My job at this point was to present the results to Jeff. What were we to do with it? We are the Marines; we take the hill. After Rapaille left the final presentation, the discovery team agreed not to speak about it publicly until we presented it to Jeff in two weeks’ time. We worried that people—not least of all Jeff—would misunderstand. And because, well, it sounded kind of silly.
But despite the disappointment I felt, it turned out that the discovery process had an important and lasting impact. We had become anthropologists, observing ourselves from a wholly new perspective. Rapaille’s gift was not The Code per se, but teaching us the process of discovery, the process of getting there.
GE’s Most Important Product: Progress
As it turned out, the real value of this effort was less about discovering something new than about us recovering something old: Thomas Edison, who founded GE. We were America’s greatest inventors. We were Edison’s Marines.
Discovery had helped to focus our attention back to our roots. We remembered that Edison was not just selling lightbulbs but life-bettering imagination and a thrilling future with wow-worthy inventions.
I latched on to Edison and this insight with gusto. Our people—customers, employees, investors—needed to be inspired again. Welch had become GE’s brand—and I helped make that possible. But it wasn’t helpful to GE in the long run. People needed to re-believe in GE, especially now that Welch had left the building.
Fortuitously, I had an impressive tool at my disposal as we were developing these insights from our discovery: the 2002 Winter Olympics. GE was an advertising sponsor, and we had to have something to say in our ad campaign. By the time January 2002 rolled around, we were already late to begin production for ads to air during the Salt Lake City coverage.
One day, with time running tight and my frustration high at the work I was seeing from BBDO, I called John Miller, the head of the NBC Agency, NBC’s in-house advertising team. I explained that I wasn’t happy with what we were getting from BBDO. “You guys make great Olympics ads for NBC Sports. Can you produce ads for GE?”
“You bet. We’d love to,” he said before I even finished. John was competitive and the opportunity to replace one of the big creative agencies was a major carrot.
I asked to work with Skip, who had been our go-to person at the NBC Agency. In a matter of two weeks—incredibly fast by media standards—Skip produced our ad.
It was a simple concept—short video clips of GE ads and videos from over the years, including a famous tagline from the 1960s: “Progress Is Our Most Important Product.” Interjected between these historic shots were “glam” shots of our not-so-glamorous products—a jet engine, an MRI, a power generator. Over a catchy dance tune by the German Eurodance group ATC, the silky-voiced female narrator said, in part, “Our 300,000 employees around the globe create and design the technologies that promise a future without limits. Because at GE, we know there are two things that make a company great: ideas and the people who have them.” As the kicker, we strategically placed a few shots of Edison moving toward the camera with a lightbulb in his hand.
“This is it,” I said. I loved it. Employees loved the ad as well; it made them feel proud. Even the New York Times ad columnist Stuart Elliot praised its portrayal of GE as the “anti-Enron,” and rated it “Gold.”
Armed with a successful advertising test, along with the insights from our discovery process, I felt emboldened to ask BBDO to assign a new creative team to work with us. I felt we needed something more emotional, something grand in the messages we were developing.
We needed a mission, a rallying cry.
* * *
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Every company, organization, person has a story that conveys their purpose in the world. And in business, telling that story is one of the most important things we do. To put it another way, if you can’t tell it, you can’t sell it. Whether it’s an idea, a product, or a project, you must be clear on why it is important, what the anticipated outcome is, and why it is relevant. It’s not what we sell, it’s why we sell.
We decided that the simplest and best way to communicate GE’s evolution both inside and outside the organization was through a new slogan, a statement of our aspiration that needed to galvanize GE inside and be shared outside. We had used “We Bring Good Things to Life” for years. It was a great tagline for its time—one of the best. But it had grown stale.
Our research told us that people heard “We Bring Good Things to Life” as bringing good things to light. They identified it more with GE’s consumer products and couldn’t find a way to connect making appliances and lightbulbs with the sophistication of making jet engines or MRIs. They identified our slogan with GE’s past. To be successful, we needed our customers and our colleagues to identify with our present. We needed to state our purpose now.
Led by our new creative director at BBDO, Michael Patti, we shaped our discovery-based insights into a narrative that aligned with our desired outcome. There was no single aha moment, nobody shouting “Eureka!” in the shower. But eventually Michael and our team created a statement of purpose meant to appeal both in substance and form to the engineers who defined GE.
The beauty of the statement was that it was told as an equation, displayed on a chalkboard, in the simple language of our engineers. It became known as the GE Equation, a compelling and smart articulation of our strategy. It ended with the line “What you imagine, we can make happen.”
I loved it. And the team did, too.
The equation is not strictly mathematical. We used “wow” instead of saying something about safety or speed, to appeal to the emotions of our people, to our engineers. Spend time around engineers or scientists and you’ll discover that what really moves a typical engineer is the thought of solving the unsolvable, building the unbuildable, and having colleagues express wide-eyed surprise and admiration. To say, “Wow, I didn’t think that was possible.”
