More Praise for
Imagine It Forward
“Imagine It Forward offers an experienced look at how nonlinear, ever evolving change saved one of America’s oldest, most traditional companies and brought it into the digital, socially conscious, irreverent era we now live in. Beth Comstock’s account of her unconventional career at a very conventional corporation, General Electric, is frank, funny, and spot-on about the need to abandon the top-down methods of the past in favor of greater collaboration, disruption, and prioritizing the needs and wants of customers and consumers over profit.”
—Joi Ito, director, MIT Media Lab, and author of Whiplash
“Beth is a true force—smart, practical, and most of all, she inspires executions in the new business world. There are few people who I think ‘get it’, and she’s at the top of that list.”
—Gary Vaynerchuk, entrepreneur and author of Crushing It!
“Imagine It Forward offers good examples of teaching bravery not perfection—in education and work. Beth offers valuable lessons that should help readers challenge themselves to risk more in pursuit of a better future for themselves and their organizations.”
—Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Girls Who Code
“Beth Comstock has a track record of innovating, leading, and being an agent of change. In Imagine It Forward, she proposes thought provoking ways to envision your future and build strategy around it.”
—Sophia Amoruso, New York Times bestselling author of #GIRLBOSS and founder of Nasty Gal
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2018 BeeCom Media LLC
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2018 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States by Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Comstock, Beth, author
Imagine it forward : courage, creativity, and the power of change / Beth Comstock.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780345812254
eBook ISBN 9780345812278
1. Organizational change. 2. Success in business. 3. Management. 4. Comstock, Beth. 5. Women executives—United States—Biography. 6. Executives—United States—Biography. 7. General Electric Company.
I. Title.
HD58.8.C665 2018 658.4’06 C2018-900746-X
C2018-900747-8
Cover design and art by Rodrigo Corral Studio
v5.3.2
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To Katie and Meredith
Your imagination and courage inspire me
CONTENTS
The future is not in our stars but in our imaginations, and our actions.
INTRODUCTION Closing the Imagination Gap
We can no longer afford to fail to imagine.
SECTION I
Self-Permission
Shift mind-set. Every change-maker learns to give herself permission to push outside expectations and limitations.
CHAPTER 1 Reinvention
Permission Granted • Ignore the Gatekeepers • Develop Social Courage • No = Not Yet
CHAPTER 2 The Outsider Inside
Build Bridges, Not Walls • Take the Job No One Wants • Make the Work Great
Challenge: Grab Agency
SECTION II
Discovery
Discovery is about infusing yourself with a spirit of inquiry and curiosity, turning the world into a classroom for learning and for unearthing ideas that can make change possible.
CHAPTER 3 Edison’s Marines
Go Boldly into the Unknown • Optimize Today and Build Tomorrow • Spark New Perspectives
CHAPTER 4 A Breakthrough of Imagination: A New Way of Marketing
Live in the Market • Protect a Class of Ideas • Get Outside the Jar • Get Weird
CHAPTER 5 Ecomagination
Pattern Recognition • Meet Change Early • The Change-maker’s Dilemma
Challenge: Make Room for Discovery
SECTION III
Agitated Inquiry
Innovation is the result of seeking out tension, not avoiding it. It’s not about reassurance or consensus—it often encourages confrontation.
CHAPTER 6 Naysayers and the Digital Onslaught
Acknowledge Reality • Conflict as an Engine of Creativity • Analog Dollars for Digital Pennies?
CHAPTER 7 Failing Forward: It Takes a Village
Tension Is the Price of Admission • The Grinf*ck • Psychological Safety
CHAPTER 8 Getting It Right
Challenge Status Quo • Authority’s Edge • Constraints Are Necessary
Challenge: Getting Good at Conflict
SECTION IV
Storycraft
You have to adapt your narrative to help the people in an organization understand their world. That, in turn, will change how they act in order to create a different, better future.
CHAPTER 9 Rewriting Your Story
Strategy Is Story • Sensemaking • Make the Invisible Visible • Shout Louder Than We Spend
CHAPTER 10 Minds, Machines, and Market Share
Getting Over Functional Fixedness • Go See for Yourself • Rolling Thunder • Platform Power
Challenge: Storytelling’s Unexpected Power
SECTION V
Creating a New OS
Share a new mind-set, spreading ideas bottom-up and outside-in, finding dedicated agents of change within the company to make the story their own.
