Interview with Beth Comstock, Author

Beth Comstock couldn’t say no when Jack Welch called. Listen in to hear Beth’s journey starting out as a quiet Southern girl all the way to the first female Vice Chair of GE and the #hoshimo she faced along the way.

Transcript:

Julie: Welcome everybody to another episode of The Conversational. I'm here today with one of my favorite women in business, I say that to her, Beth Comstock. I'm going to give you a little of her biography, but as a personal story, she's somebody that I have watched and admired my whole career and it's been really interesting to see the trials and tribulations and just how strong you are and I think you're just a great example for women everywhere.

Beth: Well, thanks [00:00:30] Julie.

Julie: And I'm very excited to have you here, so thank you. So Beth Comstock's mission is to understand what's next, to navigate change and help others do the same, which I love because that's quintessentially Beth. By cultivating a habit of seeking out new ideas, people and places, she has built a career path from storyteller to chief marketer to Vice Chair of GE.

Julie: She's the first woman to ever have held that post. And in my humble opinion, she'd have been better if she'd have been running the whole thing. But that's a different story. She has [00:01:00] now returned to storytelling as author, speaker and advisor. As GE's Vice Chair of Business Innovation and previously their Chief Marketing Officer, she led efforts to accelerate new growth, to develop digital and clean energy futures, seed new businesses, and enhance the brand value.

Julie: As the President of Integrated Media at NBC Universal, she oversaw TV ad revenue and new digital efforts, including the early development of hulu.com which is one of my favorites because I watch several shows on that one. Beth is a director at Nike, a trustee of the National [00:01:30] Geographic Society and former Board President of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian National Design Museum. Her first book just came out four or five months ago.

Beth: It was about a year ago.

Julie: Oh, a year ago, 2018, right a year ago. It's called Imagine It Forward. It's about working and living on the front lines of change and we're excited to have her here with us. Thank you.

Beth: Thanks, Julie. I'm looking forward to talking to you.

Julie: I know, it's funny, we were trying to catch up a little bit before.

Beth: You always have such good energy, so I know we'll be energized in this conversation.

Julie: Oh, we come on the air. [00:02:00] So as I always do, I always like to get people kind of going way back in the archives of their lives. So tell us where are you from? Where were you born? What'd your parents do?

Beth: Yeah, well, I was born in Morgantown, West Virginia. My father was in dental school and my parents promptly moved to a small town in Winchester, Virginia, which is in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. And that's where I grew up until I went to college and I went to school in my home state in Virginia, the College of William and Mary.

Beth: And [00:02:30] so I had your quintessential small town upbringing. It was a time of amazing creativity, imagination, also have some constraints. Small town, everybody knows your name. It's all about your reputation. I think I was well-schooled in the art of public relations and marketing because, for one, my mother was a school teacher and she knew everything. And her school teacher networks, she knew things we were going to do before we even did them. So it was a very... Everybody looked out for you, [00:03:00] but it also meant there wasn't a lot of room to go crazy.

Julie: What'd your dad do?

Beth: My dad was a dentist.

Julie: You said dentist, that's right.

Beth: He was a dentist when we were growing up and now both my parents are still there. My father, he's been a great inspiration. Both of my parents have been a great inspiration, but my dad was a dentist and then he turned into a art historian and now he is a artist.

Julie: Really?

Beth: He makes ceramic pottery based on sort of art of the Shenandoah Valley. So it's been great to see my parents kind [00:03:30] of forge their own lives of change.

Julie: Were you an only child?

Beth: I have a brother and a sister.

Julie: Older, younger? Where are you?

Beth: I'm the oldest.

Julie: You're the oldest. Yeah, see, I am too.

Beth: Are you the oldest?

Julie: Yeah, the oldest.

Beth: The bossy. I think our siblings probably have other names for us to beyond bossy.

Julie: I know for sure they do.

Beth: How many of your family?

Julie: Same. Three. I have a younger brother and a younger sister.

Beth: Yeah, my brother's in the middle of my sister and I think they... I was a bit intense, I think it's fair to say. I was your quintessential small town, good girl. There were never enough [00:04:00] gold stars for me. Never enough things I could take on. Never enough things to do and I'm sure I could've been a really pain in the butt sister.

Julie: Yeah, what did you want to do when you were little?

