Peter Fisk

In the 1400s, Leonardo da Vinci designed a complex mechanical robot clad in a suit of armour, capable of sitting, standing, and independently moving its arms. The entire robot was operated by a system of pulleys and cables.  In the 17th to 19th centuries, the Japanese built humanoid automata called karakuri puppets. These puppets resembled dolls and were used for entertainment in theatre, homes, and religious festivals.

Sci-fi movies have captured our imaginations with the cute human-like possibilities of machines – from the tin woodman in 1930’s The Wizard of Oz, to droid friends C-3PO and R2-D2 in Star Wars of 1977.

Real world examples of humanoid robots have included Honda’s Asimo, which was launched in 2000 to demonstrate new technological advancements of intelligent machines. And in 2016 Sophia, a humanoid robot developed by Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong was physically modelled on Audrey Hepburn, adding artificial intelligence, visual data processing and facial recognition.

AI-enabled robots

The prospects for machines that help with everything from serving coffee to folding laundry, carrying boxes in warehouses to handling hazardous waste, caring for the elderly to fighting on the battlefield, have improved as progress in AI accelerates and investment in humanoid robots grows faster than anticipated.

“Humanoids” are advanced robotic machines capable of emulating human actions, reasoning, and operations. They represent the convergence of technologies like AI, biomechanics, machine learning, and sensor connectivity with learning, cognitive development, and behavioral studies. Humanoids are crafted to mimic the human shape, aligning with the human-centric design of our world, from tools to building to homes.

The worldwide market for humanoid robots is forecast to be bigger than analysts in Goldman Sachs Research expected even a year ago, are currently having most impact logistics, manufacturing, healthcare and hospitality, but their use is still limited, and development costs are high. The total addressable market is projected to reach $38 billion by 2035.

Supporting this accelerated growth, the manufacturing cost of humanoid robots has dropped from a range that ran between an estimated $50,000 (for lower-end models) and $250,000 (for state-of-the art versions) per unit last year, to a range of between $30,000 and $150,000 now.

Robot Makers

Prominent companies driving the humanoid robotics field include established players like Boston Dynamics, Tesla, and Toyota, and startups like Agility Robotics and Figure, with each company bringing a distinct focus.

Boston Dynamics’s Atlas, its most advanced humanoid robot, launched in 2013 as part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, has recently been updated it with an all-electric version. With its bipedal agility, human-like movement, autonomous navigation, and robust learning abilities, Atlas has gained widespread industry acclaim and has become an internet sensation. Atlas features whole-body skills for swift, dynamic movements, allowing it to lift and carry objects, perform complex exercises like jumping and backflips, and participate in disaster response and industrial tasks that demand dexterity and adaptability.

Tesla’s Optimus Gen 2, is in development for commercial purposes. It is a versatile, general-purpose machine capable of assisting in multiple domains, including manufacturing, construction, healthcare, and entertainment. The robot offers precise, flexible movement capabilities, and its hands, equipped with 11 degrees of freedom, feature tactile sensors and high-speed actuators, enhancing its object manipulation skills. Optimus runs on the same neural networks powering Tesla’s cars, and the company’s expertise in battery technology, sensing, and computing is expected to allow it to operate more cost-effectively than competitors. CEO Elon Musk stated that the prototype could cost only $20,000 upon launch.

Agility Robotics’s Digit the first human-centric, multi-purpose robot made for logistics work has been adopted by Amazon. Digit is designed from the ground up to go where people go and do useful work safely in spaces designed for people, starting with bulk material handling within warehouses and distribution centers. Digit’s “backward” legs unlock the ability to maneuver in tight spaces and get closer to shelves, conveyors, and other infrastructure. The unique design also allows Digit to reach deeper and maintain an operational pick range from the floor all the way up to nearly 6 feet.

Figure AI’s 01 has demonstrated the first fruit of its collaboration with OpenAI to enhance the capabilities of humanoid robots, conversing in real-time. Figure AI raised $675 million from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI. Founded in 2022, it has developed a general-purpose robot, called Figure 01, that looks and moves like a human. The robot, attached to a tether, walks on two legs, and uses its five-fingered hands to pick up a plastic crate, then walks several more steps before placing the box on a conveyor belt.

Engineered Arts’s Ameca, has a silicon face and is equipped with sensors that can track a person or object’s movement. It’s able to express astonishment and surprise, and can recognise faces and voices. Ameca also yawns and shrugs, and can discern emotions and even age. It can also shush you if you’re being too loud. Engineered Arts is based in Cornwall, southwest England. Ameca is currently associated with UAE’s Museum of the Future’s robotic family in Dubai, where it can interact with visitors.

Nvidia’s Project GROOT has developed an innovative general-purpose foundation model specifically designed for humanoid robots, aiming to revolutionize robot learning both in simulation and the real world . By supporting leading humanoid robot makers like 1X Technologies, Agility Robotics, and Boston Dynamics, Nvidia’s Project GROOT stands as a pivotal AI platform that promises to enhance how robots understand natural language and emulate human movements.

Top 22 Humanoid Robots Right Now, according to BuiltIn

The internet of today is a far cry from its early promise of a democratic network of unbridled innovation. In the last decade, it has fallen under the control of a small number of monopolistic companies like Apple, Google and Facebook; companies that limit the creative potential of the internet while seizing its proceeds for themselves.

There is an alternative. Chris Dixon, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has long advocated for a technology that can revive the dream of an open, entrepreneurial internet: blockchain networks. Often dismissed, sometimes vilified, these networks have until recently been dominated by amoral speculators and get-rich-quick schemes. But, more quietly, a group of visionaries have been using them to build the future.

In Read Write Own, Dixon draws on 25 years at the vanguard of tech innovation to explore how blockchains will change the internet. He starts by introducing the three eras of the web. First came the ‘read’ era, in which the earliest networks democratized information – creating an anarchic playground for bloggers, coders and artists. Next came the ‘read-write’ era, in which sprawling corporations democratized publishing – turning us all into small-time content creators but offering us few of the rewards.

We are now entering the ‘read-write-own’ era, sometimes called web3, in which blockchain networks have begun to democratize ownership – returning power and economic benefit to all who use the internet. And it is an internet we can all help create. Lucid and practical, Read Write Own offers both a vision of a better internet and a playbook for how to realise it.

