Leave time to facilitate a discussion and seek feedback. Ask your team: Has this new perspective changed your point of view?
Spend time with your sparks to help them with the natural “lost in translation” issues. For example, don’t have them offer a series of consumer examples when addressing a B2B company.
When introducing your spark to the group, explain to the group, “She’s here to bring in a radically new perspective. You may feel uncomfortable with her comments. Stick with us.” Leave time for discussion and debate.
You may need to act as a facilitator. Help to translate the spark’s unusual perspectives into your team’s workflow.
Finally, if you can’t bring in a speaker to serve as your spark, you can channel new perspectives by distributing books or articles to your team. Offer an overview of why you selected this material and why you think it could challenge your team or help them to think differently.
LOOK FOR THE WEIRD
Ask yourself what trends you find bewildering and even a bit unsettling. Go from the big headline trends to the little ones, the trends that seem odd rather than threatening. Start with what seems like a novelty, something made purely for fun.
Record any unsettling trends or observations as you see them and think. Don’t pass judgment. Just keep a running list of weird things you encounter. Return to it often. See if your observations have changed your perspective.
Seek out unusual or weird experiences: Challenge yourself to go to one event or exhibit or read one book that seems odd or out of the ordinary. Ask people you know what’s the strangest thing they’ve seen lately.
SECTION III
Agitated Inquiry
CHAPTER 6
NAYSAYERS AND THE DIGITAL ONSLAUGHT
The Valley of Death
At GE, rising executives are regularly moved to new, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable situations. In fact, if you aren’t moved just as you’re getting comfortable, you can be pretty sure you aren’t going anywhere fast. Two years into my job as CMO, with Ecomagination showing real momentum and Jeff’s faith in me validated, it was time for my call.
It came in early November 2005. NBC Universal’s longtime CEO and GE vice chairman Bob Wright made one of his regular visits to the Fairfield headquarters. I’d worked for Bob in my last stint at NBC, so we were old friends of a sort.
Bob asked to see me up on the expansive, quiet executive floor. Bob’s office was packed with photos of him with NBC celebrities. There was something about Bob that was always a bit more down-to-earth midwestern (in a good way, although he grew up on Long Island) than Hollywood. Highly intelligent and emotional, Bob was never shy about expressing ideas, even if they weren’t always clear.
We sat in two easy chairs in Bob’s office. He blurted out what was on his mind: “Beth, how would you like to come back to NBC? We need someone with your…uh…creativity?”
I was surprised, but not completely. Wright needed new sales and marketing models, and was starting to get antsy about digital media. He had just come off the big acquisition of Universal, which gave him a way to grow earnings, but he saw that NBC wasn’t dynamic enough, wasn’t in touch with the changing media landscape. New niche cable competitors continued to nibble away at the ad sales revenue over which the networks once had near-monopolistic control, and a new generation of marketers, increasingly aware of the data websites were generating about their audience, was demanding a more intimate, data-rich connection to viewers. It was a chaotic moment.
Bob had brought my name to Jeff and Bill Conaty, GE’s head of HR. In his vice chairman capacity, Wright had seen my success in changing GE’s brand positioning and in introducing Ecomagination to a resistant workforce. The media world in general, and NBC in particular, was under siege from the piano-playing cats of YouTube and the pimply teens at Myspace.
Dismissive and condescending toward the upstarts, few people in media understood how quickly and brutally these kids would transform the media landscape. My mission would be to make NBC accept a reality it didn’t want to acknowledge. It’s a recipe for constant conflict, although I didn’t know just how mean-spirited it would get.
I now know it can’t be avoided. There is a wide chasm that separates insights about a changing market and important new ideas generated in the discovery phase (or R&D lab), and the commercialization of a new product or service. Venture capitalists call that chasm the “Valley of Death.” To me, the Valley of Death is the unstable transition where the tensions between vision and reality, idea and action, must get reconciled. Not to mention confronting all the messy and often conflicting personalities and agendas. Ideas without a committed team to lead them turn into something interesting without results. It is why so many ideas die. There are politics to navigate, short-term thinking to overcome, capability gaps to address, budgets to allocate, coalitions to build, and many difficult conversations to work through.
What’s needed are the skills of a social architect, someone who is committed to collaborating in a psychologically safe zone that allows for what I call agitated inquiry. Agitated inquiry is the practice of evolving an idea into action steps through heated exchanges and debate.
If discovery is about capturing the exotic conversations with the world outside your company’s walls, agitated inquiry is about the abrasive, but essential, conversations between the people within. Most of us are averse to conflict. But there really is no getting around it when attempting to drive change. On the one hand, conflict is dangerous; it can damage relationships. On the other hand, says Ronald Heifetz, founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, “conflict is the primary engine of creativity and innovation.”
At heart, innovation is a twelve-tone symphony of conflict and resolution. Lose control of the notes and the music will descend into chaos. Learn to conduct it and you can create something transcendent.
