Beth Comstock on innovation and why we have to fight for difference

Beth Comstock spent nearly 30 years at General Electric and NBC Universal as Chief Marketing Officer, disrupting the status quo in these two intertwined corporations. During her tenure, she championed GE’s transformation into clean energy and spearheaded the creation of Hulu long before ‘’video streaming’’ became a household term. Last year, Comstock retired as Vice Chair of GE and has written a new book on innovation called Imagine It Forward. Here are key insights from my interview with Comstock.    Q:  Ã‚   You worked on this book for about four years. Why was it so important for you to get these ideas on paper and in a book? Comstock: For a couple of reasons. One, I wanted to chronicle the change maker and innovator’s path in an organization. There’s a lot of struggle and hard work and some joy that comes with it. I felt it was necessary to chronicle it. There are a lot of books about change but few from the practitioner’s perspective. The second reason is in the course of my career, I saw people in mid and early career who were looking for some encouragement and lessons learned. Some way to say ‘Keep going’ or ‘Can I try this a different way?’ Given my range of experience, I thought I might have some insight and encouragement to offer. Gatekeepers in organizations are the ones who don’t like new ideas. They don’t like imaginative thinking. Q: There’s often a certain thickness of bureaucracy in corporations. You make a distinction between Goalkeepers vs Gatekeepers. Can you flesh out what that tension is and what your advice is to someone trying to get past the gatekeeper? Comstock: Gatekeepers in organizations are the ones who don’t like new ideas. They don’t like imaginative thinking. Sometimes they’re afraid of change; they hang on to what little control they have. They’re the ones who are constantly saying, â€Å"No you can’t do that.† So I learned, in the course of my career, that gatekeepers could define me or I could find a way to work around that. I had to develop a bit of resilience and persistence that when I hear ‘No’ the first time, I take it as an invitation to say ‘Not yet.’ So to me, it was a bit of a challenge to say ‘No is Not Yet.’ Let me come back again and see if there’s a different way to try it. Could I take some feedback and refine my idea? Or bring more people with me who had a similar point of view?