Beth: I wanted to do a lot of things. It's funny you ask, I was cleaning out my closet a couple of months ago and I found this old paper, one I found when I think I was 14. I found my autobiography, so you can imagine at 14, it was riveting, absolutely riveting.

Julie: So much has happened.

Beth: When is Nick going to kiss me or whatever, [00:04:30] but I found this page I absolutely loved. I said, "I am ambitious. I want to be 50 different things when I grow up." And I listed not 50, but about a dozen. Luckily I didn't pursue any of those. I would've made a bad lawyer. I would've made a bad doctor. But I love that I, at 14, wrote, "I am ambitious. I want to be all these different things." I'm still that.

Beth: So I don't really know what I wanted to be except I wanted to do something in [00:05:00] the world and I wanted to be involved in a lot of different things.

Julie: Which is amazing because I imagine it was back in the '70s, where women... Look, there was coming of age, but this was the time where women weren't doctors and lawyers in great numbers.

Beth: I mean, my mom had worked as a school teacher. She had taken time off when we were growing up and then went back to work. And I remember it was a bit of a scandal with some of her friends that my mother was working. But she loved working. She loved those kids. I mean, she'd still be teaching today if they didn't have a retirement age. [00:05:30] So I had seen that in my mother, but my parents, they weren't friends with people who had businesses.

Beth: There weren't big businesses in our small town. If a woman owned her business, it might've been a floral shop or a shoe store or something. It was small business. So I didn't have a touchstone for that. I remember though, it's funny you ask that question. I remember my first year dorm. I went to the College of William and Mary and I still remember it like it was yesterday, sitting around, you sit around, you're all in your pajamas [00:06:00] sharing gossip. And I don't know how we got on the subject, but I remember saying. "I am going to do it all." And so I think I went to... This would have been 1979 and I think I went there with that explicit view that I'm expected to do all these things. So by then that was part of the culture. Even though I didn't grow up with women like that, there was enough in the zeitgeist I think that... Helen Reddy, I am Woman, Hear me Roar, all that was in the zeitgeist. So here I was, spring of my freshman year, saying, "I'm going to do it all. [00:06:30] I am."

Julie: Going to do it. And what did you end up... what did you study?

Beth: Biology.

Julie: Biology?

Beth: Yeah.

Julie: So thinking that was going to be what?

Beth: Going to go to medical school. I thought I was going to go to medical school. I minored in anthropology, which I loved, but I didn't know what to do with it. And about junior year, I was like, "I really don't want to go to medical school. What I want to do is tell stories about science." And so I tried to get into writing programs in my college and it was very siloed. Like, "No, you're a scientist, you can't be a writer." [00:07:00] And I started working at a public radio station in Norfolk, Virginia, as just an intern. And it opened my eyes. I got to do amazing stories. I had this amazing mentor. Her name was Beth also, and she gave me a tape recorder and set me free. And she taught me and I just was smitten by the art of story.

Julie: So you could have been... So did you host shows or were you...?

Beth: Well, there, I did... I actually kept a tape [00:07:30] of them. I mean, I sounded so green, but then I was like, "Yeah, I'm going to pursue this." And so I got out of school and I was like, "I'm going to be a television reporter." No experience. I had my audio tapes and I had done something at William and Mary that I got on tape.

Beth: And so I did what struggling television reporters do. I started making the rounds at different TV stations and really doing horribly. I remember going to apply for a weather person job, maybe because I was a biologist, [00:08:00] in Salisbury, Maryland in the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I remember driving there and I show up and they put me in front of a green screen. I didn't know what it was and I didn't even know how to pronounce the name of the town. Needless to say, I didn't get that job. And I ended up landing a job covering state politics in Richmond, Virginia for a very small news service. But I didn't have a lot of confidence and frankly I didn't have enough patience to understand you got to pay the dues, you got to do it. I was in love with my then boyfriend [00:08:30] and so I chose a path of marrying him and moving to Washington, DC and I ended up working in local public access television.

Beth: So I got a little bit more into it and that led to a job at NBC in PR. So my career in on-camera journalism was very, very short and lacked any confidence. I couldn't tell you how little confidence I had.

Julie: Well, but you've been on TV a lot since, representing companies.

Beth: Made up for it.

Julie: Right.

