While I was coming up to speed, so was GE. We mandated CMO positions at every business unit. This was not popular, because few business leaders thought they needed marketing people, let alone one with executive authority. Their retort: “That is for consumer products. We’re a B2B [business to business] company.”
Next, because we lacked skills and people, we created a training program to hire over one hundred marketing MBA graduates every year and place them in strategic marketing and sales roles in businesses and regions around the world. Their MBA tool kit was a good way to introduce what marketing could do. But as I look back, I think we should have pushed much more on the resiliency and “figure it out-ness” of future marketers than on their fancy tool kits.
From the minute I started as CMO, this was my rallying cry: to make marketing part of the business process, at the very beginning, not just the thing you do at the end to launch something. While Jeff was preparing to invest record amounts in R&D and new technology—jet engines, MRIs, locomotives—we were coming to understand that technology untethered to a need doesn’t sell well. It becomes too expensive because we overengineer it with too many features that we think are necessary, without knowing if the customers actually value those features. Really, when was the last time you used all the features on your smartphone or microwave?
We were unfortunately all too familiar with what happened when we didn’t take customers’ needs into account. The engineers at GE Healthcare refused to design an MRI or CT scanner with a wider bore—the donut hole around which the amazing magnet with the force of up to 1.5 Tesla power spins. The marketplace trends were clear: people were getting bigger, with, um, wider girths. Some people found the experience of getting an MR image extremely uncomfortable. Or worse, they couldn’t fit at all. GE engineers refused to accept this; they believed that making the donut hole bigger would degrade the power of the magnets and thus create a less-than-perfect image. Why change if it doesn’t result in better image quality? they thought. So they refused to accept the market insights and focused instead on perfecting a scanning machine that was perfect only for engineers, and perhaps a few academic radiologists. And as a result, they lost market share as competitors came out with wider-bore MRIs, solving a big need for radiologists, imaging centers, and today’s patients.
The job for our new marketing teams was to look through the eyes of the user to find gaps in the market, to look at what isn’t happening and imagine what could. To create something that didn’t exist before. To satisfy unmet—and sometimes unexpressed—needs.
Marketing, as I was starting to see, was about taking the name seriously—living in the markets and then bringing the outside in. And that meant making the company way more open. You have to get out of the office, out of the spreadsheet, and into the marketplace. It all starts with a mentality that I’d come to call a market mind, fueled by discovery.
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The secret to successfully adopting a market mind was looking and doing and feeling things from other people’s points of view. An easy way to induce a roaming mentality is through a practice I call mental grazing. This is the seeking stage of discovery, where we playfully attempt to stray outside our comfort zones to encounter new experiences, new tools, and new people outside our networks. We ask people to be more creative, more innovative, generate new ideas…but we often forget that new outputs require new inputs. It’s like demanding milk from a cow without allowing it to graze first.
I began to barrage my team with every concept that interested me, much to their frustration at times (one of my colleagues later described me as the incessantly distractible dog from the animated movie Up, which barks and barks at one shiny object until the next quickly grabs his attention). This can be annoying, to be sure, but you never know which interactions will catalyze innovation. To get an edge on the future and graze on something new, you have to be willing to “go weird.” A fear-laden word in most workplaces, weird has taken me from a South Korean underground dance contest in search of consumer trends, to scouting an F-15 fighter with members of the Israeli military to learn about how they impact the country’s start-up culture, to being one of only a few non-thirty-year-olds on a cruise ship with one thousand start-up founders under the age of thirty. I meet often with artists, poets, fringe scientists, designers, theologians, musicians, and a range of others who seemingly have nothing to do with my business but do offer a new perspective on how we and others view ourselves.
Over time, I came to realize that my role—and that of marketing—was foremost that of an instigator of change. To move marketing from theory into practice.
Imagination Breakthroughs
“Leadership needs to understand new ideas that lead to new revenues is now part of their job. Here’s an idea how to do it,” Jeff said one morning, handing me a business magazine article chronicling an industrial company’s attempt to create a corporate incubator to grow ideas into new businesses. “See if you can do anything with this. It should be led by marketing,” he said, as if he were putting in an order for tomato seedlings at the Southern States supply store.
This would become the riff that we developed over the years: Jeff giving me his “seed of an idea, maybe a bad one,” shooing me out of the office with a quick “See what you can do with it,” and me heading off with a million questions buzzing through my head, yet oddly eager to begin the process of discovery.
I enlisted a few of the newly hired marketing MBA grads, and we did research on incubation models (the company in the article—Danaher Corporation—was our blueprint) and then drafted a rough plan to grow new revenue by reimagining existing offerings or developing new ones. I got input from the business CMOs, who were both excited and nervous: “How will we do this? Where is the budget?”
