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Building on Lean Startup was what we called FastWorks, a jumping-off point for adaptation across teams, function, and industries.
As Eric Ries often said, you have to “nail it, then scale it.”
“Like, are the batteries vitamins or painkillers?” David added. “Because if you have to explain why something might help them in the future, it’s just a vitamin. Vitamins are nice to have: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if our customer read our business plan and behaved the way we want them to?’ It doesn’t happen. But if it stops a pain, if it’s a painkiller, that’s hugely powerful. That’s what they need. And that’s what they’ll buy.”
what Elon Musk means when he says that wishful thinking is the enemy.”
Increasingly, innovation and disruption comes in the form of new business models, not just as a result of new technology.
With the early days of FastWorks, our plan was simple: every ninety days, new projects would be judged by a growth board on whether they were meeting their goals, and whether they should be killed, pivoted to a new direction, or given another ninety days to move forward as they were. It was classic VC metered, or milestone-based, funding, in which you fund based on progress. It allows you to kill a project early if you determine it’s not succeeding. You are “de-risking” innovation by spending less money on more ideas earlier, and killing off the ones that aren’t working. It allows you to move
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Certainly, we made sure the top leadership teams in each business had been immersed in the concepts and understood the critical questions and decision-making processes. We then deputized coaches within each business unit—sometimes they were people from the unit who had shown passion and skill at the new OS. Sometimes they were outside sparks such as Eric, David, and Aaron Dignan and increasingly other serial founders—entrepreneurs in residence—that Sue and the Ventures team were able to attract and direct.
Emergent leaders must be rewarded for the productivity of their failures—their idea generation, their pivots, their learnings, their clear-sighted zombie kills—as well as for their major successes. To do this, creating constant feedback loops—and getting rid of annual performance reviews—is absolutely critical. At GE, we moved to ongoing feedback via an app named PD@GE (Performance Development @ GE). Managers now give ongoing feedback to their employees—and vice versa—in a process that holds both accountable to each other and responsible for constant communication and coach-based behavior.
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We settled on a name for the new Lighting: Current. As in energy. As in what makes light. As in something that was current, now, today. More specifically, it would be “Current, powered by GE.” To show that it was a venture, not a division.
saying that I thought it was time for me to leave GE at the end of 2015. I was feeling I had reached the end of the road there, and frankly, I was tired of pushing the change and innovation boulder up an ever steeper incline.
I loved GE for all its possibility—but not always its reality. The struggle to change didn’t need to be so hard, and I’m not sure why I was attracted to it, except that I believe in fighting for a better future. Many talented others did too. We were committed, all in. If you see a better way, you have an obligation to pursue it. That’s