Excerpts from the book

1. The nature of permission

In business, permission seeking is not like asking your parents or teachers for permission, where you get a simple yes or no answer. Nor is it like traffic lights setting the rules of the road. In business, permission becomes a pretense for tyranny. Dominant tech businesses leverage the power of permission to thwart competition, desolate markets, and extract rents. (p. xvi)

2. Software as art

Software is so expressive that it is better thought of not as engineering but as an art form. The plasticity and flexibility of code offer an immensely rich design space, far closer in the breadth of possibilities to creative activities like sculpting and fiction writing than engineering activities like bridge building. As with other art forms, practitioners regularly develop new genres and movements that fundamentally shift what’s possible. (p. xx)

3. The problems blockchains solve

The ability for blockchains to make strong commitments about how they will behave in the future allows new networks to be created. Blockchain networks solve problems that plague earlier network architectures. They can connect people in social networks while empowering users over corporate interests. They can underpin marketplaces and payment networks that facilitate commerce, but with persistently lower take rates. They can enable new forms of monetizable media, interoperable and immersive digital worlds, and artificial intelligence products that compensate — rather than cannibalize — creators…. Asking “What problems do blockchains solve?” is like asking “What problems does steel solve over, say, wood?” You can make a building or railway out of either. But steel gave us taller buildings, stronger railways, and more ambitious public works at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. With blockchains we can create networks that are fairer, more durable, and more resilient than the networks of today. (pp. xxiii–xxiv)

4. A new internet era

The decisions we make now will determine the internet’s future: who builds, owns, and uses it; where innovation happens; and what the experience will be for everyone. Blockchains, and the networks they enable, unlock the extraordinary power of software as an art form, with the internet as its canvas. The movement has an opportunity to change the course of history, to remake humanity’s relationship to the digital, to reimagine what’s possible…. This is a chance to create the internet you want, not the internet you inherited. (p. xxviii)

5. The supremacy of networks

Network design is destiny.Networks are the organizing framework that enables billions of people to intelligibly interact. They decide the world’s winners and losers. Their algorithms decide where money and attention will flow. The structure of a network guides how that network will evolve and where wealth and power accumulate. Given the scale of the internet today, software design decisions up front, regardless of how seemingly small, can have cascading downstream consequences. Who controls a given network is the central question when analyzing power on the internet. (p. 3)

6. Protocols vs. corporations

The difference between a protocol network like email and a corporate network like Twitter is that email’s network effect accrues to a community instead of a company. No company owns or controls email and anyone can access it through software created by independent developers that supports the underlying protocol. It’s up to developers and consumers to decide what to build and use. Decisions that affect the community are made by the community. (p. 18)

7. The impact of new technologies

People use new technologies in one of two ways: (1) to do something they could already do but can now do faster, cheaper, easier, or higher quality; or (2) to do something brand-new that they simply couldn’t do before. Early in the development of new technologies, the first category of activities tends to be more popular, but it’s the second set that has more lasting effects on the world. (p. 27)

8. The corporate-controlled internet

Corporate networks have a simple structure. In the middle, a company controls centralized services that power the network. This company has complete control. It can rewrite its terms of service, determine who has access, and redirect how money flows, at any time, for any reason. Corporate networks are centralized because there is ultimately one person, usually the chief executive officer, who makes all the rules. (p. 31)

9. Blockchains as non-consensus bet

Blockchains are different. They’re a non-consensus bet. While plenty of people recognize their potential — including me — much of the establishment disregards them. In fact, a prevailing view in the tech industry assumes that the only vectors of technological improvement that matter are the ones incumbents are already focused on: bigger databases, faster processors, larger neural networks, smaller devices. The view is myopic. (p. 52)

10. How hobbies fuel future industries

Outside-in technologies arrive, in contrast, on the fringes. Hobbyists, enthusiasts, open-source developers, and startup founders hatch them outside the mainstream. The work usually involves less capital and formal training, which helps level the playing field with insiders. A lower bar also causes insiders to take these technologies and their proponents less seriously…. Hobbies fuel future industries…. Hobbies are what the smartest people spend time on when they aren’t constrained by near-term financial goals. I like to say that what the smartest people do on the weekends is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years. (pp. 53–54)

11. The simplicity of tokens

What tokens are matters less than what they do.Tokens can represent the ownership of anything digital, including money, art, photos, music, text, code, game items, voting power, access, or whatever people come up with next. Using some additional building blocks, they can also represent real-world things, like physical goods, real estate, or dollars in a bank account. Anything that can be represented in code can be wrapped inside a token to be bought, sold, used, stored, embedded, transferred, or whatever else a person might want to do with it. If that sounds so simple as to seem trivial, that’s by design. Simplicity is a virtue. (p. 72)

12. Owners vs. users

The concept of ownership is so deeply embedded in our lives that it’s difficult to imagine how the world would look if that were taken away. Imagine if the clothes you bought could be worn only in the venue you bought them in. What if you couldn’t resell or reinvest in your house or car? Or what if you had to change your name wherever you went? This is the digital world of corporate networks. (p. 80)

13. Blockchains as cities

Blockchain functions have neat analogues in urban planning. Starting a blockchain network is like building a new city on undeveloped land. The city designer constructs some initial buildings and then designs a system of land grants and tax incentives for residents and developers. Property rights — ownership — play a key role, providing strong commitments that property owners will get to keep what they own and can feel comfortable investing in it. As the city grows, so does the tax base. Taxes are reinvested into public projects like streets and parks, more land is given away, and the city grows. (p. 97)

14. Restoring community through tokens

Blockchain networks bake community ownership into their core design. It’s in their DNA. While memecoin mutations, like Dogecoin, may seem like a joke, they show how users are embracing all sorts of tokens — some silly, some serious — in search of community, to fill the void left by corporate networks. The internet was originally envisioned as a decentralized network owned and controlled by its participants. Tokens restore that vision. (p. 140)

15. Blockchains as network constitutions

Network designers can use blockchains to create formal rules that are enforced by code. These rules are like constitutions for networks. What these constitutions say is subject to debate, contention, and experimentation, but their very existence, the ability to enshrine rules in immutable software, is a meaningful advance that was not possible in previous network designs. (p. 167)

16. Crypto’s two cultures

Two distinct cultures are interested in blockchains. The first sees blockchains as a way to build new networks…. I call this culture the computer because, at its core, it’s about blockchains powering a new computing movement. … The other culture is mainly interested in speculation and money-making. Those of this mindset see blockchains solely as a way to create new tokens for trading. I call this culture the casino because, at its core, it’s really just about gambling. … The casino should not hold the computer down. (pp. 171, 181)