NBC wasn’t the only big media player to realize that the digital onslaught was going to involve more than a few cute kitten videos on YouTube. In July 2005, News Corporation announced that it was paying $580 million for Myspace, which set off a frantic scramble among the rest of the media world to ensure that we weren’t left without a big digital property.
Be Like Abe (or How to Deal with Conflict)
If everyone agrees on the same approach to an idea, perhaps you’re not pushing the boundaries hard enough. Perhaps you haven’t sought enough divergent views. Good leaders recognize that tension is inevitable, and they learn not just to navigate it but to use it to fuel creativity.
Learn to accept that conflict can make your idea or product better. Perhaps your problem is that there isn’t enough conflict in your process.
Recognize the underlying conflict; identify it. I’ll ask to meet with people privately and address the issue in a group setting only where necessary.
State the issues as you see them. Then ask the other person to do the same.
Give the conflict a name, something funny or memorable to cut the tension.
Ask the person or team to address the conflict while avoiding the personal issues that too often arise. Keep talking until the issue is resolved.
Or be like Abe. As Doris Kearns Goodwin tells us in Team of Rivals, Abraham Lincoln invited his biggest rivals from the presidential campaign to be top-level members of his administration. At the outset, this produced a great deal of confusion and a titanic clash of egos. But as each member of his cabinet saw that their voice was being heard, they felt comfortable expressing their opinions. For Lincoln, having difficult conversations and managing conflict was a way of governing.
The Myspace buy felt seismic. Major recording artists like R.E.M. and Nine Inch Nails had introduced releases by streaming them on the site, and ad
vertisers like P&G and Sony Pictures advertised there. The media responses were a predictable mix of urgency and fear; half of us stuck our heads in the sand while the rest ran around like headless chickens looking to acquire web companies to join the game. Our entry into the digital sweepstakes was iVillage, as I’ll describe in the next chapter. And it would prove to be a knotty mess.
One of the hard lessons I learned during this period is that a good idea itself is not enough. Making NBC digital was the right thing to do. But for an idea to become a successful innovation, to generate revenue and renewal, the harder part is the people: How do you mobilize people to open up to change and then adopt it? There’s no smiley-face version of how this goes down. You have to agitate the water.
The traditional top-down style of leadership—here’s the answer, now do it—won’t work. Often, the person leading the change doesn’t know the answer, only the need for a new direction. How do you get people to work toward unseen opportunities?
I knew from the start that NBC was going to be a very tough assignment. That I had worked at NBC before only exacerbated the situation, because my colleagues pictured me as I had been. They had little appreciation for what I had accomplished at GE.
I knew Jeff Zucker from my previous stint at NBC, when I was rising through the ranks of PR and Zucker was the dynamic, hypercompetitive young wunderkind of the Today Show. A 5-foot-6-inch Harvard grad from Miami, he had won his high school class presidency based on the slogan “The little man with big ideas.”
Zucker jumped straight from running The Harvard Crimson to a job as the researcher for the NBC Olympics in Seoul, in 1988. From there he leapt to producing Today, where he rose at warp speed, revamping it at age twenty-six and starting its sixteen-year run atop the morning ratings. He won because he was willing to take the most chances. People called him Machiavellian. Yet, no one underestimated him for long. He’d won two bouts with colon cancer. He was a gritty survivor.
Jeff was prone to hissy fits that turned his face beet red, the kind of tantrums you eventually learned to let pass. Jeff and I had our disagreements, like the time I called him out for trying to negotiate his contract in the media. After the negotiation was done, Jeff made sure to call to tell me that he’d badmouthed me to Andy Lack. “You know I talked to Andy and he said you were out of bounds,” Zucker told me, his voice shrill and breathless. “You don’t really matter here. You need to know that’s what Andy said about you.” Nonetheless, we were genuinely friendly in a work sense. We’d sit together and pass notes at Lack’s staff meetings.
At my return to NBC, Zucker’s position was infinitely more complicated. After a decade of prime-time dominance, NBC had sunk to the ratings cellar—in fourth place, behind Fox. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was fading at Bravo, Katie Couric was unhappy at Today (she’d leave for CBS News in May), and, after a miserable 2005, ratings in 2006 weren’t looking any better. Worse, when GE reported its earnings in January 2006, NBC Universal was the only division whose profits shrunk.
As someone who’d been thrown into difficult situations, I sympathized with Zucker. Before becoming head of the TV group, Zucker had led the NBC Network and the Entertainment division, and had overseen the network’s plunge. A lot of people were asking in back-office whispers and media leaks why he’d been promoted instead of fired. Jeff Immelt supported him fully and understood that television was cyclical. But this was GE, and Zucker had to meet his numbers.
It was a chaotic situation.
When for a second quarter in a row NBC was the only GE division for which profits fell, Zucker and I began to have turf battles over our scarce resources. At one meeting, we talked about how we could combine some of our sales efforts to offer the iVillage and nbc.com digital platforms to TV advertisers. The TV sales leaders thought digital was a distraction, however, the money too small for the amount of work. “You expect me to trade in analog dollars for digital pennies!” Zucker burst out.
