On risk, corporate culture and the necessity of conflict with Beth Comstock, author and former CMO and vice chair at General Electric.
Beth Comstock’s first book, Imagine it Forward, was published in September 2018. She is a director at Nike, trustee of The National Geographic Society and former board president of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum. She graduated from the College of William and Mary with a degree in biology.
Until December 2017, she spent nearly three decades at GE. As Chief Marketing Officer and then Vice Chair of Innovation, she led efforts to accelerate new growth, develop digital and clean-energy futures, seed new businesses and enhance brand value.
As President of Integrated Media at NBC Universal, she oversaw TV ad revenue and digital media efforts, including the early development of hulu.com. Prior to this, she held a succession of roles at NBC, CBS and CNN/Turner Broadcasting.
Alex: [00:00:00] Beth Comstock's first book, Imagine it Forward, was published in September, 2018. She's a director at Nike, trustee of the National Geographic Society, and former board president of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum. She graduated from the college of William and Mary with a degree in biology.
Until December 2017 she spent nearly three decades at General Electric. As chief marketing officer and then vice chair of innovation, she led efforts to accelerate new growth, develop digital and clean energy futures, seed new businesses and enhance brand value. As president of integrated media at NBC universal, she oversaw TV ad revenue and digital media efforts, including the early development of hulu.com.
Prior to this, she held a succession of roles at NBC, CBS, and CNN/Turner Broadcasting. We talked risk, corporate culture, and the necessity of conflict.
Beth: [00:00:56] Hey, Alex.
Alex: [00:00:57] Hi, Beth. Thank you so much for making the time. This is great.
Beth: [00:01:01] Yeah, sure. Ready to jump in.
Alex: [00:01:02] All right. Let's do it. So, Beth, before we get into the craziness that is your life and all the amazing stuff you've written about, which by the way, to anyone who might be listening we're late to the party, but if you haven't picked up her book please do it's called Imagine it Forward. But before we dive into all that, I think it'd be great to start at the beginning. Right, because there's such an unbelievable contrast with where you started and where you ended up.
Beth: [00:01:26] Yeah, well, I actually grew up in Virginia, but I'm born to parents that grew up in West Virginia. I was born in West Virginia, so that's you know, my heritage. And I grew up in Virginia and a small town in Shenandoah valley and kind of a great place to grow up, very nurturing. Everybody knows your name.
But also, it nurtured in me, just a sense of wanting to explore the world. I wanted to see what else was out there. And so that's what I did and business, became the vehicle for me to do that.
Alex: [00:01:57] And how did you get to business? Because if I'm remembering right, you studied what, biology in college?
Beth: [00:02:03] Right, so I went to William and Mary and I studied biology thinking I was going to go to medical school. And as I was getting closer to that decision, what I realized is I really wanted to be a science journalist. And so kind of made that, that decision worked while I was in college and public radio in Norfolk, Virginia, and then one thing led to another and when I graduated, I said, I'm going to go on a path of being a journalist. Well, I thought there-- TV journalists-- at that there are only two options you either on camera or the camera person. So I went out for a series of crazy interviews and things I was not qualified for, the worst of which was I interviewed for a weather person job in Salisbury, Maryland.
And I couldn't even pronounce the name of the town. I'd never stood in front of a green screen before I knew nothing about weather. Needless to say they were smart. I did not get the job. But I just kind of worked my way through. I worked for a news service covering Virginia politics, and then I went to work in public access cable, and one thing led to another and I ended up at NBC, at this point behind the scenes because I realized I didn't have the confidence to be a front-- an on camera person. I was much better as a behind the scenes person. And the, the role I ended up in at NBC was in the communications . Department. And one thing led to another and before you know it, NBC moved me to New York and then GE bought NBC. And, you know, after a while I ended up getting into GE and marketing and innovation. And it sounds so easy when you look back, but it was not a path. I mean, you're, you're now a third year. You know, what you think you're going to do now? Maybe it will be what you do, but my guess is it'll be a very circuitous route.
