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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
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But we kept coming back to one name: Jason Kilar. Before leaving to take a break from the grind, Jason had spent nine years at Amazon, building up its DVD service from scratch before moving to other roles. What attracted us to Jason was that he’d grown up under Jeff Bezos’s theory of innovation management. As an Amazon executive, Jason had attained a Zen-like mastery in managing conflict. To Jeff Bezos, workplace harmony is overrated; conflict is the spice that leads inexorably to innovation. Executives at Amazon are inculcated in Bezos’s management notions, such as #13, Have Backbone;
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“Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.”
If you’re going to innovate to greatness, you have to be able to give your colleagues candid feedback on their ideas—and be prepared t...
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Jason’s phrase for building a fast-moving, dynamic, and rebellious dream team was “the Ocean’s Eleven approach.” He hired buddies from Amazon and classmates from Harvard Business School, anybody he knew and trusted to spend eighteen-hour days arguing and coding in an almost suicidal bid to get the NewCo site running within ninety days. You can’t confuse credentials with character, competence, or chemistry. When your aim is to disrupt the status quo, you have to know the team has your back.
The need to go beyond what you are authorized to do can be a positive trait when you are pushing to change the way things are done. The secret is to know where the boundaries lie. Some who resist your efforts will tell you you’re “pushing too hard.” Others, just as resistant, will encourage you to “go for it” because it makes you more likely to be fired. The key is to learn how to push the limits without being seen as unacceptably subversive.
A few years down the road, many of his ideas became industry best practices. It serves as a vital reminder that it is the outsiders, the rule-breakers, who possess the kind of disruptive intelligence that cultures have always relied on to catalyze reinvention and renewal. On the other hand, weirdly, I believe having gatekeepers is a positive. Constraints and obstacles are as necessary for the mischief-maker to produce great work as it is for a poet to create a great poem. The most creative ideas are often triggered by restriction and scarcity.
As a change-maker, you will have your share of failures. It’s the nature of the job. The important thing is to learn from them. I had learned, painfully, the importance of confronting and not running away from conflict. I had discovered the importance of co-opting the resisters. I learned the importance of never giving up and constantly moving forward. Of creating a challenger brand to help drive change throughout the organization.
One of the biggest challenges that faces established-company leaders is giving credence to alternate scenarios of the future. It’s one thing to imagine change, it’s another thing to give up on a model that is working, especially with investors breathing down your neck.
His optimism made him an incredible leader—a motivator, communicator, and often an advocate for the future and today at once. Jeff has a gifted way of framing tough issues within the arc of a grand strategy, prescribing which steps to take first.
In the short term, the Federal Reserve and Warren Buffett saved us, giving us desperately needed cash infusions. The Fed bought over $16 billion in our short-term paper when no one else would, and in October we announced a $12 billion stock offering to raise desperately needed cash; Immelt convinced Warren Buffett to invest $3 billion in GE by paying him a 10 percent annual dividend.
Cosmology episodes shatter our cosmos of beliefs and the stories we tell ourselves about our companies, our careers, and our lives, unsettling us to our very core.
VUCA, which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
And acceleration. We are communicating faster, working faster, innovating faster, and by some accounts even talking and walking faster than we did in previous decades. (It’s not your imagination—studies show we’re actually walking 10 percent faster in cities than we did a decade ago.) We can’t make uncertainty go away. But we can change the way we react to it. Every uncertainty is a new potential future. Seen in this light, uncertainty doesn’t need to be a source of anxiety; it can be a signal that it’s time to change.
sensemaking is the process people and organizations go through to understand unexpected, traumatic, or confusing events (those cosmology episodes). In its simplest form, sensemaking involves collecting data about the unknown and the ambiguous, and synthesizing that data into new and revised stories and frameworks that make sense of the unknown.
strategy is a story well told. And if your story doesn’t hang together, perhaps your strategy isn’t sound.
OSOW—our story our way—top
Campaigns, he reminded us, aren’t won by the candidate or the company with the best character, or product, but by the one with the simplest and most clearly told story.
Pick a simple story, he said, and tell it again and again and again.
there are misguided beliefs that only retail companies should advertise.
Steve boiled down our message to a thing of pure beauty: GE is a builder, America’s builder.
In previous eras, marketing was about creating a myth and selling it. Today, it’s about finding a central truth and sharing it.
It is the organizations that are confident enough to share the truth—warts and all—that succeed.
Most important, our story had to resonate within GE, or it would never resonate with our customers and the world. As Steve Schmidt and David Plouffe would say, seed your message with your base. Because it’s their story, too. And they become your best ambassadors.
“There’s nothing more valuable than a human being talking to a human being,” David Plouffe would say. “Nothing.”
How do you make the invisible visible?
