Not gonna lie – when Beth Comstock kindly sent me a copy of her book and asked me what I thought, I was very nervous.
Full disclosure, it was an incredible experience being a part of Beth’s Global Brand Marketing team. I worked on a few projects where she was the key stakeholder; I drove the naming and brand development for Current, powered by GE. I led the design of the new offices when GE moved from 30 Rock to Madison Ave, (with Lorna Montalvo and Tim Cheng). And she gave me one of the more insightful exit interviews when I left GE, but this is not the type of ask I would expect to get.
I don’t want to bury the lede, Imagine It Forward is a great book with engaging stories and smart strategies that can be implemented immediately. Buy it. It will share good company on your shelf next to Kim Scott, Dan Pink, Susan Cain, and Adam Grant.
There will be a lot of people who will be talking about this book. It does a great job in compressing years into chapters while distilling the insights. The value that I can add is looking at this book through the lens of design leadership and share my takeaways.
1. Being The Outsider Has Strong Advantages
The book is very personal. Beth talks about the good, the bad, and the tough lessons learned. It’s refreshing to see an executive leader be vulnerable and talk about being the outsider on the inside of the company and all of the challenges that entail. I think that design leaders often feel like the “outsider inside” and struggle with how to be authentic to ourselves.
She talks about how to leverage that outsider-ness to your advantage and how authentic leadership goes a long way in infusing innovation into a culture, driving big-swinging corporate changes, building resiliency, and growing as a leader. I appreciate her point of view on building bridges- not walls, making the work the North Star, building social capital, and understanding the language and values of the company in order to get things done.
2. Develop The Strategies That Work For You
Develop the leadership strategies that are personal for you and play to your strengths
Beth has some personal strategies throughout the chapters about thriving as a leader. I found these to be pure gold. They are short, insightful, tactical, and practical methods for dealing with the work challenges that all creative leaders face.
Similar to Kim Scott’s GSD Wheel or Dan Pink’s strategies for timing, Beth shares a few pages from, what seems like, her personal playbook on being a Change-Maker. Some of the ones I found immense value in were: Job Crafting, Introvert Advantages, Keeping Good Ideas Alive, Scenario Planning For Challenges, Managing Difficult Personalities, and Brand Storytelling. I wish there were more and I candidly hope there is a follow-up book at some point.
3. Creative Thinkers Are A Spark To Drive Business Value
My early experiences at GE were interesting in that when I was hired, I was the only formally trained designer on the team. I knew more about UX than P&L statements. I have an MFA in Design and Brand rather than an MBA in Finance or Risk Management. I can navigate the business conversations well, but my way of thinking and how I approached problems was just very different.
Beth’s case studies make a proof-positive argument for working with people who add a spark to the organization. Divergent thinkers, healthy tension, diverse teams, and stepping outside of your comfort zone have a tremendous power to drive business growth. Her stories about developing Hulu, incubating Challenger Brands, and giving rise to the first in-house content factory are great blueprints. Creative leaders have the innate content-creating, human-centered, figure-it-out-ness that business need.
4. Make It Real
Later in the book, Beth talks about Eric Rees and how she brought a Lean Start-Up mentality to GE. This part reminded me of every story where a design leader introduced Design Thinking to a conference room of frustrated faces. Myself included. When it comes to introducing a new way of thinking, Making It Real is where most people fail.
She presents a deceptively simple and profoundly successful approach which I wish more creative leaders would embrace; Not getting angry at the resistance. Breaking down the complexity into digestible concepts. Providing the right framework for rethinking assumptions. Testing minimal viable products to get real things in the hands of real users as soon as possible. Testing, verifying, and iterating. And most importantly, inviting the business leaders into the process while having them owning it and work through it.
The value in looking at problems from a new perspective and Making It Real allows for businesses to be more adaptable, streamlined, productive, and faster to market.
5. Design Your Career
The thing that I appreciated most about this book is the theme of crafting your career trajectory and owning your life. There are plenty of times throughout Imagine It Forward where she could have taken the easy way, not have the difficult conversation, deliver the average outcome, or do what was expected. She continually made active decisions to go against the status quo, drive for more, do something different, and design the career she wanted.
We are living in a world that is more complicated than it’s ever been and being a leader in that world is challenging as all hell. I talk to a lot of design leaders and this comes up in conversations pretty regularly. I believe that your success is 100% your choice. Beth offers a good summation towards the end. “You can either open yourself up and respond to the challenges creatively, using your imagination to conjure something that doesn’t exist” or you can you can deliver the same old, same old every day. The best leaders I know, the real change-makers, believe that tomorrow will be better than today and work tirelessly to make it happen for themselves.