9

SUCCESS IS NEVER FINAL

While we’ve made clear that there are many things that have to be done right to successfully shift ahead, our final thought is this: Success is never final. In a world that is changing as fast as this one, you can never take your foot off the gas. Concurrently, you can never take your eyes off your customers and the purpose you serve in their lives. You must constantly let the customer know that you know what’s important to them. Not just on a transactional level, but on an emotional level. They are the ones who will decide if you continue to fit into their lives in a meaningful way. They are the ones who will determine whether you continue to effectively meet their evolving needs. Keeping the customer in your sights and your pedal to the metal will greatly increase your chances for not just successfully shifting ahead, but successfully staying ahead.

It is this story line that is at the heart of these final stories. Each of the organizations profiled has sound methodologies for assessing what’s down the road and exhibits strength against the five key dimensions required to successfully shift ahead (as outlined in Chapter 8). More than this, to paraphrase the contemporary cultural expression, they know there is no other option but to “keep on keeping on.” To paraphrase the Fleetwood Mac tune, they are always thinking about tomorrow. They have strategic vision, which is the ability to look ahead. They have peripheral vision, which is the ability to look around. And they have proved they can anticipate, capture, and categorically lead through one market transition after another. They create disruption before they let themselves be beaten by it and, in fact, view disruption as an opportunity. Each of these organizations has a culture that fosters innovation and a management team that is comfortable in dealing with disruptive forces as they arise.

The organizations profiled in this final chapter also take a purpose-driven approach to their businesses, not a transactional or product-driven approach. Tied to doing what is important to the consumer, purpose is the driving force behind everything they do, and it gives them greater flexibility in ensuring their actions stay aligned with what they stand for in the minds of those they serve. More important, their actions demonstrate an awareness that it is the consumer who will decide what is relevant. Being purpose-driven gives them the stability to make changes as needed, to see and seize on initiatives as they arise. While the organizations profiled in this section are altogether different from one another in form and function, they all operate on the assumption that success is never final.

IAVA:
A Clearly Focused Mission as a Compass for Veterans’ Shifting Needs

We begin not with a publicly traded company, but an exceedingly public-facing group, IAVA: the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Go to the website and the first words you see are “Be Part of The Movement.” It is a movement, a wholly constructive one, with a clearly defined mission that serves as both compass and catalyst for its vital work. IAVA is the leading post-9/11 veteran empowerment organization with a diverse and rapidly growing membership. Its purpose is to be the voice of these veterans, and to use this voice to address the critical issues facing the veterans and their families. The organization provides resources and empowers veterans to connect with one another to foster a strong and mutually beneficial community. As the IAVA website states, “Through education, advocacy, and community building, we strive to create a country which honors and supports veterans of all generations.”

IAVA serves the 2.8 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, raising awareness in the media, on Capitol Hill, and among the general public about the issues that veterans face. Among these issues are mental health injuries, the challenges of working with the Veterans Administration system, inadequate healthcare for female veterans, and GI educational benefits.

IAVA is an organization founded and run by veterans, and it is strongly committed to ensuring its programs make the largest impact for as many veterans as possible. More than this, as its website asserts, its goal is to do so at the lowest cost possible. As for the proficiency of its leadership and its fiscal responsibility as an organization, the site states, “Since our founding 11 years ago, IAVA has connected more than 1.27 million veterans with resources and support while being exceptionally fiscally responsible to the thousands of individuals, foundations, and corporate partners who support our mission. And we do so on the smallest budgets.”

IAVA was founded by Paul Rieckhoff, an American writer, advocate, activist, and veteran of the United States Army and the Iraq War. He served as an Army first lieutenant and infantry rifle platoon leader in Iraq from 2003 through 2004. It is in very good part due to his leadership acumen, his (peripheral) visionary skills, and his personal passion for the mission of the organization that IAVA has emerged as a key player on veterans’ issues on Capitol Hill. Among the various veterans’ issues in which the organization is engaged are four top priorities: combat suicide among troops and veterans; services for women veterans; government reform for veterans; and defense education budgets for veterans. With regard to CEO Rieckhoff, Senator Patty Murray from Washington State has been quoted as saying, “He’s relentless. When he brings a new issue to me, I know it’s what I should be fighting for.”

