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I'm Mike you same and I'm here with McCool Ponyo the editor in chief of knowledge at Wharton and we're going to
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be speaking with Beth Comstock who has a new book out it's got a great title he
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imagined it forward courage creativity and the power of change and Beth had many senior roles at General Electric
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before she then wrote this book including vice chair of the board of directors so Beth great to have you here
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today thanks it's great to be here thank you gotta begin on maybe a more personal
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note here just get us going on why you came into GE what what attracted you and then far side of that I think you had an
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offer from one Steve Jobs to leave GE and why did you take a pass on that and let's go into GE another yeah yeah so I
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am I was at NBC thinking my future was going to be in median I got I got had been exposed to Jack Welch because we
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had done a lot of things like the the announcement of Microsoft where I got to work with Jack Welch and Bill Gates it
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was a pretty good introduction to him and I got a call one day saying hey come up and see me I went up to see him in
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the office at GE and at NBC and he said I'd like you to come and work at GE and
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he was in the early stages of his succession and was looking for someone to come in and lead communications and
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advertising and he said I'd like you to do it and it was the farthest thing from
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my mind I did not imagine my future at GE and I don't really know why I said he
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has to be honest because one I'd say Jack's a pretty persuasive makes a pretty persuasive offer but I was
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curious about GE it was a big platform it was a big company it was a way for me to learn and see you know kind of see a
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side of business that I hadn't seen through media so I was just incredibly intrigued and curious at the time Jack
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wasn't the Jack Welch he became but it was it was an amazing time it seemed like it would be an amazing time in the
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company and the transition that was ahead and then I ended up having a great run and a great career there and midway
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through I went to GE Jack Reed retired Jeff Immelt took over and they shipped me back to NBC and at that time was a
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pretty tough job the digitisation of media was happening and I got to know the team at Apple I we were working with
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them on some digital deal and they approached me about a job and one day I picked up my phone it was like
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hey it's Steve Jobs I know you've been talking to the team I'd like you to come
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and work here you know sort of raining in the raining it in at the end and I had said no to the job it wasn't the
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right job for me and then a few months later he called me again and said hey there's this other job I was thinking
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about could you come out and we talked about it and I did and I made it really intriguing at the same time it just
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didn't seem like the right job for me and so I ultimately called him up and said no and I put it in the book because
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it's one of those moments where I knew I had a good reason for saying no the
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strategy was sound but I did regret it at times he went on and Apple went on to be this incredible company I sort of
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regretted the chance not to make myself better and of course I regretted those stock options that I never thought were
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gonna go anywhere or at least we're never gonna go as big as they've gone so
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sort of coin a phrase instead of buyer's remorse we had decliners remorse yeah
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well it was it was a mixed bag because I had all the reason to leave at that time
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because I was in a tough spot at NBC it was a really tough job but it just didn't seem like the right thing for me
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so I knew that but there's also that those moments of those paths you take in
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your career could've should've would've and I frequently went back to that
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especially when you know they had a tough time or the Apple stock did really well you're like what what what was that
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so but I again I'd come back to say that wasn't the job that I really wanted to
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take Thank You Annette Beth let's get to the heart of the book which is the challenge of changing anything
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especially for a century-old company an icon a Thomas Edison got it going many years ago it had an incredible run under
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Jack Welsh and when a company has a good run people are thinking we've got a
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great model don't foul it up don't tell us to change anything as we are doing
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extremely well now and you write a length about the challenges of working with that kind of mindset that culture
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to become more innovative more adaptive more digital so just walk through a couple of the challenges that you face
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and it will talk about the the motors of change but let's talk about the barriers
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you ran into well I mean for one when I came into GE the performance culture was incredibly
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strong and you know you need performance in any company and that was very strong