CEOs travel lonely paths where they have to take input from many sources as well as in consideration of the now and the future, often in conflict, to satisfy differing constituencies.
My goal at GE was to “shout louder than we spend”—to employ new communications tools to steer our message, repeat it, and flood the zone in order to drive brand position with efficiency. Social and digital media was the big amplifier that would allow us to tell our story and get attention in ways that added value with much less budget.
“big brand” doesn’t necessarily mean “big budget.”
great content + the right time, right place, right audience + amplification through conversation + shout louder than we spend = massive brand ROI. You have to grab shares of people’s hearts and minds before you can hope to grab shares of their wallets or loyalty. And you always have to make room in your budget—and mind-set—to challenge and experiment.
Through the vehicle of the parade, Edison invented an idea that people could rally around: safe, reliable, 24/7 electric light. Once he created that idea, the lightbulb quickly became one of the most disruptive technologies the world had ever seen.
In the early days of an inflection point, all you have to hold on to are little fragments.
Our mental models are deeply ingrained habits of mind. Those habits are useful in filtering out what is important from what is not in day-to-day life. But they can be hard to break when they turn out to be wrong. Changing our mental models requires much more than a single lecture, no matter how convincing the evidence; it requires an ongoing presentation of experiences, discussions, provocations.
The really revolutionary innovations—the ones that change the world—need to be explained before they can be accepted. They need to be experienced before they can be believed. And they need to be communicated repeatedly. Just when you think, “Surely they are sick of me saying this,” you find you need to explain it again.
Finding champions at work—true allies—is necessary for anyone who wants to transform an organization. You need a network of people who take up new ideas critically but honestly (and with passion). Change and innovation are team sports. They require internal allies against the relentless and inevitable nay-saying that will take place.
This lack of clarity at this early stage is a typical obstacle for the change-maker. You have to act boldly on instinct and not wait for the data to tell you what to do, rather than the other way around. You have to respect the data but love imagination more. As a change-maker, you need to engage in what author Amy Whitaker calls “art thinking.” That is, not getting from point A to point B but inventing a point B and then determining if it is possible to get there.
The need for imagination and courage is why shaping the future is a communal endeavor that requires a safe space full of allies. New ideas and observations are far from perfect on their day of birth. Often, you can’t even put the concept into words. That’s why I firmly believe in running a fitness test for them—and those tests require a place where people feel free to speak, make mistakes, argue, and iterate.
To ground ourselves, we’d return to two key questions: What problem are we trying to solve? And, what’s the simplest, fastest way to test a solution?
The key to our discovery is encapsulated by the Japanese phrase genchi gembutso, go and see for yourself. It’s a management principle developed by Toyota and based on the importance of going to where the action is and observing it directly. This is a fundamental aspect of meeting change early.
There was a gap between our vision of the future we had been describing—the value in Apple’s ecosystem, data, and platform—and how it applied to GE’s future.
Our brain tends to grasp for easy answers to solve the problem and end the tension. And organizations behave similarly. At first, they deny a problem exists. Then they admit that a problem exists—but it’s not theirs. Then they say that it’s their problem, but it can be solved by the tried and tested pathways.
Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway won a bet over whether or not he could create a compelling six-word story with this: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”
GE’s questions were borne out of a culture and processes built for an industrial age, when a premium was placed on productivity, certainty, and top-down control. To GE, the hypercollaborative endeavors of this new networked age came across, then, as free-spirit dot-com insanity. GE and the best of corporate America—think of them as Old Power—had always won by developing proprietary knowledge and then ferociously guarding that knowledge as a valuable asset.
In the digital age, power functions quite differently. The problems we need to solve (the environment, health care, access to technology) are increasingly too complicated for any single organization—even one as big as GE—to go it alone. As authors Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms wrote, “New power is open, participatory and peer driven. Like water or electricity, it is most forceful when it surges.”
the two most important books he had read in the last year—one was David’s The Startup Playbook (the other was The Lean Startup,
When David Kidder shouted his $50 million business query, it forced us to reconcile something very basic—and very scary: Why was new growth still so elusive at GE, a company overloaded with talent, money, expertise, international reach, and scalable leverage? And Ben Kaufman’s mockery of our new oven doors made us question our basic standards for innovation: How could the size of an appliance box inhibit new ideas?
We—all of us: GE, the corporate world, the government—were slow, organized into strict hierarchies and silos, and so beset with complicated rules and minimal feedback loops that everybody inside was largely disconnected from everyone outside. There was something in the way we were organized that inherently limited our agility to respond to our rapidly evolving environment. That limited our ability to adapt.
With innovation, we race to be first, but being early is not always a good thing, especially if you’re not ready or if you oversell the future. Timing is the difference between being successful and being close.
Clearly, the all-consuming mastery achieved at optimization came at a substantial cost: a diminishing ability to create and grow new assets.
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