We spoke to Rieckhoff about IAVA, its mission, and how the organization continuously shifts gears to develop new initiatives for the population it serves. “When we created IAVA,” he said, “we based it on what I call a constituent empowerment model that enables a relatively small number of people to do huge things. We are built to be relevant. Our mission has remained the same: listening to our constituents’ needs and representing their interests by advocating for positive change. This sounds pretty basic, but it’s the most critical part of advocacy. Our members are an underrepresented population who feel like their voice isn’t heard. The most important thing we do is create mechanisms to listen to them and amplify what they say as a catalyst for transformational change. We are able to pivot relative to what’s important to them. If your mission and values are right,” he said, “you will be durable. This is as true when it comes to running an ad agency or a bank as it is in running an advocacy group. Staying focused on your core mission enables you to be in a constant state of beta. If you’re not evolving and changing, you’re going to lose. On the battlefield the saying is ‘evolve or die.’ In other words, the enemy is changing, the threats are changing. If you don’t change, you die.”

“Keep on keeping on” is embedded in the fabric of IAVA’s culture. Leadership’s background and immersion in the military makes this phrase as much a part of their mindset as saying, “Look both ways when crossing the street.”

It came as no surprise to us that, in terms of implementation strategies and tactics, what allows IAVA to “pivot relative to what’s important” is that the group took its lessons from the brutal realities of the war zones and brought them home to Washington and Wall Street. “What we’ve learned from the battlefield is the need to improvise, adapt, and overcome. We’re good at logistics. We’re good at moving groups of people from one place to another, which is important when you work in advocacy. Over the years, policy issues have shifted, from the need for better body armor in Iraq, to the GI Bill, to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ to suicide.” These form the core of IAVA’s DNA.

Among the organization’s greatest tactical strengths, and one developed out of necessity, is its ability to leverage the media, and especially social media, to get out veterans’ stories as a catalyst for the desired outcomes. “We punch way above our weight,” Rieckhoff told us. “Our budget hasn’t changed, but the power of our communications artillery has. There is an urgency to our work that is essential. We understand we have a short window of consciousness with the American public. We have to communicate as quickly and clearly before the window closes. Another thing we learned in the military is, keep your communication simple and focused. In our work, we have to ensure people understand our message.”

A significant aspect of ensuring that people understand the message is that IAVA recognizes the value of having a person be the face of an issue, a fight, a catalyst for the legislative or policy change you are trying to implement. Even though the challenges are constantly changing, personification of the challenge provides a common way to approach them. You can throw facts and statistics at people as much as you want, but that won’t have nearly as much influence as emotional impact. The Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans (SAV) Act is a perfect example of putting forth a story that, sadly, so many people could personally relate to.

“Our members would say, ‘Hey, our friends are dying and nobody knows about it. We’ve got to do something about it,’” Rieckhoff said as he recounted the initiative. “Clay Hunt was a Marine from Texas. He came back from Iraq, wounded, but then redeployed to Afghanistan where he saw several of his buddies killed. After he came home, he struggled with the aftereffects of the wars and found some comfort in helping other veterans cope with their own struggles. He became very active in our organization as an advocate for mental health support. And then, he went down a rough lane and took his own life in 2011 at the age of twenty-eight. It devastated our community and our organization,” said Rieckhoff. “We wanted to do something about it. It was a two-year-long campaign to explain to Washington that we were losing twenty-two of our buddies a day to suicide. But Clay became the face of that campaign. He became like a North Star for the whole community.”

One of the leading causes of death for American military forces is suicide. In 2012, 349 active members of the Armed Forces took their own lives, more than died in combat. In February 2015, a year after IAVA launched the Campaign to Combat Suicide, IAVA and its partners celebrated the signing of the Clay Hunt SAV Act into law. This law makes possible improved access to high-quality, timely mental health care for service members, veterans, and their families and expanded suicide prevention efforts.

As Rieckhoff made clear, you can’t buy media presence as influential—as sharable—as Clay Hunt’s story. It was a very real and very compelling story that not only unlocked the enormous potential of social media, but exemplified IAVA’s broader mission. It was a small, personal story that evolved into a bigger story as a result of its emotional resonance. “We play where we can win,” said Rieckhoff. “We pick issues that we believe can have impact. What is the overall urgency of the issue? What is our capacity to make a change? Is there anyone else doing it? We want to be a true leader, and a true leader takes on things that no one else does. We’re ahead of the curve. We’re not afraid to throw punches, and we’re always loyal to our constituents.”

