Invite the Critic In
Most of us don’t like conflict—I know I don’t. At times, I’ve seethed in silence (or rolled my eyes in exasperation), as opposed to listening to critical comments as signals in and of themselves. But learning when and how to work with your critics is an important step in managing change.
Spend time with your biggest critics—invite them in. Perhaps they have valid points that can improve your plan or make your project better. By incorporating their input, you may find new allies.
Acknowledge that you and your critic have a difference of opinion. But see if you agree on something. For example, do you both agree that the project is worthwhile? Is it just the tactics that you disagree on?
Give the critic a starring role. Tell him or her that you need divergent voices in the process. Provided he won’t be disruptive, you need him to challenge the team.
Create ground rules. Here’s one I love: “No But.” Critics have to offer a solution or build a bridge to another idea—they can’t just say no. Or carve out time in regular meetings devoted to “objections,” allowing everyone, including critics, to make well-articulated rebuttals to key elements.
BEWARE: Some people are just negative. They don’t want to offer solutions and aren’t in pursuit of better. You may decide they can’t be part of the project, because they aren’t attempting to contribute anything beyond negative energy.
That was precisely the lesson Jack Welch taught me when he instructed me to “wallow” more in the informality of office life. Some companies mandate prohibiting their employees from eating at their desks. They are encouraged to share meals—and conversations—in the lunchroom. Some leaders schedule ice cream breaks for the entire team to encourage people to talk about things outside of work.
The point is that the more time team members spend together, the more social capital, trust, and honesty they build. And the more innovative, risk-taking, and productive they are.
Building an innovative team is about creating trust, not just hiring stars. No one person dominates the conversation; everyone talks equally. Team members are socially and emotionally attuned to the needs and feelings of the others. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the most successful teams include a range of diversity, including women and more diverse thinkers.)
Instead of putting Lauren in charge as the star, in the wake of her success at Bravo, I should have spent more time cultivating an iVillage team, putting members in situations in which they could honestly argue and exchange ideas in order to make iVillage better. Innovation is not polite; disagreement, conflict, is inevitable. But you have to feel safe to disagree.
Unfortunately, that is not the atmosphere we had at NBC when it came to iVillage. People came to meetings, raided the division like a shared fridge that nobody was stocking, and went back to their lives. It was becoming clear that the change I needed wasn’t going to happen with Lauren at the helm. We never had a big confrontation, just a gradual erosion of support. Tons of fake smiles; lots of resistance to change.
I was experiencing one of NBC’s least pleasant behaviors: the “grinf*ck.” At GE, people took a kind of plucky pride in calling you an idiot to your face. Media people resisted that kind of head-on collision. People said they were going to do things that they had no intention of doing. They smiled and said they were behind the deal. But when it came time to integrate iVillage into their brands, they’d go back to protecting their fiefdoms.
To go forward, I decided, we needed an outsider to run iVillage, someone with a digital and a women’s branding background. Someone tough enough and with enough of an outsider perspective to deal with NBC’s resistance to change. Our headhunter recommended Debi Fine, who recently had been the president of Mark, a millennial cosmetics brand from Avon that had shaken up the industry. I called Avon CEO Andrea Jung, whom I knew as a member of the GE board. Andrea said that Mark never would have happened without Debi. Then she uttered the magic phrase: “I would hire her again.”
That was enough for me.
A few weeks later, a member of our HR team went on a hike with the former head of HR of Avon, who had a different view on Debi—that she was excellent, but that it was all about Debi. This is a worrisome attribute for a team leader, especially for a troubled property that desperately needed to build a team. HR wanted me to find someone else. But I persevered: Debi was strong willed and aggressive, I said, just what was needed to combat the feudal tribes of NBC.
I soon saw that I should have considered HR’s advice. As we negotiated her contract, Debi said she wanted NBC to pay for a car to bring her to and from NYC from her home in New Jersey. She had been used to the amenities of a scaled company. But iVillage was a scrappy company, not yet scaled.
And then there was the redecoration of the iVillage offices. Or, should I say, her office.
The division’s Garment District offices were the kind of open-plan cubicle style that brought the word sweatshop to mind. I green-lit office improvement funds, because I thought it was important that the team felt like we were investing in them.
A few weeks later, when I showed up at iVillage, I couldn’t hide my surprise at finding Debi’s office beautifully appointed in a white sofa, new desk, and new carpet. Money had gone to her office and new carpet for the executive areas. There was a clear line where those areas ended and the old, stained carpet began—where everyone else worked.
What we needed was a leader, convener, and bridge builder. Was that who I hired?
To her credit, Debi was fearless in going after revenue and marketing. We upgraded the site, launched an ad campaign, invested in community. Debi bonded with sales, and they got off to a strong start courting big customers like Walmart and driving up pricing. The business plan that we handed to Debi was overly optimistic. She was quick to call us on that, and yet she didn’t use it as an excuse to slow the hunt for growth. I gave her a lot of credit for speaking truth to an unrealistic plan. I was also coming to realize the conundrum that can accompany acquisitions: revenue projections and deal “synergies” are often unrealistic, leaving the team that has to execute left holding a lighter bag of goods than planned.
