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June 23 - December 7, 2019
To combat our tendency to be lulled into inaction, I find it’s useful in planning ahead to develop at least three or four scenarios about the future, including one that is wildly optimistic, one that is disruptive, and one that is incredibly conservative.
That would require a new kind of leadership, one that expects judgment calls to be made in the face of incomplete data, that encourages original thinking, that values speed over perfection, that embraces change.
There is a lot of good in Six Sigma, because it focuses people on quality and reduced distraction. But Six Sigma created a culture that venerated process, and along the way, our people lost some of their capacity to take smart risks and use personal judgment when making decisions.
Realizing what our brand or business is really about is critically important—especially in the face of turbulence.
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.”
“Well, all those numbers you wrote on the board: What do people have to believe in for all those things to happen?
Rapaille’s methodology is unique, to put it mildly. He organizes teams of employees and customers, and puts them through a three-step process of “imprinting” or “sensing” sessions. Each lasts one hour and draws on a different part of the brain, moving from the outside (logical) to the inside (reptilian). In all, the process would involve about four hundred GE employees and customers in Connecticut, New York, Atlanta, and Cleveland.
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” th...
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Bring in a Spark
The power of an outsider
When Rapaille asked what the letters GE meant to our tribe,
The second-step “sensing” sessions were designed to take us back from our logical to our “limbic” brains. Rapaille pushed us for our emotional impressions of GE. Some staffers depicted GE as a place that was “brutal”
After getting the people in the Atlanta group to give their brief impressions of GE, Rapaille asked them to turn those impressions into a description of the company. He had us write these on our own, to avoid groupthink.
it was the third, “reptilian,” part of the process that proved the most intense. Here, people were instructed to lie on mats on the floor and allow their minds to float back to the first imprint of GE. It was a bizarre sight: grown men and women in business suits lying on their backs in a conference room, doing “relaxation” to access their innermost feelings about the corporation.
Without notes, he summarized the word associations, the stories, the motivating and demoralizing factors.
Rapaille’s gift was not The Code per se, but teaching us the process of discovery, the process of getting there.
Every company, organization, person has a story that conveys their purpose in the world. And in business, telling that story is one of the most important things we do. To put it another way, if you can’t tell it, you can’t sell it.
Whats my story?
you must be clear on why it is important, what the anticipated outcome is, and why it is relevant. It’s not what we sell, it’s why we sell.
Spend time around engineers or scientists and you’ll discover that what really moves a typical engineer is the thought of solving the unsolvable, building the unbuildable, and having colleagues express wide-eyed surprise and admiration. To say, “Wow, I didn’t think that was possible.”
I reached out to HR, in what would become a long-standing partnership, to ask what we could do to make this statement of purpose more actionable. How could we better train and evaluate our leaders? We focused on five core traits.
The top five thousand people in the company would be rated on each of these traits as part of their annual performance review.
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”).
marketing at GE had become what it still is at many companies, especially with businesses that do not sell directly to consumers: a way to launch a new product after it had already been developed.
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.
I read university marketing textbooks, especially those from Northwestern University’s Philip Kotler, the “father” of modern marketing, and I became proficient in the traditional four-P constellation of marketing: product, promotion, place, and price. Before you can challenge assumptions and dislodge the status quo, you need to understand the fundamentals. A baseline.
the curriculum from P&G’s famed marketing institute.
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.
While these consumer examples weren’t exactly relevant to the work at GE, they gave us shared experiences and reasons to laugh. And they opened up our thinking. It is one of the most important gifts of a discovery-based approach.
I created a set of personal challenges—small, deliberate steps—to push myself forward toward confidence.
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 ...
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From the minute I started as CMO, this was my rallying cry: to make marketing part of the business process, at the very beginning, not just the thing you do at the end to launch something.
we were coming to understand that technology untethered to a need doesn’t sell well. It becomes too expensive because we overengineer it with too many features that we think are necessary, without knowing if the customers actually value those features.
We were unfortunately all too familiar with what happened when we didn’t take customers’ needs into account. The engineers at GE Healthcare refused to design an MRI or CT scanner with a wider bore—the donut hole around which the amazing magnet with the force of up to 1.5 Tesla power spins. The marketplace trends were clear: people were getting bigger, with, um, wider girths. Some people found the experience of getting an MR image extremely uncomfortable. Or worse, they couldn’t fit at all. GE engineers refused to accept this; they believed that making the donut hole bigger would degrade the
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Great story
The job for our new marketing teams was to look through the eyes of the user to find gaps in the market, to look at what isn’t happening and imagine what could. To create something that didn’t exist before. To satisfy unmet—and sometimes unexpressed—needs.
Marketing, as I was starting to see, was about taking the name seriously—living in the markets and then bringing the outside in.
The secret to successfully adopting a market mind was looking and doing and feeling things from other people’s points of view.
I meet often with artists, poets, fringe scientists, designers, theologians, musicians, and a range of others who seemingly have nothing to do with my business but do offer a new perspective on how we and others view ourselves.
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.
perfection wasn’t the point. The Imagination Breakthrough process was meant to shake loose revenue-generating business ideas, but it was also a vehicle to propagate my outside-in, be-the-customer idea of marketing throughout the company. It was indirectly teaching the company discovery—by forcing executive teams to scour their businesses and their markets on idea scavenger hunts.
PowerPoints were outlawed. That didn’t last long. I’m still trying to kill PowerPoint—the ultimate business security blanket. People feel safe with their well-honed presentations complete with business plans that contain a “hockey stick of growth”–exponential growth that is always three to five years away.
Jeff would pluck the one-page profile from each manager in the pile in front of him and go around the room asking, “What is the biggest technical barrier? What is the biggest external barrier? Are you on time? How many resources do you have on this project?” He wanted more discussion, but he, too, went back to the death-by-PowerPoint ritual.
We had to convince people that it was okay to have a failed idea, that this would not be held against them financially in a promotion review.
We pushed for GE’s best people to drive the effort and committed $5 billion over the next three years to fully fund IBs.
Traditionalists, they saw marketing as the advertising department, rather than the key driver behind growth and change.
So they invited pilots to observe surgeries and help GE identify the problems.
We had learned a crucial lesson. We had to “get outside the jar,” as one designer described it to me. In other words, 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. You need a different perspective.