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I came in on the height of the sort of Six Sigma revolution that had really transformed the quality the the focus
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everybody in GE had to do Six Sigma I remember joining it at NBC going what why are we doing this but everybody had
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to be immersed just remind us Six Sigma Six Sigma was a quality program that basically was about eradicating defects
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in the manufacturing process it became a bit of a management creed at GE at the time and it had a lot of good with it
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but I came into G as I was starting to grow in GE Jeff ml took over the world was changing dramatically it was just
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after 9/11 happened growth was somewhat elusive in the future and you had to go much more globally to find it you had to
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go into new markets and so in many ways the growth that had to happen was was in
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areas we weren't that strong where the old management principles of be number
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one or to do it with precision no longer worked in an area where maybe it best should be number six in a market if you
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wanted to enter it and so it was a time of kind of a renewed effort to grow from
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within to be much more global and and I was just at that time when the sort of what got you there wasn't necessarily
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what was going to get you ahead the problem we've always got is the breaking
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the egg problem we got to sort of break the egg then to cook the egg and how did
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you go about making the case that we've got to go we got to be more market focused for example we've got to be more
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digital yeah GE I think everybody knows now is into 3d 3d printing plate awhile for that to come in so just talk about
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the the levers you use to get people to think about becoming more adaptive more focused on the market you know I think a
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lot of it started with vision I mean Jeff Immelt had had taken over a CEO and he was very much I think really as a CEO
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tried to continue the core operations but also make room for the future and encourage people like me and the people
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really this market back thinking I mean his vision was to come in we're going to
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grow by being global new technology getting closer to customer and so from a marketing perspective he resurrected
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mark I was the first chief marketing officer in 20 years it was about market back
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innovation it became that it was about seeing where change was happening it was about going and understanding what
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problem are we trying to solve in the market and so that was the journey that we went on and when you when you say
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that marketing is about living in the market suddenly you start to see the trends you see the patterns you see
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where clean tech is emerging you see customers that want it from there you see the digitization of media and the
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digitisation of media leads you to the digitization of industry so I think that was the fundamental shift that I was
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part of was that ability to kind of get outside the company open it up to partners to new ways of - new ways of
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seeing the world so here's a thesis implicit in what you've said you write
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in the book that having worked with Jack wells she didn't ask a whole lot of
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questions because he quote knew the answers person who was very confident about where he was going I infer though
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from what you've said that Jeff Immelt was a question asker number one number
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two the driver for change you were at the the tip of that spear but you did have level a top level support coming
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from the office of the CEO what do you think I mean and Jeff drove a lot of that absolutely championship from Jeff
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for kind of fighting for the future he believed in that he put people like me in that role I'd say Jeff was somewhat
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conflicted I mean again if you're a leader of a company you have to do both of those things right the core
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performance engine the quarterly earnings the the reliability that you've somewhat vetted over a business model
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and incubate and push for the new and so in some ways I think even Jeff as a leader was somewhat had to sort of
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balance that tension in his own head and so yes he did ask new kinds of questions
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but he also grew up in GE and had a lot of confidence in the systems he knew and
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I think all of us did that was some of the challenges we were trying to overcome I'll give you an example when
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we were in the clean tech space and trying to grow a new model of energy storage it was quite easy to say oh I
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know what you know from a lot of people this is exactly like how we used to run plastics so let's build a big factory
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build it and they will come it turned out to not be the right thing to do in the clean tech space what ended up would
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have been better for us would to have a small test and learn Factory get a good customer model validate the
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business model and then scale from there we learn but that's the some of the
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tension that happens in companies you take that this is what I knew in the past and you try to apply it to saying
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this is exactly the way we're gonna make the future and it didn't work we had to
