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a mentality that I’d come to call a market mind, fueled by discovery.
The secret to successfully adopting a market mind was looking and doing and feeling things from other people’s points of view.
An easy way to induce a roaming mentality is through a practice I call mental grazing. This is the seeking stage of discovery, where we playfully attempt to stray outside our comfort zones to encounter new experiences, new tools, and new people outside our networks. We ask people to be more creative, more innovative, generate new ideas…but we often forget that new outputs require new inputs. It’s like demanding milk from a cow without allowing it to graze first.
To get an edge on the future and graze on something new, you have to be willing to “go weird.”
“We’re going to iterate this several times. Get ready, and don’t wait for perfection.” Too often we take so much time waiting for all the inputs and data, preparing the most beautiful presentation, when all we really needed to do was punch the idea around and fiddle with it. As I would learn later, taking something to a client that is less than perfect is actually a much more effective way to work.
new lines of business or product applications, geographic areas, or customer bases.
Imagination Breakthroughs,
When the first IBs came back (on time—GE’s ability to execute was never in doubt), it was clear the ideas were neither imaginative nor breakthroughs.
* GE had discipline already!
“We have to pay for these?” was the universal outcry. Now Marketing had their attention. Clearly, many had picked ideas that seemed interesting, but perhaps not essential, because they thought “Uncle Jeff” would be paying. I learned an essential lesson about business innovation in this exercise: people have to be invested. They have to have “skin in the game.” When they do, mysteriously, better ideas are selected.
we needed an “outside-in” approach to generating insights to improve a product or process. You can’t see a jar’s label from inside the jar.
What was amazing about Jeff’s sponsorship of the IB idea was how it forced GE’s entrenched leaders to take it seriously. “Nobody is allowed not to play. Nobody can say, ‘I’m going to sit this one out,’ ” Jeff said.
Professor in Residence,
you require different skills and capabilities for innovating at the core versus the new,
Time is an overlooked resource as well. I make sure I carve out at least 10 percent of my own time in any given workweek for exploring what’s new. For example, I carve out Friday afternoons for discovery, whether it’s meeting with an expert in a new field or reading about a new topic. I created “Field Trip Fridays” once a month to take my marketing team to visit an emerging company or even an exhibit or art installation.
In my personal life, the percentage of time I spend in discovery is much, much higher. I search out new products, venues, exhibits, and experiences as a way of life. An adaptation that I’ve challenged myself with is to create three segments, along the lines of Things I Love to Do, Things I Have to Do, and Things I Hate to Do. It turns 3D budgeting on its head, with me attempting to have more things I love (Box 1)—like reading and exploring—while finding creative ways to outsource things I hate (Box 3)—like doing laundry!
Innovation is not just about generating, analyzing, selecting, and publicizing ideas. It’s about getting an entire community of “customers”—in this case, the company’s executives and employees—to adopt new behaviors and practices. It’s a slow process. And, as was becoming painfully clear, the Imagination Breakthrough program was only the start. Real company-wide adoption would take years. But the bigger and bolder the effort, the faster we could move forward.
a pattern that was identifiable to someone with the orientation to see it.
My friend Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, uses mushroom-hunting as a metaphor to explain how pattern recognition—what he also calls peripheral vision—works. It requires immersion without absorption—a broad awareness of the environment, while resisting the pull to fixate on any one thing. When you go mushroom-hunting, if you focus too deliberately, you won’t find any mushrooms. With your task-oriented mind switched on, you’ll filter out the weak signals, the visual hints of delectable fungi that are nearly, but not quite, hidden in the nooks and crannies of the forest underbrush; however,
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Looking at the world horizontally means considering ideas outside of our direct expertise. And because of that, we could see opportunities that deep domain experts cannot. Never underestimate the value of viewing things through a different, wider lens. You need to have both: ideas born in deep expertise and then a challenge by someone asking, Where else can this apply?
The opportunity was real, but vague, broadly focused on emissions reduction, energy efficiency, water usage, and what I would call generally the economics of scarcity. What wasn’t clear was what GE could do.
On a very basic level, change is a conversation. The more vibrant, the more diverse, the more animated and sometimes agitated the conversations an organization is having, the more likely you’ll find an adaptive organization that’s gotten good at learning, creation, innovation, and change.
We picked a time frame—and we were very deliberate in choosing ten years out—that was near enough to be actionable, but still far away enough that CEOs could “dream” and not feel competitively threatened by sharing insights with one another.
“What technologies would you like GE to invest in?” we asked. “If you had a billion of GE’s dollars to invest, where would you place it?”
While GE executives listened carefully to the input, ultimately we would make our own investment choices. “I love customers. I get great insight from them, but I would never let them set our strategy for us,” Jeff said. But by talking to more customers, we saw patterns emerge, where they were alike, and where we could develop offerings that scale.
mindshare?”
The best leaders exhibit humility in their strength, and vice versa. They embrace where they must lead and the changes in themselves that it requires.
Jeff never told me about the loss of TXU. I only learned that years later. That’s what good leaders do; they absorb the shock waves and anxiety in moments of radical change.
