  Grieving Your Workplace Failures

  The downside of trying new things and taking more risks is that sometimes you are going to fail. It’s okay to grieve what could have been; after all, it is the death of what you had hoped for.

  I try to give myself the time and space to feel bad when things don’t work out. To say the words (until I am quite convinced) “It didn’t work” so that I can get past them. This is especially hard for get-it-done people, because we tend to try every possible option before declaring defeat.

  At times like these, I summon the words of Samuel Beckett: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

  Next time you fail, ask yourself, What did I learn? What will I do differently next time? Now share it with a teammate or your manager.

  For those who manage teams, conduct regular postmortems or project “autopsies.” I have found it a good practice to gather teams right after a project launch—in good times and bad—to review what worked and what didn’t. When a project works spectacularly, challenge the team to talk about what didn’t work well. Be humble. When a project fails, start the discussion with what worked and what to feel good about. Then end with lessons learned.

  Remember, failure prepares you for future success. Even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment.

  On the other hand, the past has never held as much sway over me as the future. I began to imagine how the things I’d learned at NBC—new digital tools, data, creative content—could be applied to even bigger, better use at GE. I rediscovered the possibility and power of story at GE and in my life. It has the potential to reinvigorate companies, launch new products, and create new markets. It is muscular and real. For example, I see myself as a curious, courageous protagonist, a fearless explorer. It is a narrative that has always held regenerative power for me. Beth the change-maker, ready to take on the gatekeepers protecting “the way things are done.”

  I realized I had been telling myself the wrong story, focusing on slights and missed opportunities at NBC rather than on the promise of what lay ahead.

  The power of a positive attitude has been supported by research. Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, who pioneered the field of positive psychology, conducted studies showing that those who attributed setbacks to the larger, imperfect world (“It’s not all my fault”), who framed periods of adversity not as personal failures but part of a process of growth (“I learned so much”), were less prone to depression and more resilient.

  Or as my husband, Chris, would say to me at the end of many long, soul-searching conversations, “The NBC experience was something you needed to go through. As painful as it was, I feel like it will one day serve you well.”

  Even as I rebounded personally, by 2008 GE was experiencing its own trauma—one so severe, in fact, that GE’s survival would be called into question.

  The New Normal!

  After topping out near $60 during Jack’s last year, by late 2007, GE’s stock had climbed back to the low $40s. We had begun to refocus the company’s efforts, pointing us to technology like green energy and our inventive roots.

  The problem with this was that the story was only partially true. Half of our company was still GE Capital, and that half was driving healthy earnings, just as it had under Jack. Jeff had to feed the beast and, in fact, had built up the commercial real estate and consumer-lending portfolios. Like nearly all public-company CEOs, Jeff was beholden to his shareholders and the consistent quarterly earnings they demand. GE business leaders accept that they have to deliver the financial plans they promise. “No surprises” is the motto. But as we had seen since 9/11, the world was becoming more volatile.

  Our business model at GE Capital was to borrow money at a low interest rate, lend it out at a higher rate, and bank the difference. We raised money via short-term bonds or “corporate paper,” loaned it to companies and consumers, and made money on the gains that flowed back into GE Capital, which then boosted the profits, and shareowner returns, and offset the more modest returns from GE industrial technology.

  In 2007, though, Jeff started noticing deals coming into GE Capital where math just didn’t make sense.

  A subprime mortgage crisis had been percolating under the surface of Wall Street for years. GE, as one of the largest non-bank financial institutions, had some exposure to these mortgages. The inherent risks of GE Capital gave Jeff qualms (as it did everyone who looked at it closely). Faced with these worries, Jeff asked the consulting firm McKinsey to do a $3 million study of our credit risks and how to face them. “I mean, are we really okay?” he asked.

  McKinsey swooped in and did its Excel magic, and sixty days later, they came back to Jeff with good news: Absolutely! This is the new normal! As they explained it to him, money from nations with a trade surplus, like China, and sovereign wealth funds from places like Qatar, among other investors, would provide enough liquidity in the financial system to fuel lending and leverage for the foreseeable future.

  Then, with perfect irony, Bear Stearns collapsed and launched the financial crisis, almost killing off GE in the process. McKinsey’s people had built a model out of mining knowledge garnered from clients across industries, many of them our competitors. But they only dealt with what they knew, using the data they had. They didn’t use their imagination to interpret clues as signposts to the future, which is what was needed to predict the arrival of this Black Swan event. But few did.