17. The good old days

Blockchains are at the computing frontier, as PCs were in the 1980s, the internet was in the 1990s, and mobile phones were in the 2010s. People look back today on classic moments in computing and wonder what it was like to be there. Noyce and Moore. Jobs and Wozniak. Page and Brin. Hobbyists dabbling, debating, driving forward. Tinkerers hacking away on nights and weekends.What seems late is actually early. Now is the time to reimagine what networks can be and what they can do. Software is an un- beatable playground for ingenuity. You don’t have to accept the internet as you found it. You can make something better . . . as a builder, as a creator, as a user, and, most important, as an owner.You are here now. These are the good old days. (p. 230)

Driving out of Athens this week, away from the awe of the Acropolis, the majesty of the Panathenaic Stadium, and long lunches of Plaka, I headed down the coastal road. On my right was the beautiful, glimmering Aegean Sea. On my left was mile after mile of construction site.

After Greece’s economic crisis of the last decade, it is firmly now on an upwards economic trajectory. And this, place – variously described as a smart, sustainable megacity, and a coastal park – is the largest redevelopment project in Europe, and a great example of returning Greek confidence.

Lamda Development’s ambitious $8 billion Ellinikon project rises from the Mediterranean coastline, on land which once served as an international airport and the site of the 2004 Olympics.

The Ellinikon project boasts impressive features, including a 1-km-long public beach and one of the world’s largest coastal parks—effectively doubling the green space available to Athens residents.

Among its offerings are thousands of luxury apartments, shopping centres, hotels, offices, entertainment venues, and even a university. Additionally, the development incorporates forward-looking infrastructure, such as electric vehicle stations and rainwater capture systems.

Privately financed by Lamda, this monumental project is expected to generate thousands of jobs, attract tourists, and contribute approximately 2.4% to Greece’s GDP—an economic boost that aligns with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ focus on growth.

Lamda Development’s CEO, Odisseas Athanasiou, aptly describes it as a venture that puts Greece on the global map for all the right reasons.

Growth is the oxygen of business. It is a relentless journey towards better. It doesn’t necessarily mean being the biggest, but it does mean driving progress. Doing more, achieving more. Yes, over time, it needs to be profitable. And yes it needs to be sustainable, enduring and with positive impact.

So what drives, sustains, and accelerates, profitable growth?

Here we explore some of the most interesting growth companies, with links to their latest performance – selected to demonstrate the different approaches to growth, as well as their performance:

Growth Champion: Amazon

“Earth’s most customer-centric company” has been a relentless growth business for over more than 25 years, from online bookstore to everything store, since Jeff Bezos started out in his garage, back in 1994. Critical to growth has been a long-term perspective, driven initially by private ownership, extension to a marketplace platform, the broader partner ecosystem, the flywheel model, Prime customer membership, and its most profitable business, AWS.

• Amazon
• Amazon Case Study (Strategos Institute)
• Amazon Strategy Teardown (CB Insights)
• How Amazon built a Growth Ecosystem (Growth Hackers)
• Amazon Profile and Jeff Bezos Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Authentic Brands

Jamie Salter leads Authentic, experts in taking tired old brands and finding new growth. Authentic started with celebrity brands – like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, and more recently David Beckham. Since then it has rejuvenated brands including Reebok, Forever 21, Juicy Couture, Nine West, and Ted Baker. The business model is to take charge of the brand and business strategy, while leaving partners to operate, and create synergies between brands.

• Authentic Brands Group
• Authentic Brands Investor Presentation 2022
• Adidas sells Reebok to Authentic Brands for $2.3bn
• Jamie Salter Interview (Drapers, 2024)
• Authentic Brands Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Coca-Cola

Growth becomes harder as a business matures. Coca-Cola has learnt to keep evolving as markets, consumer tastes and cultures change. Key has been to retain a “human-centric” approach to brand experience, with deep insight into consumers, and the broader cultural context, leading to identifying new niches, new products, new channels, new engagement, and an ever-shifting portfolio. Innovation examples include AI-driven Coca Cola Creations, and Project Shaken, a cocktail mixer.

• The Coca-Cola Company
• Coca Cola Investor Overview Q3 2023
• Raising the Bar: Marketing and Innovation Q3 2023
• Coca Cola HBC Investor Day 2023
• Coke y3000 future magic (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Crocs

People who love to hate Crocs had cause to celebrate in 2008, when investors were writing the company off as a passing fad.  Crocs lost over $185 million that year and stock plunged to just over $1 a share from a high of about $69 a year earlier. But now they are back from the dead, sold 700 million pairs in the last decade, and have become a cultural icon. Crocs are a top brand among Gen Z. And limited edition Crocs are selling for up to $1,000 on the resale market.

• Crocs
• Crocs Overview 2024
• Crocs Investor Presentation Q3 2023
• Crocs Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Essilor Luxottica

The Italian French company is the global leader in the design, manufacture and distribution of eyewear. It licenses many leading brands to develop premium eyewear including Ray-Ban, Oakley, Costa, Vogue Eyewear and Persol. It offers superior shopping and patient experiences with a network of 18,000 stores including world-class retail brands like Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, Salmoiraghi & Viganò and GrandVision.

• Essilor Luxottica
• Essilor Luxottica at a glance
• Capital Markets Day 2022
• Results Presentation Q3 2023
• Essilor Luxottica Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: LVMH

LVMH, from Christian Dior to over 70 luxury brands, including Louis Vuitton and Givenchy, Sephora and Tiffany, has multiplied 20 times in market value under the leadership of Bernard Arnault. In 1984 he spotted an opportunity to acquire a finance company that had lost its way, but still owned some interesting assets including Christian Dior, and department store Le Bon Marche. He quickly set about refocusing the business and reenergising its best assets for a changing world.

• LVMH
• LVMH Snapshot 2024
• LVMH Group Presentation 2023
• LVMH Annual Report 2023
• Bernard Arnault Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Mercado Libre

Mercado Libre is on a mission “to democratize commerce and financial services to transform the lives of millions of people in Latin America”. It hosts the largest online commerce and payments ecosystem in Latin America, and operates in 18 countries, although Brazil alone accounts for 65% of its revenue, growing to 96% when including Argentina and Mexico. MELI was founded in 1999 by Marcos Galperin and two colleagues while at Stanford.