Once we had the GE equation set, we took it on the road, going to our key business units and training centers for feedback. It wasn’t always smooth going. One engineer in Schenectady pointed out that it was “mathematically impossible to divide imagination by risk.” A salesman in Cleveland said, “You really think discussing ‘sweat squared’ at client lunches is going to help sales?” One exec from Crotonville stood up in a meeting and threatened to quit.
And yet, there were green shoots emerging that showed that we’d chosen the right path. I was particularly heartened by the feedback of Dave Calhoun, the CEO of GE’s Aviation unit, who was extremely reluctant to embrace any soft and fuzzy change. A matter-of-fact kind of guy, Dave at the time was the quintessential GE leader.
“This really speaks to me.” (He liked it!) Dave embraced the need for limbic appeals, and he made it his own way of moving forward. Today, a new generation of aviation leaders define their purpose in a limbic masterpiece: “Lift people up and bring them home safely.”
Bolstered by the feedback, we went back to the whiteboards to turn this into a tagline. We shrunk our purpose down to three spare words: “Imagination at Work.”
Those three words served many purposes. First, they signified a break from the financialized, tough-guy GE of the recent past to one run by relentless innovators, connecting our archetype inventor-founder to our future breakthrough potential.
Second, they built a bridge from the past to the present to the future. To evolve into something new, we couldn’t just cut our ties to the past. Instead, we needed to revisit and see them anew, not as constraints but as forces to harness all the new possibilities.
Finally, it paid homage to what was sacred at GE—our drive and hard work, what Edison had called 99 percent perspiration and what we now called sweat-squared. And we declared our aspiration to imagine and invent what’s next.
Our new equation and tagline spoke to our desire to create a more entrepreneurial, more imagination-driven
culture. But how could we ensure that these abstract ideas got translated into concrete behavioral changes? I reached out to HR, in what would become a long-standing partnership, to ask what we could do to make this statement of purpose more actionable. How could we better train and evaluate our leaders? We focused on five core traits. We called these GE’s Growth Values: having an external market driven focus, measuring performance through the customers’ eyes; being a clear thinker, able to sift through complex information and focus on the critical priorities and strategy action steps; having imagination and courage, creating environments in which others can take risks and experiment; acting through inclusiveness, building diverse teams and partnerships, as well as collaborating across and outside the company; and deep expertise as a resource to drive change.
The top five thousand people in the company would be rated on each of these traits as part of their annual performance review. To make it clear this was indeed about growth and development, and not an iteration of the previous rank-and-yank performance reviews (after which the bottom 10 percent of GE’s performers were ousted—in theory—every year), we stipulated that everyone would have at least one value that was rated red (as in a red stoplight: “Stop, this needs work”)—and one that was rated green (as in “Keep going; this is good”). The message: growing a company, as well as growing leadership, was a work in progress, and each one of us needed to evolve.
Taglines are not enough, of course. Too often people use them as clever statements but never go further. We needed to develop ways to live them, not just say them. For us, “Imagination at Work” became our inspiration, and the Edison touchstone worked to help reframe how we made sense of our company and what we were capable of in the future. People needed that connection to give them hope and confidence that they could actually evolve. What were reasonable actions we were expecting people to take? What was a reasonable amount of evolution to expect? How quickly?
These were questions that I was about to put to the test, personally. I had recently received feedback on my performance, too. GE, like many large corporations, has a complex and formal process for evaluating executives. For my 360-degree review, an HR leader from GE interviewed something like thirty people I worked with. The feedback was good, but also stinging: “Beth has a very independent, go-it-alone style that has made it more difficult, at times, for her to integrate with team members and peers….The speed in her decision-making processes can result in people feeling left behind or unappreciated. They feel Beth’s sharp, quick responses and her body language can relay a dismissive attitude.”
Yikes! I started ruthlessly interrogating myself. Where did this come from? When do I do this? How can I fix it? Teams were engaging with me, weren’t they? But I wasn’t being as effective as I needed to be. Since I was making a practice of pushing myself into uncomfortable situations, this would be a new discovery—about myself and what I needed to do to keep moving forward successfully and as a valued teammate.
* Sadly we lost two people.
CHAPTER 4
A BREAKTHROUGH OF IMAGINATION: A NEW WAY OF MARKETING
Adopting a Market Mentality
The very ambitious growth targets Jeff had set would require GE to generate more than $9 billion in new revenues annually from internal operations alone. As the business media at the time put it, that’s like adding the combined businesses of eBay, JetBlue, MGM, and Starbucks. No one in the world was better at producing traditional professional managers. But there was no way to optimize or cost-cut your way to those kinds of numbers.
“Listen, Beth,” Jeff said. “We’ve got good technology, although it needs to get better, and we have a big sales force, but we don’t have teams to point them in a direction and to drive new revenue from new sources. We don’t have marketing.”