We dubbed the incubation initiative Imagination Breakthroughs, and went back to Jeff with a rough outline of a system to generate more usable product or service ideas. As I explained the project to Jeff, he reached over across three chairs, impatiently grabbing the papers from my hand. (This would become our regular routine.) Jeff would scribble over everything. Nothing is ever fully finished when he’s involved; I call him The Serial Iterator. This could be frustrating for those with a “checklist efficiency” at GE. They wanted to be told what to do and head out, assuming that if they did it, it was done—not something that will be refined several more times. When you are seeding something new, it’s all about iteration and refinement. This is maddening at times, but necessary. With the teams I work with, I’ve learned to say, “We’re going to iterate this several times. Get ready, and don’t wait for perfection.” Too often we take so much time waiting for all the inputs and data, preparing the most beautiful presentation, when all we really needed to do was punch the idea around and fiddle with it. As I would learn later, taking something to a client that is less than perfect is actually a much more effective way to work.
Out the other end of this process came our mandate: Each GE business had to come up with two or three ideas of new lines of business or product applications, geographic areas, or customer bases. They had to generate at least $100 million in new revenue within five years. And each team had six weeks to come back with their ideas. Ready, set, go.
A few weeks later, at GE’s quarterly convening of the business leaders, I explained the concept, and Jeff told them he was serious about Imagination Breakthroughs, or IBs as they became known. “I expect Marketing to lead it. Got it?” he added. The room was silent. Afterward, I was the recipient of their grumbling—“Marketing?…Not sure we have time or resources for this…Frivolous.”
When the first IBs came back (on time—GE’s ability to execute was never in doubt), it was clear the ideas were neither imaginative nor breakthroughs. People had dusted off old plans that had been sitting around for months, if not years—the old-products-with-added-features kind of idea. But it was a start. So we picked out a few that were pr
omising, and Jeff sent a note to the division CEOs and their CMOs saying, “Here’s the list of the IBs I like. Take another stab and come back to Beth with an updated list. By the way, I expect you to pay for these breakthroughs, so tell me how you’re going to do it.”
“We have to pay for these?” was the universal outcry. Now Marketing had their attention. Clearly, many had picked ideas that seemed interesting, but perhaps not essential, because they thought “Uncle Jeff” would be paying. I learned an essential lesson about business innovation in this exercise: people have to be invested. They have to have “skin in the game.” When they do, mysteriously, better ideas are selected.
We started with about thirty-five ideas—a small number for a company of our size—from a dual card for consumer finance that would let consumers use their store credit card in other locations to a hybrid locomotive for GE Transportation. One of the simplest and quickest came from GE Energy: a plan to yield $200 million in two years by segmenting existing markets in the Middle East, finding new customers who needed power generation equipment, and targeting existing customers with more offerings. I used this one as the clarion call to show what good marketing could do, even if it wasn’t particularly “breakthrough.” It was a way to get quick financial returns, show marketing’s impact, and hopefully get “permission” to go for longer-range ideas. It was a way to get an early win.
Some of the early ideas were inevitably duds, of course. Our appliance group suggested an unnecessarily complicated “double range” that you couldn’t install in contemporary kitchens without ripping out a wall, and the CEO of our Universal Studios unit practically spat when he saw a Plastics division idea for a “self-crumbling” DVD that reduced itself to dust a few days after being exposed to air. It petrified customers—it seemed unhealthy—and Netflix made the product obsolete before we could introduce it anyhow.
But perfection wasn’t the point. The Imagination Breakthrough process was meant to shake loose revenue-generating business ideas, but it was also a vehicle to propagate my outside-in, be-the-customer idea of marketing throughout the company. It was indirectly teaching the company discovery—by forcing executive teams to scour their businesses and their markets on idea scavenger hunts.
A year into the program, eighty IBs had been identified and qualified. Led by marketing, businesses were jumping into new markets, generating more ideas for new revenue and finding new needs to solve, like “unbanked” consumers who couldn’t get access to traditional banking. Jeff devoted hours every month to reviewing these projects with me and the teams, holding business CEOs accountable for investing and CMOs for pushing leaders to develop a new mentality that looks to the market for what’s needed.
On average, he and I would review eight Imagination Breakthrough ideas every month, with the eight program managers sitting around the big conference table. Behind each one there would be a photograph or mock-up of what that person was working on—a new locomotive engine, perhaps, or a desalination plant. PowerPoints were outlawed. That didn’t last long. I’m still trying to kill PowerPoint—the ultimate business security blanket. People feel safe with their well-honed presentations complete with business plans that contain a “hockey stick of growth”–exponential growth that is always three to five years away. But it was rarely, if ever, that easy in reality. Jeff would pluck the one-page profile from each manager in the pile in front of him and go around the room asking, “What is the biggest technical barrier? What is the biggest external barrier? Are you on time? How many resources do you have on this project?” He wanted more discussion, but he, too, went back to the death-by-PowerPoint ritual.
The fact that Jeff would devote a day a month to digging into an organic revenue-growth and marketing process delivered a clear message to the organization about the new importance of discovery, idea generation, and marketing. Still, there was tremendous resistance at first, because inevitably, some of the ideas would fail, and too often, managers do not want their names associated with failed projects.