Beth: It was [00:09:00] tough too. I remember I was determined when I was in Richmond covering this House of Delegates that I was going to go work for the local Richmond station. And I don't know where this came from in me, but I sent my tape to the local news director and I called him every day and he never talked to me. And finally he had had it with me. He picked up and he said, "Would you stop calling me? I'm never hiring you. You look like you're 12 and why would I hire anyone who looks like you?"

Beth: Of course, I was devastated, but it really brought out something in me like, "You don't know me [00:09:30] and I got to get serious." So in some ways you have this lack of confidence, but when somebody challenges you. And it was like, "Okay, I got to go and kind of..." I look at that as an important prompt to me.

Julie: It's funny. I had done a couple of recordings today for people who listen, I try to record several at a time, but Dave Morgan was just here and he talked about being in law school and it was his dream and his dad and the whole thing. And-

Beth: I don't think [00:10:00] of Dave being in law school.

Julie: Right? Oh my gosh. Yeah. But he was like, "I was in law school and my law professor..." Or "I got a job at a great firm. I was the most heavily paid of my friends who graduated and I didn't really love it, but I was making so much money and the partner came to me and he's like, 'Yeah, you should probably find another job. This isn't for you.'" And it takes those moments of somebody to challenge you and be like, "No..."

Beth: What are you made of?

Julie: Yeah. Sorry. Sometimes shutting the door on your face is what you need to open that [00:10:30] other one.

Beth: Right.

Julie: So then you went to NBC.

Beth: So I ended up working my way into NBC as publicity coordinator.

Julie: From DC?

Beth: From DC, I was working at this public access television station, Wayne's World back in the day if anyone is old enough to have watched the Wayne's World movie. It was even crazier than Wayne's World, except it wasn't in someone's basement. But from there I kept applying to jobs in local TV and I ended up going to the NBC News Bureau. So it was network news in Washington as a publicity [00:11:00] coordinator.

Julie: Wow. How long did you do that?

Beth: Well, I was there for... My career, NBC, I was there for a couple of years in Washington and as it turned out, the timing worked in my favor, even though it was tough circumstances. GE had just bought NBC, they downsized NBC news pretty dramatically. And in Washington, the PR team I was part of, which I think was six or eight people, ended up being me. And so they downgraded, I became a manager. It was me and an intern in the back of the News [00:11:30] Bureau tucked away in the filing system.

Beth: But it was a great introduction for me into the News Bureau. And then they ended up moving me to-

Julie: Into management, right?

Beth: Yeah. They kind of threw me in to run and do that.

Julie: Were you still married when-

Beth: That was during the time also I was getting a divorce. So at that point, I had had a daughter and gotten a divorce and I wasn't even 30.

Julie: Wow. And did your daughter live with you?

Beth: Yeah. So [00:12:00] it's one of those kind of defining moments. It is a defining moment for me. One, I realized I couldn't be married. He was a really nice man. It just... I wasn't destined for that path at that time. And here I was, a young mother, and so it was a very traumatic decision for all of us. One I felt bad about, liberated about, had all kinds of mixed emotions. But that was the path we chose. [00:12:30] And so then eventually NBC says, "We want to move you to New York." And so me, little kid go... She was probably three when we moved to New York. Didn't have any family, had some friends.

Julie: This is the '80s?

Beth: This would have been the '80s, yeah. The mid to late '80s. And so it was one of those moments of just going, "I'm going to do this. I don't know what the outcome is. I have no choice but to make this work. I don't know what work means. I had no [00:13:00] distinctive definition of success. I just have to make this work." It wasn't a-

Beth: Distinctive definition of success. I just have to make this work. It was no longer about me. I had a daughter. I remember we were leaving Washington, I was like the Beverly Hillbillies, all my stuff in the back of the car. And I think George Bush first was getting ready for his inauguration as we drove out of town. And I just remember that like, where are we going? Almost as if we were driving off a cliff.

Julie: Yeah. And it's so expensive in New York, right? I mean this was [crosstalk 00:13:28].

Beth: Yeah. Well we lived in New Jersey, we lived in, it was not that expensive then. [00:13:30] And we lived in New Jersey. I didn't have the wits about me to live in the city.

Julie: The city. Yeah.

Beth: And by then I had started dating another man, who ended up becoming my husband. So that led to a lot of great things as well.

Julie: Okay, so how, so you moved up to Jersey, New York, you're working for NBC. What was the job then that you did for them?

