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Beth Comstock is a change maker who has helped people grapple with rapid-fire change and open up their companies to transformation.
In her 27 years at GE, she was Vice Chair, Chief Marketing Officer, she created GE Ventures, she oversaw GE Lighting and spearheaded the companyâs innovation push under Jeff Immelt.
She has captured lessons learned in her new book, Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity and the Power of Change.
I was lucky enough to have an hour-long conversation with Beth for my podcast, Future Squared. You can listen to the entire conversation below.
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Upon reflection, and listening to the conversation several times over, here are lessons learned on corporate innovation and ultimately, driving change in a traditional organization.
The reason startups are synonymous with rapid experimentation, whilst large companies are known for meeting overload, is because startups have a limited runway and resources and are usually spending more than theyâre making on their quest for a sustainable cash-flow positive model.
Large companies, on the other hand, have an existing profitable business model, and it may have been that way for years or decades. The urgency just isnât there.
The core businessâââwhich is all about delivering on the oldâââhas a lot to protect so it should, naturally, operate at a slower speed than your fringe businessâââwhich should be all about exploring the new and asking questions like âwhat if?â.
Ask questions like:
âHow quickly do you respond to customer inquiries; or
âHow quickly do you respond to simulations or risk assessments?â
Getting faster at things essentially strengthens that muscle, and the faster our feedback loop, the faster we learn and figure out what works and what doesnât.
âSee change earlyâ stresses Comstock.
If we wait until the change is already happening, weâre too late. For example, at GE, the threat of driverless cars might not mean much given that the company doesnât make cars. However, the driverless technology which can be applied to trains and planes (something GE does make) is a threat.
What are the second and third orders of consequence?
In most traditional organizations, marketing doesnât get involved until the product is on the proverbial shelves. Instead, marketing should get involved from day one in an effort to better understand our customers, their needs and what we should be putting on shelves in the first place.
If youâre driving change, itâs not enough to just talk about what is happening on the outside. You need to translate it for decision makers internally in a way that is relatable, relevant and cognizant of internal culture and language.
Take decision makers and influencers on field trips into the heart of âthe edgesââââwhatâs happening on the outside. Immerse people. âThey need to see it to understand it themselvesâ, says Comstock.
Ask questions like:
âWhatâs the worst that can happen if threat X comes to fruition?â; or
âWhat if the problem weâre solving isnât the problem at all?â
This gets us to think about things from a new perspective and uncover ideas and opportunities that may otherwise remain hidden from sight.
By taking lots of small bets instead of few large ones, we get ongoing feedback, we invest money at a reasonable rate, and we ultimately end up allocating capital more efficiently.
Who are your partnership customers? These are customers that are more likely to be invested in product development and testing, and because they helped to develop it, they will feel a greater sense of ownership of the product too.
When you scale prematurely, you end up with an over-engineered product. Kind of like your remote control. It has 100 buttons, but how many do you actually use?
If speed is fundamental to success in innovation, then policies and procedures that slow us down must be addressed.
For example, something like a non-disclosure agreement could be a dozen pages long and take weeks to approve. âCut it down to a page and cut the cycle time and approval time down from weeks to a dayâ.
Ask questions like âdo you really need these approvals?â.
The faster we concede that and align expectations, the better.
It took a year to get early adopters of the lean startup methodology at GE on board and to a point where they could be role models for the rest of the organization. It took about 18 months to get the rest of the organization excited. Donât expect overnight transformation when it comes to long-held beliefs.
You need to have real examples you can point to, relevant to oneâs business unit in order to get and keep buy-in.
Itâs not only early adopters who matter, but if you can convince the most ardent naysayers in the organization of the value of change or of a fundamentally different way of doing thingsâââsuch as the lean startupâââand if you can turn them into vocal advocates, then you are in a very strong position, and would have learned how to overcome many of the detractors across the organization as a result.
âAnyone in the company can give anyone feedback about anythingâ.
Itâs not just the customer feedback loop that must be shortened, but so too the employee feedback loop. GE got rid of annual performance reviews in favor of ongoing feedback.
On evaluating feedback on your own performance: Understand the difference between feedback ârelevant feedbackâ and âv âinteresting but not relevant for what Iâm trying to accomplish right nowâ.
The core business can also benefit from a redesign in its policies. âThere are always areas that need improvement in core business operationsâ, says Comstock.
Leverage Amazon Web Services or someone elseâback end or app, during the early stages. It doesnât cost much, you can test and learn fast and then decide whether to build it yourself or develop your own variation and get best of both worlds. Prove the use case first!
âEvery corporate executive can carve space, time, budget out to experiment to discover what is new and nextâ
At the end of the day, it comes back to leaders taking ownership.
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Steve Glaveski is on a mission to unlock your potential to do your best work and live your best life. He is the founder of innovation accelerator, Collective Campus, author of several books, including Employee to Entrepreneur and Time Rich, and productivity contributor for Harvard Business Review. Heâs a chronic autodidact and is into everything from 80s metal and high-intensity workouts to attempting to surf and hold a warrior three pose.