Imagine It Forward

by Beth Comstock

  We had the Zen Master’s yin to match the Bullet’s yang, the strategy to match the tactics, the Ground War to match the Air War. Steve and David were sparks who could act as catalysts for change in behavior and perception. But they became more than sparks; they became teachers, coaches, confidants—even therapists.

  Jeff and our team were attacking the business issues around GE Capital and the parts of GE that weren’t working and needed fixing. But we needed a renewed narrative, as much inside the company as out, to rally our 300,000 employees together and to clarify what GE stood for.

  To create the feedback loops that collect data about the company, we surveyed eight hundred people outside the company across the country about what they thought of us in light of the financial crisis. We called our subjects “the likely voters.” We segmented the people we needed to target, and then asked them questions: Is GE a company you’re likely to buy from? Is GE a company you trust? How does GE’s innovation compare to Google’s?

  With our baseline data, Steve created a sort of cockpit, full of feedback dials and instrumentation. This one tells us how Washington, DC, influencers view us in light of bank regulation. What does the general public think of us in terms of innovation? What happens if we disseminate videos of our newest MRI scanner leading to a healthy outcome for a sick child? In other words, what happens if we spread the word about some of our amazing technology in the field of medicine and its ability to diagnose and treat patients?

  The dials Steve helped us create were much more sophisticated than any we had had before. (And seem a bit quaint now.) And he was brutal, creatively and combatively engaging with the data that was coming in—and fiercely challenging the messages going out. Along with Greg Strimple, who was his political data ninja, Steve parsed data and repackaged it into small insights that built to a crescendo.

  One of my colleagues made the mistake of suggesting that we run commercials with Jeff Immelt talking to the camera about GE’s accomplishments.

  “That’s absolute bullshit!” Steve bellowed. “We need to flood the world with tight messages, not that boring corporate mayonnaise.”

  Steve was famous for his almost tactile sense of story, his ability to simplify big issues into powerful images. Surprisingly he was also an advocate of traditional advertising, telling Jeff in meetings that we didn’t spend enough money telling our story. We were constantly battling and negotiating with finance over the size of our budget. Even today, there are misguided beliefs that only retail companies should advertise. In reality, every business is fighting for a share of customers’ minds in an effort to win a share of their wallets. For many of GE’s products, the sale is very complicated, with multiple decision-makers influencing the purchase. HBR/Corporate Executive Board estimates that 5.4 people are involved in the average B2B buying decision.

  Our days of selling ourselves as a financial services–powered conglomerate were over—although it would take several more years for this to be true. Big iron and tech, I decided, would be our new campaign. We had already found success focusing on our clean energy and health technology. Steve boiled down our message to a thing of pure beauty: GE is a builder, America’s builder. Steve relentlessly tested these ideas in our feedback loops, tightening them as much as possible, just as he distilled Arnold Schwarzenegger’s successful California governor campaign to one word: cooperation. And with the arrival of more digital tools and media outlets, we could better target both our message and who received it.

  Human Sensing Machine

  The creation of a feedback loop is a central element of the sensemaking process. There are many ways to break down sensemaking. The process we developed with Steve Schmidt involved four basic steps:

  Collect responses from multiple sources—not just your customers but also your suppliers, investors, employees, and even your competitors and the public at large.

  Invite others—sparks like Schmidt, for example—into your sensemaking program. Tell them your observations and opinions, and listen to the observations and interpretations of people who have different perspectives from yours. We’d have fierce debates with Steve and researcher Greg Strimple over their interpretations of the insight versus ours. Sometimes the process was frustrating, but we always got to a good place, and the new messages tested better and gave us even more insight.

  Use each set of responses and observations to shape experiments that you can use to test your ideas. For example, test out headlines, dozens of them, with readers using social media. Constantly iterate your messages. New questions inevitably arise. This can drive teams crazy because everyone wants to be done, to check things off their list. But with a continuous feedback loop you are never done.

  Don’t fall back on the frameworks and worldviews you’ve used in the past. Be open to new interpretations. And try to avoid sweeping generalizations, or oversimplicity, like good versus bad or science versus art. I find that viewing issues on a spectrum is helpful, as it allows you to set the dial for more nuance and context.

  We now had a structure in place so that we could craft messages that would give us new relevancy. What we didn’t have was a lot of time to play around. We needed to get our new messaging out now. Jeff went on CNBC one day, just before a quarterly close, to say that the quarter was in the bag. But the quarter wasn’t in the bag, and several weeks later when we came out with our earnings, we missed. Jeff had breached the golden rule at GE. We hadn’t met our commitment.

  The day after we missed our earnings report, Gary Sheffer came in to tell me that Jack Welch was on CNBC and would be talking about GE’s earnings. At the time, Jack was showing up regularly to do guest hosting gigs on the channel. His bluntness made for good soundbites. And so, the day after we reported our earnings miss, Welch was on CNBC and someone asked him, “Jack. What if Jeff misses again?” Jack barely skipped a beat before saying, “I’d be shocked beyond belief, and I’d get a gun out and shoot him if he doesn’t make what he promised now,” he said. “Just deliver the earnings. Tell them you’re going to grow 12 percent and deliver 12 percent.”