In addition to showing strength against the five key principles required to successfully shift gears, not as a onetime event but on an ongoing basis, IAVA recognizes that you do have to know where you can play and win, where you can be a leader and have influence and efficacy. It wouldn’t be unfitting, in this case, to say it’s knowing how to pick your battles when time and/or resources are limited. As Rieckhoff put it, “We sit down and say, What’s the one thing I can move the needle on at this point that will have a major impact? The stakes are enormous for our veterans. We want to do things that change the world for the better. There is an old saying that pilots use, ‘Focus on the target.’ We’ve got planning templates that come from the military. You lay out the situation, the mission, the execution, the communication, the command and control. We always keep in mind, it’s not about me. It’s about the mission, the greater goal. You can’t be greater than the mission. We say ‘men and women before me.’”

As a result of IAVA’s laser focus on its mission, along with its battle-tested strategy and tactics, it has become a trusted brand known to policy makers, the media, and Washington. It has become the go-to source on veterans’ issues. It is, we might add, a perfect analog for this book and this chapter on the need for all organizations to relentlessly focus on issues that can make a difference; to continuously shift gears to stay relevant to the people they serve. A final and fitting comment from Rieckhoff: “To succeed, keep your compass on true north. True north may take you over a mountain or through water, but you know what direction you’re going in.”

To try and produce an apt segue between the IAVA story and the next one (HBO), relative to the scale of human benefit, would be off the mark. So we won’t try. We can, however, draw parallels about the role that having a clear purpose plays in enabling an organization to continually and successfully “keep on keeping on” when it comes to shifting ahead. In the case of HBO, staying focused on its purpose has provided advantageous leverage in one of the most rapidly changing and mercurial business categories there is: entertainment. From the day of its inception, the folks at HBO knew what they didn’t want to be, and in fact couldn’t be, if they wanted to keep consumers voluntarily tuning in season after season. They didn’t want to be a TV network. They wanted to be the entertainment network brand that provided programming you couldn’t find anywhere else. It’s a purpose that has driven the brand—and, ergo, its supremacy in the ratings—for decades. HBO keeps on keeping on, no matter on which screen people watch their programming.

HBO:
Always Ahead, It’s Never Been Just TV

“We knew our business. We knew what we needed to get to, we knew what our skillset was. . . . We were able to keep growing the business without hurting it. We knew what was going on out there in terms of technology and competition. But, you can’t act emotionally. If you make knee-jerk reactions, you can make some mistakes from which you might never recover. HBO continues to maintain its equity as a premium brand. It’s a high-quality product, in terms of content, in terms of talent, in terms of the look of the service on the air, the production qualities, and the technology. HBO spares no expense to make sure it looks different, and that it is different from everything else. This is the philosophy that has carried through.”

Eric Kessler, former president and chief operating officer at HBO, offered these comments completely unprompted in response to our query about how the company has continuously shifted to keep its position on top of the category leader board. If anyone should know what’s required to shift, and what to focus on to stay relevant to consumers, it’s someone who, for decades, has been associated with the hyper-changing entertainment business. It was during the span of Kessler’s twenty-seven years with the company that the industry itself shifted dramatically (no pun intended) its content model, given the expanding range of competitors, as well as its content distribution model, given the evolution of technology. It was under Kessler’s leadership that HBO had innumerable accomplishments, including the launch of the network’s signature “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO” marketing campaign.

To be sure, HBO was unique coming out of the gate, and it has stayed fully attuned to the requirements of staying ahead in the entertainment-technology marathon—a marathon with very fickle spectators. Perhaps the most critical factor in HBO’s continued success as it has shifted to meet the demands of these very fickle spectators is its philosophy. The core essence of the HBO brand, what it strives to stand for in the minds of consumers, is “groundbreaking entertainment.” It is groundbreaking in the programming and in the manner in which consumers consume this entertainment. For an entertainment brand to win over the long term, it means constantly finding ways to reinvent itself. HBO has always been a forward-looking company and has consistently been ready for what it saw coming.

