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How Companies Get Creativity Right (and Wrong)
Beth Comstock, the first female vice chair at General Electric, thinks companies large and small often approach innovation the wrong way. They either try to throw money at the...
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Beth Comstock, the first female vice chair at General Electric, thinks companies large and small often approach innovation the wrong way. They either try to throw money at the problem before it has a clear market, misallocate resources, or don’t get buy in from senior leaders to enact real change. Comstock spent many years at GE – under both Jack Welsh’s and Jeffrey Immelt’s leadership – before leaving the company late last year. She’s the author of the book Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.
Innovation can be tough, especially at big, legacy companies. A lot of those companies try to make changes by setting up special departments, incubators, or R&D groups to focus on future products or services. But Beth Comstock isn’t so sure that’s the best route.
BETH COMSTOCK: I think everybody’s job in a company needs to be focused on these efforts of what’s new and next. I don’t think you just delegate that to the “what’s next” department.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Beth Comstock is the author of the new book “Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change.” She worked at NBC, CBS, and Turner Broadcasting during times of intense upheaval in the media industry, before going on to become the first female vice chair at General Electric – a company she left late last year.
She says that successful innovation means investment, clear strategy and goals, and buy-in from senior leaders. And it means more and more individuals thinking of themselves as creative.
Harvard Business Review’s editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius recently sat down with Comstock, and he started by asking her about the right way to innovate or introduce change at a company – big or small.
ADI IGNATIUS: Now, I think some people might say, “Okay, GE had these massive resources and this ability to commit billions to some of these experiments.” Some people might listen to this and say, “You know, we’re a relatively small company. We would like to innovate.”
BETH COMSTOCK: Yeah.
ADI IGNATIUS: “We don’t have some of these luxuries. We can’t put aside a big chunk of money and fail, because we’ll run out of money.” So, what’s your advice?
BETH COMSTOCK: I love that question. Because first of all, GE was a big company, but never known for big budget. So let me dispel that myth. But I think one of the advantages a smaller company has is they are more constrained, and I think that is gonna make them more innovative.
My experience with big companies is they do – I point it out in the book – we call it “premature scaling.” This idea, if we just throw enough money at an idea, it’s going to work. And what you do is you force a solution before you even know the market’s there, before you know you have a product that’s ready. So if you’re a smaller company with less money, I say “Bravo.” You’re going to be faster and in theory, more competitive because you can test things at a very small scale.
I mean, really you’re just running small tests. We have this hypothesis, let’s go out and see. Can anyone buy it? You can prototype things very easily now – manufacturing and digitally. You can put up a dummy site in a matter of hours. So, I personally think you’re at an advantage if you’re smaller. You just have to set up the means to do it.
This is classic business school. I’m sure there are articles and books that have been written on, you know, the old, 70, 20, 10 framework. I really thought that was one of the best frameworks I discovered. I didn’t go to business school, but I picked it up from all the people who I worked with who did. But this idea – I don’t care how big or small – 70 percent to the core, 20 percent to what’s next and 10 percent to the new. And that’s people, resources, time.
So if you’re running a small company, you have a lot of time. You have who presumably can do different things. And if I were a startup company, I mean you have to be super focused, but you’re always testing the next thing. So I like this idea of kind of a test team. It could be one person, it could be half of a person’s job, where their capabilities are they’re good at that sort of test and learn. And when they’re onto something, then they throw it over to the core team to get it done.
ADI IGNATIUS: And when they’re not onto something, then you have failure, and we all know failure is good. We know failure is hard. But getting past the basic cliches, what have you learned about how to think about it?
BETH COMSTOCK: Yeah. I get so frustrated. It is such a cliche, and I actually don’t – I think our entrepreneur, Silicon Valley, you know, magic, fairy tale, magical thinking… have not helped us in the failure department. It’s almost almost like fail fast, fail small and you’ll get funded, and it’s like unicorns and rainbows in the future. It really belittles the fact that nothing good happens unless you figured out how to fail along the way. And I don’t know how companies can succeed if they don’t make room for failure.
I worked in a company that had embraced, for good reason, rigor-like six sigma. And trust me, you want a jet engine, you want a fine piece of machinery to be as many sigma as you can, but what that does, if you try to apply it to everything, is it’s all about a quest for perfection.
