We can no longer afford to fail to imagine.
In many ways, I am an unlikely change-maker. I’m fundamentally shy. I didn’t go to business school, and I had no formal training when I was tapped by CEO Jeff Immelt to lead marketing and innovation at GE. I lived in the small town of Winchester, Virginia, until I was ready for college. I went to the College of William and Mary in my home state. I liked the comfort of my world; I knew my way around.
It wasn’t until my midtwenties that I had to face a big, disruptive life change. A divorced single mother of a three-year-old daughter, I was working in Washington, DC, doing public relations at NBC—then a GE division—when my department was moved to New York. I grabbed the opportunity, even as I was uncertain about what kind of my life my daughter and I would find in an unfamiliar city where I had no family. But in that period, I taught myself the skill that has fueled my career ever since: how to imagine, and then make real, a future I couldn’t yet see. I’ve done it my entire life—from succeeding in roles in which few others saw value to putting crazy ideas out there to embracing change before its time, in clean energy and digital technology. And I’ve done it wherever I have worked, from CNN to CBS, NBC to GE.
I’ve had to work hard to excel at reinvention and disruption. But what it instilled in me is an absolute conviction that anyone can master the process.
In the seventeen years since Jeff Immelt tapped me in 2001 to lead change at GE, we reimagined, then reengineered the company into the world’s first “digital industrial.”
We went from seeing 70 percent of our revenue coming from the United States to having 70 percent of it coming from our global operations. We launched the clean-tech initiative Ecomagination, which has generated $270 billion in revenue from clean-tech products, the most of any company in the world. The new GE is developing the Industrial Internet, embedding the company’s big machines—everything from MRIs and LED lighting systems to wind turbines and jet engines—software and analytics that make them, and the industries they serve, more predictive and productive.
The GE of today would be barely recognizable to its founder and inventor, Thomas Edison. It is barely recognizable to those of us who were there when the story of Imagine It Forward begins. We took a 130-year-old corporation, with more than 300,000 employees, and transformed it from a risk-averse, perfection-seeking organization to one that increasingly encouraged speed, adaptability, iteration, and discovery.
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What emerged from my decades as a dedicated change-maker on the front lines of the reinvention of American business is a systematic approach to reinventing business that can be applied to virtually any company in any industry. It can be applied to change how your business grows or learn how to launch a new business line or perform as a more innovative team. I call this approach imagining it forward. At heart, it’s an orientation to the world based on adaptive problem-solving that makes real a future few can see.
But to be clear: change starts, first, with you. As an individual, as an employee, as a leader. Coming up with new ideas is rarely the problem. What holds all of us back, really, is fear: the attachment to the old, to What We Know. It’s the paralysis engendered by resistance from our institutions when we invoke change, from our local middle school to our government to the companies we work for—to, often, everyone around us.
No one is immune to this fear, I discovered, as I pushed for change in myself and across GE.
As I finished this book, GE was undergoing yet another major transformation. I left at the end of 2017, following the departure of Jeff Immelt. The transition to new CEO John Flannery came amidst investor activism and dramatic changes in the energy industry GE serves, reminding us that uncertainty and disruption always lurk.
My goal was never to write a book about best practices at GE, but to write a book about the challenges of change we face in every company, large and small. GE is merely the backdrop, the testing ground for many of these ideas. As it turns out, GE’s story, I believe, serves as both an example of success and a cautionary tale—a reminder that change is a never-ending journey. It doesn’t stop at the end of a quarter, or a fiscal year. And it is filled with hard work, triumph, surprise, struggle, and heartbreak.
So don’t look for a simple victory here; when it comes to transforming a culture, everything does not get neatly wrapped in a bow. Many things worked, and others didn’t. Some things won’t play out for years, if indeed they are even given the chance to take root. But as time will surely tell, I believe we imagined forward one of the largest, oldest companies in the world, ushering it into a brave new digital process. If no one pushes for it then an organization has no chance to transform itself.
Imagine It Forward tells the story of my multidecade quest to infuse GE, and the broader business world, with this vitally necessary, change-making practice.
I intend to be candid about what has worked and what hasn’t, and what it takes to harness the courage, discipline, and skills to keep trying. Throughout the book, I tell my story as a way to offer valuable lessons, as well as simple tools that convert theory to action—what I call challenges—to push yourself further. I’ve organized the book into five sections that make up the imagining it forward approach:
Section I: Self-Permission. Every change-maker is forced to learn to give herself permission to push outside expectations and limitations. I was no exception.
Section II: Discovery. This is the change-making step that makes all the other steps possible. Discovery is about exploring—infusing yourself and your culture with a spirit of inquiry and curiosity, turning the world into a classroom for learning and for unearthing ideas that can make change possible.
Section III: Agitated Inquiry. Innovation is the result of seeking out tension, not avoiding it. Innovation is not about reassurance or consensus; in fact, it often encourages confrontation.
Section IV: Storycraft. Strategy is a story well told. To innovate successfully, 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.