Beth: I was Manager of Corporate Communications. And it was an interesting job but it was not my favorite job because I worked for a real jerk. I mean, [00:14:00] like world-class in my definition. I mean maybe other people who work for him thought differently, but so it was one of those jobs where the team, it was kind of the team against the boss, which not always such a good thing, but we bonded because he was one of these bosses that sat in his office, closed the door all the time, didn't talk to us. And I took it upon myself once to write up a whole like here's a way to make things better. And he was kind of like, "what do you know?" And so I promptly decided it was time to leave and [00:14:30] left and went to Turner CNN after that.

Julie: Yeah it's a tough, I mean you chose to be in the, I'll call it entertainment news business at a time where now we're seeing, with whether it's Harvey Weinstein or Fox, you just, the movie, there's so much now coming out about just what's been happening and how difficult it was. Not that everybody had to go through something as traumatic as some of the women did. But I would imagine that doesn't matter when it was [00:15:00] or who was your boss, that there was certain amount of misogyny and difficulty in that industry for women at that time.

Beth: Well, I think it was in this case, he was a tough boss to everybody. But yeah, I mean, I remember early working back when I was in the news bureau, one of the leadership guys of the news division of the local news bureau, finally, he used to have this thing, he'd take everybody to lunch and I was too much of a peon to get invited. And one time he invited me, I was like, "wow." I go [00:15:30] and it turns out he's trying to fix me up with some executive who was visiting and he's like, "hey, Bill here is going to drive you home." And no, it's not going to work that way. So you get things like that. And at the time I think, kind of shock and naive, but it was a different time.

Julie: Right, it was a little acceptance, yeah.

Beth: You just, you're like, "I can't believe that, but I got to move on."

Julie: Move on. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Beth: So I look back and I sometimes wonder, what was I thinking? I don't really remember that.

Julie: I think all [00:16:00] of us who were women in business in largely male dominated industries, think back now as we think about our children and what they're dealing with. But I have multiple store, auto business. There's a lot of that, right? It just was. You didn't-

Beth: Yeah, the auto business, I mean, you must have a lot of stories as well. Yeah.

Julie: I think and we all do, but it's just, it was the same sort of thing. It was a how dare they, and you would talk about it but it was, what are you going to do about it? You know what I mean?

Beth: Yeah, what are you going to do about it?

Julie: And you can be kind of pissed off and just, or go run to HR or you just, [00:16:30] nothing's going to happen except for you're going to lose your job and so you may as well just... And it's great to see what's happening today. So you left, you got out from underneath that guy. I'm so curious as to how you go from, I mean, where you ended up sort of running the whole business and you were starting in sort of in the news industry and the bureau and the communications. How did that, I mean it makes sense for marketing but-

Beth: Yeah. No, so I went to CNN and end up going to CBS, then back to NBC. I came back to NBC at a critical time. The world [00:17:00] of fake news today. This was the fake news of the first generation of fake news when the news division had been-

Julie: Fake news at 1.0.

Beth: Yeah, at 1.0. Had almost been closed because they had faked a news story, put rockets in a general motors truck. I don't know if you were in the industry at that time?

Julie: Oh my gosh.

Beth: But it was my entrepreneurial awakening. So I came back from CBS to work at NBC, leading communications for NBC News and it was an amazing time. I mean out of the ashes we rose and we had an amazing [00:17:30] team. Andy Lack was this amazing news director at the time. We could anything, we had nowhere to go but up and he allowed us to be very free and there was no distinction at that, in his mind at least, between the journalist and the PR people.

Beth: So we were a very scrappy entrepreneurial team. And I think for me that was the awakening, that I can be in, I can fight for better and be whatever. I didn't think of it as an entrepreneur then, in an established company. And then I got on the GE radar from there and did a couple of other jobs at NBC. And then after that they brought me to GE when Jack [00:18:00] Welch was still there, he brought me up to GE out of NBC. So that's, it's the long winded way of how I got there.

Julie: But there, Jack is, I have had the pleasure of meeting Jack. He was tied in tightly with a lot of the auto guys and with the Fords and-

Beth: Yeah, they were big costumer of a lot of GE's businesses at a time.

Julie: Yeah. And Six Sigma. I took the Six Sigma classes and Jack was a big, so he came and spoke to us.

Beth: How far did you get certified?

Julie: Oh, I got the black belt. I did.

