It was becoming clear to me that GE needed to redefine and articulate that it was safe for our employees to think and act differently—to iterate, to have hypotheses, to move faster. The focus had to be on how to create the culture that would support this new way of working. We had to rediscover our original entrepreneur’s mentality. We were once a start-up. Was it possible to turn GE once again into a 120-plus-year-old start-up? Until then, the corporate machinery would continue killing ideas—and itself.