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write that business off Beth you've got a five factor framework for thinking
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about change and I like the wording on one in particular like the word in and all five but one in particular of the
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five caught my attention and you talk about agitated inquiry so just to bring that to life may be an example if I'm
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running the division that creates or manufactures and sells medical equipment and you come to me and you say look Mike
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you got to get more into agitated inquiry what does that mean well I think it's it's two things it's it's really
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about getting a heated debate and discussion going so the inquiry part and the agitate it is it's conflict right
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you don't you don't always like people asking you what problem you're trying to
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solve tell me something I don't want to hear what's wrong with this let's beat
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this up so it's this deliberate process of bringing in sparks from the outside
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who provoke and challenge and say you know too much you're not open to learn
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something new in the case of clean tech a lot of people thought centralized energy generation from fossil fuels was
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the only way the future was going to unfold we needed provocateurs from the outside to say no wind solar storage
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these things are taking off here's why so that's a bit of the agitated inquiry
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you need to create what I call challenger brands these are people that challenge the status quo I mean a lot of
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people call it challenger brands but I like that idea we did that at NBC with Hulu the ability
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to say we're gonna bring a young turk in Jason Kilar to seed and start hulu and
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challenge the traditional way of doing television that is agitated inquiry no one liked it except maybe Jason and
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those of us who are trying to seat it who spend a couple hours at Croton Ville the site of the famous training facility
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for GE goes back many many years and has been a model for years for other companies on leadership and management
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development and there's issue in particular inquiry if we go there you've got a
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session on that for people haven't encountered that phrase before how would you get that across to people who are
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gonna be kind of constitutionally skeptical yeah so how do you teach it I guess that's the question yes well the
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first thing I would do is I would I would set up kind of a debate I'd go back to high school debate team
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we called it red team blue team it's you know been documented out of military
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practices we adopted that I think this idea of just you're gonna take the pro
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side you're gonna take the con side and we're gonna you're going to do your
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research and often assigning people who had a point of view to take the opposite
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point of view we're going to facilitate that agitation we're gonna beat up the
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idea out of it's going to come some scenarios oh ha ha optimistic I'd posit a medium and a
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negative and we're gonna kind of debate those a bit so you're creating a
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facilitated way for debate I think the second thing is you'd ask people to ask
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different questions especially in the early stages of an idea you can't ask when are you going to be
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profitable you don't know what's your hypothesis that's a good starting point
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what are you going to when you're going to know if it's proved so you're
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teaching people to ask different questions you're teaching people to allocate budgets differently so they can
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carve off money to test and learn and experiment and make room to do some of these challenge efforts so I think those
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are the things you would teach in a class and you'd show them examples of where that's happened but to me the best
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thing is to put them in the situation where they have to do it Beth when it comes to good ideas that seemed to work
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really well in one company sometimes there exportable sometimes they are not continuous improvement Toyota mastered
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that many many decades ago companies all of all over the world now have learned how to be a continuous improvement same
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for Six Sigma developed elsewhere but adapted and adopted by GE and has worked very well do you think on this agitated
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inquiry and in their four other pieces for the model that these can be thought about and maybe even applied or accepted
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and would they work well at other let's make it industrial firms but maybe beyond industrial firms as well yeah the
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fact that you're raising and I actually think that we do too much of that in
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business where we take a framework that's worked at some other company and try to apply it exactly so
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came up with a framework as a prompt as a series of prompts to say here's some
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questions to ask yourself here's some ways to challenge your mindset but you
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have to adapt it to the way you work and we did that and I a lot of work I spend
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on what we called fast words which was adapting agile Lean Startup to make the company more at more more fast more