But when Debi needed to expand beyond her capabilities, she sparred with her COO, Ezra, who had a strong background in building digital media companies. Worse, Debi brought in her own digital “guru,” who appeared from time to time as a disembodied voice on the phone, like Charlie from Charlie’s Angels.
“Any comment on our plans for the new comment widget?” I asked him on the speakerphone during one meeting.
Heavy breathing, and then the utterance: “Beware the interface.”
Instead of growing iVillage into a new child that everyone owned, iVillage was becoming the village idiot that everyone avoided. And I didn’t have the political savvy yet to woo people in NBC to work across platforms to save it.
I pestered and reiterated with ideas for integrating Bravo with iVillage. One day Lauren spun around to me to say, with some irritation, “You just don’t stop, do you?” My tenacity had served me well up to this point as a tool for managing up. But as an operational manager, I needed different tactics.
And then came the TV show.
By this point, we were desperate for someone, anyone, inside NBC to partner with iVillage. In November 2006, the NBC TV stations group pitched us on doing a live daily talk show, called iVillage Live. The show would be produced by Miami-based NBC station WTVJ at Universal Studios in Orlando, and syndicated across all of our NBC stations and offered to affiliates. It was supposed to be a first-of-its-kind lifestyle show that mixed a curated online community with a live audience. Viewers would be able to log on and send in questions or comments, or watch it streamed live on the Internet.
I was thrilled to have an opportunity to show what iVillage could do.
David Zaslav, NBC’s president of cable di
stribution, tried to convince me to reconsider. I wrote off his warning to his not wanting us to succeed. It was hard not to be a little paranoid when it came to iVillage.
“The Stations division isn’t good,” he said. “Don’t give them the iVillage brand. You need to protect the franchise. They are going to screw this up.”
I told David that we weren’t really in a position to turn down an opportunity. Plus, everybody on my end was excited. We convinced ourselves that we would create something the world had never seen.
We worked our tails off for the December 2006 premiere, and the show launched to great fanfare. I remember sitting down to watch the first episode, excited, jittery, nervous. And within minutes I realized that it was…terrible. The three novice hosts the Stations team hired to seem more like the “real people” had no chemistry. It was like a community access version of Live! with Regis and Kelly with a studio audience and the online community, except when they went to take questions no one called in. And a nearby roller coaster at Universal Studios kept drowning the hosts’ chatter. We were a laughingstock.
Worse, it wasn’t innovative.
Bravo stopped replaying the episodes three weeks after the launch, claiming (rightly) that it did nothing for the brand. We quickly reconfigured the show, moved it to Chicago, and relaunched it with slightly better-known hosts as “In the Loop with iVillage.” But that only seemed to make the media critics attack it more savagely. No one was surprised it lasted only a few months after the relaunch.
Looking back, if we had successfully married iVillage with The Today Show (or any NBC property for that matter), we would have built a community around Today, with engaged viewers and insights to make viewers, producers, and salespeople happy. It’s tempting to look back and think we had our shot at a Facebook. Of course, Facebook had only just emerged out of a Harvard kid’s room at that point. But we did see the possibility looming on the horizon. It was within our grasp, if only we could get out of our own way. Instead, as is too common within established companies, iVillage was wounded before it could even challenge. It stumbled along alone in a sort of twilight, making it look like the failure it was.
With the TV show spinning in the breeze, an idea surfaced to move iVillage from Manhattan to offices in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The state was courting digital firms with substantial tax credits. I fought hard—it was a horrible decision, one that would disrupt the franchise at a delicate moment. But Bob disagreed. “The financial reasons are clear. Your people will come to like it.”
By move-in time in the fall of 2007, half of the employees had resigned. The move tore the heart out of iVillage. The new offices were (finally) stunning, but they were empty. Our footfalls echoed as we walked the halls. iVillage was still moving, but it was the aimless shuffle of the walking dead.
In the years since iVillage, I’ve discovered better ways than fancy work spaces and lighting to help create that high-quality environment between team members. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson coined the term psychological safety to describe the kind of environment we needed, where people feel confident enough to go out on a limb in the pursuit of a new way of doing things. Edmondson found, counterintuitively, that top-performing teams made more mistakes. Or rather, that they admitted to making more mistakes, because they felt safe enough to do so. It was everything iVillage was not.
CHAPTER 8
GETTING IT RIGHT
In mid-December of 2005, Saturday Night Live cast members Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell, and two new SNL writers, gave birth to the modern Internet when they filmed a zero-budget rap video parody called “Lazy Sunday.” Samberg and Parnell played two not-quite-gangster rappers singing the praises of Google Maps and Magnolia Bakery cupcakes, and mixing Pibb soda and Red Vines candy (“Crazy delicious!”) as they head to a matinee showing of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (“We love The Chronic—What?—les of Narnia!”).
