Imagine It Forward

by Beth Comstock

  By the end of the weekend, I had beaten myself up enough and was actually now pissed. Here was a 140-year-old business that had been driven to the end of its life, with little additional investment, and we were actually trying to do something with it. So what exactly was our fault? Were we the only ones who had been naïve enough or stupid enough to suggest a potential upside? Was I perpetuating magical thinking by endorsing our outrageous targets? No. We were among the GE few who were actually taking the risks needed.

  I had asked for time with Jeff on Monday morning to review potential options. As I walked in, I saw the stance he had chosen: staid, impenetrable, tough. It was like being called into the principal’s office. As I laid out my suggestions to sell old Lighting and take on investors into new Current, Jeff shrugged, like I was missing the point.

  “I’d be thrilled to sell the old consumer lighting business, assuming anyone wants it,” he said. “But no for outside investors. We need to project some strength. You need to make this work, Beth. Listen, your business let the company down, and potentially could cause everyone to miss their incentive plan. Keep your eye on the ball. You need to be more in command of the details.”

  “Jeff, I know,” I said. “But I can’t change a 140-year-old business overnight. We’re all stretched tight, there’s little room for error. I can’t guarantee predictability with new business models. We didn’t lose $35 million we never had. Our assumptions were too aggressive—assumptions everyone signed up for, mind you. We’re learning a new space.”

  “Beth, I just need people to do what they say they will.”

  “But we’ve never done this before. Shouldn’t we have more wiggle room, a little patience?”

  Jeff shook his head. “Just fix it.”

  And then, when all seemed dark, when the “stink of fail” followed us into every meeting (when people don’t sit near you as if you smell bad, when you think they won’t look you in the eye, when they virtually stamp “Failure” on your forehead, when you think this isn’t going to ever work out), things started to turn. Not immediately, not with sudden clarity, but it began. Rays of light here, a sprout there, and then the realization of undeniable improvement.

  The need for clarity and focus seized us. We quickly moved to shed things that stood in our way, getting out of regional markets that were barely big enough to cover costs. Speed and focus became the goal. Our clunky cities play made way for a smart licensed partnership with AT&T, keeping us in the space but with less risk. Solar finally broke even, but storage was too far off and got sent back to the R&D labs for more development. This was disappointing because everyone knew this is what gets us to the final leg of the strategy. What’s more, we all had enough evidence now to believe Current could be a virtual power provider one day. But we understood the reality. Focus had to be the mantra.

  The team began to convert the projects in our pipeline. There were major sales to J.P. Morgan Chase, Sainsbury’s, Simon Property Group, Hilton Hotels, Home Depot, and Walmart. The city of San Diego began to install a smart system. Maryrose was fired up, leading the team through cleaning up the old and launching the new.

  We began to set more realistic and less rigid goals. We were pacing well on revenue, marching toward profitability, and proving that there are multiple customers.

  Just as important, our leaders transformed, or if they couldn’t, they had to leave. Jaime moved on, and Deron Miller, the new head of sales, was blessed with the rare experience of knowing how to sell both hardware and software. He loves coaching salespeople and consulting customers. More new people joined with expertise in developing digital products.

  An inner courage came out in Maryrose, giving her a boldness I had not seen before. She owned this. She wanted to be here. She shed the consistent industrial mentality and stepped up as the adaptable leader she likely always was. She opened up to new ways of working. For example, she and her team regularly tested what customers will pay for and didn’t just stand beholden to feature creep (light poles with gas leak detectors!) and unrealistic plans. An entrepreneurial leader and team emerged. It was a wonder to see. Refounding was happening before our eyes.

  We kicked off 2017 with a meeting between Maryrose, Jeff, and me, and Maryrose laid out Current’s future with a vigor I had never seen from her. It had been almost exactly one year since Current had seemed to bottom out. Jeff was relaxed this time, smiling his easygoing grin. He looked at Maryrose’s page of numbers—not her projections, but her accomplishments.

  “Wow,” he says. “What a difference a year makes. You have done a great job.”

  “Yes, this team has transformed themselves,” I said. “They really own this business. And I couldn’t be more proud.”

  Maryrose offered up a sneaky smile. “Don’t worry, Jeff,” she said. “We got this.”

  And we all laughed. But the relief was palpable. This team was intent on making the future.

  And so, as GE opened up more to change, the culture changed, too. We were becoming more entrepreneurial, willing to take more, smaller risks. We imagine, we act, we emerge.

  You Are Not a Robot

  When I had left Jeff’s office in the darkest moment of Current, I had rushed to GE’s Crotonville center, where I was to do my leadership talk with new managers. Each month, I spoke to recently promoted leaders about growth and culture at GE—both good and bad; about leadership lessons learned; and about how to adopt a discovery mind-set that seeks to imagine what’s next and go see for yourself. As an outside-thinking, creatively driven person, besides being one of the few women at the top (I don’t single out GE for this; they’ve done better than most), I brought a different viewpoint from other leaders.

