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Imagination: The Catalyst for Change in a World of Uncertainty
In 2017, Beth Comstock stepped down as Vice Chair of General Electric after nearly three decades with the company. Her departure coincided with a tumultuous period for the industrial giant, which would soon be removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average after 110 consecutive years. Yet Comstock's legacy wasn't defined by GE's later struggles but by her pioneering work in transforming how large organizations approach innovation, marketing, and digital transformation. "Imagine It Forward" quickly became a business bestseller, with leaders like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman praising it as "a rare honest exploration of the messy and uncertain path of trying to make corporate change." Through Comstock's journey from shy media relations specialist to one of America's most powerful executives, we discover a blueprint for navigating change in an increasingly complex world-where imagination isn't just a creative exercise but a survival skill.
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The Permission Paradox: Breaking Free from Self-Imposed Limitations
Change begins with giving yourself permission to imagine possibilities others don't see. Throughout her career, Comstock repeatedly faced moments requiring her to override both internal and external resistance. In 1993, she made the counterintuitive decision to leave her successful position at CBS to join NBC News when the network was reeling from scandal-what colleagues warned would be "career suicide." This pattern of running toward chaos rather than away from it became a signature of her leadership approach.
The roots of this self-permission began earlier when she left her seemingly perfect marriage in 1985. Despite having the trappings of success-a beautiful home, good job, handsome husband, and daughter-she felt trapped in a life of pleasing others and keeping herself "small." This personal reinvention taught her that meaningful change inevitably creates resistance, both from others and from within.
At GE, Comstock encountered what she calls "hall monitors"-gatekeepers whose power comes from enforcing the status quo. After presenting an eight-page critique of her department to her boss J.R., she faced the reality that gatekeepers would never willingly surrender control. This led to her understanding that change requires "uncompromising faith in experimentation, radical impatience with the default, and a bias for action."
Comstock's natural introversion initially limited her ability to connect with influential figures like Ted Turner during her time at CNN. After a failed attempt to introduce herself when Turner exited a men's room at a UN event, she developed a deliberate practice of making one new connection daily, focusing on others rather than her insecurities. This "social courage" became a muscle she strengthened through practice-being extroverted in initiating connections but introverted in conversation, listening 70% of the time.
Her career advancement often came from what she calls "job crafting"-actively shaping roles to fit her strengths and interests. She advises taking "the job no one else wants" and finding untapped potential in overlooked positions. At every step, she created additional value-launching newsletters, community shows, or new initiatives that expanded her role's scope and impact.
Perhaps most importantly, Comstock learned that "no" often means "not yet." When her boss Judy Smith left NBC, Comstock hesitated for months before pursuing the position, lacking confidence. When she finally approached HR head Ed Scanlon, he admitted they hadn't considered her because they assumed a young mother wouldn't want the travel. This taught her that managers aren't mind readers-you must vocalize your aspirations. Her persistence later proved crucial when pitching the NBC Experience Store concept, which was rejected twice before approval on her third attempt. Each rejection became an opportunity to refine her approach and build a more compelling case.
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The Outsider Inside: Finding Your Unique Value
Throughout her career, Comstock embraced the role of what Richard Rohr calls the "outsider inside"-someone who can translate external perspectives for internal audiences in terms they understand. This position requires balancing on the organizational fault line between uniqueness and belonging.
When Jack Welch unexpectedly recruited her from NBC to GE headquarters in 1998, Comstock entered a male-dominated industrial culture where her media background made her an immediate outsider. The executives' reserved cafeteria table, dubbed "The Table of Lost Dreams," became a symbol of the gatekeeping mentality she encountered-leaders who resented this woman from "fluffy" media with direct access to the CEO.
Despite these challenges, Comstock found value in her outsider perspective. As an introvert in a business world that favors extroverts, she developed strategies that leveraged her natural strengths-observing keenly, processing information thoroughly, and speaking when ideas were fully formed. She challenged herself to ask one thoughtful question per meeting and follow up with synthesis notes showing engagement.
