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

by Beth Comstock

It’s easier to keep your nose to the grindstone, do what you are doing and do it well, than it is to lift your head up and figure out where you or your organization is going and what the future may bring.

It’s usually not until an organization is engulfed by chaos or, more simply, wakes up to a stark reality that it has been left behind, that it begins to seek a new way forward. And by that point it lacks either the energy or the time to make it through to the other side. Fifty years ago, the life expectancy of a Fortune 500 firm was around seventy-five years; now it’s less than fifteen.

Instead of investing more resources in understanding the art and science of innovating our way forward, we’ve doubled down on the diminishing returns of financial engineering. That is why we are now confronting such a huge gap between the knowledge, critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity needed to survive the challenges and exploit new opportunities, and our dogged insistence on doing things as they’ve always been done. I call this the imagination gap, where possibility and options for the future go to die.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent…” Charles Darwin wrote. “It is the one that is most adaptable to change. Those who have learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

In many ways, I am an unlikely change-maker. I’m fundamentally shy. I didn’t go to business school, and I had no formal training when I was tapped by CEO Jeff Immelt to lead marketing and innovation at GE.

We can’t go on doing things the way we used to—the very ground is shifting daily under our feet. Change is a messy, collaborative, inspiring, difficult, and ongoing process, like everything meaningful that leads to human progress.

Well-meaning colleagues will try to stop you from making these bravely instinctive choices. That’s just how it is. Change-making creates resistance. It is against the rules.

I realized just how large the gap was between the story I was expected to follow and the life I actually wanted to live.

Ignore the Gatekeepers

Marc Eckō give an amazing talk in which he distinguished between the Gatekeepers in his life—the “thought leaders,” the press, the critics—and what he calls the Goalkeepers, the ones who actually matter.

My own success is a testament not to an improbable succession of good decisions—I’ve had plenty of failures—but to a bias for action. Steven Pressfield, the author of The War of Art, once said that our enemy is not a lack of preparation or the difficulty of a project. “The enemy is our chattering brain,” he wrote, “which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.” I’ve realized you can’t worry so much about making the right decision. What is more important is to develop a habit of acting decisively. It’s not that I have less doubt—as with most people, my insecurities run deep—but that I act in spite of it.

success correlates as closely with confidence as it does competence. This is particularly true for someone who intends to be a change agent.

I believed that there was always a “better way” to do things. And that became my mantra, my mission: the quest for better. It gave me the courage to act in spite of my awkwardness and fear.

social courage,

diving into the fog and seeing opportunity where others see only confusion.

“fog flyer”

white space: a positive void on which you can project nothing but possibility.

Job Crafting

Put yourself out there, with passion. And persevere. No skill in the world can overcome a lack of perseverance.

“No = Not Yet,”

learning how to withstand disappointment is critical for anyone who hopes to effect change in an organization. Disappointment, delays, obstacles, recalcitrance, and resistance—they are inevitable in fomenting change. It is in how you handle yourself during the constant tussle between the thrill of a new idea and its adoption that the real work lies.

with Jack, GE’s culture was all about performance. You always knew how you were doing. He’d come in and say, “You’re a prince today.” (I was never a princess!) But other days he’d tell me, “You’re a pig.” Quite literally. And he meant it.

That brutal intensity, his laser focus on performance, is what led Jack to Six Sigma.

But while Jack’s personal leadership and focus on performance made for a tremendous upside in terms of discipline and loyalty and stock price, it also created a top-down, parent-child relationship between Jack and GE employees. Having 300,000 employees working in lockstep is powerful, but it’s hard to enlist risky new ideas from people who are expected to do everything perfectly. A society that glorifies numbers—and fears mistakes—leaves little room for human imperfections.

To succeed in creating change, to not be picked off whenever you stick out your neck, you’ve got to act using the other side’s language and values. You’ve got to act from the inside, knowing their arguments better than they do. In other words, I had to learn how to speak and act GE. That meant learning to balance myself on an organizational fault line between uniqueness and belonging, between being someone who is not blinded by cultural assumptions and has the independence to question and provoke, and someone whose sight is credible because of her loyalty to (and performance in) that same culture. I would need to make myself into someone who belonged, yet was able to be independent enough to rebel without getting fired.

In other words, being the outsider inside. Someone who can translate the outside for the inside in terms it can understand. Someone who builds “bridges, not walls.” Someone who is enough of an insider not to be rejected by the corporation’s natural antibodies.

essayist John Gardner once wrote, “All too often, on the long road up, young leaders become servants of what is rather than shapers of what might be.”

When we are excavating the emotional reasons behind why we do things, we tend to avoid negative emotions, such as worry, fear, and anger. But these emotions are like blazes on a forest trail. They point to problems just beneath the surface, trends, or opportunities that are emerging that nobody has spotted yet. Our fears, if acknowledged and catalogued like exotic species in an unexplored rain forest, can be valuable sources of knowledge for ourselves and our organizations.

In times of chaos, it’s natural to feel you should hunker down. Almost everything may seem out of your control—but your imagination and ability to take action are not among them. You have to resist the urge to think it’s up to others; you have to take initiative.