That is why it was so vital that we find a way to protect new ideas and their authors. With Jeff’s full buy-in, IBs became what I had dubbed a “protected class of ideas,” fully funded business bets that could not have their budgets cut because of a tight quarter, giving them space to take risks and grow into something valuable. We had to convince people that it was okay to have a failed idea, that this would not be held against them financially in a promotion review. I told them this in no uncertain terms, but people had to believe it in their hearts. And their bosses and division CFOs often said otherwise. The tension could be thick.
I told Jeff, his business leaders, and really anyone who would listen that they needed to tell people they supported them in their efforts to try. And if and when they failed, offer absolution. Without that, people wouldn’t feel secure enough to give themselves permission to dream. We had to protect people from an ingrained corporate culture that is intolerant of losers.
We pushed for GE’s best people to drive the effort and committed $5 billion over the next three years to fully fund IBs. I presented our progress to GE investors, who seemed underwhelmed by the smallness of the early ideas and the length of time it would take to see a return. They were used to big, instantly gratifying acquisitions. And they just couldn’t get their heads around why this effort would be led by marketing. Traditionalists, they saw marketing as the advertising department, rather than the key driver behind growth and change.
In time, IBs were expected to deliver $25 billion of additional revenue growth, and by 2005, twenty-five IBs were generating revenue. There was a new Life Sciences platform built from umbilical cord blood that grew into a thriving Cell Therapy business a decade later, an air-taxi concept that gave rise to the small engine-powered Honda jet a dozen years later, and a new line of appliances—Café—targeted to millennials living in their parents’ basements.
One of my favorites was a simplified way to deliver anesthesia in a chaotic operating theater. The health marketing teams identified a grave problem: alarm fatigue, when a truly life-threatening event is lost in a cacophony of beeping monitors and cluttered medical equipment that are all calling out to capture doctors’ and nurses’ attention. It’s a systems failure that results from technology driving processes, rather than processes driving technology.
As we dug deep to address the issue, the team learned that our customers—the anesthesiologists—couldn’t tell you what exactly they did in the heat of the moment. As they considered this, they asked, “Who else finds themselves in such life and death situations, navigating all kinds of inputs and monitoring equipment?” And they had a startlingly useful realization: an airplane’s cockpit is remarkably similar to an operating room. So they invited pilots to observe surgeries and help GE identify the problems. That turned out to be fairly easy, as their industry had faced an almost identical problem decades before. In the 1980s, the airline industry had been about where the surgical room was in the early 2000s, with complex systems and conflicting requirements that needed to be harmonized. And just as designers of cockpits eventually consolidated and prioritized the gauges and alarms into the three screens aircraft have today, the pilots helped our medical group come up with the very successful 2007 GE Aisys Anesthesia Machine, which has three separate screens: physiologic monitoring, anesthesia machine management, and anesthesia information.
We had learned a crucial lesson. We had to “get outside the jar,” as one designer described it to me. In other words, we needed an “outside-in” approach to generating insights to improve a product or process. You can’t see a jar’s label from inside the jar. You need a different perspective.
What was amazing about Jeff’s sponsorship of the IB idea was how it forced GE’s entrenched leaders to take it seriously. “Nobody is allowed not to play. Nobody can say, ‘I’m going to sit this one out,’ ” Jeff said.
As we moved forward with Imagination Breakthroughs, I convinced Jeff
to tie a percentage of executive performance and compensation to the ability to grow top line and market share, especially generating new income from new sources. We added customer feedback metrics like Net Promoter Score and experimented with others. Now, business leaders had to up their game with skills that were harder to measure: discovery, strategy, and customer psychology.
My job in all of this was as chief instigator and shaper of “the new.” Our team kept track of the IBs to find patterns in the losses and wins of our teams. It was a grand apprenticeship in marketing and innovation, one in which we were making small bets and, more often than not, failing and starting over again.
The STAR System
Ideas need time to develop before you can show someone the money. I’ve come to believe that putting out ideas and defending them until they are ready is part of my obligation as a change-maker. Here’s a mnemonic framework that I call STAR that I’ve found helpful in keeping ideas alive and twinkling with possibility.
Shelter it: An idea starts as a seedling, sometimes something that you can’t even articulate. Maybe it comes to you on a walk or on the train, or it builds on top of something someone else said at work. Noodle it, let it breathe. Ignore it and see if it still comes back to nudge you again.
Tell it: We have a tendency to keep new ideas secret for fear of someone else stealing them or of looking silly. The irony is that the more you talk about your idea, the clearer it becomes. Ask people for help in making the idea clearer.
Ask yourself: How much do I believe in this idea? There comes a time to test your passion and commitment. Do I feel strongly enough about it that I’m willing to devote the time to refine it and test its viability? Can I handle the criticism I may receive from others when I put it out there? Do I feel so strongly about it that I want it to happen with or without me?
Imagine It Forward Page 10