  That day, however, I was feeling particularly disappointed and upset. I am usually nervous before these discussions, even after all these years, but I was especially so on that day. I almost turned to leave, running through the excuses I could use to reschedule. But I didn’t. I found my inner resolve, as always, took a deep breath, and stepped through the door to the auditorium-style room called “the pit.” I was reminded that these were new managers, eager to learn and be better. Just like me.

  I walked to the front of the classroom and fumbled with the computer, looking for the canned pages I had delivered a thousand times before. But then I stopped. That wouldn’t do today. Something about the last couple of months just made me want to put it all out there. I was in no mood for niceties or success theater. As I looked out at their expectant faces, a silence fell over the room. They sensed almost immediately that they were in for something different.

  I turned to the whiteboard behind me and started drawing a rectangular box with a much smaller checkbox inside of it, adjacent to which I wrote the sentence “I am not a robot.” It was my rendering of the online “captcha” prompt that comes up when you, say, register for a newsletter or buy tickets for an event. I turned and finally started to speak:

  Are you a robot?

  Sure, I believe you’re all humans at home. But you’re here now, at work, and so I’m not so sure. And you shouldn’t be either.

  You ask, why? Because the machines we use shape how we think and behave. Corporations, particularly big organizations like GE, were created to function as machines. It’s no accident that over time workers were referred to as cogs; unthinking, tirelessly compliant parts were the ideal employee. The very things that make you human—your independence, your creativity, your spontaneity—were suboptimal glitches in the system. As the management theorist Gary Hamel says, “One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to be awed by the scale and success of early-20th-century efforts to transform strong-willed human beings into docile employees.” And now that real robots have entered the picture, they can do all the things we did as cogs, just much better and much faster. And they don’t complain.

  I suppose, then, the question really is: Just how human do you remain? I want you to answer that by i
nterrogating what you believe. Machines have no capacity for belief. So, do you believe tomorrow can be better than today? Do you believe you have the power to make it so? Those are the two questions that will determine your future, and GE’s.

  What do such questions make you feel? Machines can’t feel, either. So, do you fear that you might be inadequate to the challenge of change that a better tomorrow implies? Or do you feel passion for a vision you already have? I still feel both almost daily.

  To be human today means living in a world in which almost every day brings some sort of massive disturbance. Unknown unknowns lurking everywhere. Competitors arise out of nowhere. Customers suddenly demand new solutions. The pace of change is never going to be slower than today. Think about that. The pace of change is never going to be slower than today. Change happens but our responsibility is to shape it, adapt to it, and make it work for us. There is no robot, no algorithm, capable of such adaptation. Yet.

  There are challenges out there that threaten our survival, and you can respond in one of two ways: either you’ll open yourself up and respond to the challenges creatively, using your imagination to conjure something that doesn’t exist today; or, you’ll arrogantly assume the sufficiency of your competence—that is, the reliable processes you’ve always used to solve the problems you’ve always had. The first move is messy, human, chaotic, forcing you to imagine a new way forward, try things, admit mistakes, fail, learn, iterate, try again. Down that path, with no guarantees, is the possibility of renewal. The second option offers only eventual irrelevance.

  I understand. You thought your competence and credentials were enough, so why rock the boat when rocking it implies new ideas and approaches that only threaten to make you less competent? You might look bad. You thought there was a formula. They basically said as much in business or engineering school, right? Well, there is, and there isn’t.

  It would be a mistake to say that the system in place, the old OS, doesn’t work. It works incredibly well. It generates and optimizes what we can measure. Unfortunately, the innovative things we urgently need to create, and the innovative way we need to work to make that happen, are not things and ways that can be measured in the same way.

  The old metrics and new algorithms can’t help us here. What we need is to imagine different, be different, do different. This is what I know as a marketer: being different gets a better price and more loyalty. This is what I know from my early studies in biology: being different paves the way for adaptation. This is what I know from my experience: taking the jobs and assignments that were unexpected or undervalued, showing up in unexpected places and getting to know people who at face value were too different—these do lead to success. It takes courage to act on instinct and not wait for ever more data to tell you what to do. It takes courage to see patterns and then use the data to validate, rather than the other way around.

  That feeling you’re feeling—that’s fear. Fear of failure. It’s easier to play it safe. Why do we need such a radical departure from what we’ve always done? Why not just aim to get a bit better? That doubting voice in your head about all the dramatic difference I’m asking from you—that’s why we’re still not responding to change with the speed that’s necessary. The rewards will go to those who stand up and stand out, taking what feel like unreasonable chances.

  Who here feels empowered to do that—to stand up for an idea you believe in? A few of you are raising your hands. Why not the rest of you? Who are you waiting for to tell you it’s okay? Your boss? Jeff Immelt? Your mother? Yoda?

  Don’t tell me you’re not empowered. There is power that is yours. Use it. Grab your own permission. No one is going to give it to you.

  I don’t know many of you, but I think some of you fear power. Have you thought of that? It’s easier to let it be someone else’s issue, someone else’s decision, someone else’s harebrained idea.

