GE Careers Blog.

At first blush, Comstock doesn’t have an eclectic career path–she’s spent more than two decades within GE’s various divisions. But that hasn’t limited her embrace of flux. While she can dress and act the part of a quintessential corporate soldier, she’s also got a sweet spot for creative types who can bring her fresh thinking–and can spur GE forward. She’s brought in folks like Benjamin Palmer, the groovy CEO of edgy ad firm Barbarian Group, to help inject new ideas and processes into GE’s marketing apparatus. “We’re creating digital challenge teams,” she explains. She’s also trolling among cleantech and health startups, pointing to Luke Fishback at home-energy service PlotWatt as an example. “We’re doing a lot more work with entrepreneurs,” Comstock says. “It’s part of our internal growth strategy. It creates tension. It makes people’s jobs frustrating. But it’s also energizing.”

Executives at GE are bracing for a new future. The challenge they face is the same one staring down wide swaths of corporate America, not to mention government, schools, and other institutions that have defined how we’ve lived: These organizations have structures and processes built for an industrial age, where efficiency is paramount but adaptability is terribly difficult. We are finely tuned at taking a successful idea or product and replicating it on a large scale. But inside these legacy institutions, changing direction is rough. From classrooms arranged in rows of seats to tenured professors, from the assembly line to the way we promote executives, we have been trained to expect an orderly life. Yet the expectation that these systems provide safety and stability is a trap. This is what Comstock and Peters are battling.

It’s not just C-suites that can benefit from team leadership. Consider this example from General Electric (GE): in 2007, 19 senior managers of GE Power Generation, one of the company’s oldest businesses, convened at GE’s management-development center in Crotonville, N.Y. It was the first time that all of the senior executives of a GE business went through leadership training together. The result? They drafted a vision statement and developed plans for growth, including focusing on regulatory and other staff in emerging markets, which is now a key area in GE’s overall strategy. In just four days, the team efficiently devised, agreed upon, and began implementing a unified strategy.

This year Krenicki’s division, which manufactures things like gas turbines and solar panels, is expected to bring in about $45 billion in revenue, making it the biggest industrial unit in the company. Profits haven’t grown year over year since the third quarter of 2010, hurt by the popping of a bubble in the wind turbine market. GE says the energy division’s profits should start to rise again in the final period of 2011.

One constant in all the varied industry sectors GE operates in is the need to innovate successfully. Steve Sargent, CEO, GE Australia and New Zealand, describes how the company approaches the crucial execution challenge for innovation.