Working with Jack Welch taught her to value directness over "niceness." With Jack, you always knew where you stood-some days she was "a prince" (never a princess), other days "a pig." This transparency, though sometimes harsh, created clarity that enabled faster progress.
Comstock's outsider status became particularly evident during GE's battle over Hudson River PCB cleanup. Despite her biology background and environmental concerns, she initially aligned with Jack's position against EPA-mandated dredging. She recruited Gary Sheffer, who had worked for New York's Secretary of the Environment, to help fight the EPA, and supported Jack's campaign showing eagles flying over the Hudson with the message "The eagles are back, the fish are happy."
This experience taught her about "incapacitated learning"-knowing so much about what we already know that we're the last to see the future differently. She recognized that most people fear losing what they have more than they desire winning something new, a pattern that would repeat throughout her career as she pushed for digital transformation in traditional businesses.
Comstock's time with Jack culminated in managing the public side of GE's CEO succession-a very public competition that revealed the character of the candidates. When Jeff Immelt took over on September 7, 2001, just four days before 9/11, Comstock found herself questioning GE's identity beyond Jack's influence. The world was about to change dramatically, and GE would need to reinvent itself once again.
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Discovery: Reconnecting with Edison's Spirit of Innovation
By Jeff Immelt's first week's end, GE shares had plunged 20%, cutting company value by nearly $80 billion. Beyond leadership changes and 9/11, GE faced the dot-com bubble burst, corporate scandals like Enron, and growing distrust of large corporations. The company had become a complex conglomerate spanning television, banking, healthcare, energy, and manufacturing, with slowing growth and questions about its consistent profit performance.
Jeff believed GE had relied too heavily on acquisitions and financial engineering rather than organic growth and innovation. His mandate was to invest in technology and connect to global markets, especially in developing countries. This required new leadership that valued judgment calls with incomplete data, original thinking, and speed over perfection.
The challenge was expanding beyond Six Sigma's process-veneration culture, which had diminished GE's capacity for smart risk-taking. The new GE needed to balance opportunity with efficiency-"optimize today and build tomorrow." But this notion of discovery sounded absurd to many GE leaders whose identity centered on efficiency and process rigor.
To reconnect with GE's innovative roots, Comstock hired unconventional consultant Clotaire Rapaille-a Frenchman prone to wearing velvet capes who helped companies articulate their cultural identities. Through his "imprinting" sessions targeting different brain functions, participants revealed GE as both "brutal" and "the best of the best." When Rapaille finally revealed GE's code as simply "the Marines," Comstock initially felt disappointed by its obviousness.
However, the real insight wasn't the code itself but reconnecting with GE's Edison heritage. They weren't just Marines; they were "Edison's Marines"-America's greatest inventors. This rediscovery of purpose led to a powerful new marketing campaign reviving the 1960s tagline "Progress Is Our Most Important Product" and strategically featuring Edison with his lightbulb.
Building on these insights, they crafted a new purpose statement presented as an equation to appeal to engineers: "What you imagine, we can make happen." Despite some resistance, they ultimately distilled their purpose to three words: "Imagination at Work." This new tagline signaled a break from the financialized GE to one run by innovators, building a bridge from past to future.
When Jeff appointed Comstock as GE's first Chief Marketing Officer in twenty years, she immersed herself in discovery to build a new marketing approach. She studied textbooks, networked extensively with other CMOs, and brought GE business leaders to meet with consumer marketing experts at companies like P&G. Despite resistance from business units who claimed "We're B2B, not consumer products," she mandated CMO positions throughout the organization and created a training program hiring over 100 marketing MBAs annually.
To drive growth, Comstock launched "Imagination Breakthroughs" (IBs)-a program requiring each GE business to propose ideas that could generate at least $100 million in revenue within five years. These became a "protected class of ideas" with guaranteed funding that couldn't be cut during tight quarters. By 2005, twenty-five IBs were generating revenue, including a Life Sciences platform, an air-taxi concept, and innovative medical devices.