Beth: Oh, did you? I only got to green belt. Woo.

Julie: Oh yeah. No, I did that well, Ford kind of trained [00:18:30] me along while I was doing marketing communications for them and breaking down projects. But he had a big influence, not just on GE but on industry, Jack.

Beth: Yeah. Six Sigma was the gospel.

Julie: Oh my gosh. So he was there. Did you work under him or with him?

Beth: Yeah. I had gone to work for Bob Wright, who was leading NBC, doing head of communications out in news division, all of NBC. And I thought my whole career was going to be media. I loved media. That's what I had lived for. And I got a call to [00:19:00] go up to Jack's office. He had an office in 30 Rock as well. And I expected he was saying, "hey, we're going to sell NBC. You need to get a press release ready." And he's like, "hey, I want you to come up and work with me." And I was not expecting it.

Beth: And it was one of those things, I went back and the head of HR and said to me, "you know you can't say no?" And I was like, "I feel the same way." I don't know why, I really, I went to GE meetings but I didn't really know that much about them. And I remembered as I was leaving, one of my colleagues, I remember standing at the elevator [00:19:30] and he came over to me and said, "you know they sell light bulbs, right? Why are you doing this?" And I couldn't explain it. It just was a pull to me that I wanted to be part of something bigger and different and learn.

Julie: What did he say? What did he want you to do? What did he-?

Beth: He was head of communications and advertising. And he knew, he had announced he was going to be stepping down in four or five years. So that had been announced and he wanted somebody to help orchestrate his rundown, his succession. [00:20:00] I feel like in the end we ended up being stage manager for this world watching succession, that all eyes on business at the time were on that. So it was a crazy four years working there.

Julie: And he was, I mean, and your job was double duty because in addition to trying to do your job for GE, Jack in and of himself was his own brand.

Beth: Right. And that was a lot of, I think one of the reasons why perhaps I appealed to him, because he had seen the work we'd done at NBC. I think [00:20:30] more of a recognition of him as a brand. I have kind of mixed feelings about that. I was all in and Jack was an amazing leader on so many levels. He was right for the time, but we did get a bit too carried away about him as the brand. So that when he left and when Jeff Immelt took over and the job for Jeff and the team that I was part of was a lot harder.

Julie: Yeah, I'm sure.

Beth: How do you define what you are when [00:21:00] the guy has left the building?

Julie: Right, when you've interlocked the fortunes of the two so tightly together, right?

Beth: Yeah. Exactly. And I think I knew that but you just get caught up in the moment and you're like-

Julie: We'll figure it out.

Beth: Just keep going. And we're all in on this. And I even remember inside the company there were people who like, "do you think this is wise?" And I was probably pretty dismissive about it and they were right to ask that and I should have asked that.

Julie: Yeah. So Jack ended up obviously retiring and [00:21:30] in comes Jeff. How did things change? How did your role change? I mean, I know how, but talk to me about that path.

Beth: Well, I was leading advertising communications. Jeff takes over. I don't think one, don't think he appreciated how much communications was going to be part of his job. I mean, you know this, every CEO doesn't realize. Already with Jack and then with Jeff, there was a habit, a practice of them being very engaged in the advertising. That was important. So that was good. But I think there were a couple [00:22:00] of pivotal moments with Jeff. It was asking that question, who are we now? Now that the Sun King's left the building, who are we? What is GE?

Beth: And Jeff had a very clear vision. He wanted to be about innovation, about customer, about global. How do we get there? And so I remember I brought in, I just started doing some different things and had been done. I brought in a crazy cultural anthropologist to do a serve, a deep dive research project. And the process was weird and in a GE context [00:22:30] he might've been a little weird. And I think Jeff liked that. He saw that the team I was part of, we were willing to try things, take risks, and he had grown up in sales and marketing. And I think in some ways we reminded him of people he had worked with. And he was like, "I want more of that."

Julie: A solid appreciation.

Beth: So from there, after about a year, so he's like, "hey, we're going to have you be Chief Marketing Officer." So that really, that championship helped me tremendously. And I mean hopefully I helped the company but that was really important [00:23:00] for him to recognize that and give me some air cover.