• Mercado Libre
• Mercado Libre Institutional Presentation 2023
• Six Stories of Mercado Libre (The Generalist)
• Marcos Galperin Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Monster Beverage

Monster Beverage is the top-performing US business of the past 30 years – a $1,000 investment in 1994 would be worth $2,000,000 today (+200,000% gain). It produces a range of energy drinks including Monster Energy, Relentless and Burn, but was originally founded as Hansen’s in 1935 in Southern California, selling juice products. Monster is 20% owned by Coca-Cola and benefits from distribution through its global network.

• Monster Investor Presentation 2024
• Monster Annual Report 2022
• Monster Design Case Study
• Monster Profile by Peter Fisk

Growth Champion: Novo Nordisk

Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company, based in Denmark, with more than 90 years of innovation and leadership with a clear focus on diabetes care. It’s innovation is patient-centric, focused on what it can be best at, and delivered by one of the world’s most sustainable companies. Most recently, a new diabetes drug Ozempic was found to have remarkable side effects, creating significant weight loss in patients. It has now become the world’s most in-demand obesity drug.

• Novo Nordisk
• Novo Nordisk Investor Presentation Q3 2023
• Novo Nordisk Corporate Strategy, Capital Markets Day 2022
• Ozempic makes NN Europe’s most valuable company (Peter Fisk)
• Novo Nordisk Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Nubank

Nubank launched in 2013 with the mission to fight complexity to empower people in their daily lives by reinventing financial services. Its first product was a credit card that differentiated itself by not charging traditional fees, such as annual fees or over-limit fees, and all based in a digital app. It is now one of the world’s largest digital banking platforms, serving more than 80 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.

• Nubank
• Nubank Earnings Presentation Q3 2023
• How Nubank became a $30 billion fintech (FT)
• Nubank Profile  and Cristina Junqueira Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Nvidia

AI is transforming our world. The software that enables computers to do things that once required human perception and judgment depends largely on hardware made possible by Jensen Huang who cofounded Nvidia in 1993. In 2024, Nvidia’s earnings are forecast to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 103% over the next five years. That would be more than double the 48% CAGR Nvidia’s bottom line has clocked in the past five years.

• Nvidia Story
• Nvidia Investor Presentation Oct 2023
• Nvidia Investor Presentation Nov 2023
• Nvidia growth forecasts (Yahoo Finance)
• Jensen Huang Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: On

Olivier Bernhard is on a mission to “ignite the human spirit through movement” and to make Swiss brand On “the most premium global sportswear brand”. The former triathlete devoted himself to finding a running shoe that would give him the perfect running sensation. In doing so he crossed paths with a like-minded Swiss engineer who had an idea for a new kind of running shoe. In 2010 he got together with two friends to develop a product range fully engineered in Switzerland.

• On
• On Investor Day 2023 
• On Annual Report 2022
• Circular Running (Peter Fisk)
• On Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Ping An

Ping An is the world’s largest insurance business, and more generally provides products and services through its five ecosystems in financial services, healthcare, auto services, real estate services and smart city solutions. The company’s first steps beyond finance started in 2012. Co-CEO Jessica Tan has developed a vision of “technology plus finance” as key to Ping An’s ongoing growth, most notably with Good Doctor as the world’s leading digital healthcare platform.

• Ping An
• Ping An Investor Day 2023
• Ping An Results Presentation Oct 2023
• Ping An Healthcare’s “Good Doctor” (Peter Fisk)
• Ping An Profile and Jessica Tan Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Temu

The Pinduoduo-owned online fashion. retail platform burst into western markets in September 2022, and immediately outperformed the similar Shein business, and has continued to gain more visitors than Amazon. While Chinese owned, Temu is a US registered company, based in Boston USA. It’s focus is on super-cheap, super-fast, medium-quality fashion, using an on-demand super-fast business model. Sales are driven by social media, live-streaming, relentless offers, and gamification.

• Pinduoduo Overview 2022
• Is Temu the future of buying things? (New Yorker)
• How Temu works (EJet Sourcing)
• Temu Profile and Pinduoduo Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Tencent

Tencent is a tech ecosystem, with a purpose “Value for Users, Tech for Good”. It’s social platforms WeChat (known as Weixin in China) and QQ connect users with each other, with digital content and daily life services in just a few clicks. It was founded in 1998 by Ma Huateng,  known as Pony Ma, in Shenzhen. Launched in 2011, WeChat has grown into the most popular and widely used mobile app globally, and serves as a central part of daily life for its many users in China and beyond.

• Tencent
• Tencent Corporate Overview 2023
• Tencent Results Presentation Q3 2023
• Tencent Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Tesla

Faster than a Ferrari, powered by the sun. Tesla was founded in 2004 “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”. Elon Musk took over as CEO in 2008, and achieved profitability in 2013. Tesla is by far the world’s most valuable automotive company (more valuable than the next 9 companies together), but it is much more than that. Tesla’s latest strategy “Master Plan Part 3” describes how it plans to transform the future of energy.

• Tesla Investor Day 2023
• Tesla Investor Update Q3 2023
• Tesla Master Plan Part 3
• Tesla Profile and Elon Musk Profile (Peter Fisk)

Growth Champion: Tony’s Chocolonely

Dutch journalist, Teun van de Keuken, founded the chocolate company in 2005 to fight against modern slavery on cocoa farms.  Over 10 years it grew 10x, 24% a year, and a gross margin of 46%, and is the leading chocolate brand in Netherlands. It’s latest “fair” report starts with “Another choc-tastic year, proving that social impact and economic growth can soar together.”

• Tony’s Chocolonely Annual Fair Report 2022/23
• 10X+ growth from €1m to €100m in 10 years (SOM)
• Tony’s Chocolonely Profile (Peter Fisk)

So what drives growth?

Growth might seem obvious, but it is often confused. Profitable growth is the key driver of value creation.

Consider the automotive market. Tesla has the highest growth rate (around 35% CAGR over 5 years). And while Volkswagen sells 4 times more cars than Tesla ($335 billion to $95 billion revenue in 2023), Tesla is almost 10 times more valuable than Volkswagen ($650 billion vs $65 billion in terms of market cap). Ferrari is the most profitable (25% operating margin to Tesla’s 14%), but is even less valuable than VW, with almost no growth. Tesla, of course, is also the most sustainable.