As Kessler told us, “There had been very few significant changes in the way people watched television since 1946 until just a few years ago. There was the introduction of color in 1951, and the introduction of HD in 2000. The box itself changed from that big clunky set sitting on a table to being a sleek screen mounted on a wall. Regardless, [for] the first fifty years of television, people were tethered to their living rooms if they wanted to watch their favorite shows. Over the course of just the last decade, we’ve seen multiple devices hit the market on which people can get entertainment, including television shows. Computers, iPads, and smartphones have fundamentally changed the way people think about watching television,” Kessler said. Expanding distribution opportunities brought an expanding set of competitive players. In addition to networks, HBO was also competing against an emerging list of direct-to-consumer streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.

In response to the changing technology, HBO modified its distribution model, which was based on paid subscriptions, the staple of cable television. Kessler explained that they had to implement this change at an appropriate pace. HBO couldn’t afford to harm its relationships with Comcast and Direct TV, among others, whose thousands of representatives were selling HBO’s channels to millions of viewers. Much as they did everything else, it was a well-thought-out process. HBO GO, launched in 2010, was a partial answer to this challenge. HBO GO allows subscribers to watch HBO shows anytime and anywhere it’s convenient for them. “HBO GO was the integration of delivery and content through technology created specifically to meet audience needs,” Kessler said. “The concept is simple. An HBO subscriber should have the ability to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, at no extra cost. They’ve paid for the content. They should be able to watch it on their terms. If you take this further, as HBO has, it changed the whole competitive set for television, and for HBO. You had the consumer sitting at home on the couch watching HBO or another network. To move ahead, we had to evaluate this experience within the context of both programming and technology. Beyond individual networks, for example, you had content aggregators gaining on us, including the growth of over-the-top services such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon. The key for HBO was, and continues to be, to look at the competitive set and see it as inclusive of technology and myriad new content options.”

Getting HBO GO as part of an HBO cable bundle was the first step in shifting the distribution model. It was more likely that users would keep renewing their subscriptions if they could watch what they wanted, when they wanted. By increasing access, HBO, like any other premium cable channel, would increase customer satisfaction with the brand experience, thereby making subscribers more loyal. Next, in 2014, after years of saying it didn’t make sense to sell an online-only version of HBO because the economics of the pay -TV bundle were too good and the size of the broadband-only market was too small, Richard Plepler, the current CEO of HBO, decided to launch HBO Now to target the “cord-cutters,” or people without pay-TV subscriptions. This decision was in response to the need to compete for the ever-growing audience of people who consume programming online from Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, among others. As the Internet remakes the television landscape, targeting cord-cutters becomes a growth imperative. HBO Now, among the latest online pushes for HBO and Time Warner, is a service that lets broadband users watch new episodes of popular HBO shows like Game of Thrones, Veep, and Silicon Valley without a traditional cable subscription.

HBO continues to be a crowd pleaser for Time Warner with its nonstop creation of groundbreaking offerings, from big-ticket dramas to comedy specials, brilliantly produced documentaries to sports-related programming. Its obvious challenge is the proliferation of home-based entertainment choices, and the fact that it has to prove on a regular basis that its programming is worth the price of admission. “The genesis of ‘It’s Not TV. It’s HBO’ was that if it was the type of program you could see on a regular TV network, we wouldn’t do it,” Kessler told us. “Basic cable? Let’s do it differently. We needed to take a position that was different and we needed to deliver on it. The simple statement captured the essence of the brand idea at the time and became the driving force behind everything we did. If you make a claim like that, you’ve got to develop programming to support it. We needed to transcend the category. Once we latched onto the idea, the programming took on a life of its own.”

The key thing to notice in HBO’s story is that the shift in technology went hand in hand with the shifting in programming in the late 1990s and early 2000s. HBO used to simply have first-film licensing agreements until the company decided to create and own original content. It served as a major differentiator that separated HBO from other premium services, but it also redefined the network’s competition as not just other premium networks but other basic cable and broadcast networks. The creative minds at HBO used that as a touchstone for its programming. They developed an intuitive feel for what was—and wasn’t—HBO quality. Beginning in the 1990s with The Sopranos, followed by The Wire, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Six Feet Under, Entourage, Sex and the City, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Big Love, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Silicon Valley, and Westworld, HBO continued to break new ground. The network has aired more than 100 series and twenty miniseries in its history, ushering in, along with AMC, what some have called a new golden age of television entertainment.¹

HBO also continues to be a crowd pleaser due to its ability to see what’s coming in terms of technology and shift as needed. HBO Now, its stand-alone streaming service, has surpassed 2 million domestic subscribers. More than this, HBO has lined up a host of A-list players in the digital arena to help distribute and market the service, partnerships that include Amazon, Microsoft’s Xbox, Samsung, and PlayStation Vue. All this may at first glance seem counterproductive in that HBO is cannibalizing its own traditional cable TV-based service. However, the cord-cutters are coming, and if HBO doesn’t cannibalize them, someone else will take them away.