Julie: But then you were made Vice Chair and I remember just cheering from the sidelines like, for many reasons. Right? One, I knew you, but a woman is being put there. They're recognizing somebody in the marketing role at a quintessentially manufacturing behemoth, to come and help to be part of that leadership. What was, I'm just so curious what that moment was like and how you felt and how they asked you?

Beth: Yeah. Well, that would have been about 15 years after the CMO role. So there was a lot of time in between there. I [00:23:30] went back to NBC, came back. But it felt great and scary for all the reasons you said. I mean for me what I liked about it was, it was a recognition of difference. Here after all these years, I was the first woman, frankly I shouldn't have been the first woman to have that role. There were a lot of qualified women earlier. And it was about being a marketer. It was about having a different, being an innovator in all kinds of things.

Beth: So I felt proud to represent that kind of difference [00:24:00] in the company that hadn't had much of that. And certainly when it came to a Vice Chair role and Jeff had been a really great champion for difference. He had pushed the company to be global. A lot more women went to leadership roles under his tenure. So it felt natural. And he named a lot of women leading businesses at GE.

Julie: And how was it, I mean you were obviously the, I actually was surprised when you said 15 years you were in that role. I guess it goes by like that, when we've been in the business it [00:24:30] seems like it was almost like five, six years.

Beth: Yeah, maybe it was more like, yeah. I think I got the CMO role in 2003 and I got the Vice Chair role in like 2015 or 16.

Julie: Okay. So 12, but still-

Beth: 12 years, yeah.

Julie: But still, it seemed shorter than that to me. How was you, I mean you got married again in this time frame, right?

Beth: Yep.

Julie: And you, did you a-?

Beth: I had a second daughter.

Julie: You had a second daughter. Right. Okay.

Beth: All while I was in the media world.

Julie: Right. In the media world. And how so again, there were those of us, I was also [00:25:00] the breadwinner and I have friends like that, but we were much more of the exception than the rule. And so how was it for you to try to balance that with the kids, with the big role that you had?

Beth: I don't know that I'm such a, I know I'm not a great role model in balance. I'm really proud of my daughters. They're both grown now. They're very independent and amazing, amazing husband. But it, they had to deal with a stressed out mother who liked to work and was ambitious. And [00:25:30] I think a lot of good things came out of the work I did for them. But also they didn't always win, a lot of times work won. And you have to kind of get your head around that and there are things you can do that you can bring on yourself and things you just got to say, "hey, this is the way it is." But I'll give you an example of things that could have, example. So my younger daughter, when we moved from New Jersey to Connecticut, I was like, good to go GE. I was like, "I'm only 15 minutes from work, at home. Great news. I'm going to be able to come home and have lunch with you now." She was going into first [00:26:00] grade. And then when we move, excuse me, 12 years later, we moved to the city.

Beth: Great. And then when we move... 12 years later, we moved to the city, she's at college and we're selling the house. She loved that house and she was like, "Oh, so now I guess it means I won't be able to have lunch with you." She was right. Like one, why did I commit to that if I wasn't going to do it? Why didn't I go home for lunch when... Did I really need to show my face at lunch every day? No.

Beth: So I think I could've done a lot better job of setting boundaries, of understanding the [00:26:30] what's important, urgent, all that kind of thing. And you get caught up in the moment. And so those things, you can't take them back. It is what it is. I think my daughter saw me. They're very independent. I feel seeing me work all that influenced them. They saw a lot. But there are those moments that you're like, "I could have done better."

Julie: Yeah. I think it's important that you say that because people say the same thing and you do. Job becomes, and I've just started a new job [00:27:00] and they don't see me very much anymore, but they know. And so-

Beth: Do you communicate your kids like, "Here's what I'm doing. I like what I'm doing,"?

Julie: Yeah, absolutely. And we talk about it and my new job with Party City is something they can get their heads around and now I get texts from my son, "I'm at party's..." I get complaints about, "I'm at Party City. Balloons, blah, blah, blah-"

Beth: Mystery shopper. That's some mystery.

Julie: I was like, "I know. That's why mommy has a job."

Beth: Oh, no.

Julie: "We're working on it. We're working on it." But they get that. And actually the digital age when they were young, [00:27:30] had we had this to be able to text with the kids-

Beth: Yeah, exactly.

Julie: I think they're so used... That's how they keep in touch with lots of people. So it doesn't feel second hand to them. It feels like their primary way that they talk to everybody. I think that if I... Going back today, maybe you would feel as well, we would have been able to be better.

