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June 23 - December 7, 2019
The ability to harness story is what differentiates a good leader from a great one.
Strategy is the story. The story has to bring to life the strategy. They are two sides of a coin. If you can’t do one, then maybe you don’t have the other. Write It as a Press Release
Framework follows
HEADLINE: What is happening SUB-HEADLINE BULLETS: List the two or three most compelling points. BODY COPY: Restate what is happening in the first two paragraphs, list the anticipated outcomes and benefits, and then quote the leaders of the effort to summarize the strategy. End with supporting points. END: Summarize in one sentence the benefits, and in another the bridges to what’s next.
I use this approach after an ideation session with teams. Once we’ve summarized our best ideas and then agreed to a course of action, I’ll assign someone to write a press release. When we get back together again, we review the press release as a way to revisit and test our ideas. Do they make sense? Are we united in the vision? What’s missing?
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.
Some people are eager to change and are just waiting to be given the permission; others are undecided and need proof, permission, and skills; and others still can never get there—either they don’t want to change, they don’t like it, or they don’t have the skills to change and ultimately they leave.
What I tell them is that it really comes down to a (relatively) simple equation: 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.
When I was first introduced to Thomas Edison in grade school in Winchester, Virginia, he was presented as the quintessential American inventor. But that description does his wide-ranging mind a disservice. In fact, he didn’t actually invent the lightbulb—British inventors had demonstrated electric light forty-five years before. Rather, he invented a way to communicate about it, and commercialize it (his carbon filament dramatically extended durability and reliability). And finally make it scale. In other words, he made the invention real.
Edison saw what many people miss—that getting people to adopt a new way of doing things, mobilizing them around a new story, is the hard stuff of innovation.
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.
To change how people think, you need to go at people in full surround sound. They need to see how new models work in specific contexts. 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. Shifts in how we think don’t happen overnight, any more than eating a single lettuce leaf will make you thin.
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.
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.
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.
“We have to expect this, Beth,” he told me when he left in 2012. “We can see things that others can’t. And it makes us a joke sometimes—for daring to imagine what will be.”
Do you know what the people who champion you are saying about you? Do you take time to tell them your story? It’s important to check in with them regularly to make sure they have an up-to-date version of your accomplishments and your goals.
We had been trying to convince Jeff that “business model” innovation—new ways to generate revenue—was as important as technological invention.
the battle between marketing and tech can be described as Should versus Can.
Good leadership focuses on making concepts easy to understand, and inviting people to engage.
the power of 1%
What if going digital could increase industry productivity by 1 percent? How much would we save? How much would customers save? In aviation, a 1 percent savings on fuel would offer $30 billion over fifteen years; in health care, a 1 percent increase in productivity would return $63 billion in fifteen years; and in rail, a 1 mph increase in train speed would have a $200 million impact per year on one of our big customers.
get our storytelling capacity up to speed, we worked closely with Alexander Jutkowitz, cofounder of Group SJR, one of the agencies that pioneered brand journalism. Here are his tips on branded storytelling: Digital storytelling is in some senses a race. Speed matters. Serialize and atomize. In an age of ephemeral content and short attention spans, the ability to serialize a story and tell it in small pieces over time determines its staying power. It’s essential to tell stories that can live anywhere and respect the rules and quirks of a particular platform (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).
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Much of the heavy lifting of these major organizational pivots has to do with bringing in the right outside agitators, sparks, and translators.
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 Startup Playbook, in which he asked the world’s best entrepreneurs two questions: First, What are your selection criteria for picking great ideas? And second—and this one really spoke to me in the context of a big company—What do you do in the first five years so that those ideas don’t die?
“Well, the question I’d ask is, ‘Jeff, how many $50 million companies did GE launch last year?’ I bet the answer is zero. If that’s true, you should be terrified. How is that possible if you have 300,000 people and billions in the bank? How come you’re not using GE as a platform to embed and launch start-ups on a regular basis?”
One of the lessons of that panel was that provocateurs like Ben and David serve as a way to filter who’s in from who’s not. When pressed like that, people have to choose a side.
he wrote to all GE shareholders to mention 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, as I’ll talk about later).
It would require GE to understand a radically different mind-set based on informal decision-making and self-organization, open-source collaboration, transparency, do-it-yourself “maker” culture, and tolerance for risk-taking and variability.
we launched a contest for outside inventors to submit clean-energy innovations and committed a combined $200 million to fund those picked by our selection committee.
Venture investors ask one basic question: How will we exit?—meaning, How will we make a return on the company as it gets sold or acquired in a defined period of time? With that guiding them, VCs, like many people, favor models, people, and outcomes with which they are experienced.
As psychologist Dean Simonton argues, the difference between Bach and his mediocre colleagues is not that he struck out less often, but that he had many more ideas. More ideas, more innovation, and more contact between people lead to more insights, theories, observations, and unplanned connections. To head off the naysayers, however, you have to show that the “dabbles” are part of a broader strategy.
As our planet-wide digital nervous system grows, it is causing a mass reorganization of people, money, information, and things. That digital information flow has become the main driver of change. And we need new frameworks to understand and anticipate what comes next.
As more and more human activities flow through digital systems, those activities also take on the properties of adaptive emergent systems. We are collectively and spontaneously reorganizing around the flow of our digital information.
In VC investing, if something is not a sure huge winner, it’s a loser.
Such is the path of the emergent leader. This all can’t be done without unrelenting passion and humility. You need the passion to try new things and take great risks, enabling others to do the same. But you also need the humility to realize failure is part of your job and you will be unable to know the answer or predict the outcome. You need, most of all, a kind of faith that amidst all this uncertainty and ambiguity, the next new thing will emerge, eventually.
I learned what happens in companies—small or big—when you throw too much money at something before it has the capacity and capability to use it well. It’s something we now call premature scaling, something we determined to fix. My colleagues hate when I say this, but companies often throw too much money at ideas too early.
Timing is the difference between being successful and being close.
We needed to reacquire that capacity we would come to call New-to-Big, and quickly.
It’s easy to forecast exponential growth.
Eric laughed, too. I could tell he was used to this. Not once did he get angry at the mockery and resistance. This is one of the values of a good spark. They can say things that people inside the company couldn’t or wouldn’t.
It wasn’t that we didn’t have the technology or the budget. It was that we had too many internal obstacles that were slowing us down. Some obstacles were just approvals and the need to get many people engaged in the process. And some were mental ones that made people feel they had to do things a certain way.
what was really important was that it changed the attitude of the team from one of being really scared about making a mistake to being engaged and thoughtful and willing to take a risk, shifting our mental model from fear of creating failures to thinking through how to test our assumptions.
Here are the key steps of Lean Startup methodology:
Key steps
Name the “leap of faith” assumptions that must be true if a planned product is going to succeed—like,
Create minimum viable product (MVP) experiments to test those assumptions.
Iterate. That means going through repeated build/test-and-learn cycles with MVPs, asking yourself what’s working and what’s not.