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nimble more adaptable you have to make it work for you I think you have to use these as prompts it's about critical
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thinking right it's about using your own judgment to say this is going to work
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for us or not I really caution against taking a blueprint that maybe worked at Nike and
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saying it's going to work for you because it's a very different company the context is very different one more
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question on the five-factor model your fourth factor is story craft I like the phrase tell us how we would exercise
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story craft yeah well I think story is too often what business people think we do at the end to me it's where you start
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story is your strategy strategy is your story it is can you tell your vision your vision where are we going and why
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why is it relevant and I think that's it that's the simple message and too often
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we start with illogical outcomes the financial outcome and we forget that there's an emotional piece of it there's
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an imagination piece that's about the vision and it's sort of weaving those
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pieces together to say where are we going why does it matter to me what's the the promise and outcome I'm going to
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get where are you coming from so that I have credibility that you're going to be
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able to do what you're saying and I think anyone can master the art of story
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it's kind of what makes us human but we don't invest enough in it so I'm trying
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to make a case for here's some here's some practices you can develop simple
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questions maybe just start a challenge people to say what's your story at an
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individual level someone gets on an elevator with you Mike a student and you go what's your story
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they probably freeze right because we don't ask people that often enough they're like your optimism about the
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human condition if we think about storytelling or agitated questioning we become better at that and now to turn
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that back on you and the account in the book which is that many points very personal you describe yourself in your
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earlier zazz an introvert and in particular just to pick up on one moment you were called just to bring out
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another facet you were called into Jeff Immelt office the chief executive and he said
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Beth I want you to be more confident you are no longer the introvert if you ever
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were you're probably much more confident in the way you work with the managers
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how did you become less introvert --is-- and more confident in that public sense
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well I think confidence comes after kind of experience for sure the more the more
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I frankly the more you try things and realize you can you can actually do this so it was a continual series of just
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trying things and seeing what worked and didn't builds confidence and for me I'm
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still an introvert to me it's that a sense of just needing to conserve energy
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but I also was somewhat reserved and shy and I realized that was standing in my way I wasn't the one putting the ideas
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out forcefully I wasn't asking questions I missed opportunities to connect with
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people and I realized it was getting in my way so while introversion might be good I
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might be a good observer and listener it was also holding me back so I had to fix
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that I gave myself a series of small challenges really behavior shifts it's about I mean here in the land of Adam
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grant this the master behavior science but I think it's that kind of mindset
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shift give yourself the shift of mindset to just say I'm going to take small
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deliberate steps to make that happen and that's what I had to do just say I'm
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going to ask a question here I'm gonna go in and I'm going to participate in
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this meeting I'm gonna go meet somebody at this event a networking event and so
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when Jeff said you need to be more confident I wasn't I wasn't showing up
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enough I had to adapt that I then had to next time show up in a meeting and make
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sure I had prepared a question that I was able to challenge somebody who had a perspective that I might have a point of
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view on and do it with my strengths I wasn't going to go in and like rally about about gap accounting because I
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didn't have expertise in gap accounting but I knew insights I knew where the
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market was going I knew the customer so I'd have to come back and have that point of view that's that's kind of
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builds confidence because you say okay I know these things I can bring that forward but the final question on this
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terrain before we move into a different direction how do you know when you achieved what you wanted to achieve
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and pushing a company to be more market-driven or more outside in or more innovative or more digital what would be
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a typical metric to know if operation of division an office had moved in the right direction well I think customer