Section V: Creating a New OS. Changing an organization’s operating system requires adopting a new mind-set—often in an uncertain or difficult environment. That means spreading ideas bottom-up and outside-in, finding dedicated agents of change within the company to make the story their own. It means developing emergent leaders who embrace and inspire a better, more adaptable way of working.
Imagine It Forward is the book I wish I’d had before starting my journey. I want to use the stories of change that I instigated and led to inspire others to explore and rethink their own path. I want to put flesh and blood on the ideas and concepts, advocating for a new way of doing things. I know how difficult change is. And how necessary. We can’t go on doing things the way we used to—the very ground is shifting daily under our feet. Change is a messy, collaborative, inspiring, difficult, and ongoing process, like everything meaningful that leads to human progress.
My hope is that this book will help everyone, everywhere to learn and master the change-maker’s craft. To believe, as I have, that the future is not in our stars but in our imaginations, and our actions.
SECTION I
Self-Permission
CHAPTER 1
REINVENTION
Taking Ownership of My Life
I was leading East Coast entertainment publicity at CBS—the “Tiffany Network”—when I got the call offering me the job as vice president of NBC News Media Relations.
People’s resistance to me taking the job—to even considering it—started immediately after I got the call. Totally crazy! Career suicide!
It was late at night as I considered the job, and the resistance from colleagues and friends to my taking it. I know it was late because that’s always the time when I try to create the logical rationale for a decisio
n I’ve already made on instinct. The pros, the cons, every possible scenario. Morning came and the only clarity I had was emotional. I felt it in an almost spiritual way. I’m taking the job. I’m going back to NBC, where my career had started.
Only this time, in the fall of 1993, the network was a national disgrace.
We are hardwired to flee ambiguity, chaos, and the unknown. And yet here I was, running toward a disaster, embracing it. My colleagues and friends were sure it was professional ruin.
Not long before, the NBC news division’s Dateline program had aired “Waiting to Explode,” an investigative report that showed a sedan T-boning a Chevy pickup truck, with the truck erupting in a fiery explosion.
The problem was, the whole thing was a fake. An investigation revealed that NBC News had duct-taped model rocket engines to the truck’s frame and initiated the blast with a remote-control device. It took anchors Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips three and a half minutes to issue a full on-air apology—an eternity in TV time—and promise that “unscientific demonstrations” would never again be conducted by NBC.
But the Dateline crisis was just the latest in a string of NBC failures that included the highly public and embarrassing departure of David Letterman for CBS, and a ratings dive to third place among the networks. “Morale is in the toilet,” a veteran NBC producer told Entertainment Weekly at the time, in what became a months-long public flaying. “There’s nobody at the rudder.”
CBS was the ratings leader. Friends and colleagues thought I was crazy to leave. “I’m worried about you,” someone confided. A reporter from the Wall Street Journal was even more blunt: “NBC News is washed up.” Why would I leave the “Tiffany Network” for a demoralized number three?
And yet, in my gut, I knew this was the job I was meant to take.
Well-meaning colleagues will try to stop you from making these bravely instinctive choices. That’s just how it is. Change-making creates resistance. It is against the rules. Change is seen as loss. It is scary.
But you have to learn not to stop yourself. You have to learn to give yourself permission to imagine a better way, to envision opportunity where others see only risk.
It’s something I had to learn for myself.
Perhaps the best way to explain why I took the NBC job is to take you back to 1985, to tell you the kind of deeply personal story that doesn’t often appear in business books. In this story, I’m hiding behind a closed bedroom door, listening as my husband conveyed my first truly life-changing decision to my mother.
At the time I was in my midtwenties. I’d always followed the rules in my life, kept to the straight and narrow. I did very well in school, got involved in all kinds of clubs and community activities, and I astutely protected my “good girl” reputation. But I’d been beset by the growing realization that, like so many people, I had been keeping myself “small” by pleasing others and fitting in, by looking to see what everyone else was doing before acting, by making sure all I attempted was sanctioned, what nice girls do.
Conformity had created in me an insurmountable fear of being different, of putting myself out there. Every day I was killing off my true self with compromises.
The door was cold against my ear. My mother, at our house for the weekend to visit and care for our daughter, Katie, was sitting in the kitchen with my husband, Dave, as he told her something that I knew wouldn’t register: Dave and I were getting divorced. I had decided I needed to leave—without being able to say exactly why.
I was the woman who seemed to have it all at the time: a fancy new home near DC, a seemingly happy marriage to a handsome man of means, a new job as the NBC publicity coordinator, and a beautiful baby daughter. By every normal measure of success, I’d made it. Underneath that success, however, I was filled with despair.