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Ecomagination: Finding Opportunity in Environmental Challenges
In 2004, Jeff approached Comstock with a "quarter of an idea" based on patterns he'd noticed in client conversations. Energy and rail customers were expressing anxiety about environmental regulations-they wanted to do right environmentally but feared financial ruin from expensive technology conversion. "Is there something we should be doing about our technology and the environment?" Jeff asked.
Comstock became a "sense-making machine"-examining early signals, collecting information, and identifying patterns across energy, rail, water, and aircraft engines. Her team discovered an emerging theme focused on emissions reduction, energy efficiency, water usage, and the economics of scarcity.
To move beyond internal debates, she created "Discovery 2015," a future-focused dreaming session with thirty major utility customers. CEOs like Duke Energy's Jim Rogers joined GE management to hear Columbia's Jeff Sachs discuss global warming and debate renewable energy technologies. This environmental session became a pivotal moment, demonstrating GE could go beyond management improvements to true business innovation.
Comstock deliberately chose a ten-year timeframe for the session-close enough to be actionable but distant enough that CEOs could share insights without competitive concerns. They asked what technologies customers wanted GE to invest in and where they'd place a billion GE dollars, presenting options like cleaner coal, wind, solar, and geothermal.
Meanwhile, her team engaged with former adversaries-NGOs, government leaders, academics-asking what GE could contribute environmentally. When Eileen Claussen of the Pew Foundation advised "Trust, but verify," Comstock realized they needed third-party verification of their environmental claims. They hired respected consultancy GreenOrder to evaluate innovations against detailed economic and environmental scorecards.
The resulting "Ecomagination" initiative offered a tremendous boost to GE both operationally and in brand reputation. According to Interbrand, GE's brand value increased by 35 percent as GE became synonymous with Green Energy. What began in 2005 with $10 billion in Ecomagination sales grew to over $35 billion annually by 2017.
Throughout Ecomagination's life, GE faced the constant tension between funding newer, cleaner technologies versus incumbent technologies that generated immediate cash. This tension intensified in 2016 when GE acquired Alstom, the French power company, for $15 billion. While Alstom had renewable energy assets, it also came with coal-burning technology needed for economic growth in Asia.
Despite skeptics dismissing Ecomagination as "just marketing," Comstock understood this was precisely what new marketing should do-live in the market, create business strategy, meet change early, build coalitions for the future, and deliver growth. As Jeff later told a reporter, "There were only two of us who thought this thing was a good idea."
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Agitated Inquiry: Embracing Productive Conflict
Innovation is essentially a symphony of conflict and resolution-lose control and it becomes chaos, learn to conduct it and you create something transcendent. Comstock learned that good ideas alone aren't enough; mobilizing people to embrace change requires navigating inevitable resistance and tension.
She advocates what she calls "agitated inquiry"-the deliberate introduction of constructive conflict to challenge assumptions and spark creativity. If everyone agrees on an approach, perhaps you're not pushing boundaries hard enough or seeking enough divergent views. Good leaders recognize tension is inevitable and learn to use it to fuel creativity.
Comstock recommends several approaches to productive conflict: accept that conflict can improve ideas; recognize underlying issues and address them; state problems clearly and ask others to do the same; give conflict a memorable name to cut tension; and keep talking until resolution. She cites Abraham Lincoln's "Team of Rivals" approach-inviting his biggest campaign opponents into his administration, where their diverse perspectives strengthened decision-making.
When managing the iVillage acquisition at NBC, Comstock encountered what she called the "grinf*ck"-unlike GE's direct confrontation style, media people smiled and agreed but had no intention of following through. They'd promise integration but return to protecting their fiefdoms. This taught her that building innovative teams requires social capital, trust, and honesty-not just hiring stars.
Successful innovation teams don't let one person dominate; everyone talks equally and members are emotionally attuned to each other. What they needed was what Harvard professor Amy Edmondson calls "psychological safety"-an environment where people feel confident to take risks. Top-performing teams admit more mistakes because they feel safe to do so.