And if not, if you can't imagine it or your colleagues can't imagine it just, maybe that's a good exercise. Imagine where, you know, it'd be the craziest thing. What craziest path you might take. I didn't do that. I certainly wouldn't have imagined that I'd end up where I did though
Alex: [00:04:00] Yeah, I guess you have to sort of accept some level of unpredictability to the whole thing, but to your journey again, like you, you want it to be a science journalist and by the time you're in, like what your mid twenties things seem to be getting maybe held up. I mean, I've heard this story right, of you ringing up your local station for like months on end channel 12 Richmond, right? Ringing them up for months on end and then finally getting hung up on by the news director. Is that right?
Beth: [00:04:25] Yeah. Yeah, no, I just, you know, people were like, well, just be tenacious and just go for what you want. And at this point I was working covering local. I was working for like the CSPAN of Virginia at the time, and we were covering the house of delegates and I had accumulated a bit of a reel from what I had done in college and radio and a little bit of college TV.
I had a reel. So I was able to send this news director something and I was in Richmond, so he's going to hire me. And I just made it my business to call them every day. I called them every day at lunch, every day just made the call. And finally, one, one time he picked up the phone and he just, he kind of went off on me and he said, yeah, I did look at your tape.
You look like you're 12 years old.
Alex: [00:05:12] Oh my gosh.
Beth: [00:05:13] Why would anyone hire you? You have no experience get lost, basically. And it was a good thing that happened to me. And I was sad that I didn't get the job, obviously, but it kind of brought up this, this sort of tenacity at one, I'm a shy person so to just be able to call him every day was. Oh my God, every day I had to get my courage up and call him, but then it became a challenge. And having him say like, you look like you're 12 and you don't know anything. I was like, you don't know me, buddy. And so it sorta created this test, this challenge for me, that's like, I'm gonna keep going. I'm going to keep going. So again, I wouldn't have expected that kind of reaction.
Alex: [00:05:51] I mean, is that where you think that persistence came from-- that tenacity? Did you sort of like have a chip on your shoulder? Would you say from that kind of, is that where it started for you?
Beth: [00:05:58] Well, I think I think I I'm the kind of person, I'm your classic good girl, I always got good grades and one of the gold stars.
So, you know, I don't really know. I haven't wanted to rock the boat, but those kinds of things, the more people would say, no, you can't do this. It would start to raise questions in me. So it did stir something. At a formative time in my early twenties to say, well, why not? Who says, why can't I?
And I went on and it became sort of a, a theme for me in business. I talk about it in my book, the role of gatekeepers, the people who close the gate and don't let you in. And so I think that was a very formative experience with a gatekeeper. I mean, this guy, he ultimately never let me this news division at the channel 12 in Richmond, Virginia.
But soon thereafter I did get somebody, you know, who reached out to me from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hey, do you want to come here and work at our TV station, but then I had decided to get married and went down a different path. But things did open up. I just had changed a bit of how I, what I saw my path was going to be.
So again, persistence, patience, you know, things do blossom sometimes.
Alex: [00:07:07] So at that point you sort of throw caution to the wind and you say, you know what, I'm out of here. Right? Like there's more to this and you end up in DC, right? Like looking back, how important do you think risk taking or rather rather that capacity for action, right, was in the success that you ultimately found?
Beth: [00:07:26] Well, I do think action, you know, you can think a lot of things. And I saw this in business. I mean, everybody has good ideas, but if you're not taking a step they're not ever going to get done.
Alex: [00:07:37] Right.
Beth: [00:07:37] And I think action is often underestimated. It's like everybody thinks about the idea. So yeah, I mean, In the face of defeat in the face of things not happening, you still got to make stuff happen. I went to work for a small trade association for cable television. I was not doing anything on air. Then I found out about something happening across the river in Arlington with a public access cable television. I went to work there. It was production. I was programming it, you know, and then one thing led to another, put me in a network, and that's how I came to find out about the NBC job. So I could have turned up my nose at those and said, well, they're not what I want. They were at least in the neighborhood.
