6. MAKE THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE
Generally, we tend not to appreciate inventions that came about before we were born or came of age. We take that technology for granted. That’s a challenge for companies like GE, whose technologies provide some of the fundamental pillars of progress, such as electricity. Part of our challenge was to make the invisible visible. These are often complex technologies, so the stories about them need to be simple.
In one of my favorites, we turned our R&D center over to the Slow Mo Guys, YouTube filmmakers who created amazing slow-motion videos, such as the one of superhydrophobic and magnetic liquids (which has generated over twelve million video views). And another time, we convinced Ron Howard and Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment to coproduce a series with us for National Geographic television on stories behind modern science breakthroughs, including some of GE’s.
7. BRING DATA TO LIFE
Increasingly, all companies struggle with the huge streams of data they generate. Early on, we teamed with designers to create visual stories around the data. One great example of this was an excursion led by GE brand innovator Sam Olstein to accompany explorer Sam Cossman to the edge of a volcano and to create a series of videos and digital experiences on the Internet that combined data with science as part of GE’s efforts to increasingly digitize big things.
Soon after we launched our content factory, we were noticed by the business community for our embrace of digital, winning us yet more attention. The Wall Street Journal called us a “surprising experimenter.” Entrepreneur said, “GE is killing it in social media.”
My point here is that “big brand” doesn’t necessarily mean “big budget.” A lot of these new media initiatives were inexpensive: A 2017 Interbrand study estimated our brand value at $44.2 billion, on an annual media spend of less than $200 million. IBM and Mercedes had similar brand values but spent over $3 billion each to get there. We calculated that for every $1 spent via our content factory, we got $1.41 of value through amplification.
When I launched the content factory, no one else was doing this. But frankly, not enough companies are doing it even now, because they are sometimes afraid of risking any of their spend on new methods. I continue to get calls from CEOs who want to know how to shout louder than they spend.
What I tell them is that it really comes down to a (relatively) simple equation: great content + the right time, right place, right audience + amplification through conversation + shout louder than we spend = massive brand ROI. You have to grab shares of people’s hearts and minds before you can hope to grab shares of their wallets or loyalty. And you always have to make room in your budget—and mind-set—to challenge and experiment.
CHAPTER 10
MINDS, MACHINES, AND MARKET SHARE
When I was first introduced to Thomas Edison in grade school in Winchester, Virginia, he was presented as the quintessential American inventor. But that description does his wide-ranging mind a disservice. In fact, he didn’t actually invent the lightbulb—British inventors had demonstrated electric light forty-five years before. Rather, he invented a way to communicate about it, and commercialize it (his carbon filament dramatically extended durability and reliability). And finally make it scale. In other words, he made the invention real.
In 1878, when Edison was ready to launch his version of electric lighting, he faced a daunting obstacle: people were deathly afraid of electricity. In a world grown accustomed to candles and gaslight, they had no reason to believe they needed incandescent light.
Edison saw what many people miss—that getting people to adopt a new way of doing things, mobilizing them around a new story, is the hard stuff of innovation. A lot of innovators put their focus on coming up with new ideas, which involves creativity and the ability to ignore constraints. But the harder part, the especially hard, big slog, is inspiring the enthusiastic embrace of change among people who aren’t that interested in changing—i.e., most of us. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.”
To build public support for his grand project and demonstrate it was safe, Edison organized an “Electric Torch Light Parade,” in which four hundred men wore lightbulbs on their heads—connected via wires that ran up their shirts to a steam generator that rolled behind them. Through the vehicle of the parade, Edison invented an idea that people could rally around: safe, reliable, 24/7 electric light. Once he created that idea, the lightbulb quickly became one of the most disruptive technologies the world had ever seen.
In the weeks following the financial collapse, I thought back on Edison’s parade and Emerson’s quote. GE was facing a new definition. We were an industrial company, built on mechanical engineering, that had reinvented itself as a financial juggernaut. And now we needed to redefine ourselves again. Again? Didn’t we already do this? That was on the minds of most everyone I spoke with. I had to remind them: if you want to stay relevant—reinvention is a continual act.
The digital world was beginning to change everything, from how we communicated to the movies we watched to the books we read, touching the entire product chain from design and manufacturing to sales and customer service. I believed that it was just a matter of time before digital—meaning the Internet and mobile versions of our technologies—would impact more parts of the business world in new ways. It seemed inevitable to me, although I had no idea how it would unfold. I had come to know this feeling—the feeling that says to me, “Pay attention.”