The room fell into an uncomfortable silence. I could tell he’d been waiting to deliver that line for weeks, to cut the digital folks down to size.
Soon “analog dollars/digital pennies” became his go-to mantra wherever he went, from the media to industry conferences and GE business reviews. My digital team was frustrated. When a top exec belittles you in front of the whole division, spouting, “Come back when you guarantee me $500 million,” it undermines our efforts to try new things. And it was incredibly shortsighted. You have to believe that those pennies will become dollars. And they did, a decade later. Today, online video streaming services have market caps of $100 billion or more.
Being an outsider, building a network, telling our story had been a strength of mine at GE. But when I returned to NBC, I also signed up for a lot of publicity. The job became as much about my personality as it was about NBC. I did a lot of interviews, and I was the subject of a lot of articles, complete with glam shots of my hair blowing in the wind.
My goal was to make sure people knew we were serious about NBC Digital. And in much the same way I had done at GE, I tried to be the living embodiment of that, an evangelist on a mission. But I let it go too far. NBC was a place of dueling egos. I could have saved myself a lot of tension by lying low at times. Instead of proselytizing in the media about why digital was great, I should have been spending more time fighting it out inside NBC. Retail politics is what begets real change inside an organization. You have to build “local majorities.” Businesses in many ways aren’t run from the top, especially now.
I was certain that NBC needed to embrace a digital future. But I was failing to sell my vision to the swing voters.
My relationship with Jeff finally fractured over my attempts to make budget cuts to one of “his” units. Zucker had been incredibly supportive of me in some things, like the launch of two creative studios, one that would create BuzzFeed-style digital shorts and the other creating content for advertisers. But he grew increasingly upset when I tried to make changes in the NBC Agency, which John Miller had run forever. The NBC Agency had a team of 250 that did all the NBC on-air promotion. They were the ones who came up with “Must-See TV,” and Zucker loved Miller.
As good as the NBC Agency was, it was bloated. I tried numerous times to discuss the cuts with Miller, but he brushed me off. Even though I was technically his boss, he had protection from the corner office.
So I had no choice but to go to Zucker. I told him that the costs were high compared to other agencies, and with my GE-certified thriftiness, that leanness would breed more innovation. It wasn’t just about the money—the group needed a shake-up. With each rationale, Zucker waved me aside. “Don’t mess with Miller—he’s an icon,” he said. “Focus on something else.” Finally, I couldn’t continue the dance, and my insistence gave way to a demand. “Listen, Jeff,” I said, “I really need you to support me on this.”
Zucker stood up. He stomped over to the easy chair where I was sitting and physically lifted me by the collar of my shirt and walked me back to his office door. “Just get out of here! I can’t take you!” he yelled, with a childish temper, and slammed the door for added effect. It was like a scene out of a bad movie. I wish I could say I had stood up for myself the way Jennifer Lawrence or Sandra Bullock would have on screen. But I was too shocked to act.
I went back to my office, closed the door, and cried tears of pure frustration. I had this stunning corner office on the fifty-second floor of 30 Rock, overlooking Manhattan and the Hudson. I was up in the clouds but feeling as if I couldn’t sink any lower.
It was a moment of truth for me. I realized I needed to learn to handle conflict better with my peers. You have to use release valves in the office to let the tension out. You can’t avoid it. In fact, you have to surface conflict continuously, before tensions mount too high. Tension is the price of admission when you are innovating. I should have confronted Jeff Zucker long before and told him that his actions were unacceptable. And I should
have stated my position up front—I was in charge of the NBC Agency. I didn’t need his permission to run the agency. I had backed down to preserve the peace, but as I was coming to realize, appeasement is the antithesis of innovation.
My relationship with Jeff Zucker didn’t grow any more tranquil as the months passed, and the iVillage acquisition turned into the iVillage nightmare. But business failure wasn’t the cause of the moment that truly broke our relationship. Instead, it was sunk by the most natural of human emotions—the fear of being pushed aside.
As Bob Wright approached the “not-official” retirement age, the media began to buzz over who was next in line. Soon, news articles began to appear saying that Zucker’s ascension wasn’t as sewn up as it seemed. I was an unlikely “dark horse,” they said, who had the support of Jeff Immelt. “She’s the one set up as a competitor to him,” one nameless source told the New York Post. “That’s the way GE works, as they typically pit two people against each other.”
Imagine how Zucker must have seen things at that moment: profits and ratings down at NBC, GE breathing down his neck, and a mole from Fairfield planted in case he failed. To him, I was a threat. How many of us have lashed out privately, if not in public, at someone who is yapping at our heels?
On September 15, 2006, an item in the New York Post Page Six gossip column froze me where I sat.
Comstock—who once headed p.r. at the network, and marketing at GE—is said to be building an empire through the Internet, using her talent and charm. “She’s lethal,” said one insider. “She could take out your kidney and you wouldn’t know it was gone.”
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