I wasn't going to work for the like funeral association. At least it was cable television. And so yeah, small steps. And you just got to say to yourself, I mean, This was not what I wanted to do with my life, but it was something, it was a paycheck. It was action. It was getting me at least a little bit closer.
Again, for someone who had no connections. My parents didn't know anybody who knew anybody. And my dad knew somebody once, he took me like 12 hours to an interview, but like it's random stuff.
Alex: [00:08:49] You know and that's something I hear you talking about a lot is just this thing. That's like, who are you waiting on permission from, you know?
Beth: [00:08:57] Yeah.
Alex: [00:08:57] Have you found that with just talking with other people? Like who are we waiting on permission from to ultimately make those changes? Like how are we holding ourselves back?
Beth: [00:09:06] Yeah, we do hold ourselves back. I think that was one of my awakenings in just maturing as a person. And certainly in my career, so many times it's easy to say, well, so-and-so, didn't ask me to apply for that job or I didn't get it.
You know, and then you realize, well, I didn't really try for that job. I remember once there was a job, I had by this time I had gone to NBC, they had moved me to New York and there was a job that was open and it was open for six months and, and I knew I was qualified for it, but they, they never reached out to me.
It's one of those classic sort of mistakes. And finally, after six months I got my nerve up. I marched up to see the head of HR and I said, I want to apply for that job. And, you know, I was kind of thinking like, I can't believe you called me, but I didn't say that. And he said, oh yeah, me and the boss, we thought of you.
But at the time I was a young mother with kids. They're like, well, we thought this job requires travel and. And it's not right for you. I was so furious. One I hadn't put my name in and they were making assumptions without ever talking to me. So that's the kind of permission you have to give yourself.
It's classic. You learn that. But I also, when I talk about sort of give yourself permission, there's something else on, or just even a, a more internal level, like I'm shy. I don't naturally like to go to networking events or parties, I'm never the life of the party have never been accused of that. And I doubt I ever will, or it would be a very boring party if that was the case.
But I had to, I realized I often didn't speak up. I didn't, I didn't bring my ideas to the table. I go to an event and I leave before I met anyone and I wasn't having that opportunity to get to know people to make connections. And so I would just push myself, I would say, okay, I'm going to go to this event and I'm going to just say hi to one person.
I'm going to exchange contact information with just one person, and then I can leave next time. Right. And then I'm going to go to this meeting and I'm going to ask a question. I'm going to suggest an idea because if I don't some other, Bozo's going to suggest it and I'm going to be mad it wasn't me.
And so you have to sort of get, you kind of chat with your stuff, you kind of grab yourself and you go like, listen, sister, you gotta get with it. And so that's that permission granting. You don't want to, I mean, I still like this. I get sick to my stomach sometimes that I still remember that feeling of, oh, I've got an idea. But if you don't put it out there, how's anyone ever going to know, obviously you do your homework, you don't say something totally stupid off the top of your head, unless the situation calls for it. But that's the permission granting that I'm talking about.
Alex: [00:11:49] Yeah, no, I'm actually exactly the same way. And it's, it sort of works like that. I think more people than maybe we'd like to admit are as well, but it's sort of those steps that you have to take to just say, okay, let's just start by saying hi to some kid in the hallway in high school.
Right. And then just sort of move it along from there.
Beth: [00:12:05] Kid's just waiting for you to say hi to her anyways!
You're like, you're thinking something's wrong with you or that you think something's wrong with them. It's the thought bubbles that go off in our heads, you know, it's like, why is he looking at me that way?
Does he think like, do I have something in my teeth? Do I look wierd? Does he think I'm a weirdo? I mean, while he's thinking, why is she looking at me that way? Does she think I'm weird? You know, so you go, we have these conversations without ever actually having it.
Alex: [00:12:33] Everybody's in their own heads. And I think that's an important thing to sort of recognize when you're doing this kind of thing.