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satisfaction would have been one I think sheriff wallet would have been another one where you're seeing same customers
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buy more from you because you're able to adapt and offer applications or products
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that they previously didn't know you understood that they wanted I think as we got more into innovation new revenue
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from new sources would have been things who would have asked for I think I think
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just the the quicker speed to adoption of new products meant that they were simpler to use the user experience was
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more clearly defined I think just growth from new markets is another metric that
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you were actually able to not just define a market opportunity but start to recognize it Beth let's think about the
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company historically you go back to Thomas Edison you're your founding inventor and over the years GE has not
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had a whole lot of the hundred years plus have not had a whole lot of chief executives the famous Jack Welsh was in
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office for 20 years his successor Jeff Immelt I believe it was 17 years though recently you brought in a new person
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John flirty and he I think was there for less than 14 months going back to your phrase what got you here won't
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necessarily get you there just to pick up now and the McCool's gonna come in on
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this as well what do you think has helped derail the the innovativeness and the success in the market that Jeff Jack
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Wilshere was there I think the CEO of the decade at one point the century story it was the century guarantee CEO
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of the century how about that so that got him there but these successors have had more of a struggles so what's going
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on do you think well I guess I first I'd say I've worked at GM most of my career
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it's a really good company and they are innovating if I could take you today to
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Cincinnati Ohio where they're inventing the future of manufacturing in the aviation business through 3d printing
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and metals they're totally transforming not just aviation but manufacturing the digitisation of Industry is
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happening the clean energy revolution not all of them have scaled fast enough big enough still questions about it so I
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think I would say there is still innovation alive there but I think you're seeing business at a crossroads
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through a lot of the the GE story in some ways I mean G had a big run up in scale complexity and trying to come up
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with new models and globalize the company from a market perspective figure out new models at work obviously
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conglomerates had fallen out of favor the need to reset and kind of shift gears with GE Capital all that created a
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lot of complexity and so I think that's what you've seen and some certainly the
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the stock market reaction some of the the challenge is just the depth of complexity and so any later today and
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big companies like that has to know how to navigate complexity and I I'm I think
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it was perhaps even more complex and insiders and Outsiders appreciated about the company so I'd like to come back to
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what you just said it stock market in a bit but was very fascinated by what you were saying about Jack Welch and also
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Jeff Ament yeah since you've worked with both of them I wonder if you could speak to some
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what was some of the differences between the two as leaders yeah and and how did
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you view their strengths and weaknesses yeah it's I appreciate that question a
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lot I mean Jack was incredibly you know bold Jeff was bold they were both bold in in different ways obviously Jack
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really used financial services as a way to scale the company up and and that was
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a model that worked until it didn't the financial crisis called that into question jack was a really he really
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believed in the investment in people seeded a lot of the people development at GE was very intense and focused but
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he was at the time think of the company at the time it was a very hierarchical leadership it was very much command and
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control because that's the the business world we lived in at the time Jeff Immelt comes in really overnight 9/11
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happened and sort of called into question a lot about the global nature of the world and I think Jeff was a much
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more market focus customer focused CEO much more distributed in how he saw the networks and partnerships off shot
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opportunities and I think needed a more distributed leadership team to be able to do some of that but maybe the
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conglomerate structure was made it more difficult to do to do that but both bold
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both invested in people but did it in very very different ways now you referred to earlier the stock
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performance and that that may be one difference also that has been reported about in the media I remember there was
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a story in Fortune sometime ago that talked about the fact that if you look at the performance of the GE stock
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during the 20 years that Jack Welch was the CEO the stock went up by about 2700 times and at a time when the SNP 500
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went up 700 times and if you were to take the you know 17 years of Jeff Emilie's tenure as CEO the stock