And there are certain stages of a company’s development in their business where perfection is probably attainable at a machine level, but certainly never on a human level. There are certain times when you’re developing an idea, a new business, when you’re going to fail. Let us do that in ways that we’re spending the least amount of money. Your CFO should be your friend, because you’re CFO should say, “How many ideas are you putting through at the least amount of money?” That’s something that’s measurable – making early failure something that’s the way you work.
You don’t want to fail colossally. And I worry about failure because I think we’ve made it into a competition. I’m sure you, you go to a lot of different events like I do, and there’s always the “share your biggest failure” story, right? And it’s almost like a competition like – am I worthy of failure? Have I failed spectacularly enough? But yet to your point, in our companies, we’re not necessarily – the markets aren’t rewarding us. Our processes don’t reward us for failing.
ADI IGNATIUS: So you’re right, it is ridiculous. But share your biggest failure.
BETH COMSTOCK: Well, I tried to document, I mean, in the book I almost – I jokingly feel like I could call it failing forward because I specifically wanted to share some of the failures. I mean there were a couple of them. I documented one, when I went back to NBC and we were trying to get into the digital media area and fast. And we acquired a company iVillage that had great strategy. Again, this one was classic great strategy but horrible execution.
And that was on my watch, and I saw that fall apart because of a lot of cultural things. And you see this in a lot of companies where they think we’ll just acquire it and everything will be great.
ADI IGNATIUS: And did anybody want you to pay a price for the failure?
BETH COMSTOCK: I mean, sure. People point out and say, “You don’t know what you’re doing.” You’re constantly taken to the woodshed, and said this is a problem. And you know, you’re worried you’re going to lose your job and you don’t get funding for the next project. For us out of that one – at the time at NBC – out of that came something really important and that was understanding, I think, we couldn’t give up one video and we ended up, together with News Corp, seeded what became Hulu.
So I also believe that out of those things come a lot of painful learnings, but then it gives you the confidence that maybe you can do this yourself
ADI IGNATIUS: One interesting aspect of your book is your description of your own journey and it seemed people kept putting you in jobs where it wasn’t necessarily obvious that you should be in that job and I want to talk about that. There’s that great passage where I think Jeff Immelt comes to you and says, “I need you to be more confident.” What do you do with that?
BETH COMSTOCK: Yeah. Well, I panicked when he says that, because my first reaction is, “Well, how did he figure that out? Because I feel that way, but I thought I was a pretty good actor. How did he know that?” And he called me into his office to say, “I need you to put it out there more. You’re showing up in these meetings and I’m not hearing from you. I put you in this job for a reason. You have good ideas and I want to hear from you about them. And it’s not acceptable to bag out because people are arguing.”
So he kind of took me to task and I think that I often pick the jobs I think that other people didn’t want, because I saw there was opportunity in them. And I often approach them in a different way. I mean, taking on the marketing job. When Jeff told me that at the time, I was chief marketing officer, had grown up in promotion and advertising, but had never taken a marketing class, did not go to business school. Was not – I think AdAge said I was, you know, one of the rare breed of marketers with no marketing background.
ADI IGNATIUS: That’s probably a compliment.
BETH COMSTOCK: I don’t think they meant it as a compliment. And yet I saw in that this opportunity to think of marketing differently, to make it about the markets. And so I think that is a bit of me willing to take these ideas in a company that marketing was – it didn’t even know what it was. It was where washed up salespeople went when they didn’t know what to do next. It was the brochure department. Yet I thought maybe there was a way you could take it, sure, tell stories, but hey, it’s a way to understand and explore the market.
So I’ve tried to be that person who crafted jobs differently, but it did mean I had to have confidence in what I was good at, and I think you learn that over the course of a career. So at that time I felt quite confident in my skills as a marketer. I perhaps didn’t feel as confident about my skills as a business executive or able to hold my own with a bunch of high-powered finance folks or technical engineers who were talking things I didn’t know what they were talking about. So, I could speak confidently as a marketer. But I was intimidated. And so I had to work on that.
ADI IGNATIUS. You also described yourself as an introvert and you are adding to my list of really impressive people in public roles who confessed that they are actually introverts. Was that something you had to learn as well, to kind of function in a high-powered job at a company despite what your inner self was telling you?