CHAPTER 11 Opening Up
Who’s in Charge? • Emergence • Premature Scaling • Return on Failure • Partner Power
CHAPTER 12 Illuminating the Darkness: A Faint and Flickering Light
FastWorks • Test & Learn • New to Big • Success Theater • Refounding
Challenge: Be an Emergent Leader
Epilogue
We can’t give up on imagination and possibility. Tomorrow always comes.
Acknowledgments
If you see a better way, you have an obligation to pursue it. That’s the change-maker’s rallying cry.
INTRODUCTION
CLOSING THE IMAGINATION GAP
I was able to see the sunset fade from red to purple as the plane began to descend over the rolling hills of Northern Virginia. A few moments later we were down, puttering to a stop in a small airstrip carved into rural Virginia farmland barely 40 miles from where I’d grown up.
A man in a blue jumpsuit waved me over after the pilot had helped me down the plane’s narrow stairs to the grass. As I walked toward him, carrying my overstuffed tote bag, notes hastily crammed in the side pocket, I heard the plane’s engine fire back up. Soon it was riding up over the trees, and banking into the purple sky.
“Anything I need to know?” I asked.
“Sorry, ma’am. They just pay me to bring the pl
anes in and then guide them back out,” he said.
I didn’t know exactly who was going to pick me up, and I had no number to call. All I knew was that the CIA wanted my advice. I closed my eyes and inhaled the autumn air. Wild grasses, oak and pine trees. The smell of home.
Soon a black SUV with tinted windows pulled up in front of me. Three men get out, each in a dark jacket and, of course, aviator-style glasses. “Beth? Come with us.”
We talked a bit about the weather, about my hometown (where one of them lived), before I turned my mind to the notes I’d scribbled down after a brief talk with the CIA deputy director a few days before:
We’re siloed. We need to collaborate more with each other and across the agency.
It’s hard to keep up with the pace of change. We’re in the business of secrets and yet we need to continually open up to new perspectives, to taking risks, and being ready when change shows up.
We need to continually reinvent ourselves.
Although it would be my first time lecturing our nation’s spymasters, the worries they expressed were the same urgent concerns I have been hearing from organizations and businesses around the world: How do we navigate the relentless pace of change? How can we open up our culture and innovate more quickly? How do we stay relevant in a world that is being constantly disrupted?
Inside a CIA training center, about thirty-five regional leaders were having predinner cocktails. I’ve been brought into this kind of gathering on hundreds of occasions. Sometimes I play the spark, an instigator to seed new ideas and directions for change. Sometimes I’m brought in to play the explorer, teaching others the process I use to truffle-hunt for new ideas. Other times I’m the champion, preaching the need for leaders to support the lonely voices at the edge that are calling on their organizations to change. And sometimes my role is to coach a team to create the prototypes that will serve as the “proof points” that justify a leap into the new.
As we chatted, they didn’t talk about what they did, which I understood, of course. But I found it telling how eager they were to steer the conversation away from the work I did—spreading change. It’s not polite dinner conversation. It’s easier to keep your nose to the grindstone, do what you are doing and do it well, than it is to lift your head up and figure out where you or your organization is going and what the future may bring. It’s usually not until an organization is engulfed by chaos or, more simply, wakes up to a stark reality that it has been left behind, that it begins to seek a new way forward. And by that point it lacks either the energy or the time to make it through to the other side. Fifty years ago, the life expectancy of a Fortune 500 firm was around seventy-five years; now it’s less than fifteen. And the sobering reality is that the world is never going to be slower in terms of change than it is today. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that “we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress.” What we are witnessing is the battle for the future of many of our businesses.
One of the defining characteristics of our new age of rapid-fire change is that leaders, managers, and employees have to be able to move forward without having all the answers. They have to feel their way in the dark. It is very disconcerting, particularly when you have to do it at full speed. They know they need to be more inventive to succeed, but they admit to being uncomfortable with creative people and their rule-breaking ways. They realize they need to partner more with other companies, but are afraid of reaching beyond their own insular communities. They know they need to make changes, but want proof of success before doing so.
I’ve been courting change my whole career. It has taken me from media manager to Business Innovations leader and vice chair for GE, a company that lived through 125 years of change and adaption. I’m known as a change wrangler, the person who chases tornados of disruption, driving full speed into the funnel clouds. Not a week goes by when I don’t hear from some leader or practitioner seeking advice on how to reinvent their way forward. An Australian official asks me to be part of a working group to outline a vision for Australia 2030; they want to know how to “surf the crest of the wave of change.” A team manager asks me how to convince her boss to pursue a big idea—the customer needs it desperately. An executive at a major broadcast network calls me to brainstorm how to help her people spot disrupters before the competition does. An energy executive corners me after the Saudis initiated a major OPEC price cut and caused a collapse in oil prices. “How the hell did I miss that?” he wondered.