As a critically acclaimed innovator, ratings-breaker, and multiple Emmy and Golden Globe winner in the cable industry, HBO creates the programs that everyone talks about, driving conversations online and off. Its original series, miniseries, documentaries, comedy specials, and films draw ratings numbers its competitors covet. With streaming video now among the competitors in the television space, HBO has invested heavily in technology to expand its own streaming service and to build new applications to support its content.

“HBO and all networks have to get continuously better at technology,” Kessler said. “Not the technology required to take a signal, send it to a satellite, and have it beam back content. Rather, the development of software and use of analytics that make for the best customer experience possible. HBO has had to evolve and bring in different types of talent in recognition of the fact that things are changing and companies in the category need to improve and broaden their skillsets. That said, HBO has kept the culture intact. It’s always had the right people for the job at the right time. They’re no longer competing with other cable networks, but with Facebook and YouTube and Apple. It’s always had a culture of wanting to try new things. We’ve brought in interns not to learn from us, but to teach us what the next generation wants. If you’re not keeping pace in this industry,” said Kessler, “you’re quickly falling behind to the extent that you can never catch up. It requires constant investment, in software and in people. Success in this industry demands that you continuously make adjustments; that you are constantly in beta mode.” One has to “keep on keeping on.”

Kessler oversaw the distribution of both the HBO and Cinemax networks in both domestic and international markets, along with the worldwide sale of HBO’s programming through licensing, DVD products, and digital distribution. An early seer of the digital future, he was instrumental in the exploration of mobile experiences and, ultimately, the launch of HBO GO and HBO Now, HBO’s first direct-to-consumer service in northern territories. Today, HBO continues to make the shifts necessary to help keep HBO a leader in its category with a laser focus on keeping up with content and the latest in technology.

Perhaps no business is as prone to dramatic changes as the entertainment business is today. Taking home the awards is equally dependent on leveraging evolving technology and perfectly forecasting mercurial consumer tastes. HBO’s tagline has morphed from “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO” to simply, “It’s HBO.” This is in recognition of the fact that the category is not just about TV anymore. That said, HBO has not deviated from its “true north,” providing groundbreaking programming with only the highest levels of production values, from the writing to the acting and directing. As Kessler said, “One thing is for sure. In this business, doing what you did before rarely leads to success. It’s good to be first out of the box and have that advantage, but what matters most is to get it right. It’s more important to differentiate your product and to spend the time to really get it right and be sure you’re visionary. HBO has always been visionary, [able] to look for the new and to try different things. You can’t survive in entertainment if you just rely on the tried and true.”

As we’ve said in a number of ways throughout this book, there are few, if any, industries in which you can survive, let alone shift ahead, by relying on the tried and true. This is especially true of industries in which technology plays a pivotal role. General Electric, a huge multifaceted, multinational organization with thousands of employees and hundreds of products, absolutely gets it. The company has boiled down what it stands for into a simple, emotional idea—a statement of purpose—that everyone can connect with, inside and outside the company: imagination at work. It defines the culture and it’s believable because coming from GE, imagination is credible. As this final story illustrates, from the get-go, GE has used its imagination to powerfully fuel its way forward in a rapidly changing world.

GE:
Reinvention at Work for over 125 Years

“Imagine a world where we treat great female scientists like celebrities.” General Electric (GE) is in the perfect position to not only imagine this, but to do something about it. In the sixty-second TV spot that poses this idea, Millie Dresselhaus, the first woman to win the National Medal of Science in Engineering, is treated like a paparazzi favorite—photographed, celebrated, thronged by crowds of admirers. The spot is part of GE’s campaign to raise awareness that it plans to employ 20,000 women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) roles by the year 2020 and have a 50/50 gender representation in its technical entry-level programs by the same time. The campaign shows how celebrating female scientists could inspire girls to become scientists and help GE find its recruits to meet its 2020 deadline.