  One misstep and you’re executed? Jack’s statement battered the internal story of nearly every GE employee, rattling our psyches. We couldn’t be the legendary deliver-the-earnings company if we couldn’t hit our numbers. Clearly, there was a lot of resetting to do.

  Magical Thinking

  I confess: I read my horoscope daily and have since I was a teenager. (I’m a Virgo.) I used to travel with a small hamsa given to me by a Middle Eastern colleague to “keep me safe.” But I’m not alone. A number of us bring superstition into the way we work. Just try finding an elevator button to take you to the thirteenth floor. Or listen to how many times in a week you hear someone say “knock on wood” in a business meeting.

  Many of us have quirks and rituals to bring us luck at work, to close the deal, to get the job. (Jack Welch carried “Mr. Lucky,” a gnarly brown briefcase given to him by his mother.) Lucky charms and rituals do have a positive effect. Researchers at the University of Cologne found that superstitions boost confidence and, in turn, serve to help our mind push for better performance.

  But beware when a person, a team, or a culture gets locked into habits out of fear—or pursues goals based on magical thinking.

  During World War II, indigenous people in the Pacific Islands, after observing airplanes landing on military bases, came to believe it was the runways and the strange motions of the helmeted men that summoned the planes from afar. When the war ended and the planes departed, these native groups built their own runways and staged rituals on them, imitating air traffic controllers waving landing planes to safety.

  It’s all too easy for companies to develop their own rituals to sustain magical thinking. We come to believe that if we just conduct the same series of meetings and generate more of the same reports and utter
the same reassuring phrases, we’ll be okay. I believe this behavior made change harder than it needed to be at GE.

  The next time you find yourself scheduling a meeting that has lost its purpose, or you find yourself writing another report that will never get read, ask yourself, Have I joined an island cargo cult? Mistaking magical thinking for important actions can be fatal. Get your team to try another way, to take a step in another direction—just once. But never on Friday the 13th.

  GE Works: Authenticity Begins at Home

  Armed with our political survey data, I called together all of the various creative media agencies working for GE—from PR to advertising and digital and brand marketing—to help us create a new master narrative. For two days straight we locked ourselves in a hotel suite in Manhattan, blank paper on the walls for notes, cans of Diet Cokes, plates of cookies on every table. If I couldn’t rally them, maybe the sugar and caffeine would.

  “The economy is suffering, people are losing their jobs. Some economists estimate that it may be 2017 before the economy fully recovers. As a country, as a company, we’ve got work to do. So here’s the assignment,” I told them. “How do we rediscover the important work GE does, and how does it make us more relevant in these times?”

  I challenged our agencies to swim in one lane, to function as a relay team rather than individual competitors—without a lead agency. Without individual glory. It was a profoundly creative session. We were a team on a mission: To deliver the words that would define us. To unlock our strategy, through the power of story.

  In previous eras, marketing was about creating a myth and selling it. Today, it’s about finding a central truth and sharing it. Manufactured myths just don’t stand up these days. With a few clicks of the mouse, people can discover almost anything about a company and instantly circulate it to an audience of millions. It is the organizations that are confident enough to share the truth—warts and all—that succeed.

  I believe this passionately. And it was something we had seen from the early days of Imagination at Work. Authenticity begins at home. Most important, our story had to resonate within GE, or it would never resonate with our customers and the world. As Steve Schmidt and David Plouffe would say, seed your message with your base. Because it’s their story, too. And they become your best ambassadors.

  Our team, as well as representatives of our agencies, traveled to our factory sites. We wanted to explore anew what it meant to work for GE, starting on the factory floor. There, craftsmanship meets sweat meets high technology. We canvassed our colleagues, asking them simple questions that cut to the essence of who we are: What do you do? Why do you do it? What do you love about your work? Unlike with the Rapaille work, when we brought people in for deep thinking, this time we were field anthropologists. We watched them. We photographed them.

  What we saw was that our employees were passionate and entrepreneurial. They were craftspeople. Everywhere we looked, GE people were innovating at their workbenches. They were inveterate hackers when it came to solving problems. I remember the presentation I gave to our key corporate staff to share what we had found. One of my favorite examples had to do with the handcrafted work from our aviation team. One guy made custom parts by tracing them by hand and then cutting them out with an X-Acto knife to create forms that would be machined into high-tech engine parts.

  Another guy told me he had grown frustrated because he couldn’t find a way to accurately test the tensile strength of a new metal sheet. After failing with the new equipment we had bought, he had an epiphany: From years of practice shooting at a target range near his house, he knew exactly how fast the bullets traveled, and how much they weighed. The next day, he brought his rifle to work and figured out how to use it to test the strength of the metal in a way that was ten times more accurate than the most sophisticated gear we had. And another guy, just starting out at GE, showed us how the fine welding he was doing inspired him to become a tattoo artist in his spare time. He loved working with his hands, loved the orchestration of man and machine.