I’ve learned that you have to pay close attention to what’s emerging before it turns into a crisis or an emergency for your company or industry. Things are good until they aren’t. The question about how to respond to the uncertainty and the chaos is coming from many quarters now: the taxi industry, the media world, big box and one-store retail, the post office, the school board. “How do I get a handle on change? How do we adapt, evolve, thrive?”
As the CIA dinner came to dessert, I walked to a lectern at the front of the room. I smiled at their skeptical expressions and said hello. I was about to tell them the message of this book in front of you. But first I was going to have to answer two questions that you probably have as well:
Why are so many of our organizations shortsighted—unable to see around corners and unable to move forward in the face of accelerating change?
And, why do people think I have some of the answers that will lead them to the way forward?
About three years after the September 11 attacks, an independent commission issued a report that cited “deep institutional failings” at the CIA leading up to the attacks. The most important failure, it said, was “one of imagination.”
What started out as seemingly isolated, episodic incidents has come to resemble an epidemic. We are failing in government, failing in education, and, too often, failing in business. Thrust into an unpredictable and profoundly complex world, the nature of today’s challenges cannot be solved by yesteryear’s tried-and-true expertise. Instead of investing more resources in understanding the art and science of innovating our way forward, we’ve doubled down on the diminishing returns of financial engineering.
That is why we are now confronting such a huge gap between the knowledge, critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity needed to survive the challenges and exploit new opportunities, and our dogged insistence on doing things as they’ve always been done. I call this the imagination gap, where possibility and options for the future go to die. But I refuse to give up on possibility. We have to narrow the gap—that is why I had to write this book.
We must become “change ready”—that is, fearless, perpetually ready to reenvision, rethink, and redesign, whatever we do and wherever we are. We must constantly adapt, discover, think ahead, and iterate. We must meet change early and continually adapt to it. Yes, we must focus on the scaled-operations part of work—we must deliver for our customers and shareowners; but we also need to liberate the forward-thinking parts of business—our ability to evolve, to defy convention, to embrace emerging change. And to do that requires imagination: infusing our work with a disciplined capacity to go beyond what we know and can conceive is possible. And that starts with a shift in mind-set. You must give yourself permission to imagine a new future and act on it.
We’ve been taught to believe that our capacity for imagination is reserved for artists and inventors. The science on this is clear, however: imaginative thinking is a universal human talent, an evolutionary gift handed down to us that has made us who we are, the undisputed champions of adaptation. But with the rise of the Industrial Revolution and the corporation, we lost some of our ability to adapt.
We designed our institutions and our people to function as machines, a reflection of the machine-driven industrial revolution. We’ve optimized ourselves to maximize standardization, specialization, predictability, productivity, and control. We have tried to take the variability,
the improvisation—the human—out of the workplace.
It has made our organizations efficient and predictable. But it has excised the imagination part. We stopped telling stories. We stopped pushing discovery. Our institutions became less imaginative and, in so doing, increasingly lost their ability to collaborate, improvise, and respond to change. That is, to adapt. For over a century, that worked because organizations flourished on repeatability at scale. But recently—say, over the last twenty or thirty years—the pace of change accelerated. Things moved much faster, fueled by advances in technology and digital networks and data that have radically altered the way we—and our colleagues, partners, and customers—behave, live, and work. The nature of change has changed. With more intersections of technology and global humanity, there are exponentially more places for change and chaos to emerge. And also for ingenuity and opportunity.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent…” Charles Darwin wrote. “It is the one that is most adaptable to change. Those who have learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
Well, Darwin’s theories are now having their way with our institutions and businesses. The cogs of those machines—you and me—have been stripped of our unique evolutionary advantage, of our power to create. The research says 75 percent of people in advanced economies feel that they are not meeting their creative potential. We’ve created legions of managers afraid to absorb new perspectives, unable to work without a script or respond quickly by letting go of strategies that no longer work and embracing new ones that do.
Marry that with the coming onslaught of even more digitization, and automation and artificial intelligence—it means virtually every industry is coming to its point of reckoning. What’s more, we face massive and massively complex problems—climate change, economic inequality, global trade—that will require an extraordinary degree of imaginative problem-solving, collaboration, and forward-driven leadership. It will require our most powerful institutions to adopt a more adaptive operating system, one that can unlock the creative potential of all of our people.