The video was anything but what was considered professional at the time: they recorded the song on a used computer they bought on Craigslist and filmed the video with a borrowed camera. The fast-cut short just screams, “Anybody can do this.” The creators doubted that it would ever see the light of day. But an hour before SNL broadcast on December 17, 2005, show creator Lorne Michaels gave the thumbs-up, and “Lazy Sunday” went on the air.
Within the week, “Lazy Sunday” broke the Internet.
During its first week on YouTube, “Lazy Sunday” was viewed over two million times. Within a few more weeks, it had gotten five million views. It wasn’t the Internet’s first viral video. But it was its first mainstream hit. The problem for NBC was, we weren’t getting a dime.
Suddenly it was clear that if we didn’t figure the digital world out, we would end up having our own Kodak Moment.
In those early days, YouTube cast a big shadow. I saw user-generated content as a real advantage to whoever was running a community. I’d ask show producers, “Why don’t you put out a clip and ask users to edit it?” But people were too afraid of being consumed by piano-playing cats to do it.
Even the earliest iterations of YouTube were foretelling a remarkable shift from passive viewers gazing at a big black box waiting for the next sitcom, to users clicking actively through YouTube’s visual kaleidoscope, leaving comments and sharing those that inspired their awe (or ire). People were putting their stamp on the media, making it their own. And NBC needed to be there.
NBC Universal had put some money behind a digital creative studio, bringing in young digital natives to figure out how to create this kind of experience. It had been started with a fairly big budget of several million dollars. By the time I arrived, a combination of organizational arrogance (“Look at those amateurs!”) and fear (“Where’s the business model? What about IP and rights?”) had conspired to cut the studio’s budget. But not its enthusiasm.
Seeing this ignored white space, I saw a chance to innovate. The remaining half dozen film producers and directors, twentysomethings who had come out of digital and advertising agencies, just needed a mission and someone to believe in them. So I commandeered the team.
iVillage subsumed me not long after, and the digital studio band eventually broke up. But while my crackerjack team of digital turks didn’t produce any blockbuster victories—they did create a few viral hits of the day like “Microwave Gorilla” and “The Easter Bunny Hates You.” To see such initiatives as failure is misguided. We fall back on doing so because we are used to big versus small, success versus failure. But we do so to our detriment.
Change is not a single act or initiative. It is an ever-evolving dynamic in which you prod and seed the environment with a range of friction-causing catalysts. This is why you need sparks, be they people, projects, or perspectives.
A change-agent is like an early-stage investor. You put down a lot of small bets, and a few large ones, on the belief that one or more will blow up big and lead you forward. You learn from each failure in this evolving portfolio of strategic experiments. There is a larger class of experiments that I call challengers: the creation of a corporate-funded competitor functioning independently outside the mothership, or (as you’ll see in the next chapter) the formation of an internal digital marketing team to compete against the existing department. They are high-stakes challengers to the status quo. And of course, defenders of the old order inevitably pile on to kill them. But challengers are what lead companies to qualitative leaps forward. From my years launching Ecomagination and Imagination Breakthroughs at GE, I knew the advantages of Red Team/Blue Team exercises, when you set up two opposing teams to work on the same project, to inject more ideas and a competitive edge into the process. At GE, we used Red Team/Blue Team in Imagination Breakthroughs as a way to consider new ventures with opposing points of view—to tease out the tension, arguments, and counterarguments. With Ecomagination, we pitted a group of researchers tasked with proving climate chan
ge (the Red Team) against a team refuting it (the Blue Team). In the end, the Red Team’s evidence, based on the science, was so compelling that the Blue Team capitulated.
The Red Team/Blue Team mentality came out of the military, as Bryce Hoffman describes in his book Red Teaming, and is now playing a bigger part in the corporate world. In one form of it, one team tries to find holes in the organization’s security system; a second version involves something called “alternative analysis” in decision-making, in which one team is charged with trying to find facts that disprove existing hypotheses in order to get past our all-too-human tendency to look at information selectively as a way to support or confirm existing biases.
To free us from our “Lazy Sunday” paralysis, I felt we needed a Red Team at NBC, an outsider who could challenge The Way Things Are Done.
In July 2006, Viacom reached out to David Zaslav, NBC’s head of cable distribution, to suggest we form a “Broadband Joint Venture.” The plan was basically that NBC and Viacom would create a walled hub of shared content. Each of our network-based websites (nbc.com, bravotv.com, MTV.com) would continue to have their own video content, but all would be aggregated in the NewCo joint venture, which would be ad supported; the owners would share the returns. Eventually the discussion expanded to include Fox. The code name of this Red Team was “Project Caterpillar.”
The Red Team never got off the ground, though, as the media partners obsessed about protecting their own turf, how they would make money, and making sure no one got something on the other.
Then, in November, an unforeseen event sent the media world into a frenzy. Google bought YouTube for $1.5 billion, which totally changed the landscape (and infuriated Jeff Zucker, who felt that YouTube’s value was built on the back of the SNL video). With Google’s backing, the digital onslaught we had feared was suddenly very real.
Imagine It Forward Page 15