Okay. So to get ourselves back on track, after moving around for a bit, you're brought back to NBC after some kind of scandal there to sort of patch things up. Right, what was that all about?
Beth: [00:12:49] Yeah, it was NBC news. I had NBC brought me to New York. I left and went to CNN and then I went to CBS and then NBC news, back in the nineties, it had kind of a debacle where they, they actually faked a news story and it brought the news division down.
And so they had to rebuild. And so they brought in a new news president and they brought in, they were looking for someone to lead their communications team. And it was a job I just felt I had to do. I had people warning me off. Why would you go there it's career suicide. It was one of the sort of best career decisions for me.
It was just a great ended up being a great job. So I'll always be grateful that I could have that job, but it put me on a path and it showed me that you could be very entrepreneurial in existing organizations. We had nothing to lose, but to try stuff. At the time Andy lack was the head of NBC news.
And he had a very, let's try things out attitude and allowed people to take risks. And so I think that would have been for me a chance to say, you know what, I am entrepreneurial and I can be that way in a company. So it was formative on many levels.
Alex: [00:13:56] I think it sort of. Said the same thing to me, you know, what it does for me is it's really opened my eyes about what it means to be entrepreneurial in a corporate environment.
Like whenever I think about corporate innovation, I think about like Lockheed skunkworks, do you know that story from like world war II? It reminds me of that. And what they had going for them was just this lack of hierarchy that they had going on. But it sounds like you didn't have that luxury, right?
Beth: [00:14:21] Well, every organization I've worked for largely had hierarchy. And I had jerks for bosses. I mean, you know, in some respects, that's some of the best teachers, you can have to work for a jerk. But yeah, I mean, I think you do need some kind of a supportive champion in there. If you're going through organization where they say they're about innovation or change, and then no one really supports it, you're going to be frustrated.
Alex: [00:14:43] Right.
Beth: [00:14:44] So you have to spend a lot of time and it's that constant tension you have to push and you have to not ask for permission for certain things. And so that was a formative job for me, where I had that supportive environment.
Again, nothing to lose. It was somewhat instinctive and intuitive. I couldn't have told you, that's why I took that job. But in hindsight, that's why I took that job because there were no expectations. How exciting is that? And to all appearances, it would have been, it was a job that many people didn't want.
Why would you go there? Truth be told they didn't, they gave me a better title, but I maybe got a couple thousand dollars more in salary. That wasn't why I took it.
Alex: [00:15:25] And you know, another thing I'd love to touch on, I think it would be doing like a disservice not to talk about this is you talk about this in your book, just the level of corporate sexism that you experienced, particularly after that move to GE.
I know there's a story about even women's restrooms at this conference. You attended being repurposed for men. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Beth: [00:15:46] Yeah. I mean, I think you have to put it in sort of historical context. I mean there were just so many men at GE at the time I left, I went and again, GE owned was the parent company of NBC.
And so I was sort of on the GE radar. It was the last place I thought I would go to work. But I was intrigued, Jack Welch was the CEO at the time. And I went to their big leadership conference actually was still at NBC the first time I went. And yeah, there were so many men that they had to take the women's restroom at this conference center and turn it into the men's rooms.
And there were so few of us women that we had to go to the bathroom, like behind the kitchen, down the hall. And, you know, it wasn't normal, but it wasn't, it was just the sign of the time. I, you know what I mean? It was just the way it was. Things changed so dramatically over the 20 years that I was at NBC, GE to see that change, I'm really grateful to be able to see that hopefully it was in some small way, played a part in that, but I, there were some really great leaders who made big changes after that.
Alex: [00:16:50] How do you think things have really changed since then? Because obviously you've been in a great position to sort of see a lot of that.
Beth: [00:16:57] Well, I think across business we've seen good changes. I mean, you know, I'm, I'm a director at Nike who there, number of great women and, and diverse you know, diverse directors.