  What if you really fear your imagination, or you fear taking a chance on it? Can you learn to conquer such fears, and take such risks? Of course you can; I did.

  I was younger than all of you when I failed on a scale GE could appreciate. For the first two decades or so of my life, I did everything everybody told me. I obeyed all the rules. I got good grades, good internships. I married the perfect man, and we bought the perfect little house. I was, you might say, competent at life. It just wasn’t a life I wanted to be living. If I had gone the “bit better” route, I’d still be living it.

  Then, just like that, I was divorced, a single mom, with uncertain prospects. I had failed, or maybe the better way to put it is I found the nerve to be considered a failure so that I could chart my own way through unexplored territory, leaving the previously known behind. I discovered something then that opened life and work up for me—the mistakes you rectify and learn from will give you more freedom and progress and ultimately even wealth than the mediocrity you can be certain of by living and working mistake-free. You don’t just live a life; you blunder your way toward creating one you love. You don’t just submissively work in a company you tolerate; you agitate, sometimes rebelliously, to craft it into something great.

  Of course there’s a cost. Do you know where I was just before coming to this room? I was in Jeff Immelt’s office. He told me that shaving my head wasn’t a feasible punishment, and besides, it wouldn’t really make amends for jeopardizing our bonuses. Current, the outcome of precisely the kind of imaginative leaps I’m asking you to take, will fall short of its quarterly target by $35 million, and counting. I don’t need to tell you, my GE colleagues, why I initially would have preferred crying in my car now than talking to all of you.

  I could give you a lot of excuses right now. I could tell you it’s damn near impossible to start something like Current in an environment driven by the next quarterly report. The possibility of some innovative new business model making money is just that—a mere possibility whose chances for success are imperiled by a system that demands the certainty of short-term gains. Let me tell you, it’s hard to explain to investors that if failure is not an option, then neither is success. These are the same people who scoffed at Ecomagination a dozen years ago and now demand to know why we’re not even bigger in renewable energy, now that solar is growing three times faster than even the optimists projected.

  But it’s too easy to blame investors for organizations not taking risk and not being willing to fail. Sure, they can squeeze the life out of your future, if you let them. But they give us money so that we can grow and invest, and our obligation is to return it with a gain. The expiration date on blaming others for anything comes the moment you realize blame robs you of your agency.

  Yes, working imaginatively within this reality makes it hard. Your job is operations and growth. Your job is to be ambidextrous, to think with both sides of your brain. Your job as emerging leaders, the kind we desperately need, requires an “and.” Company out and market back. You have to optimize today and plant the seeds for tomorrow. The world is physical and digital. Get used to living in the in-between. The old is going away, and the new is emerging. You have to plan for multiple possible futures emerging, potentially all at once.

  These are times of widening imagination gaps—where possibility goes to die. But I refuse to give up on possibility. And neither should you. But let’s be clear, we are talking about a disciplined, action-oriented, adaptive form of problem-solving and judgment, using your critical thinking skills. It’s about meeting change early. It’s about being ready for change and not being surprised. It is about the ability to imagine it forward.

  1. Explore. Discovery needs to be a continuous part of your routine. Replace an obsession with competence for curiosity. Give yourself permission to leave the familiar and seek out variation: hang out with strange people, learn provocative ideas, play with crazy tools, and visit unexpected places. Get weird. Think of life as a scavenger hunt with unimaginable rewards.

  2. Have a vision and a m
ission. Tell stories about the new future you can make together with others. Get it out of your imagination and into reality. Sell it. Take action.

  3. Experiment. Ask better questions. Create hypotheses inspired by your discoveries and test them. You won’t get it right the first time. Or even the fifth time. Trial and error is the way we learn. Embrace failure, but make it fast, cheap, and survivable. At GE, going big is all we’ve known. The trick here is to find the right Goldilocks scale for your experiments: big enough to learn from but not so big that your bets will kill you.

  4. Share. Open up. Be transparent. Learning to work out loud in a generous, trusting, connected way will facilitate the creation of robust feedback loops that allow you to learn and pivot with greater and greater speed and confidence.

  5. Be an emergent leader. We’re not there yet, but I can see the day in my mind’s eye when nearly everyone at every level of this organization is experimenting daily, asking provocative “What if?” questions, unafraid of failure, ambidextrously attending to the company’s core as they invent its future—emergent leaders running an adaptive organization that is in a constant state of reinvention.

  Listen, not everyone gets to the end with a victory lap. Transformation is messy. Legacy doesn’t take kindly to its obsolescence. You have to just keep working it. GE is a radically different company from the one I started with twenty-five years ago. We’re more open, more entrepreneurial, and just as committed to creating the things that move, power, build, and cure the world. Clean technologies, a digital industrial company leading the fourth industrial revolution, additive manufacturing, small aviation, cell therapies, low-cost/high-tech accessible health care, these are just a few of the ways in which GE is changing the world right now.