Imagine It Forward by Beth Comstock, GE’s former Vice Chair and Head of Marketing and Innovation, is an inspiring read for current and aspiring change-makers. Comstock talks about her career, and how she uses her various roles to disrupt the status quo and create customer-driven change. She talks directly about coming up against old school thinking, slow-moving bureaucracies, and the profit- and numbers-driven measures of success in the corporate world.

This book will clearly resonate with business people, but as someone who works in the non-profit sector, I found a lot of parallels with my own work. I think that bureaucracy and deeply entrenched work cultures are a reality no matter what industry you’re in, and I love Comstock’s approach to putting the customer’s voice first when deciding what innovations to push through.

Some things that resonated with me are:

• Comstock’s admission early in the book that she’s a naturally shy person. As a shy person myself, it helped me to read about how she managed to make herself speak up even when her comfort zone was in the background. More importantly, as the book went on, her shyness no longer seemed as big a barrier, and she was able to go head to head with powerful executives who tried to shut her down.
• The stories about how GE’s engineers and scientists were so focused on innovating for the sake of innovation, but failed to consider what exactly they were innovating for. Their usual question was “What is possible?” when they should have been more concerned with “What do our users need?” Comstock took the completely opposite approach to marketing, and thereby shifted company culture. I love that because it shifts GE from a lab in an ivory tower to one that actually meets real-world needs.
• I was also struck by a story about focusing on small and quick innovations at a time rather than waiting for a large-scale change. Basically, GE engineers were looking to develop an update that’ll take a couple of years to finalize, but when they focused on solving a problem for one particular customer’s needs, they were able to cut down the development time to six months. I love that because we’re often so focused on making a big splash that we neglect to consider all the little steps we can be making along the way.
• And finally, Comstock talks about how there was a lot of push back from GE executives on customer-centred marketing, because they were a business-to-business company. But as Comstock rightly points out, the businesses they deal with are also trying to please their customers, so it makes sense to appeal to the customers directly. It reminds me of a business school project I worked on once where my group made the same mistake the GE executives did, and ended up with a project that would have worked well operationally, but didn’t at all push boundaries. I love how simply shifting your notions of what your company is can totally change your approach to business.

Comstock has a very readable writing style, and helpfully places significant points in large font sidebars that makes them easier to find.

Imagine it Forward is an informative and useful book that will give you ideas for how you can create change in your own workplaces. And if you’ve ever tried to create change or innovate in the past, chances are that you’ll find sections from this book familiar, and will get ideas that you can implement in the future.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

When Cara, an antiques dealer, discovers an old diary in an estate she’s working on, she gets drawn into the story of the diary’s writer: Louise, who falls in love with a RAF pilot during WWII and, tired of small-town life, joins the army. Louise’s intelligence gets her a job as a gunner girl, one of the team of five women who do all the math and calculations to aim guns at German planes and support the (always male) soldiers who load the guns and do the actual shooting. Louise’s romance with Paul isn’t super smooth — he’s never available to meet up and he isn’t happy about her being a soldier — but her work is very rewarding and there’s a strong camaraderie within her team.

I found Louise’s story very compelling. I knew a bit about women code breakers, medics and ambulance drivers during WWII, but I don’t think I’ve ever read before about gunner girls. I love how kickass brave and intelligent these women are. I also love that while they meet some initial sexism from commanding officers who are unsure of women’s capacity to fight, the men in their unit quickly show them respect. After a sexist remark from someone else, one of Louise’s male colleagues tells her she and the other women will easily prove that jerk wrong, and I liked that the story did include men who saw these women soldiers as equals.

I also really like how Louise’s romance was handled. Too often, we see stories of women pitting themselves against each other over a man, and I like how mature the women in this story were in how they handled a difficult situation.

The present-day story was pretty good as well. I found Cara’s romance with her neighbour Liam to be sweet, and I like how supportive he was of her interest in the diary. I also really like the backstory about Cara’s ex-husband. He was a fascinating character — a weak man with grandiose ambitions who couldn’t quite handle failure — and I like that the reason they broke up was because of this kind of weakness rather than the usual cheating trope.

I did find Cara a bit annoying in how persistent she was in demanding her grandmother share her experiences during the war. The big secret turned out not to be as horrific as I thought, but I can imagine how traumatic people’s war-time experiences can be, and I don’t at all blame Cara’s grandmother for not wanting to relive that part of her past. I recognize Cara’s interest about her past and her family, but I thought it was pretty selfish to demand her grandmother relive a potentially painful past just to satisfy her own curiosity.

Overall, The Light over London is an entertaining WWII novel. Dual narrative novels are often touch-and-go for me, but I thought it worked nicely here.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an egalley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book is much better than the marketing suggests. From the summary, I was expecting a fairly standard grip lit / domestic thriller about a talented young woman looking to usurp a successful older woman. We’ve seen a lot of novels like that, and movies dating back to Single White Female years ago. I was expecting Emma to be devious and conniving, and for Emma and Carrie to end up competing over Carrie’s husband Adrian.

Instead, I found a story about two women who are powerful in their own way, simply at different stages of their career. It’s an unexpectedly feminist spin on this type of thriller, and I absolutely adored it.

Carrie is indeed insecure about the ease in which Emma steps into her shoes while Carrie’s off on maternity leave, but because Michelle Frances gives us both women’s perspectives from the start, we know that Emma is more interested in impressing Carrie and possibly getting Carrie as a mentor than in actually taking her place.

Emma is indeed somewhat fixated on Carrie’s career and on Adrian himself, but not in the way we’ve come to expect. The real reason behind Emma’s fixation is a wonderfully feminist take that lays bare an all-too-common occurrence for women in many industries. I already sympathized with Emma for her money problems and her utter haplessness at understanding Carrie’s coldness towards her, and her backstory made me cheer her on all the more.

Ultimately, I love that this thriller doesn’t really pit the women against each other. There is some conflict between Carrie and Emma, and certainly some very understandable insecurity on Carrie’s part that she’s built up a long career only to become dispensable. However, neither is really a villain, nor is either really standing in the way of the other’s career.

In a world where women are constantly being pitted against each other, we need more thrillers like this. Michelle Frances delves into the complexities and insecurities of being a woman working in a creative field (which itself is fraught with instability regardless of your gender), and crafts a beautifully textured psychological drama that also happens to be a fast-paced thriller.

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Thank you to Publisher’s Group Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.