BETH COMSTOCK: Yeah. And I’ve always been – my whole life I’ve been, it doesn’t sound like it now, but I’ve been shy and I’ve been reserved and I’ve been introverted. And it’s something I really had to work at, especially earlier in my career because business is this extrovert arena. Everybody’s putting it out there, especially in the cultures I worked in, in media and industry. People yell, they talk over each other. It’s always, you know, tension and everybody’s trying to make a point, and so it’s hard to get in there even if you consider yourself an extrovert. So again, my natural proclivity was to pull back, but it’s funny you say that.
I think we’re all a little bit extrovert, and all a little bit introvert. And some of us just skew a little bit more than the other because I had to tap into that extroversion that I had in me to figure out how to do more of it. Right? I mean I had to push myself out. I’d go to meetings and if it wasn’t Jeff Immelt saying, like, “Why didn’t you say something?” I’d leave the meeting like: “I had that idea! No one – I didn’t say it, someone else did!” So I’d miss my opportunity. And you go to that many meetings, and you feel pretty bad about yourself and you see other people getting ahead and you’re not, you have to change it.
ADI IGNATIUS: The book implicitly – I’d say more implicitly than explicitly – deals with sort of gender issues. Implicitly that you were often seen to be the only or one of the few senior women in a culture that was very male-dominated. But you don’t talk a whole lot about that. What were your takeaways from a career at GE and elsewhere? What’s your advice, maybe, to women who want to have a career like yours, given the world we actually live in?
BETH COMSTOCK: Yeah. No, it’s interesting. I mean, I am a woman who’s had a career in business and I’ve written a book. It’s not about women’s leadership, which is interesting. Sometimes people, when I meet them and say I’m working on a book, they’re like, Oh, it’s ‘Lean In.’ It’s like your ‘Lean In’”
And I love ‘Lean In,’ but it’s not what I’m trying to do. Yet, I did have some of those examples and another thing I’ve had people who I know who’ve read it early have said: “You had very few women mentors.” I hadn’t really thought about that as I was putting it through, but it’s true in the in the traditional sense of mentors, but I had a lot of great women colleagues along the way.
And I think I was there at that time of GE and NBC where there were more women coming in to those key positions and we all were given opportunity to rise, but there weren’t enough of us. And so hopefully if there’s any message I’m trying to give away – one, hopefully you’re seeing a different style of leadership. I think as women, many of us lead differently. Perhaps that stereotype, but I do believe it. I think as a creative person, I lead differently.
So hopefully you’re able to see that. But if there’s any takeaway from that perspective, I hope it’s a recognition that we need more difference in our organizations and it’s so hard. It’s really hard because we don’t give ourselves enough time. You don’t pick your head up to go and see who else is out there. We end up hiring people like us. We all do it. We all do it, even if we have the best intentions. And so hopefully it would be just, “Hey, you got to make room for these people who think differently, have different backgrounds, different gender, different race, because they bring a different perspective.” Introverts and extroverts, engineers and lawyers. If it was just a team of marketers sitting around a table, like, that’s really boring,
ADI IGNATIUS: But you had a trickier problem, and the book does deal in specifics – you don’t seem to be holding back about triumphs and failures both – but the problem being not different perspectives exactly, but people who resist, people who didn’t want to change, people who would belittle, you know, those of you who were trying to lead change. That’s a different perspective, but it’s something different. So I’m interested, you know – a lot of this is politics. A lot of this is process. How do you survive as, what was your term, “inside outsider”? Almost provocateur, leading change where you know the status quo is strong and there is resistance.
BETH COMSTOCK: Yeah. I think for myself, I – and this is where maybe the introversion has helped me, I because I’m not the first one to blurt something out in a meeting – I observe and I listen. So I’m able to survey the situation and kind of pick up the language, understand what’s important, and then jump in.
And so I, that outsider inside, I believe that is the job of people making changes. You have to see what’s happening on the outside. Then you have to know how to translate it back inside. And boy did I learn from not doing that well. You know, those moments where you come back like a golden retriever, like dropping the bone, you know, at the team’s feet. And they’re like, “What do I do with this?” And you’re like, “Look, I found this amazing new discovery. It’s so exciting!” And you’re going on and on and they don’t know what you’re talking about.
They’re a little frustrated because they don’t know what you’re talking about and then suddenly you’re acting like you found this new discovery. Well, maybe I want to find this new discovery too. So you’ve just got a lot of those things I learned to have to deal with. It’s really the psychology of us and how we work.