• How do you drive and sustain profitable growth?
• Does it mean doing more? Or less, by doing the best things better?
• Is it all about smarter selling, or more about innovating?
• To existing markets and customers, or looking beyond to new opportunities?
• How does growth fit with sustainability, and using less natural resources?
• Can inorganic growth replace the need for real, organic growth?
• Is growth still the primary way to drive long-term value creation financially?
• Does growth need a strategy, and active leadership, or is it just a result?
• What inspires growth, sustains growth, and accelerates growth?

Explore more about growth

• Growth Recoded (video) by Peter Fisk
• Finding and accelerating better growth by Peter Fisk
• Growth in an uncertain world by Deloitte
• 4 Stages of Growth: Start-up, Grow-up, Scale-up
• Video: AG Lafley on Growth Strategy
• Video: Inside P&G’s Growth Factory
• Now New Next: Growth Champions by Mckinsey
• Leading for Growth by McKinsey
• Growth Triple Play by McKinsey
• 6 Strategies for Growth by McKinsey
• 10 Rules of Growth by McKinsey
• Summary of Growth IQ by Tiffani Bova
• Growth IQ Workbook by Tiffani Bova
• Life Centricity Playbook by Accenture
• 11 Secrets for Exponential Growth by Salim Ismael

And also

• New topics for inspiring growth keynotes by Peter Fisk
• Practical strategic growth workshops by Peter Fisk
• Accelerated executive development by Peter Fisk

War. Inflation. Recession. Pandemic. The pursuit of economic stability is increasingly unrealisable, with the volatility of recent years challenging leaders and companies to find new ways to create value as they navigate the changing business landscape.

When turmoil hits, business leaders and investors face notoriously unreliable macroeconomic forecasts, whipsawing data, and contradictory opinions. Are disruptions transient and ephemeral—or permanent and structural? False alarms are costly traps, but so are true structural changes that go undetected. Leaders must also assess the doom-laden public macroeconomic discourse, which habitually presents worst-case scenarios as foregone conclusions.

How can business leaders avoid these traps and make better strategic decisions?

Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms

In his new book, Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms, BCG Global Chief Economist Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak and Senior Economist Paul Swartz provide a fresh and accessible way to analyse and understand the macroeconomy, or what they call “regime analysis”, that pushes beyond conventional model-based prediction to emphasise structural context and judgment.

Focusing on what it takes for macroeconomic regimes to break, they apply their approach to key risks in the real economy, financial structures, and geopolitical arrangements to help senior executives and investors assess the true risks of their economic context and to build their capacity to respond to changing conditions more effectively.

With dose of rational optimism, the book explores the key macro debates and controversies that shape our time, and it empowers leaders with the analytical skills to assess and judge macroeconomic risks for themselves, with a new way of thinking that will continue to apply as risks change over time.

 

• Europe 2024: Subdued growth, political fragmentation and the green transition.
• North America 2024: US elections will dominate the year, while the economy will struggle with higher borrowing costs.
• Latin America 2024: substantial political change has led to democratic retreat and social risks.
• Asia 2024: Strong growth despite China’s slowing economy and geopolitical tensions.

Ipsos’ Global predictions for 2024: Optimism is on the rise as more think next year will be better

• 53% say 2023 was a bad year for them and 70% say it was a bad year for their country. This is the lowest level since before the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Seventy per cent think next year will be a better year than this one. This is an increase of 5pp on last year’s figure.
• More people think AI will lead to more jobs being lost than being created in 2024.
• After 2023 being the hottest year on record, 81% expect average global temperatures to go even higher in 2024.
• A majority (59%) think we’ll spend more time working in the office in 2024 than working at home.

The Economist focuses on 10 business trends:

• Central banks including America’s Federal Reserve start to reduce interest rates as price rises slow. With global inflation still at 5%, however, consumers remain thrifty.
• Amid efforts to slow climate change, renewable-energy consumption climbs by 11% to a new high. But fossil fuels still meet over four-fifths of energy demand
• IT spending picks up, rising by about 9%. Artificial intelligence generates remarkable hype but produces precious little revenue and plenty of scrutiny.
• The gap between the infrastructure the world needs and what it gets amounts to $3trn. To plug its infrastructure hole, Asia’s gross fixed investment expands by 4%.
• Revenue in the advertising industry increases by 5%, thanks to America’s presidential election and big sporting events such as the Paris Olympics.
• International tourism rises above geopolitical and economic uncertainty to create record revenue of $1.5trn, fuelled by high prices and post-pandemic wanderlust.
• A greying world spends vigorously on health. With about one in ten people aged 65 or older, health care makes up one-tenth of global gdp.
• America shells out $886bn on defence, supporting Ukraine and countering China—whose neighbours, including Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, also bolster their defences.
• Electric vehicles speed forth, driven by strong government support. One in four new cars is a plug-in, with more than half of these sold in China.
• With 60% of America’s firms allowing working from home, a fifth of American offices lie empty. The eu’s less relaxed employers will keep its vacancy rate at just 8%.

Where’s the love?

Accenture’s Life Trends 2024 report is a refreshingly human view of emerging behaviours, but from a tech expert company. largely thanks to its acquisition of Fjord which did great work on trends.

Davos 2024. Trust was on the lips of every participant.

Three years of increasing division, heightened hostility and a surge in conflicts have created a challenging global landscape. Humanity is grappling with a converging multitude of crisis and change, the need to reinvigorate economies, respond to the threat of climate change, and ensure AI is used as a force for good.

Trust comes in many forms. Trust in authority – from global institutions to governments, scientists and technologists, businesses and brands. Trust in each other. Ultimately we trust in people. Do we accept them? Do we believe them? Do we follow them? Are they authentic? Are they worthy? Are they right?

The World Economic Forum’s theme was in particular focused on our trust in the future.

“After an era that lifted a billion people out of poverty and improved living standards everywhere, the anxiety about losing control over what lies ahead is pushing people towards embracing extreme ideologies and the leaders who champion them.”

Rebuilding trust in our future is paramount. We can only trust in the future, if we trust in people. In institutions. And from an economic perspective, in business.

The Trust Paradox

Rapid innovation offers the promise of a new era of prosperity, but instead risks exacerbating trust issues, leading to further societal instability and political polarisation.

This is the paradox explored in the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer.

“In a year where half the global population can vote in new leaders, the acceptance of innovation is essential to the success of our society. While people agree that scientists are essential to the acceptance of innovation, many are concerned that politics has too much influence on science. This perception is contributing to the decline of trust in the institutions responsible for steering us through change and towards a more prosperous future.”