In a press release in Adweek following the launch of the campaign, GE’s chief marketing officer, Linda Boff, said:

GE has been injecting urgency into conversations—and actions—for over 125 years. In our conversation with Boff about the company’s ability to continuously shift gears to stay relevant, she said, “Progress is part of our constant. Progress and solving tough problems for the world. You don’t get to be 125 years old without continually reinventing. Our ongoing pivot points reflect the advantage we can bring our customers. We are continuously defining what a superb customer experience will be for GE customers. Increasingly, our offerings are digital in nature and we want to make sure that the experience we are delivering is simple and frictionless. We want the best possible outcomes for our customers,” Boff said, “be it productivity or efficiency. Our marketing is a reflection of how iterative our business is. It’s reflected in the storytelling. That said, our core is constant. It’s rooted in our DNA. We are and always have been about imagination and reinvention. We know who we are. Our ethos has never changed. I like to say ‘embrace your own interesting-ness.’ How can we be relevant? What moments can be ours?” This is very much reminiscent of the IBM story in Chapter 6. Iconic companies become iconic for a reason. They change, they adapt, all the while staying true to who they are.

Boff went on to explain that, unlike having a core mission that is focused on products—the things a company makes—existing to solve problems is an “evergreen idea.” Problem solving requires reimagination according to which specific problems need solving at different points in time, as the marketplace changes. Having purpose, not product, as its laser focus gives GE the freedom to experiment, to take risks. “You have to invent and to market in the year in which you live,” Boff said. “Our DNA doesn’t change. How we bring things to life changes. You have to look in real time at the world you live in. You have to try new things and go outside of your comfort zone. You have to spend time out of the conference rooms to see and assess what changes are coming and how to deal with them. The risk is not in experimenting with new things, but in not experimenting. Our teams are organized to experiment. Embracing your inner geek is something we take pride in.”

There have been many successful pivotal moments that have belonged to GE in its history, all the result of the company’s core DNA and its can-do culture: its built-in ability to shift as the marketplace conditions evolve and a new set of challenges emerge to be solved.

As a crash course in the history of science and GE, 1876 was the year Thomas Alva Edison opened a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he could explore the possibilities of electricity. Out of his tinkering was to come one of the greatest inventions of the age—a successful incandescent light bulb. By 1890 Edison established the Edison General Electric Company, bringing together its various businesses. This was, in GE’s history, the beginning of its industrial age. It was a company of tinkerers, proud to celebrate its “inner geek” and even prouder to be able to develop and manufacture products that would enhance life for generations of people around the world. They “brought good things to life.”

This worked as an inspiring tagline—and driving force—for the company’s mission until around twenty years ago. As if the pace of change were not fast enough, there was no question that competition was increasing at a “Moore’s Law” pace, most significantly in the technology space. Globalization was no longer a concept hovering on the horizon, but a requisite way of doing business. GE’s business model was shifting year by year in response to these new conditions, yes, encompassing not just the production of light bulbs and refrigerators, but extending to the areas of transportation, health services, consumer finance, and entertainment, with digital experiences underlying many of these competencies. It was evident that this sweep of newer and newer offerings called for a different rallying cry, a new way to communicate its continued relevance and significance to the world market.

To achieve this, led by then CEO Jeffrey Immelt, GE went back to its genesis, Thomas Edison. From day one, GE had been able to imagine things that other companies couldn’t and make them real. As Immelt put it, they could do things that made people go “wow!” Within this framework, the company rallied its more than 300,000 employees around an idea: “What we can imagine, we can make happen.” Or as the tagline stated, “Imagination at work.”

Imagination continues to be very much at work at GE. Also at work, however, is the ever-quickening pace of change in the world, specifically in the technology realm, from big data to artificial intelligence. The explosion of the “Internet of Things” or the “Industrial Internet,” as it’s sometimes called, has been the stimulus for GE’s latest series of necessary shifts to stay relevantly differentiated: industrial company to imaginative company to digital industrial company. As Boff explained to us, by staying focused on its core mission of invention, GE has been able to stay ahead of others in this category. It realized, before many of its competitors, that the current economy depends on the swift, silent transmission of information. As such, in its work, GE is looking to turn jet engines, locomotives, and other giant machines into data-churning computers. It is putting additional effort into healthcare solutions and on various forms of energy. As a company, GE is at the leading edge of the intersection of the physical and the analytical, a very different portfolio than even just twenty years ago.