Jeff Immelt was a forty-five-year-old unknown to most people,

Investors and half of Wall Street were asking whether he was up to the task. But I—and everybody else who worked closely with him—knew that he had both that calculating Six Sigma mental toughness (Jack Welch would have never let him close to the corner office without it) as well as an appreciation for the “softer skills”—including empathy, storytelling, and connecting with people, especially customers—that he seemed to have picked up while he was in marketing and sales earlier in his career. And he believed strongly in the power of communications, in story, as a transformative leadership tool.

“Just send me everything you’ve done.” This is a standard practice of mine: ask people what they didn’t show you, the questions they didn’t ask.

I am a worrier. In part my runaway imagination is a way to prepare for every possible outcome. And partly it’s just my anxiety going unchecked. I’ve since learned to channel this anxiety into scenario-planning; it is one way I’ve been able to feel so comfortable dreaming up the most outlandish, crazy scenarios for the future.

“Change seems impossible—until it happens. At which point it seems to have always been inevitable.”

Jeff sought what investors call organic growth, meaning you don’t buy your revenues, you grow them. He wanted to put the company on a course to invest record amounts in technology but also to be more connected to the world’s global markets, especially those in developing countries where suddenly much of the world’s entrepreneurial energy (and growth) was being generated.

How many times had I heard, “That’s not who GE is.” I knew the primary source of resistance to the changes we were seeking would be our own identity.

At the heart of Rapaille’s work is a theory based on a three-part concept (or “triune,” as he calls it) of how the brain works. The Cortex is the seat of logic and reason, abstract thought and language; the Limbic is the brain’s emotional center; and the Reptilian is the area controlled by our basic human needs: eating, breathing, reproducing, surviving. All three sides of the brain exert powerful influences. But in Rapaille’s world, “the reptilian always wins.”

But Rapaille then said something that changed the entire tenor of the meeting. “Well, all those numbers you wrote on the board: What do people have to believe in for all those things to happen? People don’t get out of bed to work for ‘the numbers’…for ten percent.” That was a question that resonated deeply with Jeff after the upheaval we had just been through. Rapaille was searching for the soul, the raison d’être, of GE.

Rapaille’s great value was as a catalyst, a spark, via his selection of questions. A spark is a person, usually an outsider, whose unique perspective—the more different, the better—challenges the team to think differently. Asking us to describe our tribe to an alien forced us to be our own cultural anthropologists. Posing good and discomforting questions creates distance and makes you observe yourself. This process—discovery—is in dialogue with the environment. And the more vital and “weird” the environment is, the more likely you are to grow.

As it turned out, the real value of this effort was less about discovering something new than about us recovering something old: Thomas Edison, who founded GE. We were America’s greatest inventors. We were Edison’s Marines.

“Imagination at Work.”

next. Our new equation and tagline spoke to our desire to create a more entrepreneurial, more imagination-driven culture. But how could we ensure that these abstract ideas got translated into concrete behavioral changes?

How could we better train and evaluate our leaders? We focused on five core traits. We called these GE’s Growth Values: having an external market driven focus, measuring performance through the customers’ eyes; being a clear thinker, able to sift through complex information and focus on the critical priorities and strategy action steps; having imagination and courage, creating environments in which others can take risks and experiment; acting through inclusiveness, building diverse teams and partnerships, as well as collaborating across and outside the company; and deep expertise as a resource to drive change. The top five thousand people in the company would be rated on each of these traits as part of their annual performance review.

To make it clear this was indeed about growth and development, and not an iteration of the previous rank-and-yank performance reviews (after which the bottom 10 percent of GE’s performers were ousted—in theory—every year), we stipulated that everyone would have at least one value that was rated red (as in a red stoplight: “Stop, this needs work”)—and one that was rated green (as in “Keep going; this is good”). The message: growing a company, as well as growing leadership, was a work in progress, and each one of us needed to evolve.

People needed that connection to give them hope and confidence that they could actually evolve. What were reasonable actions we were expecting people to take? What was a reasonable amount of evolution to expect? How quickly?

For my 360-degree review, an HR leader from GE interviewed something like thirty people I worked with. The feedback was good, but also stinging: “Beth has a very independent, go-it-alone style that has made it more difficult, at times, for her to integrate with team members and peers….The speed in her decision-making processes can result in people feeling left behind or unappreciated. They feel Beth’s sharp, quick responses and her body language can relay a dismissive attitude.”

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.

You can cut the time to fluency in any discipline if you can get a world-class practitioner to guide your journey. Open yourself up to be an apprentice, finding a “master craftsperson” to study under. Seek out the best in the field; take a key element of wisdom from each one, and then find a way to make it your own.

So I created a set of personal challenges—small, deliberate steps—to push myself forward toward confidence. Each step, each minor victory became a small deposit in my confidence bank. I made sure I came to Jeff’s meetings with strongly articulated arguments, and I didn’t leave a meeting without adding a point of view and perspective. Instead of my normal “On one hand…on the other hand” approach, I would clearly state, “Here’s what I think.” I stopped saying, “This may be stupid, but…” or “I’m not an expert, but…” I became very aware how often my lack of confidence led me to put myself down or qualify my comments. I’d tell myself, You can do this. And I would congratulate myself after every small victory, telling myself, See, you can do this!

technology untethered to a need doesn’t sell well.