He paused.
“I want to resurrect marketing in this company,” he said. “And I want you to do it as our new chief marketing officer.”
It came out of thin air, and it was a major promotion. I gave Jeff a broad smile that I hoped didn’t seem as frightened and excited as I felt inside and said, “I think that’s exactly what we need, Jeff. And I’m honored you want me out there in front.”
No one had occupied the CMO role for twenty years when Jeff tapped me for my new assignment in early 2003. My mandate wasn’t just to bring marketing back to GE; it was to help jump-start new revenue growth. As it turned out, I would also have to figure out how to make marketing into an innovation engine that inspired cultural transformation. We desperately needed growth, fueled by the power of ideas, and to get that we needed to become a GE that ventured into new and unfamiliar areas and used our intuition and imagination to turn whatever we discovered into billion-dollar businesses.
Advertising Age made the snarky observation that I was the “rare breed” of marketing chief who had never done any marketing. But I couldn’t blame people for looking askance at the notion that a neophyte marketer was the key to resuscitating the ethos of Edison. At the time, marketing at GE had become what it still is at many companies, especially with businesses that do not sell directly to consumers: a way to launch a new product after it had already been developed. It consisted—if it existed at all—of advertising, trade shows, sales collateral, and publicity events. At worst, marketing was the place where washed-up salespeople went. But Jeff saw the potential—and the need—to use marketing in more proactive ways, probably because he had worked in marketing himself before going into sales.
I wasn’t the most obvious choice for the role. While I had experience in communications and advertising—and I had come up through NBC, which was all about marketing—I had zero training in the fundamentals. I didn’t have an MBA, hadn’t grown up in GE’s culture, and had never even taken a business class. Before I could think about how I was going to reinvent a marketing department for GE, and how that department would help spur massive behavioral changes in 300,000 people, I had to learn what marketing was. What do marketers do? I gave myself ninety days to get up to speed on a career’s worth of teachings. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But I discovered that being an outsider would be my greatest advantage.
I did what has become my signature move: I engaged in discovery, the process I expected to become the basis for the new marketing we would build at GE.
I read university marketing textbooks, especially those from Northwestern University’s Philip Kotler, the “father” of modern marketing, and I became proficient in the traditional four-P constellation of marketing: product, promotion, place, and price. Before you can challenge assumptions and dislodge the status quo, you need to understand the fundamentals. A baseline.
I also reached out to headhunters to ask them which marketers were good and why, and I joined councils like M50 that convened CMOs. I’d research the examples that CMOs shared. I’d call them up and ask for more details, taking advantage of the access to ask them: “How do you measure marketing success?” I’d come to find that this was the hardest question; everyone had different metrics and different definitions of marketing.
Jim Stengel, P&G’s CMO, was particularly generous with his time and advice, walking me through organizational charts and the curriculum from P&G’s famed marketing institute. You can cut the time to fluency in any discipline if you can get a world-class practitioner to guide your journey. Open yourself up to be an apprentice, finding a “master craftsperson” to study under. Seek out the best in the field; take a key element of wisdom from each one, and then find a way to make it your own.
Several times, I dragged GE business CMOs with me to meet with P&G’s marketing teams. On one occasion, we studied the success of the Mexican feminine products group that boosted revenues by infusing chamomile scent into the products. My male colleagues were embarrassed to even look at the product, let alone smell its “garden fresh” scent. We were a long way from jet engines.
While these consumer examples weren’t e
xactly relevant to the work at GE, they gave us shared experiences and reasons to laugh. And they opened up our thinking. It is one of the most important gifts of a discovery-based approach.
* * *
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About six months after I took over the CMO role, Jeff Immelt called me into his conference room. I assumed it was about a pending project. It wasn’t. He said, “I need you to be more confident.” That wasn’t what I was expecting! He said he expected me to put not just my voice out there but my opinion, and to do so with conviction. I’d hesitated one time too many.
“I know how good you are, but I don’t hear enough from you.”
Clearly, that had to change!
As CMO, expectations were higher, as was my discomfort at not knowing all the answers. Changes in mind-set can take years—if not a lifetime—to master. So I created a set of personal challenges—small, deliberate steps—to push myself forward toward confidence. Each step, each minor victory became a small deposit in my confidence bank.
I made sure I came to Jeff’s meetings with strongly articulated arguments, and I didn’t leave a meeting without adding a point of view and perspective.
Instead of my normal “On one hand…on the other hand” approach, I would clearly state, “Here’s what I think.”
I stopped saying, “This may be stupid, but…” or “I’m not an expert, but…” I became very aware how often my lack of confidence led me to put myself down or qualify my comments.
I’d tell myself, You can do this. And I would congratulate myself after every small victory, telling myself, See, you can do this!
Imagine It Forward Page 9