Beth: Be more connected.

Julie: Right.

Beth: Yeah, exactly. And then to travel the FaceTime and all kinds of things like that. And I think I could have... My girls knew I liked what I did. They knew it was important [00:28:00] to me. It was important to the family. My husband was good at that. He'd often run interference and say, "Calm down. Your mom likes what she's doing." And so he was very helpful on that. But I could have exposed them to even more, not just take them to the holiday events or whatever.

Beth: I'll tell you one of the colleagues I had toward the end of my time at GE, she was amazing. I love this woman and Kate Johnson, who's now a head of sales at Microsoft. And she used to bring her kids to work a lot. Not just like take your kids to work day. You'd come in and there was her daughter Zoe in a meeting and [00:28:30] it was delightful. I mean, she wouldn't bring it to a board meeting, but it was a way to one, her kids got to see her at work and work got to see her as a mom and she was very comfortable with that where it was appropriate.

Beth: And I thought, "I should have done more of that." Another woman I worked with who was leading a couple of big divisions at GE, she had a very strict rule of boundaries. "You can't call me on the weekends. I mean, if the place is on fire, call me. [00:29:00] But otherwise I'm not going to email you. You don't email me." And she was very good in boundaries and again those kinds of things like you can do that.

Beth: And maybe she could do it because she was the head of a division, but you can set small boundaries and I could have done more of that.

Julie: Yeah. I've never done it either. You think about it. Yeah, we could have.

Beth: Because you get into the momentum of it. And you're all in.

Julie: Well then work becomes your family too and you kind of give everybody a little bit of yourself. Those people depend on you and [00:29:30] you get that feeling for it.

Julie: So kind of thinking about that and work as your family and you've got all these people and now you've been at the company for decades and you've been in this leading role and vice chair. Okay. So talk about the end of the GE days and how that happened and how it felt because I think it's, obviously it's a big, talk about a holy shit moment in your life, but how that went down, how you felt about it?

Beth: Yeah, so I left GE at the end of 2017. It was sooner than I expected, although I knew I'd be leaving at some point. I mean, [00:30:00] it was just the natural evolution. The vice chair role was a bit of a kind of a recognition. You kind of done what you're going to do here. And I knew Jeff Immelt was going to be leaving and there had been a succession in place. So all of that was knowing. I'd started working on my book, but I thought I had a couple more years and then we get an activist investor and Jeff leaves more quickly than the plan and certainly more unexpectedly than any of us thought.

Beth: And the new guy says, "Hey, we don't have any place for you." And so [00:30:30] I'm done. And as much as... I remember just being like, "I can't believe it." It's sort of the finality of it and a couple of things. I mean, I'm such a person of change, but I'm a big believer, you only like change when you're leading it and if it happens to you and you don't have a say you hate it.

Beth: And so I was reminded of that in that moment. I remember my husband saying... I was upset about it, and he's like, "But you couldn't to... You were done. You said you were done." I was like, "Yeah, I kind of was. But I wanted to"-

Julie: [00:31:00] On my terms.

Beth: And also that sense of I was very loyal to the company. I wanted to help. It was having a tough time. And so the finality of it, it was tough.

Julie: More abrupt.

Beth: More abrupt than I expected. But those things happen.

Julie: And I would imagine the feeling, well, I have imagined, I've been... That feeling of ending, you suddenly go from this 24/7 over decades to like, okay, now there's nothing there and you don't [00:31:30] necessarily, because it happened quicker than you thought, you don't have sort of that game plan of what's next. I mean, yeah. At least you had your book that you were in progress of, but how were those first few months after?

Julie: Were you restless? I mean, how did that manifest?

Beth: Luckily, I did have the book, which ended up being a huge project and so I probably drove my co-writer more crazy because-

Julie: Need all your time.

Beth: "Hey, guess what..." But I mean, it takes a while to get into a new rhythm. I remember the first few months, it was probably this time of year and [00:32:00] sitting at my desk and my husband walks by me in the home at my desk and he's like, "What are you doing?" I had this big to-do list. I had taken out my markers and I had written an art all around it to do and he was like, "What do you have to do?"

Beth: You're right, what do I have to do? and I was sort of following the same routines and trying to get into the same rhythm. And so things like that, you have to establish new routines and new habits. And [00:32:30] I think the book was very cathartic and good. But if I could have, in hindsight, I might've taken a bit of a breather and then jumped into the book, I just think I would've had a chance to reflect more.