Comstock's greatest innovation success came with Hulu, where she hired outsider Jason Kilar as CEO. Having spent nine years at Amazon under Jeff Bezos's conflict-embracing management philosophy, Jason had mastered constructive dissent. He built his "Ocean's Eleven" dream team using trusted colleagues rather than credentials, creating a frugal, meritocratic culture focused on building the future of television.
Jason constantly exceeded his authority-digitizing SNL clips before legal approval, rejecting NBC's $5 million video player for something simpler, and insisting on showing competitors' content alongside NBC's. His rule-breaking approach frustrated executives but ultimately pioneered industry best practices. The tension between Hulu's user-first approach and the parent companies' profit focus highlighted why challenger brands succeed: small teams, autonomy, experimentation, and creative disobedience driven by passionate conviction.
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Storycraft: Rewriting Your Organization's Narrative
After the 2008 financial crisis shattered GE's identity, Comstock needed to lead a sensemaking project to redefine who they were. Jeff called her "the chief storyteller" and tasked her with getting ahead of their narrative. She recruited political strategists Steve Schmidt (McCain's campaign) and David Plouffe (Obama's ground game guru)-opposite personalities but complementary skills.
They abandoned GE's financial services narrative for "GE is a builder, America's builder." Comstock gathered all their creative agencies for a two-day session to craft a new master narrative, challenging them to work as a relay team rather than competitors. In today's transparent world, she learned that marketing isn't about creating myths but finding central truths-authenticity begins at home, resonating first with employees who become your ambassadors.
Their sensemaking process involved four key steps: collecting responses from multiple sources beyond just customers; inviting outside perspectives to challenge interpretations; using responses to shape experiments that test ideas; and avoiding oversimplifications by viewing issues on a spectrum for nuance and context.
To humanize GE's story, they built a grassroots ambassador program, identifying influencers within the company who could spread their narrative. These volunteers formed geographic teams who shared GE's story of "big-iron passion" while collecting powerful employee narratives-like Mark from GE Research, whose son's cancer treatment used imaging technology he helped develop.
Comstock recognized that people rarely think about the infrastructure that powers modern life-electricity, transportation, healthcare systems. Programs like #GEInstaWalk invited superfans to photograph aviation facilities, while #SpringBreakIt showed materials science in action. These campaigns made manufacturing and science cool again while producing shareable content. An unexpected benefit: these visibility initiatives broke down silos between divisions, creating cross-pollination between appliance engineers, physicians, chemists, and anthropologists.
Digital transformation required managing creative tension between traditional and emerging approaches. Comstock had to balance Judy Hu's traditional ad team against Linda Boff's digital challenger team, who operated with just 15% of the budget. This created inevitable conflicts, but she deliberately allowed productive tension while keeping it in check. They launched GE Reports (one of the first corporate blogs) and pioneered platforms like Instagram and Twitter's Vine, creating a "content factory" that delivered $1.41 of value for every $1 spent.
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Minds, Machines, and Market Share: Leading Digital Transformation
By 2009, Comstock recognized that digital transformation would profoundly impact GE's diverse industries. Having observed at NBC how data was entering homes through gaming consoles, cable boxes, and mobile devices, she sensed the pace of digitization was accelerating.
She began her digital transformation efforts in healthcare, partnering with Jean-Michel Cossery, GE Healthcare's CMO. They assembled a discovery team, meeting with giants like Google and Microsoft alongside startups like PatientsLikeMe. Following the Japanese principle of genchi gembutso ("go and see for yourself"), Comstock immersed herself in markets like Saudi Arabia where they created breakthrough solutions like mobile mammography vans.
The data revealed shocking statistics: globally, fifteen million years of "healthy life" were lost to breast cancer in 2008. Working with VG Govindarajan, they realized their products weren't aligned to emerging regions-they were too high-end or impractical for local conditions. By immersing themselves in these markets, they created innovations like the Mac I, a $500 portable EKG machine for rural India that ran on batteries-a dramatic improvement over their $50,000 standard model.
Despite initial resistance from GE leadership, Comstock persistently advocated for digital transformation through what she calls "rolling thunder"-the gradual announcement of something new until it's too loud to ignore. When her presentations about digital consumer healthcare were dismissed as "cartoons" by Jeff and sales leaders, she brought in outside experts like Aaron Dignan to translate digital concepts.