So I just learned there are ways you can be that outsider inside. You know, one, you have to let other people find those trends as well. You have to take time. You have to keep coming back. At first people were like, that idea is so silly. Driverless cars. I remember we were having these big debates, driverless cars or solar – solar was really it. You know: “Solar! That’s so absurd!” Like, no one’s going to make money doing solar.
And you just have to believe it. You just like, “Yeah, but it’s going to happen. Imagine, energy from the sun is free. That’s a huge disruption.” So you almost – like this dog with a bone, you just don’t give it up. You just keep coming back. So I think there is a bit of that, that you just keep finding ways to come back and tell the story and expose your colleagues to it so that they can make it real and it’s not you against them. It’s not my idea versus their idea. So that’s a lot of what I’ve had to learn how to do.
ADI IGNATIUS: I said I wanted to talk about GE, so let’s talk a little bit about that. You left GE in October.
BETH COMSTOCK. Yeah, like early December of 2017. I announced it in October.
ADI IGNATIUS: You know, I would say GE is in the middle of a transition right now. I think the share price is about half of what it was when you left in October. I realize you’re not there, you’ve been away, but, you know, I’d love your thoughts on kind of what’s happening there.
BETH COMSTOCK: Yeah, because I’m not there, I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but obviously as we said, I spent 30 years there. So I know a lot about the company. I mean, it’s a really good company; the people are really passionate about what they do. They make amazing things. I mean, trust me at GE jet engine is awesome and I’ve seen it – I’ve seen the handwork, the mission that people have for what they do.
The stock is not in a good place right now and I hate that a company just gets judged by that. On the other hand, investors invest their money and expect a return. I think the GE story is complex. It’s hard for us to deal with complexity. I mean, the company had to be reset and rebooted multiple times – certainly in my career there.
And maybe my takeaways are a little bit – I guess a couple of lessons I feel like I take away from it is, no matter how fast an incumbent, traditional company thinks they’re moving, they’re never moving as fast as they think they are. Complexity is really hard, and most people don’t know how to deal with it, especially when you have the near term pressures and you’re trying to see the long-term pressure.
I mean, think of a GE – of all the people it has to take care of in a sense. Customers foremost, pension retirees, investors – investors in the form of dividends, investors in the form now of stock buybacks. You’ve got to invest in the core business to keep it running and expert and you got to invest in the future. It’s a lot of complexity that has to be managed.
And the business model dramatically changed at GE. I guess in my fantasy world of how I wish things could work, there would be these recognitions of more reset moments for companies and an appreciation that some of those short-term deliverables may be unrealistic while you’re figuring out the long-term. But then again, I’m a long-term person so you might expect me to say that.
ADI IGNATIUS: You would say that. So the new CEO, John Flannery, is taking GE in some different directions, and it seems to me in some ways that points to the transient nature of innovation, in that you have a window to try to achieve what you achieve and then circumstances pull you in another direction.
BETH COMSTOCK. Yeah. From everything I’ve read John’s putting, continuing to put GE on a path of just a simpler company. Conglomerates fell out of favor along the way. And there’s a lot of cleanup. I think people have perhaps underestimated the amount of cleanup that goes into sort of a new course, whether it’s John Flannery, Jeff Immelt, Jack Welch, Reg Jones, in the history of it.
And the other thing I guess I learned a lot that I think anyone who would look at GE and say, “Think of the cultural tension, that you’re trying to operate this well oiled machine and create the future at the same time.” It’s almost like your company’s moving at two different speeds in some ways, and then the market’s demanding that you move really fast.
The culture has to change. And I think often in companies we think that’s what you do at the end. It’s what you do at the beginning. So how do we get our people to be more adaptable, able to change faster? How do we get markets that are looking for that newness, not just the well-oiled machine. I think that’s one of our challenges at more traditional companies.
ADI IGNATIUS: I mean, your impact was evident when you were there. You know, you also worked for two of the great long-running CEOs of our era. I’d love to just hear, you know, a little bit, you know, GE under Jack Welch, GE under Jeff Immelt. What’s sort of the first thing you think about or the anecdotal memories that you have?
BETH COMSTOCK: Yeah, well, I came in – Jack pulled me out of the NBC just as he had announced his plans to retire and there was a four year run that I got to work with him as he was transitioning out. And it was just as GE was going to it’s total top peak performance in terms of the stock price and the GE capital machine was really what was driving the company.