  The backbreaking straw was, of course, Lehman Brothers. In September 2008, after hordes of its clients had fled and its stock had plunged, Lehman Brothers was told by the Treasury Department that it was not going to bail them out. With no other option, Lehman filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and just like that, American’s financial markets plunged into panic.

  At GE, we found ourselves on the brink of collapse. We couldn’t sell our bonds; we were in a liquidity crisis. The government declared us a systematically important financial institution (or SIFI). In other words: too big to fail.

  Our stock dropped at one point to an ominous $6.66.

  Jeff said ruefully to me after the Lehman bankruptcy, “In the words of the immortal philosopher, Mike Tyson, ‘Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.’ ” Or my version of his sentiment: it works until it doesn’t. Too many times people assume their models will work…forever (aka “Trees will grow to the sky!”). As happened at NBC Digital, change often happens in barely pe
rceptible ways, before, surprisingly, it disrupts—the same way Mike, in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, went bankrupt: “Gradually and then suddenly.” Emergent change seems impossible until it happens, at which point it becomes inevitable.

  One of the biggest challenges that faces established-company leaders is giving credence to alternate scenarios of the future. It’s one thing to imagine change, it’s another thing to give up on a model that is working, especially with investors breathing down your neck. Especially if you’ve been trained to keep your promises. A kind of magical thinking takes place. We convinced ourselves we were doing something that made a difference—“We’re on it!”—when in fact, we were just working harder at the same things.

  It’s as if one can just will reality to go one’s way. That’s the magical thinking at work. And sometimes Jeff subscribed to this. His optimism made him an incredible leader—a motivator, communicator, and often an advocate for the future and today at once. Jeff has a gifted way of framing tough issues within the arc of a grand strategy, prescribing which steps to take first. But GE’s golden rule was chiseled into his DNA: always deliver on your commitments, always with integrity. But looking back, delivering the numbers consistently made his—and the GE teams’—job much harder.

  Every day, I’d see Jeff as he hunkered down in his conference room with his core financial team, desperately searching for buyers to take our bonds and let us escape our capital crunch for another twenty-four hours. Jeff and CFO Keith Sherin and their GE Capital and treasury teams threw around piles of paper and screamed on the phone as they slogged through the list of bond buyers. We were in the crosshairs.

  One day Jeff pulled me aside after a meeting and looked at me with sleepless, haunted eyes, his normal optimism hijacked by the bond traders. “You know, Beth, every night when I get home, and it’s always late, Andy wakes up to talk to me,” he said, mentioning his wife. “Every night when I tell her about my day, she says, ‘It will be all right.’ Last night when she said that, I said, ‘No, honey, not this time.’ I really don’t know.”

  Jeff isn’t one to let his emotions show. He never shows how concerned he is. I had never seen him flinch. His default is to just work harder, dig deeper, keep moving, and he expects others to do the same.

  In the short term, the Federal Reserve and Warren Buffett saved us, giving us desperately needed cash infusions. The Fed bought over $16 billion in our short-term paper when no one else would, and in October we announced a $12 billion stock offering to raise desperately needed cash; Immelt convinced Warren Buffett to invest $3 billion in GE by paying him a 10 percent annual dividend.

  But we were like a heart attack patient who had been stabilized with a jolt from a defibrillator: alive, yes, but not long for this world unless we seriously changed our plan, our story, our narrative.

  Making Sense of the Senseless

  In the 1980s and 1990s, organizational psychologist Karl Weick coined two terms that I believe help to describe the issues GE faced after Lehman collapsed. The first of those is cosmology episode—that is, the sudden loss of meaning that people and organizations experience when faced by a traumatic event (such as the death of a child in the case of a parent or, in 2008 for GE, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and a looming global financial crisis, or as would happen again for GE in 2017 with another leader transition and investor activism). Cosmology episodes shatter our cosmos of beliefs and the stories we tell ourselves about our companies, our careers, and our lives, unsettling us to our very core.

  The path from the impossible to the probable to the new normal used to take years. Now it seems like we have a new normal every few months. The world has become so uncertain that economists have come up with an acronym for it: VUCA, which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. (I’d add another A, for anxiety.)

  And acceleration. We are communicating faster, working faster, innovating faster, and by some accounts even talking and walking faster than we did in previous decades. (It’s not your imagination—studies show we’re actually walking 10 percent faster in cities than we did a decade ago.)

  We can’t make uncertainty go away. But we can change the way we react to it. Every uncertainty is a new potential future. Seen in this light, uncertainty doesn’t need to be a source of anxiety; it can be a signal that it’s time to change.