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actually went down 30% and so I wonder what some of the decisions that you as part of the
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leadership team made that led to GE losing about a hundred and fifty billion dollars in in market capitalization
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during the second phase yeah well I think I mean I think if you were to take that arc and look back I think the the
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run-up that you talked about in the Welch era only happened in the last part of his tenure as well right there was a
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lot of volatility very early in his in his run you look even back into the 70s very flat GE performance so I think in
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the arc of a company you can't just look at one period of time I don't know you
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could you you guys are the Business School folk experts I mean there was a huge run-up to scale is it possible to
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keep growing company's growth on growth like that forever and so I think as I
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said earlier I think some of the issues with GE conglomerate model that perhaps fell out of favor looking at GE Capital
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in a world that maybe that was not a competitive advantage anymore those things had to be cleaned up I asked a
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broader question as I think about it from a business perspective do businesses at a certain
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size scaled do they get reset moments could she have had a bigger reset moment maybe they're having one now that's
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overdue would the public markets have let GE have a reset moment should the leadership have taken a reset moment to
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me I asked more of those kind of questions I certainly know in the generation of GE that I was part of it
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was definitely a vigorous approach to grow to find new growth to return to kind of some of the core basics of
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making manufacturing high focus technology to really simplify the the portfolio that was seemingly what was
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needed at the time history I guess will judge if those are the right things yes I've got a quick
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question on that before we leave it you mentioned that the era that conglomerate
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is is over and we'll see where it were it's going on net but two of the arguments that GE historically made
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about the value of the diversified set of companies who are under the same umbrella is number one it was a
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leadership engine that could create talent the way that others couldn't and it could assign talent across those
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divisions it was like an internal labor market that was very well defined it very well controlled
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number two divisions or companies however you want to label the separate profit and loss centers sometimes in
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very different industries would sometimes share their research their ideas or scientific innovations do you
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think that in the first two decades of this century that both of those became less of a competitive advantage that
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help define the Jack Welch era but in the reverse sense kind of undermine the Jeff a meld era yeah what do you think
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well I certainly think the the scale and complexity made the the Jeff ml era challenging but I I'm always always a
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big fan of the centralized Rd in a focused way I mean III actually if anything I think maybe we could have
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done more to tell the value of that from an investor perspective because I saw it
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firsthand what would happen take 3d printing that we talked about earlier the ability to seed it in an aviation
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business and then move to power and move it to a rail business it really was quite profound and the
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speed and the the capabilities really really did create a competitive advantage I saw it I know it I believe
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it it was the same on the market innovation I led I think to the to the other point about the the leadership
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Factory I think that works if the businesses are always going to be this run the same way but suddenly you're in
00:27:05
a world where growth is in a different way you're in different growth markets
00:27:09
the growth is not happening from the markets where you were before what are your choices you're going to keep
00:27:14
acquiring the growth which is not a sure thing or you're going to try to grow in
00:27:18
the markets where you already are and it requires a different kind of mindset it's ok to say you're going to be 1 or 2
00:27:24
in a market but what often happens is you narrow the opportunity of that market and to grow you might have to be
00:27:30
number 5 6 4 to get to number 1 and that requires a different kind of management
00:27:36
mindset it's more of a growth leader kind of mindset where you're seeding
00:27:39
things you're making a market you don't have the certainty yet it's more of a
00:27:44
commercial kind of market that is how I would have seen that challenge where maybe you needed different kind of
00:27:51
management capabilities to meet the new challenge of a global marketplace just to pick up on what you said about when
00:27:59
you make acquisitions it's not always a sure thing every one one thing that you
00:28:04
know struck me there's a reference to it in your book as well I mean when you
00:28:08
talk about the energy industry is the 2015 of Alstom you know the French a gas turbine company I think it was acquired
00:28:17
for 10 billion dollars and Jeff Immelt and also John Flannery played a very active role in the acquisition now if
00:28:25
you look back about at what has happened since the acquisition was done I believe
00:28:31
that in October there was a twenty three billion dollar write-off much of it attributable to the Alstom acquisition
00:28:40
there was wondering what are some of the lessons that can be learned to your earlier point that you know acquisitions
00:28:48
