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June 23 - December 7, 2019
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.
The Red Team/Blue Team mentality came out of the military, as Bryce Hoffman describes in his book Red Teaming,
a second version involves something called “alternative analysis” in decision-making, in which one team is charged with trying to find facts that disprove existing hypotheses in order to get past our all-too-human tendency to look at information selectively as a way to support or confirm existing biases.
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; Disagree, and Commit. “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
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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 to face the same firing squad yourself.
Real innovators can be disagreeable; they don’t require the social approval of their peers to move ahead with disruptive ideas.
Research shows that creative tension promotes stronger idea generation and group problem-solving. Constructive dissent and debate encourage people to reexamine assumptions and make room for creative thinking.
Jason was doing exactly what needed to be done: he was exceeding his authority based on his need.
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.
The friction between Jason and the higher-ups at Fox and NBC illustrated one of the inherent difficulties for challengers like Hulu:
choosing profits over the user experience is one of the things that made broadcasting so vulnerable to disruption,
small teams, autonomy and freedom, insulation from the practices of the parent company, relentless focus on solving consumer problems, an approach that encourages experimentation (with no stigma attached to failure), and a reverence for creative disobedience.
To change an industry, you must be driven by a passionate conviction for how that industry should be—that is, you must have clarity around what the business or team believes and the change it’s trying to bring about.
I believe creating a challenger brand is an effective way to introduce entrepreneurship into organizations.
Hulu was, for me, a validation of my approach to marketing. Jason showed how entrepreneurs have to think outside in, but always with the user as their North Star. The user and her “unmet needs” was at the center of everything Jason did. He took a discovery-based mode of inquiry that starts with questions that look beyond the current reality: What if there was a place where all the high-quality premium TV and movies could be watched? Whenever and wherever people wished? And in HD quality? And in a video player that was elegant and clutter-free?
How might we…? These are the questions that change-makers must ask, and continue asking.
Often, when we’re frustrated, it’s because we didn’t seize an opportunity to speak up and disagree, ask a question, or propose an alternative.
TOWARD INNOVATION, OR HOW TO UN-GRINF*CK A TEAM
Great section and set of principles
Make the work about learning, not just performance.
Here are a few tricks I’ve learned over the years to conduct those difficult conversations, and to co-opt those with whom you don’t necessarily have a positive relationship, in order to turn conflict into momentum.
Good tips
Keep the opposition close. It’s vital to do things like have coffee with the person most dedicated to seeing you fail. I should have sat down for coffee with Jeff Zucker—often.
Ask your opponents to articulate their vision for success. I didn’t ask Zucker several vital questions about NBC and digital: What are your goals?
Be candid. Turn conflict into the basis for an alliance.
Trust can’t be coerced. It is earned, one action at a time. Being vulnerable (and not in a Speedo) is a good way to set the tone: Admit what you don’t know. Ask for help. Tell a story of adversity. Share a good laugh at your own expense.
A friend of mine uses a great icebreaker for a dinner series we host. She asks: Tell us something about yourself we can’t find out from Google.
Grieving Your Workplace Failures The downside of trying new things and taking more risks is that sometimes you are going to fail. It’s okay to grieve what could have been; after all, it is the death of what you had hoped for. I try to give myself the time and space to feel bad when things don’t work out. To say the words (until I am quite convinced) “It didn’t work” so that I can get past them. This is especially hard for get-it-done people, because we tend to try every possible option before declaring defeat. At times like these, I summon the words of Samuel Beckett: “All of old. Nothing else
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Needed to read this post launch of retail
I see myself as a curious, courageous protagonist, a fearless explorer. It is a narrative that has always held regenerative power for me. Beth the change-maker, ready to take on the gatekeepers protecting “the way things are done.”
those who attributed setbacks to the larger, imperfect world (“It’s not all my fault”), who framed periods of adversity not as personal failures but part of a process of growth (“I learned so much”), were less prone to depression and more resilient.
McKinsey’s people had built a model out of mining knowledge garnered from clients across industries, many of them our competitors. But they only dealt with what they knew, using the data they had. They didn’t use their imagination to interpret clues as signposts to the future, which is what was needed to predict the arrival of this Black Swan event.
In the 1980s and 1990s, organizational psychologist Karl Weick coined two terms that I believe help to describe the issues GE faced after Lehman collapsed.
The first of those is cosmology episode—that is, the sudden loss of meaning that people and organizations experience when faced by a traumatic event
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.
The path from the impossible to the probable to the new normal used to take years. Now it seems like we have a new normal every few months. The world has become so uncertain that economists have come up with an acronym for it: VUCA, which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
We can’t make uncertainty go away. But we can change the way we react to it. Every uncertainty is a new potential future.
I would argue that strategy is a story well told. And if your story doesn’t hang together, perhaps your strategy isn’t sound.
traditional business strategy too often does not bother to create a story or narrative about its actions for its employees and the world to gather around. For the strategy to become reality, people need to see themselves in the story and then take action to make the story happen.
“What you can do is ramp up the volume with the stories that you want to convey to customers and the public. But to do that well, you have to gather feedback to answer some vital questions:
What are those stories? Who do we want to tell them to? How do we want people to act when they hear them?”
There are many ways to break down sensemaking. The process we developed with Steve Schmidt involved four basic steps:
Four steps
Collect responses from multiple sources—not
Invite others—sparks like Schmidt, for example—into your sensemaking program. Tell them your observations and opinions, and listen to the observations and interpretations of people who have different perspectives from yours.
Use each set of responses and observations to shape experiments that you can use to test your ideas.
Don’t fall back on the frameworks and worldviews you’ve used in the past. Be open to new interpretations. And try to avoid sweeping generalizations, or oversimplicity,
I challenged our agencies to swim in one lane, to function as a relay team rather than individual competitors—without a lead agency. Without individual glory. It was a profoundly creative session. We were a team on a mission: To deliver the words that would define us. To unlock our strategy, through the power of story.
In previous eras, marketing was about creating a myth and selling it. Today, it’s about finding a central truth and sharing it.
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.
What do you do? Why do you do it? What do you love about your work? Unlike with the Rapaille work, when we brought people in for deep thinking, this time we were field anthropologists. We watched them. We photographed them.
“There’s nothing more valuable than a human being talking to a human being,” David Plouffe would say. “Nothing.”
This grassroots story brigade continues today through the robust “GE Voices” outreach effort, enlisting nearly 100,000 GE employees and suppliers to share messages—in person and digitally—about innovation and the economic value of jobs.
Silos were broken down. People doing different things met and formed clusters, networks, and joint ventures.