The breakthrough came in late 2011 during a meeting when Steve Liguori coined the term "Industrial Internet" to describe their approach-not selling to consumers or marketing enterprise software, but capturing data from machines to give customers better insights about performance. To demonstrate value, they developed the "power of 1%" concept, showing how small digital improvements could yield massive savings: 1% fuel savings in aviation would save $30 billion over fifteen years.
Their storytelling breakthrough came with the "Owen" ad campaign featuring a nerdy college graduate explaining to disappointed friends that rather than joining their app company making cat GIFs, he was going to "transform the world" at GE by writing code for industrial machines. The ads resonated immediately-visits to GE's recruitment site jumped 66% within a month, and they successfully hired thousands of coders from tech giants like Google and Apple.
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Creating a New OS: Opening Up to External Innovation
The digital era demands openness-a shift from hierarchies to networks, from centralized control to decentralized platforms. Around 2007, this new ethos began delivering unprecedented growth for companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google, who orchestrated ecosystems of buyers, sellers, and even competitors to create value at scale.
This represented a fundamental clash between Old Power and New Power approaches. Old Power, which GE embodied, functioned like cash-something to hoard. Partnerships meant control (always seeking 51% ownership), and proprietary knowledge was fiercely guarded. New Power, as authors Heimans and Timms described, is "open, participatory and peer driven... most forceful when it surges."
Comstock staged this power clash deliberately at GE's 2013 Global Leadership Meeting, bringing three New Power players-Ben Kaufman of crowdsourced invention company Quirky, entrepreneur David Kidder, and VC investor Phin Barnes-before 700 traditional GE executives. The cultural disconnect was immediate. When David boldly questioned why GE wasn't launching $50 million companies despite its resources, the room fell silent.
The challenge wasn't choosing between old and new approaches, but becoming "bilingual"-blending openness with structured accountability to create what Comstock called "emergent leaders" and "adaptive organizations."
GE's first major step toward open innovation was the Ecomagination Challenge, committing $200 million with VC partners to fund clean-energy innovations submitted by outside inventors. The response was overwhelming-over 4,000 ideas from 150 countries. They invested $140 million in 23 startups, though they struggled with how to handle many good ideas that didn't fit traditional investment criteria.
Comstock's journey with Quirky began when she was introduced to Ben Kaufman's crowdsourced invention company. They partnered to open up two hundred GE patents to Quirky's community, and later expanded to connected products, promising six devices by Christmas for Home Depot. Some products, like Pivot Power Genius and Spotter sensors, were hugely popular, while others like the Egg Minder flopped spectacularly.
Despite wanting Quirky's start-up DNA inside GE, Comstock couldn't force anyone to embrace change-they had to find their own path. Tensions with Ben worsened when he rejected GE's advertising advice and spent all $10 million of their committed media budget at once. Despite friction, Quirky delivered innovation-their Link Bulb was ready in five months after GE had struggled for five years with connected lighting.
When SoftBank offered to double Quirky's valuation, Comstock felt validated. Then everything collapsed. GE decided to sell Appliances to Electrolux, devastating Ben who had dreamed of running it. Financial problems emerged at Quirky, and when the Wink software broke due to a programming error, potential buyers backed away. Despite efforts to save it, Quirky declared bankruptcy.
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Illuminating the Darkness: Becoming an Emergent Leader
GE's Nela Park campus in East Cleveland symbolized both the company's glorious past and its uncertain future. Inside, Norman Rockwell paintings celebrated light's cultural significance, while hundred-year-old tungsten bulbs from time capsules still flickered to life. Yet this symbolic heart of GE's industrial heritage bordered one of Ohio's most destitute areas.
Over decades, GE had replaced innovation with optimization-layoffs, spin-offs, outsourcing, Six Sigma-all delivering incredible short-term gains without changing long-term earning potential. As competition increased in the lighting industry, GE lost pricing power and adopted a costly fast-follow strategy. Managers focused on "kicking the can"-squeezing every penny from the business while postponing tough investment challenges.