GE was very good at putting diverse members on its board. So it's been a huge change. I mean, leaders at one point when I worked at GE and the aviation division something like between 80 and 90% of the aviation employees reported to a woman. That was huge change in engineering fields where people said, oh, it's a pipeline problem.
So that was great leadership at, at GE aviation, who focused to make sure the head of technology, the head of engineering, that these were women. So good leaders do that. And so the conversations changed a lot has changed, but there's still more to do. And why don't we do it? I've come to, I mean, there were always some jerks people who just don't want to do it, but mostly we, we, it's a sort of a human nature thing where you hire what you know. You hire teams that make you feel comfortable. And you don't, it's a lot of work to find people who aren't in your network. And so the first thing you need to do is expand your network and bring in more diverse people. I think, for anyone listening to this, and this goes to whether you're putting together a project for college, your first team project in a company, or you're leading a whole company.
If you have too many people around the table who look like you, you're not going to innovate. You're not going to change. And so you really have to hire people who have diverse mindsets more than anything. And that usually leads you to diverse skin colors, diverse religious backgrounds, diverse global experiences, introvert, extrovert.
You know, can't just hire all marketers. You know, so some of the most creative people, I worked with were lawyers and they get a bad rap, but if put in the right circumstances, wow! Lawyers can be very creative too. So that's really my message. And I think we still struggle with that. And certainly from a people of color and still for women, it's still a challenge and that business has to fix that.
Alex: [00:19:06] Do you think it's a pipeline problem because just like speaking from experience, if I'm sitting in like a computer science class or something like it's, it's definitely better than I think it used to be. But you know, still for the most part, you're seeing pretty one-sided demographics in fields like that, and I think it is slowly changing, but what do you think the root sort of is there?
Beth: [00:19:25] Well, it takes, it takes a while to get the pipeline expanded. People want to go into careers and work in companies where they see people they can identify with. So you need a few key senior or examples of people who, who people can say, wow, that person's thriving at university of Chicago. I can do that too.
Alex: [00:19:47] Right.
Beth: [00:19:47] So that's, you know, and that takes a while. So I think that's, that's part of it. You have to have time and patience, but you set up different incentives. I'll give you an example. When we were trying to, when I was at GE for a while, we were really trying to get more diverse candidates, more women and minority underrepresented populations into technology jobs.
And so with a lot of the universities where we did recruiting, we said, unless you can balance the playing field in terms of gender and underrepresented people we're going to take away those internships. So if you just give us all one kind of category of people, we're gonna reduce your number of internships next year.
And so things like that you can do to just say there's incentives. There's measurements in place. That takes time though. I mean, the university has to adapt, it's not like they only want to tee up those people either. It just takes time.
Alex: [00:20:45] Another thing I thought was really interesting was how you point at conflict as actually being necessary for progress or for innovation to be made. And that isn't even like an idealistic sort of take by any means. I mean, you just have to read that book, right? Like you sort of, self identify as this very maybe introverted person, but a lot of people might not think the kind of stuff that you've been through during your time at NBC, or GE or any of these other places. Like from smaller arguments to there's this story about you literally being dragged out of a room by your collar, after vouching for some move to more digital content at NBC with the rise of platforms like YouTube and Netflix at the time, like, how did you navigate all of that?
Beth: [00:21:25] Well, you have to be tenacious. I mean, yeah. And I, I shared that example, not necessarily to, you know, call out the person it wasn't as much about the person that I should, you know, someone grabbed me by the Scruff of my collar and threw me out of his office, but it was just in the moments of change, people, lose perspective.
What, what I found when, especially in times when I've been driving part of teams, driving change, whether it was introducing more. Environmental future at GE or more digital future at NBC. And also at GE you have, you have the want to change versus the not want to change. And people get so embedded in their way that we become more in tribes. And we fight against each other as opposed to fighting for the future or fighting against the competition.
And that's what happened in that example. And so how do you solve that? I mean, one, you recognize it. Hopefully a bit of humor helps, but I think inviting in critics, inviting in the people who poke holes in your ideas, have them be part of your team, creating the right kind of feedback, loops, sharing budgets, sharing glory, all those things.