Only one third of consumers trust most of the brands they buy or use, according to an Edelman special report.

According to the survey of 16,000 people in eight countries, 81% of consumers see brand trust is a deal breaker or a deciding factor when they consider a purchase. Trust is becoming more important because of growing concerns about the fast pace of innovation and automation, the use of personal data in tracking and targeting, and the impact of products and productions on society and the environment.

“Trust has always played an important role in brand purchase” says Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman. “But consumers now have much larger expectations of brands, and their trust is predicated on how well a brand can pass through the three gates of trust – product, customer experience and impact on society.”

When brands build trust, consumers reward them. Consumers who trust a brand are more than twice as likely to be the first to buy the brand’s new products, to stay loyal in the face of new competition, to recommend it, and defend it when things go wrong. Also, a brand trusted because of its broader role in society, is almost twice as likely to gain such support, than if it’s trust is due to product aspects only.

Despite all of this evidence, brands are increasingly untrusted.

Most consumers believe that a brand has a responsibility to get involved in at least one social issue that does not directly impact its business, yet few see brands doing so.  Indeed, most people think brands are using social good as a marketing tool, “trustwashing” if you like. This exasperates their loss of trust.

However people’s trust in governments and other institutions is far less than in business, meaning that whilst many are unsure, they do see business as a better platform for addressing social and environmental issues than politicians and their agencies. Interestingly, people believe they have more influence on business than governments and can persuade them to take these issues more seriously.

 “It’s time for brands to take the next giant step,” says Edelman. “They must accept the responsibility consumers have given them to effect change and welcome greater accountability and measurement of their impact.”

Building trust with authenticity

We engage more emotionally, human and empathetic, than every before. In fact people trust each other more than any business, they influence and are loyal to each other.

25 years ago, Ray Davis arrived in the small Oregon town of Roseburg, where nothing much changed for the lumberjacks of the huge surrounding forests. His task was to transform the sleepy old South Umpqua State Bank with its 40 employees before it died.

Initially people poked fun at his insistence that employees, or colleagues as he called them, answer the phone with a cheery “Welcome to the World’s Greatest Bank.” However, over time, it became true. The bank was transformed, firstly by learning from other great customer service businesses, not banks. Banks become community hubs, interiors were opened up and modernised, products and language humanised. They served coffee, played music, and showcased great local businesses. Staff smiled, and customers loved it. Nowadays, Umpqua Bank, with over $25 billion assets and 350 branches across America,  is one of the best banks.

However, Davis, now enjoying his retirement, or in “cruise” mode, as Umpqua calls it for customers who wanted to slow down and enjoy life, has a warning about change. “When we arrived in Roseburg, change was exciting, people loved progress. Today change is different, it has become relentless and dominated by technology. It scares the hell out of a lot of people” he warns. As change accelerates, and technology dominates, many people lose faith in progress. The bond of trust can be lost.

Being real, authentic and transparent

In her book Who Can You Trust? Rachel Botsman asks “If you can’t trust those in charge, who can you trust? From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low.” However, she argues that technology can enable trust in new forms, and that our main problem is a mismatch, saying “institutional trust was not designed for the digital age.”

Originally trust was built locally between people, in local communities. Then as cities and business grew, we deferred to institutions as curators of trust – governments and corporations – trusting them to act on our behalf. Trust went from people, to being built around hierarchies. Today, trust is built in networks, and flows between people enabled by technology. For a business there are three layers of trust:

• Trust in the organisation: the reputation of the business and brand, particularly in terms of ethics and responsibilities, openness and transparency.
• Trust in the concept: the relevance to customers, authentic and reliable, a positive way to solve a problem, and delivers on every promise.
• Trust in the people: the respect for people who lead the business, and deliver the concept, who are real and authentic, empathetic and caring.

Authenticity is closely associated with provenance, which is now a source of transparency for many manufacturers utilising the potential of IOT sensors and blockchain certification. Cult Beauty uses a transparency app to help users of its cosmetics to understand the sources of all products, from oils to colourings. Canada’s Bridgehead Coffee was one of the first to set benchmarks for other in fairtrade and organic certification. Fishpeople can tell you the which boat caught your fish and when. Tiffany & Co. can do the same with diamonds.

Whilst all of these matter, the most important is that people trust people. For most customers, they see two faces of the organisation – the leader who typically appears as the company spokesperson in times of challenge, and the everyday frontline employees who sell and serve customers in stores, on phones, or one to one.

As Botsman says “Most businesses that we interact with are built around money, and money only goes so far. Money is the currency of transactions. Trust is the currency of interactions.”

Trusted leaders

Another clue might lie in the new Brand Guardianship Index 2024 produced by Brand Finance. This takes a numeric perspective on the impact which leaders have made to their organisations over time. Not just financially, although this is one useful metric as a proxy for customer and employee engagement, but through a host of other ESG and related metrics too.

Huateng “Pony” Ma, CEO of Tencent, recognised as world’s leading CEO – or at least “brand guardian”, in the report – for his guardianship of WeChat brand. “His leadership, marked by a steadfast commitment to innovation, user engagement, and trust, has not only propelled Tencent to remarkable heights in the technology sector but has also set a gold standard for CEOs worldwide.”

Under Ma’s leadership, WeChat has become the world’s strongest brand, as measured in the Brand Finance Global 500 Index of brands. Ma has led WeChat to build exceptional brand strength, underpinned by its essential, familiar, and trusted status in China, its dominant market.

People trust people

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, provides a model for business engagement with society when he gave his views on corporate responsibility, the pressing need for human oversight of artificial intelligence systems and a succinct description of how Microsoft has earned its social license to operate in many countries around the world.

Nadella says every company is now a technology company and that brings with it a range of responsibilities, particularly in areas such as the ethics of AI, which he seeks to proactively take a lead in. “Technology is going to be so pervasive in our lives, and across all industries, that we’d better have one core currency around it which is trust. Without trust, we are not going to have a long-term business” he said at a recent Envision event.

Indeed, Microsoft has positioned itself as the world’s “good tech” company, whilst Facebook and Alphabet are often seen by regulators and politicians as “bad tech”, given their reluctance to address issues like privacy and fake news.

Leadership of trust, and trust in leaders, drives everything else.

