“You don’t understand the legal precedent here, Beth,” said Ben. “Steve and I have been steeped in this for years. There were sound reasons we fought bad science. You just can’t throw that aside. GE will look ridiculous.” Steve opted for the “hold on” approach, choosing to school me, the marketing chief who was clearly overwhelmed by all the science. And Gary would repeat various versions of “But what will the media and NGOs think of our sudden change of mind?”
“The world is moving in this direction, and we have a chance to be industry leaders,” I replied.
“Why do we have to make a statement about being green?” Steve said. “We manufacture a lot of technologies that aren’t green. Unfortunately, most of manufacturing isn’t green!”
“But it turns out so much of what we do and so many of the technologies we created already are green,” I countered. “We have something concrete, something real to build upon! Why would we not use that to grow sales and mindshare?”
“We can’t put our customers at risk, making them a bigger target than they already are, inviting in NGOs like Greenpeace and more regulation,” Ben said.
“Our customers are in the crosshairs now,” I said. “They know if they don’t do anything, it’s only going to get worse. They’re clearly asking for our help.”
Jeff had listened long enough. “Strict standards like those from the EU can be good for GE. We’ve proven we have the technology to meet and beat emissions standards. We can do this. Our customers need us to do this. But neither they nor we can go broke doing it. What the marketing team proposes here positions us on the right side for them and us. We’re doing this.”
In other words, green had to be about doing what’s right for the environment and our customers. That was our commitment. It had to be ecological and economical.
Then Ben blurted out, “Green is ‘green.’ ”
It was the perfect expression of our mentality. Our goal was to harness the collective power across all of GE’s business units to deliver new products to solve big ecological challenges—fewer emissions, better fuel efficiency—while at the same time improving our customers’ P&Ls. Customers from rail to air to power generation had said they wanted to do the right thing in terms of using technology that was better for the environment and that met tougher standards—but that also wouldn’t break their budgets.
The team was on board; maybe not all in, but we were moving forward. All we needed now was a name, and a story, and a launch plan. This part of the process—the packaging—fell to me. We couldn’t roll this out with some dull dressing, like GE Ecological Portfolio. BBDO was pushing GE Plus, with a green plus sign. But I wanted something with more spark.
The name we finally settled on was Ecomagination. It wasn’t perfect. I had pushed for the neologism because I thought it allowed us to be unexpected and attention-grabbing, and to reinforce that our imaginations were at work. But as imperfect as it was, the name, both cute and deeply serious, worked because it encapsulated all we meant to say. It stated our mission to deliver on two versions of eco—ecological products that offer economic benefits—while using our imagination, our most limitless resource, to find newer and better solutions to our limited energy resources. Our core positioning to customers was simple, too: “Invest in the future of the planet, meet and exceed industry clean-energy standards, but don’t go broke doing it.”
I remember Jeff saying, “You need to present this to the CEC,” our corporate executive council. Which brings me back to the shouting match that opened the chapter.
* * *
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Standing up in front of that room in Crotonville was intimidating. The place is designed with auditorium-style seating, but intimate, like a gladiators pit. On the back wall someone had hung a cheesy motivational wolf poster that read “Only the strong survive.” Jeff teed me up, saying, “I think we’re on to something. I like what Beth and the team have done here, I’ve asked her to present it.” Then he added, “This is somewhat controversial. We’re taking a stand on something.”
The meeting started ugly and got worse. I kicked off with a presentation on what Ecomagination was and the myths and realities of green business—things like “It’s Too Expensive” versus “It Makes Money”—and then ran into our big promotional blitz, most notably with the ad of Ellie the elephant dancing to “Singin’ in the Rain,” and these beautiful images of our wind turbines mixed with sunflowers.
Some of our people hated it. Some GE executives believed we’d embarrass ourselves with such a position, given our long-standing Hudson River issues. Others believed we didn’t have the technologies to make the performance commitments. And many didn’t want us to get ahead of our customers; they feared these declarations would incentivize more federal regulation, or worse, make our customers not want to buy from us. And they especially hated the name. “Oh, my god, that’s ridiculous,” one said, which quickly became a chorus.
I have to confess that the reaction to my Crotonville Ecomagination presentation was deflating. But I had put so much on the line for this. I knew in my heart and my gut that this was an important effort. It was tapping into the mission that people so desperately wanted from us. We’d found a way to make purpose tangible, and profitable. I’d been a passionate driving force behind the design of Ecomagination. It must have been tempting at this point for Jeff to backtrack, to tamp down my enthusiasm with a lot of qualifiers, and allow me to shoulder the blame for going too far, too fast, down a road that our customers weren’t ready to take. He could have apologized for taking bad advice, and allowed me to take the fall. But he didn’t. He saw the potential, too.
Instead, he became a champion of Ecomagination. A few times every year, he would look at the leadership team and say, “Hey, I’ve got a really good idea right now. I’ve listened to all of you, but here’s where we’re going. Get in line. We’re doing it my way.” Ecomagination was one of those times.