are not always a short yeah well I think the the lesson I take away from looking
00:28:52
at the awesome situation I was always so focused on the clean tech piece and I remember in the early days the investors
00:29:00
didn't they had no time for that our ecomagination effort seemed silly or frivolous it seems so small yet 15 years
00:29:07
later why aren't you bigger and solar why aren't you bigger renewable energy
00:29:10
and in fact that's been one of the criticisms and so I think it's just always tension in getting that short in
00:29:17
the long term right and so take you to what to sort of remind everybody what happened the decision was made after the
00:29:23
financial crisis the new regulatory environment that G Capital just that business model no longer worked for GE
00:29:30
get out of GE Capital yet from an investor and from a running the company perspective that created a huge gap to
00:29:37
fill in terms of earnings cash other things that needed to happen so the quick answer to that is to shore
00:29:45
up a installed base of energy products that are going to be more creative in the in the short term and gives a base
00:29:53
while the long term is trying to catch up and gives a base for service and some of the digital things so I think you
00:29:59
could understand why that why that would be made I mean I think the debate for business schools and others would play
00:30:06
that out would you have been better to take that money and invest in digitization and clean tech would you
00:30:12
have been able to would the market have allowed you to do that you know you needed something that was going to be a
00:30:17
creative near-term to earnings so I think put yourself in that CEOs job not everybody in the company thought that
00:30:26
was a good deal but you could also understand why you had to do it right and if you've got if you're Jeff and
00:30:32
you're John Flannery trying to balance the near and the you've got people like
00:30:35
me going yeah more solar yeah but how do I make money doing that right and then you've got just this installed base that
00:30:42
you know how you make money that can buy us some time while we figure this out so
00:30:47
I think you have to put yourself in their shoes so I can understand based on everything you've said why it might have
00:30:52
been so compelling to do it what I'm trying to understand is why didn't work
00:30:56
and what lessons we can learn that I mean I don't I think you're declaring it hasn't worked based on the
00:31:02
point in time right now I I mean they had to write off some of it the valuation wasn't there I haven't been in
00:31:07
the company for so it's hard for me to say what the justification was for the
00:31:11
for the for the write-off but I certainly know they felt the strategy was rationale I would say from
00:31:19
everything I understand from reading again I haven't been in the company is the market dynamic changed much faster
00:31:26
the the rise of solar and some of the other factors have been much faster than a lot of people in traditional energy
00:31:33
business anticipated in some ways I think that's what a lot of us are trying
00:31:37
to rally for you need to be in the market understanding and adapting to the pace of change so some of those models
00:31:44
perhaps might have allowed for longer term for these things to play out and yet the nature and pace of change is
00:31:51
faster that would be one one answer Beth to begin to bring it to a close Keith John Flannery ran GE for a little more
00:32:01
than a year and now Larry cult who n on the board who would himself earlier run as a CEO of another industrial firm
00:32:09
there was somewhat diversified not unlike GE if Larry called you in and said Beth you've written a whole book on
00:32:16
a topic of how we get change going here at GE what would be just looking back on
00:32:22
your time at GE and what you've said in your book what would be your most hopefully most value-adding advice to
00:32:28
Larry Culp looking forward now and he's looking forward I'm sure and with
00:32:34
enormous pressure to get a write in two months ahead one I actually think it's I think it's
00:32:40
probably a good thing that Outsiders coming in and bring in an outside in perspective I'm a big believer in
00:32:45
bringing outside perspectives and he's been on the board for a few months enough to have a little hint of inside
00:32:50
insight so I think I think bringing that outside perspective is helpful at this time so I would encourage him to keep
00:32:56
that fresh perspective I would encourage him to like also like communit one what's your vision we need to give him a
00:33:02
little bit of time but he's buddy be pretty clear that he has a thesis and a
00:33:05
vision for the company he's got to recognize there are some strengths in the company I mean gee
00:33:11
it's a really good company it still makes things in the world that the world
00:33:14
needs you can't discount that there are good things about the company what's his
00:33:18
plan the future of manufacturing digitization clean tech and then what is the focus on the near-term challenges
00:33:26
the cash that challenges that have to happen GE Capital a lot was sold off but yourself the good stuff first you don't
00:33:34
get you you're left with a lot of things that are harder to sell off so in some
00:33:37
ways the job is hard to clean up the things that needed that are on ongoing part of cleaning up it's not like they
00:33:45
that I mean smart people tried to do that so he's going to have to continue that path of simplification and figuring
00:33:52
out what what's going to make sense so I think he's got to do both things shore
00:33:56
up the now and continue to give us a vision for the future and there's a lot
00:33:59
to work with thank you on that near the end of the book you write that after 27 years of GE
00:34:05
you might have stayed a little bit too long I think many people feel that way about me probably and in that regard
00:34:12
though passing up Apple along the way they're giving a lot of thought to that
00:34:18
what's next building on what you know what you've done what you said in the book yeah well
00:34:23
I am one I've been focused this year and getting the book out I wrote it for a
00:34:27
couple of reasons one anyone to chronicle kind of the innovation evaders journey in a big company it's not easy I
00:34:32
wanted to chronicle the struggle I feel people at mid to early career need some encouragement so I wanted to do that so
00:34:38
I feel like I've accomplished that this year and I'm going to reenter business
00:34:41
in a much different way I'm gonna try to take some advice in my book I'm gonna
00:34:44
get out I'm gonna give myself permission to try new things discover figure out
00:34:48
what my story is probably beat some ideas be beaten up in the process but I I have a I like to begin again so I'm
00:34:54
going to be looking for places where I can come in and kind of start over again in a business context Thank You Annette
00:35:01
Beth Comstock thank you for joining knowledge of Wharton today thank you very much thank you thank you for an
00:35:07
excellent for more insight from knowledge at Wharton please visit knowledge Wharton
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