I mean, Jack is incredibly charismatic. He loves people. He just, he loved connecting with people inside. He was really big on performance and leadership development. And I feel like one of my favorite stories of him is just, he gave you direct, candid feedback. You always knew where you stood with Jack. I lovee that about him. He’d have this line: You’re a pig or you’re a prince. Never a princess. I was either a pig or prince and if I messed up he’d call me up or march – rarely, but sometimes march – into my office and go, “You’re a pig, you’re a pig. Let me tell you why.” But I knew where I stood. “You’re a prince,” and usually you know, you get a nice note like, “You’re such a prince, this is amazing.” In this sort of great Jack Welch handwriting in the felt tip pen.
And you felt like you were on top of the world, but you knew where you stood. Now I think there are times when feedback can be blunt, can not be helpful. He’d say: “That’s got to be the second dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.” And you’d like slink out of the room, like I’m a dope. But I’d also go like, “What’s the worst idea you’ve heard? Should I aspire for that?” So, you know, he was really a man – like most leaders – a man of contradiction, but incredibly driven and really wanted the best of people.
Jeff Immelt was a man of the world in the sense that he lived for the customer. It wasn’t about the internal, it was about – he would, the guy, I think he might not have been human. I don’t know. He would fly nine hours to go meet with a customer in Russia, and 12 hours to go see somebody in Indonesia. He lived for customers and his mission was really to make the company much more externally focused, bring us back in line with where the customers wanted us to be and what we needed to be for them to mandate the future. It was very much about the network of GE in the broader context.
It was not just the GE way, it was: let’s collaborate, let’s work together. What I learned from Jeff is he’s very – nothing affects that guy. He just keeps moving on, right? This was a guy who had 9/11, the financial crisis, and what I saw in his leadership was he absorbed the fear. He absorbed the fear of the team in terms of translating change and doing things they didn’t feel comfortable with and he absorbed that and said, “Keep going, keep going.” And so I think you need leaders who do that.
ADI IGNATIUS: Getting back to your experience then at GE, your book has a lot of sort of handy frameworks for readers who want to try to apply some of the ideas. I guess if you had to boil down – if somebody’s listening to this podcast thinking: “How do we develop a culture of innovation at our company and achieve these breakthroughs?” You know, what are some basic practical tips?
BETH COMSTOCK: Yeah, and I tried to be very practical. I mean it’s kind of like the school of hard-knocks – lessons, I think, as opposed to fancy frameworks. I mean, to me it’s kind of three key things. And you had a podcast about this recently, but this idea of giving yourself and your teams permission. I thought that was a really great work you guys did and I’m a big believer in that. And you know, that’s how change happens. You’re going to give yourself permission to imagine something new, to try something new. The second is getting a team and a culture that’s always at least carving off hopefully 10 percent of their time to get out and discover, see patterns, trends.
And the third is to create some part of your team and your own way of working that’s constantly testing and experimenting to navigate risk. Really what I’m saying is you have to act on the imagination. It’s about navigating risk and too often we think our jobs in companies is to mitigate risk. When people say to me, my job is risk mitigation, I said, you will fail. And so that’s what I’m trying to rally for, is that we need more people who realize that you have to fight for the future and there are simple steps you can take to do that.
ADI IGNATIUS: And then I think trust is a key to almost everything – the extent to which somebody like you is trusted internally, the extent to which the brand is trusted externally – can give you the runway to accomplish great things. Do you think about trust?
BETH COMSTOCK: I think about trust all the time in terms of company because I think we take it for granted. And it’s the fears that keep us from having the trust, right? The fears are: I don’t trust he’s really going to do what he says he does. And I’ve seen that. I talk about it in the book and I have – there was a term at NBC that wasn’t so flattering, but basically what it meant was everybody would come into a room, we’d apparently duke things out and agree to a course of action. But then when we were done, people would go around and try to lobby to redo that.
And that is certainly not a team that is full of trust. And that happens too often in companies where we’re not vulnerable, we don’t say things like, “Oh, I’m really afraid of this,” or “Oh, I don’t know the answer,” or “I’m afraid, you know, we messed up – now can we get back?” And so you just tell yourselves: “Yeah, these are great things, the business plans are always the same. Those hockey sticks, you know, three to five years, like grow to the moon. No one ever challenges that. “Yeah, we’re going to do that in three to five years. Yeah, we’re going to do that.”