It takes commitment and courage to go forward when you know that you risk being criticized, by customers and investors. The best leaders exhibit humility in their strength, and vice versa. They embrace where they must lead and the changes in themselves that it requires. Not long after we launched Ecomagination, Jeff backed off from GE’s most complicating environmental legacy—the strident fight against the EPA—and agreed that GE would pay to dredge the Hudson to the tune of an initial $460 million.
Jeff also stood up to customers pressing him to back away from environmental issues. As we unveiled Ecomagination, the boss of the energy company TXU, John Wilder, called Jeff personally to tell him that he was so disturbed by our program—he feared it would draw unnecessary government regulation—that he was going to withdraw his business from GE to the tune of $100 million.
And you know what? Jeff bravely asked us to push Ecomagination forward, because he believed it was both good for the environment and good for business. Jeff never told me about the loss of TXU. I only learned that years later. That’s what good leaders do; they absorb the shock waves and anxiety in moments of radical change.
Luckily for all of us—especially for me—sales were lifted. We launched Ecomagination in 2005 with the first seventeen products, and we pinpointed $10 billion of revenue from products tapping renewable energy sources, such as the sun and wind, during the first year after launch. By mid-2006, thirty-two products across our businesses had been Ecomagination certified, including things like the GEnx jet engine, which saves 22 percent on fuel compared with conventional engines, saving airlines over $350,000 annually on each plane; our 210-ton, 4,400-horsepower hybrid diesel/electric Evolution locomotive, which burns 15 percent less fuel and pumps out 40 percent less pollution than conventional trains; and our Harmony washing machines, which use 75 percent less energy than old-school models.
We created ecoTreasure Hunts with customers as a way to help them better reduce energy and water usage and emissions. The idea of the “t
reasure hunt” was to find untapped savings within a company that would reduce emissions or energy and water usage and save money. At GE, we had given ourselves stringent targets for reducing CO2 emissions in our factories, and for reducing energy and water consumptions, and in the process our employees took the challenge and helped us exceed the goals. It made it easy to share the blueprint with customers—a franchise of Wendy’s fast-food outlets—and in turn helped them get greener and strengthened the GE relationship. The lesson here is that there are many ways to engage employees and customers together to deliver a solution that has meaning and economics; our “gamification” of it added a twist, and with enough examples, made way for a simple application that sales teams could use with prospective customers.
* * *
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Ecomagination offered a big lift both operationally and in terms of our brand and reputation. According to a study by the independent branding group Interbrand, GE’s brand value increased by 35 percent at one point, in large part because GE began to mean Green Energy. In 2005, GE saw $10 billion in Ecomagination sales. By 2017, our annual Ecomagination revenues paced at over $35 billion annually.
Of course, Ecomagination’s success required an enormous amount of commitment and passion. Plunging into customers’ fears and turning them into a product—turning ecological worries into Ecomagination—is not done easily. Telling our biggest industrial customers to get ahead of regulation was in a sense telling them to accept that by having dirty emissions they were behind on preparing for the future.
There is also the ongoing tension of funding newer, cleaner technologies that require time and investment to develop and scale versus incumbent technologies that generate cash and operating profit. Over the duration of Ecomagination, its mission would be tested as GE grew its Oil & Gas and Energy businesses through a series of acquisitions—most notably, in 2016 when GE acquired Alstom, the French power generation company, for $15 billion. While Alstom had a good base of renewable energy (mostly wind, hydropower, and smart grid), it also came with coal-burning technology. Given the pace of economic growth in Asia, it meant that there was still much need for established power generation, providing near-term profits that GE (and investors) needed. Accordingly, Ecomagination expanded its industrial strength, being applied in tougher-use cases like flare-gas capture, and renewable hybrid power and water reuse at gas drilling sites. Some customers, like Norway’s Statoil, became early development partners, proving that there are almost always forward-focused customers, despite fears to the contrary. But for carbon-based technologies, the pace of change would come faster than even the early adopters imagined.
Jeff championed Ecomagination proudly as he hedged his options. He bulked up on legacy tech and he invested in the new. He made room for Eco, for debate with our teams and external advisors (especially on solar energy, about which I became a fanatic, a pain in the neck, even. But it was hard to break through because solar seemed far off, even as new models were launched by challengers. “How will GE make money?” was always the question and the answer). Annually we convened a meeting of the country’s top ten utility CEOs, and every year we noted declines in energy usage due to efficiency; that energy technology was becoming more decarbonized, distributed, digitized, and democratized; and that renewables were scaling faster. A few utilities had been able to spin off new units that harnessed these changes; others weren’t able to shake their regulators or investors, or they got lost in their gaps of imagination.