Yet amid this darkness, Comstock discovered a flickering ray of hope. In the 1990s, a small rebel team moved outside Nela Park, creating a stealth skunk works that kept LED innovation alive despite corporate pressure. This scrappy team operated on small budgets, failed fast, and developed innovative products while carving out new markets.
To accelerate innovation across GE, Comstock brought in Eric Ries shortly before he published "The Lean Startup." After meeting Eric at his book launch, she invited him to help evolve GE's innovation DNA despite his initial skepticism about whether GE had the patience for startups.
In August 2012, Eric challenged the Series X diesel engine team's assumptions about their business plan with simple questions: "What do we actually know versus what have we guessed?" When he suggested creating a "minimally viable product," the room erupted with mockery. Yet by simplifying the problem-focusing on power generation for a single customer rather than multiple contexts-the timeline collapsed from five years to just six months.
This breakthrough moment culminated when research chief Mark Little declared, "I get it now. I am the problem," recognizing that GE leaders needed to embrace unlearning and renewal to move faster and get closer to customers.
They launched FastWorks company-wide to tackle bureaucracy and inward focus. Early success stories emerged across diverse teams: Terri Bresenham in Healthcare developed low-cost baby warmers for India by starting with customer needs rather than existing products; Legal teams reduced 200-page contracts to just 5 pages; and Mike Mahan's underground Monogram refrigerator team created a French-door model through 18 iterations despite initial rejection from leadership.
To govern innovation properly, they implemented growth boards that pooled resources across budgets, people, and capabilities to scale the best ideas fastest. They created a network of coaches within each business unit-sometimes passionate insiders, sometimes outside entrepreneurs. Because these coaches came from within the units, employees felt ownership: "This is ours."
In the first year alone, eighty coaches trained for nearly one hundred global FastWorks projects, exposing almost one thousand executives to the methodology. Eventually, this grew to four hundred coaches and one thousand projects until it simply became "the way we worked."
In a pivotal moment after facing Jeff's criticism about Current's shortfall, Comstock delivered an unusually candid leadership talk at Crotonville. Drawing a "captcha" box on the whiteboard, she challenged new managers to examine whether they'd become corporate robots. She shared how organizations were designed to treat workers as compliant cogs, but today's challenges demand our human qualities-creativity, independence, and adaptability.
She urged them to grab their own permission rather than waiting for empowerment, to embrace the messy human process of imagining new paths forward, and to become ambidextrous leaders who can optimize today while planting seeds for tomorrow. She concluded with five principles: explore beyond your comfort zone, develop vision and mission, experiment with fast and survivable failures, share openly to create robust feedback loops, and be an emergent leader who helps create an adaptive organization in constant reinvention.
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The Future Belongs to the Adaptable
Leaving GE in late 2017, six months after Jeff Immelt's departure, marked the end of Comstock's 27-year journey with the company. Those 16 years since becoming an officer felt like "112 in dog years" as they navigated through historic technological and economic shifts. They had accomplished much-$90 billion in portfolio changes, greater global reach, and forging GE's digital path, especially in 3D printing metals which could transform manufacturing.
But it wasn't enough; they weren't fast enough. With Jeff's departure, there was no victory lap. An activist investor amplified pressure for short-term wins while GE struggled with underperforming energy businesses and the massive Alstom acquisition. John Flannery, the new CEO, brought a back-to-basics approach, selling Current and spinning off Healthcare. GE even fell off the Dow Jones Industrial Index.
Despite these setbacks, Comstock still believes in innovative legacy companies whose products improve the world. This is a call for emergent leaders who create their own reset moments and move swiftly. Even change-makers must change-she stayed longer than she should have, but she believed in fighting for a better future.
The world will never be slower than today, change is everyone's job, and the future belongs to those with courage and adaptable minds. We must get comfortable with not knowing, with living in the in-between of what was and what will be. In the end, imagination isn't just about creativity-it's about having the courage to bring new possibilities into reality, especially when others don't yet see them.