And, and so what builds trust is duking it out, letting people see what the issues are and then agreeing once we’ve agreed, we’re going to all support this idea and move forward.
ADI IGNATIUS: So the question of “duking it out,” – I think some companies probably aren’t comfortable with that concept, but you write in the book about the phrase you use is “agitated inquiry.” And I like that and that’s really the sort of duking it out and great things can come of that – or not. How do you create that culture in a way that’s productive?
BETH COMSTOCK: Why I like that phrase is because you know, you basically had a hypothesis that this is an idea or a future we’re going to pursue, but you need to beat it up and you need to ask really good questions, like, “Is this good? Is it going to work?” And you fall in love with ideas. So this is the willfulness of saying, “I want to invite people and critics in to beat up my team’s idea, which teams rarely do.”
The other thing that often happens in the middle of change, there’s the cool kids – the kids who have been given the green light – and then the kids who feel left behind, right? They’re the kids that don’t have the budget and so they get an intention because suddenly it’s a fight for resources. So there’s all kinds of behavior that we bring into work.
And I think hopefully the way you can do it when you’re navigating change is remind them what you’re trying to accomplish, and the team is together. And so I’m a big proponent of things like having a growth board as a disciplined way of vetting ideas where everybody knows what the money is. There’s a sort of board, if you will, and that sounds a bit bureaucratic. It’s not meant to be that way, but there’s a vetting process.
And you decide which ideas are going to get funding to what stage. It’s very transparent. People understand the strategy, they understand who’s doing it and what the mistakes are. Too often we try to cover all that up. We don’t want to admit that we failed. We don’t want to admit the customer didn’t like that feature. There’s a difference in teams not getting along or being fearful and teams deliberately trying to beat up their ideas to get to a better place.
ADI IGNATIUS: So imagine a company that’s getting a lot of this right, and is innovating at the core, is creating the future. A lot of what we write about now, what readers respond to is kind of complexity, both in positive and negative ways. And the negative ways are: we suddenly have this very complicated organization and there are dotted lines everywhere. And it’s a matrix and there’s a lot of burnout. And part of it is the inability to stop certain projects that it probably need to be stopped. But any advice?
BETH COMSTOCK: Well I’m glad you’re looking at complexity – keep doing it. I think that is one of the biggest challenges of our era for companies. I just – even your question of what people say to you – the matrix and the stress – because I basically, what I hear in that is: “I don’t have control. And I want people to report to me and I want to tell them what to do.”
In a complex world, you don’t have control. So I think some of our basic management principles – I believe the management a lot of us knew growing up is almost dead because this idea that you are going to have a team and tell everybody exactly what to do, that you know all the answers as a manager, is foolish. In complexity, you need people who can figure it out, can move fast with feedback.
As a team leader, your job is to say: “Here’s the vision, here’s what we’re trying to accomplish. The brief, if you will. Now you’ve got to go figure it out. I don’t have the answers. You need to get them.” And creating that feedback loop so people know faster if what they’re doing is good or not.
I think belatedly, but certainly in my career and I think in the time we were doing things at GE like FastWorks, this idea of more mission-focused teams – where it doesn’t matter, Okay, I’m in IT. I probably have to have some sort of structure in the IT department where they’re making sure the capabilities are good, but I’m assigned to a mission, to a project. There’s a team leader and we’re going to go do that project.
It’s not about IT versus sales – were all in that project. I’m just big on that as a way to deal with complexity, but I’m not sure we train our teams how to do that. Feedback is a big thing in this. I think in complexity, can you get feedback faster? Customers, employees, colleagues, but we don’t train ourselves and our traditional managers how to give or take feedback.
ADI IGNATIUS: I think to come on an HBR podcast and say “The field of management as we know it is dead,” – for an introvert is very, very impressive. All right, Beth thank you very much for being here on the IdeaCast.
Beth Comstock: Thanks for having me Adi. Happy to be here.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Harvard Business Review editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius, speaking with Beth Comstock. She’s the author of the new book “Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change.” She was also the first female vice chair at General Electric.
This episode was produced by Mary Dooe and Curt Nickisch. We got technical and production help from Rob Eckhardt and Amanda Kersey. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager.
Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.