Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change

by Beth Comstock

While I had experience in communications and advertising—and I had come up through NBC, which was all about marketing—I had zero training in the fundamentals. I didn’t have an MBA, hadn’t grown up in GE’s culture, and had never even taken a business class. Before I could think about how I was going to reinvent a marketing department for GE, and how that department would help spur massive behavioral changes in 300,000 people, I had to learn what marketing was. What do marketers do? I gave myself ninety days to get up to speed on a career’s worth of teachings. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But I discovered that being an outsider would be my greatest advantage. I did what has become my signature move: I engaged in discovery, the process I expected to become the basis for the new marketing we would build at GE.