Beth Comstock with Tahl Raz, Imagine it Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change, London: Penguin Random House, 2018.
Imagine it Forward is Beth Comstock's sizable corporate memoirs, narrating her journey from public relations at NBC to Vice Chair of General Electric.
The book is organised in five sections (see page xxiii):
Section I: Self-Permission. Every ‘change-maker’ has to give themselves permission to depart from expectations and limitations.
Section II: Discovery. To make changes, you must be curious, ‘turning the world into a classroom for learning’.
Section III: Agitated Inquiry. Innovation is not about reassurance or consensus, and often encourages confrontation.
Section IV: Storycraft. To innovate in a business, you have to adopt a story that allows people to understand their place in the world.
Section V: Creating a New OS. To change an organisation’s operating system, identify agents of change within the company who will adopt the new story.
Comstock’s story is interspersed with excurses on such topics as: bias for action; job crafting; the introvert’s advantage; giving yourself permission; the STAR system; how to deal with conflict; inviting in your critics; challenger brands; grieving your failures; creating a feedback loop; writing a press release; mentoring; branded storytelling; emergence; lean startups; how to ask better questions; and, how to organise a growth board.
Throughout, blacked-out pages highlight the ‘gems’ of her experiences in creativity and innovation. Some of these are (passim):
- ‘What we are witnessing is the battle for the future of our businesses.’
- ‘Change is a messy, collaborative, inspiring, difficult, and ongoing process — like everything meaningful that leads to human progress.’
- ‘Who are you waiting for to tell you it’s okay? Your boss? Your mother? Yoda? Grab your own permission. No one is going to give it to you.’
- ‘People who effect radical change have to exhibit an uncompromising faith in experimentation, a bias for novelty and action, and a sense that disruption is something you cause, not observe.’
- ‘Be the outsider inside, translating new ideas for the organization in terms it can understand. Someone who is enough of an insider not to be rejected by the corporation’s natural antibodies.’
- ‘Invite outsiders to help tear down the walls, pave over the moats, and connect the company castle to a diverse flow of ideas and people.’
- ‘Discovery is about engaging the world as a classroom, to extract the ideas that will create the future.’
- ‘Bring in a spark, an outsider who challenges the team to think differently. Be the spark!’
- ‘Look at what isn’t happening and imagine what could.’
- ‘To get an edge on the future, you have to be willing to go weird.’
- ’Try brailling the culture. Use all your senses to recognize patterns that you don’t yet see.’
- ‘To be innovative, you have to learn to be comfortable with some level of “maybe.”’
- ‘To be a change-maker, think mindshare before marketshare.’
- ‘Most of us are adverse to conflict. But conflict is the primary engine of creativity and innovation.’
- ‘As the Dalai Lama once told me, your enemy is your best teacher.’
- ‘Learn to listen and trust your doubts. And don’t be afraid to express them to others.’
- ‘When you are innovating, tension is the price of admission.’
- ‘Change is not a single act or initiative. It is an ever-evolving dynamic in which you prod and seed the environment with a range of friction-causing catalysts.’
- ‘Don’t be afraid to go beyond what you are authorized to do when you are changing the way things are done.’
- ‘We can’t make uncertainty go away. But we can change the way we react to it. Every uncertainty is a new potential future.’
- ‘Strategy is a story well told.’
- ‘Getting people to adopt a new way of doing things, mobilizing them around a new story, is the hard stuff of innovation.’
- ‘Act boldly on instinct; do not wait for the data to tell you what to do. You have to respect the data but love imagination more.’
- ‘Necessity may be the mother of invention, but I’ve found irritation works pretty well, too.’
- ‘In change, people have to find their own path. You can’t mandate how that happens. But you can create the right conditions.’
- ‘Emergent change seems impossible until it happens, at which point it becomes inevitable.’
- ‘The pace of change is never going to be slower than it is today.’
- ‘You don’t just live a life; you blunder your way toward creating one you love.’
- ‘If failure is not an option, then neither is success.’
- ‘You have to believe in two things: (1) tomorrow can be better than today, and (2) you have the power to make it so.’
- ‘Get comfortable with not knowing, with living in the in-between of what was and what will be.’
To visit Beth Comstock’s website, follow this link.