We know that any form of change sparks fear in the human psyche. If not addressed early, proactively and directly, fear of job losses due to automation or globalisation can quickly take hold. In times of crisis, a leader brings urgency and compassion, but if there is not also direction and hope, then people lose confidence, and courage in their own actions.

Employees trust leaders who do what they expect them to do.

This requires an openness of leaders, so that people know what to expect. It means engaging people in the future direction, being honest about the need and implications of change, asking for ideas, and equally challenge, being visible and accessible, and being human.

Externally, there was a time when business leaders would never say anything controversial, when businesses were agnostic to the debates of society. Today, as people trust business more than politicians to show them a way forwards, they seek business leaders to take a stand, to have a point of view.

This can be controversial, a viewpoint means that not everybody will agree, that some of your customers might feel alienated or even reject you. Apple is a strong advocate of diversity and human rights; Starbucks challenged the state on their actions against migrants. Leaders need to step up, to express their view, to fight what they believe is right.

In this way, brands develop a more authentic personality, business adopts a more meaningful role in society, and you gain the respect – and trust – of people.

Cradled in your skull, immersed in protective fluid, your brain is your body’s mission control. It changes radically throughout a human’s life, starting work not long after they’re conceived and continuing even beyond your final breath.

As a business leader you are asked to step up, to see business and markets from new perspectives – and in particular to make sense of fast, complex and dynamic futures. As a leader, rather than functional expert, your challenge is to connect the organisation, to ask the big questions rather than having all the answers.

This is a huge mindset shift, and particularly for leaders who are also probably getting older, and could easily fall into old habits, as their brain starts to fall into standard ways of behaving, and naturally diminishes with age, and without stimulus.

As a leader, now is the time for peak performance, to dream of new possibilities, to drive innovation and change, and to act in ways that are different from what got you here. Now is the time to recharge, and even reshape, your brain.

How your brain changes

We used to assume that we each have our established ways of thinking and behaving, and as we get older the capability of our brain to learn and adapt declines. Medical science suggests that the volume of the brain and/or its weight declines with age at a rate of around 5% per decade after age 40 with the actual rate of decline possibly increasing with age particularly over age 70.

Yet our brain can grow new neurons at any age.

Each neuron can transmit up to 1,000 nerve signals a second and make as many as 10,000 connections with other neurons. Our thoughts come from the chemical signals that pass across the synaptic gaps between neurons: the more connections we make, the more powerful and adaptive our brain can be.

Tara Swart is a neuroscientist, practising medical doctor, and executive coach, with a background in psychiatry. I first met her on stage in Bratislava, where we both were delivering our “Big Idea” for Europe. Her first book, “Neuroscience for Leadership” was more of an academic text, while her new book is “The Source” is more populist, and claims most of the things we want from life – health, happiness, wealth, love – are governed by our ability to think, feel and act. In other words, by our brain.

Keeping the brain fit through exercise, continual learning and rich experiences, enhances your mental agility. In the past leaders relied more upon experience and procedure, in today’s world we need leaders who can make sense of new patterns, imagine new possibilities, thrive on diversity of thought and complexity of action. Leaders need to have a mind that is always ahead, seeing and anticipating what next.

“Think of the brain as the hardware of a computer” says Swart. “Your mind is the software. You’re the coder who upgrades the software to transform the data (your thoughts). You also control the power supply that fuels the computer — the food and drink you consume, when and how to exercise and meditate, who to interact with… You have the power to maintain or destroy your neural connections.”

Mindful activities such as yoga or meditation reduce levels of cortisol and increase the fold of the outer cortex of the brain, allowing the pre-frontal cortex to better regulate our emotional responses. Swart says just 12 minutes a day, most days of the week, will make a noticeable difference. New experiences such as travel, learning a skill, such as a foreign language, and meeting new people can stimulate the growth of new neurons.

How to change your brain

Brain plasticity allows you to learn new skills, gather and use new information, and recover from brain injury. How can you rewire your brain?

There are some obvious ways to improve your brain function, such as drink more water, get more exercise, and don’t read from electronic screens in the last hour before bed. But there is much more besides. Some are obvious, some less so. Some are just good healthy tips for everyone, some require deliberate focus in order to achieve your goals.

For starters here are 10 simple ways to start changing your brain:

1. Run

Physical activity can improve your brain’s plasticity, a cerebral quality that affects memory, motor skills, and the ability to learn – according to a study conducted at the University of Adelaide in Australia. A small group of adults in their late 20s and early 30s participated in a 30-minute session of vigorous activity. Immediately after the session, their brains showed a significant increase in neuroplasticity. If that’s not enough motivation to get out for run, research shows that exercise also release chemicals in the brain that make us feel happy. Endorphins and a protein called Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) are released in the brain as you do physical exercise, two chemicals which help fight stress and promote happiness.

2. Sleep more

Sleep is an essential activity that not even science can fully explain. You feel better with it, but really bad without it. Going without sleep can make you irritable, lead to memory loss and false memories, and, in extreme cases, cause slurred speech and even brain damage. So what happens when you sleep? Your brain gets to work archiving memories, making creative connections, and cleaning out toxins. Even a short afternoon nap can provide you with a boost of energy equivalent to roughly one or two cups of coffee, as well as increased retention of facts and greater creativity.

3. Meditate

Meditation doesn’t just help you find emotional balance in your life – it actually changes your brain. Before beginning a regular meditation habit, people tend to have strong neural connections with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, what is often called the “Me Center” of the brain. As a result, they are more likely to interpret physical sensations of anxiety or fear as a personal problem, something directly-related to themselves. As a result, they are more likely to experience repeated thoughts about their lives, mistakes they’ve made, what people think about them. In contrast, people who meditate regularly show weaker connections with the “Me Center” of the brain and stronger connections with the lateral prefrontal cortex, or the “Assessment Center” of the brain. This helps meditators to take problems less personally and approach them more logically. This means that, through meditation, we can become better at managing anxiety, stress, and potentially dangerous situations. In addition, the neural connections which grow stronger through meditation help promote empathy and compassion.

4. Drink coffee

From the time you wake up until you lay down to sleep, neurons in your brain produce a curious chemical called adenosine. As adenosine is produced, it binds with adenosine receptors in the brain, causing you to feel tired and eventually fall asleep. When caffeine enters the bloodstream and makes its way to the brain, it blocks the adenosine receptors.  That’s what gives you the boost of energy and alertness, improved memory and cognitive performance, increased focus, and even increased accuracy of reactions. Over time, however, your brain will begin to build up a tolerance to the drug, and you may experience withdrawal symptoms, such as headaches, increased sleepiness, lack of concentration, and irritability. Coffee (or more precisely, caffeine) changes your brain chemistry, providing you with that boost of energy and focus you need in the morning.

