I can’t promise you a meaningful career unblemished by failure (actually, the opposite). You will struggle. What I can promise is that this kind of life, this kind of approach to leadership, will give you a more creative, a more impactful, a more purposeful career. This is business at its best.
You just have to believe two things: (1) tomorrow can be better than today, and (2) you have the power to make it so.
You are not a robot.
You’re a change-maker.
You can do this.
How to Be an Emergent Leader
This book has outlined the mind-set and tactics needed to evolve as a more emergent leader—one who is ready to meet change early, navigate ambiguity, and help develop a future few can see. Here is my summary of the essential considerations for you and your team.
Ditch hierarchy. With the rise of more distributed teams and a mandate for speed and collaboration, hierarchies simply aren’t effective. Organize teams around a specific mission or project, regardless of who reports to whom. Focus functional and operational reporting for critical business process and talent development.
Organize around information flows. Find ways to get data into your team projects faster. As more data becomes available, from people and machines, it gives you clues as to how to organize your teams—ideally as close to the customer as possible. For example, marketing and service teams must become customer-loyalty focused, driven to improve the customer experience quickly.
Develop a good MO. Give your team a clear brief—a Mission Objective—of what is expected, by when, and then allow them the freedom to get there and to test and fail small along the way. Increasingly, your job as a team leader or manager is to be a troubleshooter and a coach. Micromanagers aren’t needed.
Seek and use feedback. Find ways to get more feedback on everything you do; ask for feedback at every interaction. It could be as simple as: Tell me one thing I didn’t want to hear. Or, Did our meeting meet your expectations? Continually get and give feedback with teams, the faster the better.
Get used to living in the in-between. Rapid, emerging change is the hallmark of our era. The old is going away and the new is emerging, at once. You will rarely have certainty and never enough data. Move forward with hypotheses and multiple scenarios, and test and learn opportunities. With faster data, you can evaluate. Know when and how to pivot your strategy and actions and still align to long-term vision.
EPILOGUE
In late 2017, it was time for me to leave GE—this time for real, coming six months after Jeff Immelt’s departure. It was the end of another era of leadership and transformation at GE. Those 16 years had felt like 112 in dog years in many ways, as we navigated through what I believe will stand as one of history’s big reorderings, driven by tectonic shifts in technology and global economics. GE had certainly been reordered. In all, more than $90 billion of portfolio changes had taken place in that time. The company had become more global, more industrial, more innovative, more willing to step boldly into the new.
We had forged GE’s digital path, and while still in the early stages, it was gaining traction with customers as more companies faced their digital reckoning—something that will indeed reshape most every company as they figure out how to thrive in that in-between space of physical meets digital. Most promising was GE’s move into digital manufacturing, including 3-D printing metals. This could dramatically transform GE’s future, playing to the company’s strengths in material science and making things, and allowing GE to enter new industries like auto and aerospace parts, and even replacement parts for humans (starting with titanium hips and knees). Walk through Additive HQ in Westchester, Ohio, and you get a glimpse of the future. Collaboration, iteration, open source shape the way teams work. Jet engine parts that used to contain three hundred components are now printed as one. Teams are organized around solving a problem, delivering on missions. David Joyce, who leads Aviation and seeded additive manufacturing there, stands as an example of a leader who encouraged his teams to optimize today and also have the conviction to find, and fight for, the future. I can point to many other leaders similarly poised to shape and impact the future, if they grab the chance.
There was much to be proud of. I am proud of our work; we had impact. The culture moved faster, personal agency had taken root in parts of GE. Many people adapted to the increased pace of change. We grew businesses. GE stayed relevant and lived to see more days ahead—something that gets harder the older and bigger a company gets.
But it wasn’t enough; it wasn’t fast enough. The raging river of change rushed on.
With Jeff’s departure, there was no victory lap, no transition worthy of the Pope, or even a celebrated CEO. Those days were gone. An activist investor bought shares in GE, amplifying pressure on short-term wins—the activist’s disruptive playbook, something we might have imagined. GE’s energy businesses hadn’t performed well enough—some managers had failed to react faster to rapid change in service models and the growth of distributed, renewable energy. On top of this, GE tried to absorb the gargantuan acquisition of Alstom with its base of old, declining technology. The company had gaps to fill, especially to make up for the loss of GE Capital revenue and its remaining debt. Earnings targets got harder to meet. Once again, the company faced a reset moment. Investors and media critics shouted their outrage as GE’s stock price declined precipitously. Many didn’t seem to understand how complex GE’s transformation was. Now, GE stands as a case study of how hard it is to navigate the tension between short-term gains and long-term readiness. Investors have little patience and markets don’t forgive. Lost in the dramatic reaction was that Jeff had been a courageous leader at a time when business urgently needs bold leadership. He had focused the company on industrial technology; pushed to new places; absorbed risks, setbacks, and fears of those around him. I am better because of his championship. GE was too.
John Flannery, GE’s new CEO, brings his back-to-basics approach to the company, cutting costs and dramatically reducing structure. In one of our early meetings, John told me he was going to sell Current. “The team has done a great job, and I get why it’s important, but it’s just too small for GE.” My heart broke at that; I know how the team had persevered; that distributed energy is the future. But I’m betting on Maryrose and the team to make their future; in many ways they will be better on their own. John continued to narrow GE, spinning off businesses including Healthcare, in an effort to meet investor calls for a simpler GE. GE became the last original company to fall off the Dow Jones Industrial Index—its place on the Index something we had pointed to proudly as a sign of our resiliency. You’re winning until you’re not. The punch to the mouth, swift and stinging.