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I may have sensed the coming change overtaking us in the oncoming digital age more clearly than most because of my time working on digital media inside NBC. But that didn’t mean it was clear to me what the emerging digital world would mean for GE—only that it would be breathtakingly complex, given our range of industries. What I did see at NBC was the way that data was coming into our homes. We talked about Microsoft’s Xbox as a Trojan horse in our living rooms, capturing not just how we fought battles in “Call of Duty” or rocked the band in “Guitar Hero,” but that potentially recorded data about the patterns of our lives. Same for the cable set-top box. Start-ups emerged on our radar that saw the cable set-top box as a way to target in-home users with advertising by knowing who was watching what. You could imagine forward all kinds of future scenarios from there. We saw the rise of home health devices that allowed patients to go home from the hospital early and upload data for their doctors to see. With mobile phones, and the emergence of location data, technology was untethering us physically but holding us more tightly together digitally. The sheer pace of digitization was dizzying. Data collected by companies telling them how consumers used electricity, or what the wear and tear on appliances was, was clearly going to have great value in gauging what people wanted and how to reach them.
Of course, in 2008, this was a far-off opportunity. In the early days of an inflection point, all you have to hold on to are little fragments. But I knew that if we could harness data from our machines and from the work patterns of our people (sales, marketing, manufacturing, operations), GE could make a huge leap forward; we could radically remake how we work, and even what we work on. How far from the Xbox collecting data in our living room was it to monitoring when your washer’s spin cycle ends, or monitoring patients’ vital signs remotely? If we could figure this out quickly, we could lead. But if we hesitated, I feared we might well become Kodak, an industry giant that had stumbled and fallen. A faded photograph of past glory.
I was convinced that we needed to fully embrace the digital world and change how and what we sold—even if it just meant engaging our customers online so that they could find GE solutions, pay their bills, or order parts. But how to prove it?
How many times have we heard the cliché “I’ll believe it when I see it?” But that isn’t necessarily true. Sometimes even when you see it, or hear it, if it is at odds with what you’
ve always thought to be true, your beliefs and behaviors won’t change one iota.
In part, I was haunted by a story I had heard about a nineteenth-century Austrian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis. To me, it was a cautionary tale of what could happen to our business if we failed. In 1847, Dr. Semmelweis was working in a Viennese maternity hospital with two separate clinics: doctors delivered the babies in one clinic, and midwives delivered the babies in the other. And yet in the doctors’ clinic, mothers and their babies were dying at triple the rate of those in the midwives’ clinic.
By observing the different processes in the two clinics, Semmelweis discovered what he thought was the reason: The doctors were coming to the deliveries straight from the autopsy ward, where they had been examining the previous day’s cadavers, many of whom were mothers and babies who had died as the result of a devastating bacterial disease called childbed fever. These doctors would promptly infect the living mother and newborn infant with the same bacteria, repeating the cycle. Once Semmelweis had these doctors wash their hands before attending to the births, the mortality rate at the doctors’ clinic plummeted.
But when he presented his discovery to colleagues three years later at a medical conference, he was met with rejection, derision, and mockery. His colleagues, and even his wife, thought he was going crazy and had him committed to a mental institution. He died shortly thereafter.
Why had he failed? What had gone wrong?
As I replayed the story of Semmelweis’s failure to convince doctors and medical institutions to adopt the practice of washing their hands, I came to the realization that to change what people think, sometimes you have to change how they think. Semmelweis’s observations and experiences conflicted with conventional medical thinking of the time—that disease was the result of an imbalance of the four humors of the body (this was more than a decade before the work of microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur). That was the mental model under which the doctors in that lecture hall operated. And neither Semmelweis’s accounts from the clinics nor the concrete data he presented could sway them from it.
Our mental models are deeply ingrained habits of mind. Those habits are useful in filtering out what is important from what is not in day-to-day life. But they can be hard to break when they turn out to be wrong. Changing our mental models requires much more than a single lecture, no matter how convincing the evidence; it requires an ongoing presentation of experiences, discussions, provocations.
To change how people think, you need to go at people in full surround sound. They need to see how new models work in specific contexts. The really revolutionary innovations—the ones that change the world—need to be explained before they can be accepted. They need to be experienced before they can be believed. And they need to be communicated repeatedly. Just when you think, “Surely they are sick of me saying this,” you find you need to explain it again. Shifts in how we think don’t happen overnight, any more than eating a single lettuce leaf will make you thin.
Transforming people’s mental model of how business works—shaping the new market—is almost infinitely complex. But my experience at GE and NBC has taught me that people can’t just be told change is coming and be expected to spring into action. They have to work through it. Your job is to create the environment, actions, and coaching to shape opportunity before others even see it.
Galvanizing others to make a new vision of the future come true is risky, sometimes very risky, yet most necessary in times of rapid change when you are trying to grab opportunity. After the financial meltdown, I sensed it was time for grabbing GE’s digital future. But first we needed to figure out what it was.