  That brings me to Karl Weick’s second term: sensemaking. At a basic level, sensemaking is the process people and organizations go through to understand unexpected, traumatic, or confusing events (those cosmology episodes). In its simplest form, sensemaking involves collecting data about the unknown and the ambiguous, and synthesizing that data into new and revised stories and frameworks that make sense of the unknown. It acts as a springboard for collective action.

  Too often, most of us think “story” is what you add at the end, the colorful wallpaper that gives your room (or company) that decorator touch. But telling your story in a coherent way is not spin. It allows you to describe the actions you are taking and to bring everyone else in the organization along with you. People spend so much time focused on the synergies of the merger, of a product’s new revenue growth trajectory, that they lose sight of the essence of their company. I would argue that strategy is a story well told. And if your story doesn’t hang together, perhaps your strategy isn’t sound. Of course, story alone does not make a business strategy. But traditional business strategy too often does not bother to create a story or narrative about its actions for its employees and the world to gather around. For the strategy to become reality, people need to see themselves in the story and then take action to make the story happen.

  I realized we were faced with a desperate need in late 2008 and the early months of 2009 to create a sensemaking project to understand GE’s identity in relation to the world around us—or risk sinking into irrelevance.

  “Beth, you are the chief storyteller here,” Jeff said to me early on in the crisis. “We need you to help us get ahead of the story. Because we’re not looking like the good guys right now. How can we tell our story, our way?”

  In the first months after the Lehman Brothers collapse, our VP of communications Gary Sheffer led the crisis communications effort with Jeff. With Gary focusing on day-to-day crisis communications, I turned to the strategic perspective.

  With OSOW—our story our way—top of mind, I strode into my weekly communications meeting, and asked three simple questions: Who are we now? And what is our value? Then, How do we tell that story louder and faster, and more often?

  We were just coming off the presidential election of Barack Obama. Fresh in my mind was a series of stories documenting how modern political campaigns were being reshaped by Big Data and cutting-edge social science. Political campaigns were, in essence, aggressive sensemaking operations—precisely what we needed. Political candidates lose when they allow themselves to be defined by their opponent. And when they win, it’s because they are able to tell their story more effectively, loudly, and have it resonate with enough people to carry the day. Why not bring a guru from the political campaigns into GE’s sensemaking efforts?

  I started calling around my network of people I knew from NBC News and beyond, looking for introductions to the Obama team, and spoke with political journalist Chuck Todd of NBC News. Chuck had spent most of the previous year following the campaign, so I was sure he knew the key players in Obama’s election campaign. But his answer surprised me.

  “The best is Steve Schmidt,” he said. “From the McCain campaign,” he said to my stunned silence. “He’s a fighter.”

  “The McCain campaign?” I thought to myself. But Chuck was convincing, and a fighter was what we needed. So I called up Steve, and we set up a meeting.

  I still wanted someone from the Obama campaign, however. I decided we needed David Plouffe, who had run the grassroots ground game that allowed the Obama campaign to connect so intimately and authentically
with voters.

  When Steve strode into the offices at 30 Rock, I was hooked from the second he caught me in his icy blue stare. Tough and relentless, Steve was the kind of guy you knew would rather die than lose. In the HBO movie about the McCain campaign, he was played by Woody Harrelson, the actor who starred in Natural Born Killers and, later, True Detective.

  “Steve, people here feel under siege. The media and analysts are questioning our financial model, questioning us! Our own people no longer know what GE stands for. How do we fight for our reputation and good name?” I said.

  Steve leaned forward and barked, “Okay, this is the number of negative stories,” he said, holding his hand a foot above the desk. “You’re not going to be able to control that.” Then he held his hand three feet above the desk. “What you can do is ramp up the volume with the stories that you want to convey to customers and the public. But to do that well, you have to gather feedback to answer some vital questions: What are those stories? Who do we want to tell them to? How do we want people to act when they hear them?”

  With him on the team, he said, GE would attack, attack, attack, always selling its story. Campaigns, he reminded us, aren’t won by the candidate or the company with the best character, or product, but by the one with the simplest and most clearly told story. Pick a simple story, he said, and tell it again and again and again. Republican operatives called him “The Bullet.” With his focused tactical ferocity—and the shape of his shaved head—I could understand why.

  David Plouffe was the polar opposite of Schmidt: soft-spoken, thoughtful, almost delicate. He calmly laid out the keystones of Obama’s success almost as Zen koans. David valued strategy above all, playing the grassroots ground game, using the art and science of microtargeting authentic messages to individuals or small groups. Almost quaint in a Facebook world.