Up to that moment, I’d lived my life more or less by someone else’s narrative. A simple story, with defined roles, that led to a simple happy ending. Elegant, without complications. But with every day that passed, I realized just how large the gap was between the story I was expected to follow and the life I actually wanted to live. While I had ideas—I wanted to be a television reporter, specifically a science reporter—mostly, I dreamed of setting out in the world. Once my father, who was a dentist then, convinced a patient, a news producer who commuted to DC, to have me shadow a reporter. (My dad, a big supporter of my future career, was not afraid to use his unique advantage of extracting promises for his kid while extracting a patient’s back molar.) As it turns out, I spent two hours with Diane Sawyer, then a young State Department reporter for CBS, just back from Chad. A few years later, sitting in the auditorium at my sister’s high school graduation soon after I graduated from college, I daydreamed of the career I’d surely have by the time she graduated from college. In my mind’s eye, I had the sophisticated worldliness of Diane Sawyer. What big city would I be living in? Would it be New York, where Diane had recently moved? What travel would I be returning from? Keep in mind that at this point I was working two jobs in Richmond—one as a Mexican-restaurant waitress to pay for my second, barely paying job as Jackie of all trades (and on-camera reporter) in a small news service covering the Virginia House of Delegates, which I had landed via a friend of a friend’s friend.
I was the daughter of a small-town dentist and a schoolteacher, and while my parents did well and afforded my sister, brother, and me opportunities, we were not wealthy, and certainly not well-connected. My father’s other aching-molar patients didn’t work in media. I jokingly call my mother “the mayor,” because she knows and talks to everyone; our town was our world. While working in the news service, I continued to seek out bigger jobs, perusing the want ads of Broadcasting magazine. That’s how I came to apply for TV meteorologist in Salisbury, Maryland, where I horribly mispronounced the name of the town as I did the on-set interview. In Richmond, I hounded a local TV station’s news director with my videotapes, calling him so relentlessly that he lost control. “You look like you’re twelve,” Mr. Rant barked. “Why would I put anyone like you on camera?” My confidence was shaken, and my fear of striking out into the unknown had held me back. I was happy to say yes to getting married. I was in love and lacked the maturity to ask what that meant beyond saying no to pushing for jobs that would jump-start my career—jobs in TV markets beyond Richmond or Salisbury or locations as exotic as, well, Tulsa, where I had in fact been offered a job.
Dave’s outlook didn’t change as much as mine did after Katie was born. He still went out, had fun with his friends. I was the earnest wife, and now mother. In fairness to him, I had never declared that I wanted to be otherwise. In fact, I may not have known, or at least been able to articulate it. That was the worst part, being slowly caged by my own passivity. I had a growing, painful sense that another side of me needed to be released, and the only person standing in my way was me.
I don’t even remember the conversation we had in which Dave and I decided on a divorce. I initiated the process, but I don’t remember the words. I just knew: I. Can’t. Be. This. Until that moment, my fear had held me in place. I was worried about what my family would think, what my friends would think, what my colleagues would think. I was terrified of traumatizing my daughter. And I was deeply afraid of going against convention.
My mother, knowing me to be shy, had pushed me to be a joiner in my small town, where the ethos was to always say the “right thing.” That mentality followed me at school, with friends and teachers who encouraged me to do what I was told, do well, look good, and obey the rules. My school, like most, was pervaded by the myth that rewards are reserved for those who say “I know,” instead of reveling in “I don’t know” and learning to ask the probing questions.
Wading into the unknown just wasn’t a skill I had acquired yet as an ambitious but aimless twenty-three-year-old trying to shake off my limited perspective. So I gravitated to “what was done”: I got married to my college boyfriend, Dave.
And then not long after, without planning it, I was pregnant. Everything was happening too fast. It was as if someone else was narrating my life.
The moment Katie was born, she created a love in me so strong that it yanked a fierce clarity from my depths. My vague despair morphed to a clear-eyed vision of a future that I knew had little to do with my present. I knew I had to chart my own course, be the captain of my soul. What was clear was that I had to go; what was less clear was where. I had fantasies of fleeing back to Richmond, Katie and me rooming with a high school friend. I was going to start over and this time get that job at the local TV station. When fantasies weren’t enough, I’d tell the babysitter that I was going out. I’d drive to the movie theater at the local mall and buy a ticket to an emotional movie like Terms of Endearment. And cry in the dark. Alone in every sense.
I came to see that—while incredibly hard—there was nothing shameful about endings or mistakes. It can be a wise decision to leave one path and choose another. Scary, yes, but it can be the first step to something better. And that itself was a massive insight for me: something better was a deliberate choice. Already I had a different perspective on reality.
Once I’d spoken the word divorce aloud, it didn’t feel like as much of a failure to me. I felt free, in a slightly terrified way. Finding the optimism to imagine a better future allowed me the courage I so desperately needed to move forward, as me.
Of course, my new life was no Eat Pray Love romantic journey, where I could shrug off my responsibilities in the quest for a sexy guru and the perfect cup of chai. I was choosing life as a single mom and just starting out in a career. I rented a little place of our own in Alexandria. I loved every square inch of that tiny house, even with all the pressures of motherhood and work and change. I had bills to pay. (I even had to take out a loan to hire a lawyer to “petition the court” to get my surname back.) I was alone. My baby, Katie, was crying. I was crying. It was scary. But it was also exhilarating. The thing I’d only imagined was now happening, and I was frozen in disbelief. Now what?
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