The idea of the “treasure hunt” was to find untapped savings within a company that would reduce emissions or energy and water usage and save money.
With Ecomagination we instigated a cleaner, more relevant future. Of that I am certain and proud. We succeeded in many ways. Yet, frustratingly, we could only impact so much despite that the potential to make the future was profound. This is the change-maker’s dilemma. In GE’s case, despite all the momentum, Ecomagination could only reach so far through the layers and layers of complexity and denials of change—across GE, across our customers, across the ecosystem, across financial markets.
Because tomorrow always comes, change-makers can’t be afraid to share their vision and declare their aspirations for it loudly, even before they’ve built it, done it, won it. This is how you grab mindshare. And you need mindshare before you can capture market share. You need to sell a vision, devise a plan, and invite others to help build it. This is how change gets harnessed.
Alvin Toffler, whose Future Shock got attention in the 1970s with its bold (and accurate) predictions, is said to have employed a method whereby he kept stacks of newspaper clippings on topics around a room; the stacks that got bigger became his heat map for new trends. At a basic level, patterns start with a hunch or a hypothesis, and each data point serves to strengthen the insight.
alternate your routes to work in the mornings to see what new things stand out when you do. Read about other industries, and see what kind of similarities you can spot.
What’s needed are the skills of a social architect, someone who is committed to collaborating in a psychologically safe zone that allows for what I call agitated inquiry. Agitated inquiry is the practice of evolving an idea into action steps through heated exchanges and debate.
innovation is a twelve-tone symphony of conflict and resolution. Lose control of the notes and the music will descend into chaos. Learn to conduct it and you can create something transcendent.
Often, the person leading the change doesn’t know the answer, only the need for a new direction. How do you get people to work toward unseen opportunities?
That I had worked at NBC before only exacerbated the situation, because my colleagues pictured me as I had been. They had little appreciation for what I had accomplished at GE.
I realized I needed to learn to handle conflict better with my peers. You have to use release valves in the office to let the tension out. You can’t avoid it. In fact, you have to surface conflict continuously, before tensions mount too high. Tension is the price of admission when you are innovating. I should have confronted Jeff Zucker long before and told him that his actions were unacceptable. And I should have stated my position up front—I was in charge of the NBC Agency. I didn’t need his permission to run the agency. I had backed down to preserve the peace, but as I was coming to
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Leadership is not for those with weak kidneys. You can’t stay above the fray and still be an effective leader.
had taken to talking to Zucker only when absolutely necessary and only about our disagreements over digital and cost-cutting. The real solution, I realized later, was to seek out more genuine, more open, more emotional engagement with him to better offer feedback so it’s not seen as criticism. But I didn’t understand yet how powerful that kind of conversation could be, or how necessary it was to have the tools to do it well. I had a lot to learn.
the Dalai Lama said to us, “Your enemy is your best teacher. I lose my temper, yes, but deep anger, no. I’ve learned to look first at the human level. I’m just like you.”
Later, I felt turning Steve down may have been one of my biggest missed opportunities. Not the money, although it hit me a few times how much I could have made in stock options. The thing that nagged me most was the missed chance to be tested, to grow and be made better. And yet, in my gut, I worried that I might not have thrived in that environment. There may have been too many constraints on my ability to grow and innovate. There would be a few other times I talked to companies about open roles. I’ve never considered it disloyal to discover new potential paths and understand your worth
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It was only years later that I learned to trust my doubts, and express them candidly to others.
In the face of rapid change, people tend to retreat into their silos and guard their own turf. The question was, How was I going to overcome those walls and fiefdoms? How do you get a company to embrace the new?
I’d grown a lot since leaving GE—I shouldn’t have to say, “Because the boss said so.” I had been hired to handle this. So I fell back on old habits and tried to go it alone. That’s tempting but also foolish, I would come to find.
Social capital is the mortar that connects team members, the feeling of safety and trust that allows people to ask crazy questions and provide slightly less crazy answers without embarrassment, to iterate to greatness. But social capital has to be built, banked, and stored. That means engaging in practices that are antithetical to a world that measures people by how well they meet their numbers. In that environment, asking your employees to make time for more idle chitchat sounds ridiculous.
The point is that the more time team members spend together, the more social capital, trust, and honesty they build. And the more innovative, risk-taking, and productive they are.
Building an innovative team is about creating trust, not just hiring stars.
My tenacity had served me well up to this point as a tool for managing up. But as an operational manager, I needed different tactics.
It was within our grasp, if only we could get out of our own way. Instead, as is too common within established companies, iVillage was wounded before it could even challenge.
In mid-December of 2005, Saturday Night Live cast members Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell, and two new SNL writers, gave birth to the modern Internet when they filmed a zero-budget rap video parody called “Lazy Sunday.” Samberg and Parnell played two not-quite-gangster rappers singing the praises of Google Maps and Magnolia Bakery cupcakes, and mixing Pibb soda and Red Vines candy (“Crazy delicious!”) as they head to a matinee showing of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (“We love The Chronic—What?—les of Narnia!”). The video was anything but what was considered
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