Julie: But being who you are, being who... that's the idea of... Like, no, no, no, no. Must keep going.

Beth: Exactly. Jump right into this.

Julie: There's no time for that, right? There's a time later.

Beth: Because time to reflect, I mean it's the blank canvas. It's all these things we say we like as creative people, but they're also very scary.

Julie: [00:33:00] Frightening.

Beth: Now I have to do this right. And growing up in media, if you don't make it to [inaudible 00:33:07] dark space, right? You're dead and so always used to doing something.

Julie: The next thing. So, you've spent the last two years with your book, but basically sharing it, going around the world. What's that experience been like?

Beth: It's been great. I mean, on one hand it's been very cathartic and reflective and I have distance from the experiencing. It's less [00:33:30] about a GE conversation, although I never really get the, "What the hell happened to GE?" Those kinds of questions. And I don't blame people for asking, but I really talk about change.

Beth: I almost called my book Permission Granted as opposed to Imagine It Forward. But this idea of agency and giving yourself permission, and I've especially targeted it for people in the middle of the company, middle of their career and there's so much is expected of people at that stage and yet so little is granted in terms of either permission, tools, [00:34:00] encouragement.

Beth: So, it's been good to connect and to see that there is this group of people who are hungry for new ways of doing it. And so that's been nice to connect and also to connect with some business leaders in different industries and realize when people are people. Auto, aviation, healthcare, we're all... and we all have the same challenges in business. And right now everybody's just crazy with the pace of change, the complexity of the world.

Beth: And so some of the things [00:34:30] I feel like I learned from just hard knocks, they're relevant and so they're kind of timeless and so it's been nice to be able to connect on that front.

Julie: I'm just curious just about the, Imagine It Forward. What prompted you to want to write? I mean, because you did this before. It wasn't like, "Oh, I'm done with GE now. I got nothing..." You'd started it. So, obviously something was in you.

Beth: Well as I said, I knew I'd be wrapping up at GE in a couple of years, but I taught a monthly class at GE at our learning center [00:35:00] for early managers, and I love this. I love this. It was just so great because they would challenge me, I'd challenged them, but I started to notice this theme where they would always have talk about wanting to innovate and ask me for case studies and what I had learned, but they'd all... I'd say, "What are you doing?" "Oh, I can't do that. I just can't. My boss won't let me. We don't have enough budget. You don't know my manager, my manager..." And I go, "Well, did you ask?" Like, "No, but you just don't know."

Beth: And I just started to see this permission [00:35:30] granted kind of notion. And so I came up with this hokey thing. I created permission slips and I would challenge the team. I'd tell them stories. "Here's times when I pushed myself and I'm a shy person. I'm an introvert." A lot of those things. "And I pushed myself to do something I didn't feel good with," and I shared the outcome and I'd say, "Now, what are you going to do?"

Beth: And I literally would pass out these permission slips, half the class would rip them off like, "This is so goofy," but the other half, 40% they would follow up with me afterwards [00:36:00] and they'd tell me stories of what they did. And then I started keeping a stack on my desk. And when people would say that I'd hand them out.... So it just became, "Hey, there's a way to capture some of my mistakes and my learnings and try to offer it to people who are looking for that encouragement right now." So, that's how the book was born.

Julie: It's funny because as you're talking, I just have memories of you talking about your mother and how she loved teaching and like she just couldn't... And it's sort of obviously that was somewhere [00:36:30] in you because the way that you're talking about it is sounds very similar to how you were describing your mother's fashion.

Beth: Yeah, no, I come from a long line of educators, so there's probably something in the DNA there.

Julie: Especially with the permission. So you harken back to the [crosstalk 00:36:41].

Beth: I was too much of a good girl. Never forced my mother [inaudible 00:10:48].

Julie: Right. You wouldn't have missed a school.

Beth: I've made up for it [inaudible 00:36:49].

Julie: That's awesome. Okay. Thank you so much for coming and being a guest for me.

Beth: Thanks, Julie. Good luck with everything. I'm glad you're doing this and you bring such great energy to it. So party on.

Julie: Yeah, [00:37:00] right. Woo.

Beth: Start the party.

Julie: Thank you.

Beth: Thanks, Julie.