Again, I tried to share some learnings there. Because it's human nature. You want to say like, my team did this, but your team has to expand and other people have to feel welcome. And so that's the part of change we run away from. It's like, well, my my team's idea versus yours, and it's a recipe for disaster. Academia is full of that as well as business.
Alex: [00:22:53] But you need to have those kinds of conversations to actually move ahead. Is that sort of the point in conflict being necessary, right?
Beth: [00:22:58] Yeah. You have to recognize. And as a team leader, you have to be able to create time where we're gonna instill this conflict.
I love things like red team, blue team exercises, where you deliberately ask people to take an opposing point of view. You create spaces where you say we're going to argue these points, and then I'm going to make a decision. Right. We're going to put the points that we're going to sleep on. It we'll come back, you know, so you're, you're constantly, let's bring all the bad ideas in, and now there's a time where there's no room for no, you can also create that where it's just an optimistic meeting. We're just going to have best ideas. We're not going to kill anything and then we'll come back. So it's a lot of orchestration. I think that's what I tried to talk about as being sort of the symphony orchestrator, where you're orchestrating a symphony. Because you're constantly knowing when to bring in, okay, here's the heavy sound.
Here's the light sound. Here we're bringing it all together. And if you don't do that, it literally falls flat.
Alex: [00:23:57] Now to wrap us up, I want to get your take on story-driven leadership in general. I think a really good example of this is during your time at GE. Right after the 9/11 attacks, I think, is this move that you made to take out a full page print ad, it's this really powerful image and I'll sort of let you get into that. But at the time it sounds like people were sort of frozen, right?
Beth: [00:24:20] Well, it was after 9/11 and many people were saying, what can we do? How can we help, at GE we were asking that company Jeff Immelt, you know, donated $10 million to the rescue family fund. But we wanted to express ourselves and you know, an average there wasn't advertising happening on television.
And if I take you back, I mean, this was 2001, obviously a while ago. And we were like, we were advertising and marketing. So reached out to the ad agency. Let's do a print ad. Well, At, at gut reaction, that's a stupid idea. No, one's advertising. It looks self-serving.
Alex: [00:24:53] Right.
Beth: [00:24:53] How could you put out a GE branded ad at a time when you know, national security and especially most importantly lives have been lost.
And so we, we pulled the agency in, we said, give us all your work. There buried at the very bottom of the stack of work they gave us was this incredible pencil drawing of lady Liberty, rolling up her sleeves, almost like stepping off her pedestal. And it was like, that's the image. That's what people are feeling.
Let's get back to work. Let's rally together. So we just used it as a way to say kind of this, this message, this rallying smally brought to you by GE and it captured what we were feeling. And yet people were nervous. We were sticking our head out. Why would we do that? We're going to get totally criticized.
And It was one of those, I was up all night waiting for it to come out in the New York times and Washington post. And it did. And the reaction was really good, despite a lot of internal dissent and Jeff Immelt was like, go for it, but kind of like go for it. But you're, you're, I'm, you know, I'm counting on you to get this right.
But he was very supportive and very much a champion of a lot of change we drove. And to me, the crowning moment was a few days later, Jeff and I, and some of our colleagues went down to wall street and there hanging in the trading floor as, as the trading floor came back to business was that image.
It was in newsstands around New York city. It captured what we were thinking. And so just to summarize, I think that's great storytelling and that's when a message deserves to be in the zeitgeist, because you're trying to sort of listen. And encapsulate what people are feeling. And maybe can't give words to when you can help give that back in a way.
And so I was very proud of that because it was a giving back and using a medium that many people would want to criticize. It was advertising. It had its place.
Alex: [00:26:50] Wow. And I think that's pretty much our time. Beth thank you so, so much.
Beth: [00:26:55] Nice talking to you. Good luck with everything.
Alex: [00:26:57] Thank you. Bye!
Beth: [00:26:58] Bye!