To raise awareness of this shift in its history, along with its proud focus on its geekiness, in early 2016, GE introduced an advertising campaign that featured Owen, an earnest young software developer who had just been hired by the company. In a series of ads and online platforms, in his charmingly befuddled way Owen has to explain to his friends and family that their preconceived notions about GE are no longer valid. Rather than design light bulbs, he has been hired to write the code that runs transportation systems, industrial equipment, and power grids. This campaign was produced to help clarify consumer perceptions about the company. GE doesn’t make things; it solves problems. Owen was also meant to be a recruiting mechanism, reaching out to millennials who had never associated this traditional company with dominance in the technology arena. The twofold approach to the campaign was to reinforce GE’s presence as a digital industrial company, a leader in the space of merging digital and industrial. The second was to recruit software developers.

And this brings us back to the beginning of this story—and the beginning of GE—with just a minor detour for recent news from the company’s website. As part of the next phase in its ongoing shift to brilliantly implement its digital industrial strategy, the company announced the formation of GE Digital, a business unit that will provide customers with the best industrial solutions and the software needed to solve real-world problems. It has also launched Predix, an operating system for the “Industrial Internet of Things.” Overall there are 20,000 developers working on Predix. In 2017, GE is expecting to grow the platform to 35,000 developers and continue to expand its digital capabilities. In addition, the company has acquired software companies such as Meridium, Servicemax, and Wise.io that bring together sensors, cloud-based algorithms, and advanced field technology to help transform the way engineers and coders work together. And—yes—imagine if at least 50 percent of this population of technology experts could be women?

As GE says and continues to do in so very many cases, what they can imagine, they can make happen. The public commitment to hire more women in STEM positions is an ambitious one. And although plenty of companies introduce goals for narrowing the gender gap in technology positions, GE is among the first to take a tangible step in achieving this goal. The beautifully produced ad campaign was created to raise awareness of this goal. Among the tactics to “make it happen,” GE is expanding recruitment efforts at colleges and universities that have greater proportions of women in technical majors and enhancing efforts to retain and promote women who are current employees. As Boff told Adweek, “While we’re really proud of the nearly 15,000 women that we currently have in technical roles, we’re talking about adding 36 percent more. I would like to highlight that while I’m thrilled at how this ad will hopefully capture people’s attention, the heart of this will be more women working in technical roles.”

To repeat what Boff told us, “Our marketing is a reflection of how iterative our business is. How can we be relevant? What moments can be ours?” Well, from Thomas Edison and an incandescent light bulb to the one billion terabytes of information Predix will process by 2020, from your grandmother’s refrigerator to a host of transformational medical technologies, from wind turbines to more energy-efficient airplane engines, GE has had a lot of moments. Its visionary leadership has certainly made this possible, as has its laser focus on using its imagination to solve tough problems for the world. GE has been shifting for over 125 years, and given its strength against the five dimensions required for successful shifting (presented in Chapter 8), we can only imagine that the company will keep it up for the next 125 years, making changes that will continue to reflect “the world in which we live.”

Lest you think that we are groundbreaking in our belief that success is never final, we openly admit otherwise. Recall from Chapter 4, Gary Briggs told us about Facebook’s credo of being one percent done. If you look at the Marriott organization’s list of core values, for example, key among them is that “success is never final.” Bill Marriott, son of the company’s founder, has been quoted as saying:

At the risk of being too obvious, no matter the organization, whether public or private, for profit or not, there will always be more “guests” to satisfy. As demographics, markets, technology, and global forces continue to rapidly change, so, too, will the needs and expectations of these guests. For organizations to meet these needs and expectations, for organizations to maintain their relevance in a fast-changing world, they must possess both the skills and the attitude required to shift ahead. The skills, detailed in this book, can be learned and applied. The attitude is in your court.

That said, in addition to the lesson that “success is never final,” we’d like to end with two personal stories from our own “shift ahead” experiences—lessons we continue to find valuable and hope you will, too.