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

by Beth Comstock

Change is not a single act or initiative. It is an ever-evolving dynamic in which you prod and seed the environment with a range of friction-causing catalysts. This is why you need sparks, be they people, projects, or perspectives. A change-agent is like an early-stage investor. You put down a lot of small bets, and a few large ones, on the belief that one or more will blow up big and lead you forward. You learn from each failure in this evolving portfolio of strategic experiments. There is a larger class of experiments that I call challengers: the creation of a corporate-funded competitor functioning independently outside the mothership, or (as you’ll see in the next chapter) the formation of an internal digital marketing team to compete against the existing department. They are high-stakes challengers to the status quo. And of course, defenders of the old order inevitably pile on to kill them. But challengers are what lead companies to qualitative leaps forward.