I want to believe that there is still a place for innovative legacy companies in the world—companies whose products make the world work better and whose people find purpose in that mission. I experienced GE’s impact, it is real, profound. There has to be a more sustainable model for how some companies grow—trees do not grow to the sky, nor do companies. But alas, no company is guaranteed immortality—no story, no business plan, no good intention can replace committed, constant adaptation.
This is a call for leaders who are ready for whatever emerges, courageous and committed to the power of change. You make your own reset moments and must move swiftly to do so. Company management, boards—even investors (I’m an optimist!)—must honestly evaluate their leaders’ imagination gaps, ability to move forward without all the answers, and communicate a vision, not just march on with precision.
And yes, even change-makers must change. I stayed longer than I should have. Twenty-seven years at one company today is a long time for anyone. Knowing your exit ramp is also part of the journey.
I loved GE for all its possibility—but not always its reality. The struggle to change didn’t need to be so hard, and I’m not sure why I was attracted to it, except that I believe in fighting for a
better future. Many talented others did too. We were committed, all in. If you see a better way, you have an obligation to pursue it. That’s the change-makers rallying cry. Writing this book was a way to document the hard, messy, wonderful struggle to adapt to change, to open up and innovate more. I am grateful for the apprenticeship and support that many leaders and sparks offered to me. And for the opportunities that unlocked in me the joy of discovery and power of change. Here’s how I sum it up:
The world will never be slower or simpler than it is today. Wishing it so will not make it so.
Change is part of everyone’s job. Transformation is a never-ending journey, for your company, for your team, for you.
The future is made by those who can go forth with courage, with adaptable, open minds, learning to discover, to agitate and instigate, and to collaborate and build, always with a bias for action.
Story is the glue that binds us. We need stories to give our work and our lives meaning. Strategy is a story well told. Vision and courageous leadership never go out of style.
Believe in possibility. Get comfortable with not knowing, with living in the in-between of what was and what will be. It’s hard. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman said (on Krista Tippett’s On Being): “It’s a very difficult principle to grasp, this idea that actually what I don’t know matters enormously, and what I can’t see matters enormously. The interpretation of the world imposes itself on us. We have too much confidence in our beliefs, and it really is associated with a failure of imagination.”
That’s it. I believe devoutly in our humanity, in our creativity, and in our need to make meaning in our lives and our work. We can’t give up on imagination and possibility. Tomorrow always comes. And that’s why the struggle is worth it. So now I’m off to do what I do best—to discover, imagine, struggle, and create again. I tell myself: You can be this. Do this. You can imagine it forward.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It would take volumes to thank all of the people who’ve helped me get here. I hope you know how much you mean to me and how honored I am to have called you colleague, teacher, and friend. GE proved to be a vital training ground for me—equal parts finishing school, business school, global immersion, and pure leadership excellence. Thank you, all.
It’s times like these when the final product is not at all what I imagined, yet weirdly, much richer. The hard things turned out to be easy, and the easy to be hard. Actually, there was little easy about doing this book! Getting the tangled hairball of thoughts out of my head and into this book ranks among the hardest things I’ve done. That’s why I want to express my gratitude here to the people who helped get the book done well.
A huge thank-you to Elyse Cheney, my literary agent. Everyone should have an agent as ferocious about quality, with as good a sense of humor and partnership as Elyse. Thanks to the Cheney Agency—Adam Eaglin, Alice Whitwham, Alex Jacobs, Claire Gillespie, and Peter Finnerty.
Thank you to Tahl Raz, my collaborator, who had the tough job of wrestling a career’s worth of ideas and experiences into great shape and with the right turns of phrase. We were united in our shared interest in psychology and belief in the power of change.
Thank you to the Currency team. Editor Roger Scholl helped me experience the master craft of great editing. Thanks to publisher Tina Constable for her support, never sweating it out (at least not in front of me). And to David Drake, Campbell Wharton, Ayelet Gruenspecht, and Megan Perritt from the sales, marketing, and publicity teams—thank you for the great efforts.
To Evan Leatherwood, thank you for being an intellectual spark—especially for the prompts on emergence. I have valued the steady streams of challenge ideas and edits from you and team SJR.
To Lorna Montalvo, Sehr Thadhani, Annette Shade, and Claire Fitzsimmons: thank you for helping to produce, organize, and amplify efforts surrounding this book. I appreciate your creativity and reality checks.
I am grateful for the limitless patience, support, and love of my family: Chris, my husband, daughters Katie and Meredith; and my parents Gene and Shelby, brother, Matt, and sister, Susan. I love you all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Beth Comstock is the former vice chair of GE, where for twenty-five years she led GE’s efforts to accelerate new growth. She built GE’s Business Innovations and GE Ventures, which develops new businesses, and oversaw the reinvention of GE Lighting. She was named GE’s chief marketing officer in 2003. She served as president of integrated media at NBC Universal from 2006 to 2008, overseeing the company’s digital efforts, including the early formation of Hulu. She is a corporate director of Nike. Written about and profiled extensively in the media, from the New York Times to Forbes, Fortune, and Fast Company, she has been named to the Fortune and Forbes lists of the world’s most powerful women.
Tahl Raz is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author. Find him at tahlraz.com.
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