With Ecomagination we instigated a cleaner, more relevant future. Of that I am certain and proud. We succeeded in many ways. Yet, frustratingly, we could only impact so much despite that the potential to make the future was profound. This is the change-maker’s dilemma. In GE’s case, despite all the momentum, Ecomagination could only reach so far through the layers and layers of complexity and denials of change—across GE, across our customers, across the ecosystem, across financial markets. There were business managers and investors who dismissed Ecomagination as “just marketing.” Time would prove them right: Yes, this is marketing. Ecomagination stands as an example of what new marketing does well—live in the market, create a new business strategy, meet change early, build a coalition of those willing to work for a new future, deliver new growth.
Because tomorrow always comes, change-makers can’t be afraid to share their vision and declare their aspirations for it loudly, even before they’ve built it, done it, won it. This is how you grab mindshare. And you need mindshare before you can capture market share. You need to sell a vision, devise a plan, and invite others to help build it. This is how change gets harnessed.
It’s not without frustration or peril. As Jeff told a newspaper reporter several years later, “There were only two of us who thought this thing was a good idea.” For my sake, I’m fortunate that Jeff was the other one.
Challenges
SEEING THREES
When you’re trying to recognize a pattern, it can be difficult to determine which signals you should pay attention to. One handy rule of thumb is what I call “Go On Three.” The idea comes from newspaper “trend” stories (i.e., “Everyone’s Wearing Bowties!”), in which the rule is that one event is an occurrence, two similar events form a coincidence, and three are a trend. Many futurists use a similar method. Alvin Toffler, whose Future Shock got attention in the 1970s with its bold (and accurate) predictions, is said to have employed a method whereby he kept stacks of newspaper clippings on topics around a room; the stacks that got bigger became his heat map for new trends. At a basic level, patterns start with a hunch or a hypothesis, and each data point serves to strengthen the insight.
I often advise people to practice this in simple ways: For example, alternate your routes to work in the mornings to see what new things stand out when you do. Read about other industries, and see what kind of similarities you can spot. At the airport newsstand, observe the range of magazines. Buy a few that you’ve never read before (Backpacker magazine will surprise you!). What observations do you make? What questions start to form?
SEEING THE FUTURE
Here are a few of the Imagine It Forward scenario planning tactics I use to better “see” or anticipate the future. Try them out with your own team or company:
Opposition: Assume the opposite of convention. Good is bad. Bad is good. For example, what if fats were good for you, sugar were bad for you. All electricity we generate were powered by the sun.
Worst-case scenario: What is the worst that could happen? Work back from there, and see what kind of ideas emerge to prevent or address that.
Parallelism: Put yourself in another’s position. You are the competition. You are the client. You are a colleague. What ideas might you generate from this perspective?
Time shift: What if it took no time to create a solution? What if it took five years? Ten years? What would change in terms of the solutions you seek out?
Control shift: Imagine a shift in governance or technology or nature brings about a shift in power. Technology did that for Uber in competing against local taxi authorities.
Roadblock-busting: How would you approach the problem if the roadblock didn’t exist? Or if you could remove it easily?
Phantom problem: What if it’s not really a problem at all? What if money isn’t a challenge? Or if the boss isn’t standing in your way? Or if the competition doesn’t have a better product? What would you do differently?
“Ungranted”: What happens if something goes away that you’ve taken for granted?
Strange bedfellows: What interesting or unlikely things can be combined to create something new?
Wrong problem: What if the problem isn’t what you think? For example, the issue isn’t that we don’t have enough skilled jobs, we just have a mismatch in skills.
Sky’s the limit. Are you thinking big enough? Yah
oo! developed a search to narrow parameters. Google had a grand vision to search the entire Internet.
THE POWER OF CONSTRAINTS
Constraints fuel creativity. Sometimes having a smaller budget and a tighter deadline—especially in the early days—forces you to hone your idea. Look at your constraints as a source of creativity rather than as a temporary hardship to overcome.
The next time you are tempted to say, “We don’t have enough money to do X,” or “My manager will never green-light the budget for this,” or “We’ll never get this done with such a short time frame,” STOP. Such thinking will only quiet your imagination. Let it sing. Instead, ask:
How much faster can I come up with a good idea here?
How much budget do we really need to get to the next phase?
Who else has done work in this area that I can learn from or build on?
If you manage a team, turn budget and project requests into a challenge. Reward people who generate the best ideas with the most constraints. Can you establish a measurement for innovation efficiency or innovation throughput—more ideas in, better ideas out, faster?
BRING IN OUTSIDE SPARKS
Succinctly identify one issue or problem area where help is needed.
How do you think an outside spark can help shine light on the issue?
Identify your spark, ideally an outsider. I’ve found that good places to find sparks are at industry conferences, trade publications, and universities. But you can also find experts in other teams or departments within your own organization.
Invite them to address your group, using a relevant case study. Most people are flattered to be asked to speak. It doesn’t have to be a formal presentation. Invite them to a team lunch.
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