Survivor
As GE began to emerge from the financial crisis in late 2009, I cast around for a market in which I could test my ambitions to shape GE’s digital future. The first call I made was to Jean-Michel Cossery, then the chief marketing officer at GE Healthcare. I had worked with Jean-Michel before I went to NBC; he was our most imaginative CMO from a business-making perspective. Supersmart (two PhDs in life sciences, plus an MBA), dynamic, and full of optimism and charm.
A slim Frenchman with a heavy accent, Jean-Michel had a fearless approach to life and work. In fact, at the time, he was into horseback archery, having been the French university show-jumping champion in his youth. I could not think of a better ally in my quest to shape the future.
Finding champions at work—true allies—is necessary for anyone who wants to transform an organization. You need a network of people who take up new ideas critically but honestly (and with passion). Change and innovation are team sports. They require internal allies against the relentless and inevitable nay-saying that will take place.
I could see the consumerization of health care taking place through digital media—from WebMD to the rapid acceleration of health content on the Internet from customers like the Cleveland Clinic and GlaxoSmithKline. They were fledgling efforts to connect more directly with consumers. In periodic strategy reviews, we would get our teams together to plot the future. These reviews were ostensibly about something like how GE could better serve the Cleveland Clinic, for example, but then we’d end up brainstorming future opportunities, like connecting the patients to the hospital remotely, through their mobile phones or small devices not yet commercialized.
In a more connected world, consumers would have all kinds of digital data about their health that they could use to take more control of their care. The health industry was looking closely at digital because one of President Obama’s stimulus packages gave doctors incentives to use electronic medical records. Certainly GE customers would be impacted, and eventually GE. What was the opportunity for us to get ahead of it?
Jean-Michel and our R&D center were incubating an Imagination Breakthrough about home medical devices with sensors—in-home tracking of elderly people—while I was trying to link NBC health media initiatives with home appliances and electronic medical records. Our efforts were still very vague, but we could see the outlines of what was being shaped by digital.
This lack of clarity at this early stage is a typical obstacle for the change-maker. You have to act boldly on instinct and not wait for the data to tell you what to do, rather than the other way around. You have to respect the data but love imagination more. As a change-maker, you need to engage in what author Amy Whitaker calls “art thinking.” That is, not getting from point A to point B but inventing a point B and then determining if it is possible to get there.
The need for imagination and courage is why shaping the future is a communal endeavor that requires a safe space full of allies. New ideas and observations are far from perfect on their day of birth. Often, you can’t even put the concept into words. That’s why I firmly believe in running a fitness test for them—and those tests require a place where people feel free to speak, make mistakes, argue, and iterate.
Jean-Michel and I created a shared team for discovery, comprised of two marketers plus one from our MBA program. Each of us went off to uncover where digital was already taking place in health care. We met with giants such as Google and Microsoft, and with consumer companies such as Walmart and CVS who were toying with in-store care beyond pharmacy (there once was a time when you couldn’t get a flu shot at CVS). We also reached out to start-ups like PatientsLikeMe and MedHelp that were growing communities of patients who were sharing health data.
We started to map out our vision for consumer health—centered on a totally connected person who could take action early and proactively, given all the personal medical data available.
“Appliances could become a digital health care business,” I stated. “Water becomes a health care business, because access to clean water is essential. Power becomes a health care business when you really think about it—by giving access to power that can create new medical centers and health care in remote parts of the world. Generating power with clean technology, reducing pollution and health diseases like asth
ma. Doctors can be beamed in via videoconference to do telemedicine.”
Jean-Michel shook his head.
“First, we need to worry about all of the data that is coming in—from consumers, doctors, hospitals, the Internet. It’s random and not connected,” he insisted.
Jean-Michel and I had enormous trust in each other. We could challenge each other freely, loudly, and dramatically—in fact, with Jean-Michael, everything was dramatic! And our teams felt the same way. Our meetings were physically draining and yet mentally invigorating at the same time.
“We need to create the data backbone,” Jean-Michel would exclaim, jumping up and drawing a primitive train track on one of the huge notepads I had placed on easels around the room. Then I would get up and grab the marker out of his hand. “And here is the locomotive on top,” I’d say, drawing a dreadful train, the kind more worthy of a first-grader. “What’s in this locomotive?”
And off we would go on this riff, in a state of pure give and take. It was workflow Zen.
To ground ourselves, we’d return to two key questions: What problem are we trying to solve? And, what’s the simplest, fastest way to test a solution?
“Health care costs too much, it’s not good enough for most people who need it, and too many people cannot get access to it—whether they are living in a developing country like India or in parts of the United States,” Jean-Michel said. “People everywhere want first-world health care at third-world cost.”
“Digitization should allow us to capture the data that proves we can improve quality and access, and lower health costs.” I said. “Those are three things that we are going after—cost, quality, and access.”
Imagine It Forward Page 21