  After my presentation, our core storytelling team—a mini version of the one in our hotel powwow—frantically worked the conference room whiteboard, adding, editing, and deleting sequences of a new GE equation, one that would replace the one we had created years ago. For hours, we had been shouting, laughing, suggesting, demanding, writing, editing. They are among my favorite memories at work, when the team becomes one, when idea builds on idea. We were finishing one another’s sentences even as we interrupted ourselves with a new thought or inspiration. Grabbing markers off the table, out of one another’s hands, we were pure energy, in a frenzy to find the words that would unlock the story.

  What the world needs × Our employees + Belief in a better way and our relentless drive to invent and build things that matter = A world that works better. “We give people electricity that powers their homes, their schools, factories, and economies. We provide medical equipment that peers into the human body and saves lives. And we build jet engines and locomotives that transport people safely.”

  Then, taking it further we distilled it down to: We build, power, move, and cure to make the world work better.

  GE was manufacturing, yes, but manufacturing of consequence.

  We make big “badass” things—amazing mechanical beasts combining human ingenuity and science. GE could still very much be identified with Imagination at Work, but the times called for us to shift the balance from imagination to work. It was a simple, subtle evolution, but one with powerful repercussions.

  Next we created a series of ads to focus on what we were now. In the first GE Works commercial, viewers follow several factory workers from GE Healthcare’s U.S. headquarters in Wisconsin, as they meet a crew of cancer survivors whose disease was identified at an early stage by the MRI machines they make. “You see somebody who was saved because of this technology,” one GE worker says as he tightens bolts on the assembly line. “You know that things you do in your life…matter.”

  In another, floor engineers at the GE Aviation manufacturing site in Durham, North Carolina, hand-assemble a jet engine turbine as they talk about how they were fascinated by balsa wood airplanes as kids. “At GE Aviation, we build jet engines that lift people up off the ground,” one says with real pride. “It’s going to fly people around the world, safely and better than it’s ever done before,” says another.

  It expressed both what we were—and what we aspired to be.

  Human to Human

  “There’s nothing more valuable than a human being talking to a human being,” David Plouffe would say. “Nothing.”

  When David was with the Obama campaign, he created a homemade video of himself describing the campaign’s strategy to get to 270 electoral votes, and then they put it out in an online mailing. The letter sent with it was informal—“Frank,” not “Dear Frank”—and it was signed, simply, “David.”

  To make our own campaign human, David helped us build the equivalent of a door-to-door canvassing team, a cadre of in-house ambassadors for the new GE. It was our grassroots movement. The idea was to empower our employees by offering them a crisp version of our new narrative, along with the freedom to be our ambassadors in their local community and with friends and family.

  To start, we asked senior-level GE people to identify candidates—influencers in communities—that ran from GE campus recruiters to “power” retirees. Next we asked these influencers if they would be willing to volunteer as grassroots brand ambassadors.

  With these volunteers we created twenty- to twenty-five–person teams led by “captains,” each assigned to geographic areas or specific business sectors, and empowered them to be GE’s representatives by giving them online stories, infographics, and talking points, and offering them direct contact with top-level execs—including conference calls with Jeff.

  The idea was to teach them how to solicit great GE stories from their teams and return them
to us to distribute and amplify. Soon our ambassadors were spreading GE’s narrative of big-iron passion around the country, and returning with stories that illustrated it. At GE, some of the best storytellers are engineers.

  One story we got back, for example, came from Mark, a lab manager at GE Global Research. Mark saw firsthand the effect his work had on real-world patients when his young son, Adam, was diagnosed with cancer. The treatment Adam received at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute included advanced imaging technology developed at High Energy Physics Lab GE Global Research. After Adam completed his treatments, Mark created a video of his story and the role imaging-technology played.

  When you make big, intimidating, world-shifting products like a jet engine or an MRI machine, it is easy to take for granted the individuals behind it. And those who make the machines may not see the full force of the product in action. But if you reconnect them with story, then you can make the impact of what they do come to life.

  This grassroots story brigade continues today through the robust “GE Voices” outreach effort, enlisting nearly 100,000 GE employees and suppliers to share messages—in person and digitally—about innovation and the economic value of jobs.

  Make the Invisible Visible

  The only time people think about their electricity is when their power goes out or when they have to pay the bill. Yet without it, the very latest technologies, like their iPhone, wouldn’t be possible. People often don’t see the amazing feats of science and engineering behind everyday progress. In that sense, people—inside and outside GE—weren’t seeing GE. To get them to do so, we needed to give people X-ray vision into GE places and spaces they didn’t know existed, where we were doing cool feats of science they didn’t know about.