5. Read 

Brain scans of the most avid readers typically show heightened connectivity in the left temporal cortex, the area of the brain associated with receptivity for language. Readers also often experience something called “embodied semantics.” That’s the technical way of saying that the “brain connectivity during a thought-about action actually mirrors the connectivity that occurs during the actual action.  For example, thinking about swimming can trigger some of the same neural connections as physical swimming.” That means that imagining actions as you read about them can physically alter the connections in your brain.

6. Listen to music

When some people want to truly focus, they seek total silence, but many turn on their music.  When you graph the electrical activity of your brain using EEG, you generate what is called a brainwave pattern, which is called a “wave” pattern because of its cyclic, wave-like nature…When we lower the brain wave frequency…we can put ourselves in an ideal condition to learn new information, perform more elaborate tasks, learn languages, analyze complex situations and even be in what sports psychologists call “The Zone”, which is a state of improved focus and performance in athletic competitions or exercise. Part of this is because being the slightly decreased electrical activity in the brain can lead to significant increases in feel-good brain chemicals like endorphins, noroepinephrine and dopamine. So you can actually “force” your brain into this ideal “alpha brain wave relaxation” with the right frequency of music.

7. Wander

Spending time in outdoor green spaces has been linked to improvements in mood, concentration, and creativity. Brooding, which is known among cognitive scientists as morbid rumination, is a mental state familiar to most of us, in which we can’t seem to stop chewing over the ways in which things are wrong with ourselves and our lives. This broken-record fretting is not healthy or helpful. It can be a precursor to depression and is disproportionately common among city dwellers compared with people living outside urban areas, studies show. Going for a 90-minute walk in a quiet, tree-lined neighbourhood can have the effect less morbid rumination and showed less blood flow to the subgenual prefrontal cortex than those who had walked along a busy highway for the same amount of time.

8. Don’t multitask

Research suggests that humans are physically incapable of multitasking. Instead, the human brain merely single-tasks very quickly, switching back and forth between multiple tasks at a rate that makes you feel and believe you’re actually doing two things at once. If you think you spend much of your time “multitasking”, you could actually be rewiring your brain – and not in a good way. Your attention span is considerably shortened and your emotional intelligence is stunted. At the same time, you become worse at sorting through information and completing creative tasks.

9. Eat less sugar

Overconsumption of sugar may impair neurological functioning, according to a study at UCLA. Heavy sugar intake caused the rats to develop a resistance to insulin — a hormone that controls blood sugar levels and also regulates the function of brain cells. Insulin strengthens the synaptic connections between brain cells, helping them to communicate better and thereby form stronger memories. So when insulin levels in the brain are lowered as the result of excess sugar consumption, cognition can be impaired. Too much sugar can impair memory and learning skills, and may even contribute to diseases like dementia. It can also make you depressed. Sugar activates the mood-enhancing neurotransmitter serotonin in our brain. When continuously overstimulated, our serotonin levels begin to deplete, making it more difficult for us to regulate our mood.

10. Believe

Believing you can change, that you can be better, and you can achieve more, is the starting point. Open your mind to the possibility. Rather than going in to the rationale, let’s take the inspiring story of Tan Le, as I described in my recent book Business Recoded. She is the Vietnamese boat refugee who became one of the world’s leading neuroscientists.

Tan Le’s inspired mind

Tan Le was only 4 years old when she fled Vietnam with her mother and sister, crowded on board a fishing boat with 162 other people, in search of a better life. It was a difficult choice, leaving her father behind and heading out to the uncertain seas.

For 5 days they sailed, and then after losing power, drifted across the South China Sea. She remembers the long dark nights and rough seas, and everyone becoming desperate once food and water ran out.

Fortune came in the shape of a British oil tanker, which offered to rescue them. After three months in a refugee camp, the family were offered a flight to Australia. As the plane flew across the unknown country, she was struck by the huge emptiness of the land, and later reflected on it as symbolising the new opportunities which she could never have imagined.

At 8 years old, her mum says she was a dreamer, and particularly liked to pretend she had the power of telepathy, as inspired by a movie she had seen. In reality, she called herself a curious nerd, desperate to work hard and seize her opportunity. At the same time, she was very conscious about being different – her looks, her accent, her background.

Then, when she was 20, she won Young Australian of the Year for her work in helping other immigrants to settle locally, to learn the English language, and to find jobs. She was astonished that somebody like her could win such an award. It was the moment that really opened her mind.

She started to look beyond her mum’s dream of her becoming a doctor or lawyer. She qualified as a lawyer, but quickly turned her attention to software engineering, exploring how brainwaves can control digital devices.  It was all about understanding the brain in context, and how it could be directed to do more productive work, to engage consumers more deeply with brands, to help people with disabilities. Her early work included the development of EEG (electroencephalography) headsets enabling people to control a car, or drone, or game, with your mind.

“When the neurons in your brain interact, they emit electrical impulses, which we can then translate into patterns that become commands, by using machine learning” she explained.

She founded Emotiv, a bio-informatics company focused on understanding the brain in context, and how it could be directed to do more productive work, to engage consumers more deeply with brands, to help people with disabilities.

Chosen to be part of the World Economic Forum’s Young Business Leaders in 2009, she sat at a dinner held in Buenos Aires with fellow participants. Opposite her sat a wheelchair-bound Brazilian called Rodrigo Hübner Mendes. He introduced himself as a Formula One racing car driver, who used a specially developed brain interface to control the vehicle.

Mendes explained how he would turn left by imagining eating tasty food, turn right by imagining he was riding a bike, and accelerate by imagining he had just scored a World Cup goal for Brazil. He explained how the technology for the car was developed by a small innovative company called Emotiv. She smiled, deeply moved by his story.

Today Emotiv is a world-leader in brain interface software, with technology that is cheaper than a gaming console, but has the ability to fundamentally disrupt and improve our lives. With offices around the world, She spends much of her time in Hanoi, where her ground-breaking technology is being developed by young Vietnamese technologists.

Lee reflects on her personal journey saying, “Like my mum, I took a leap of faith into the world of technology, and particularly into a completely new area for which I had no qualifications or experience.”

She freely admits that she doesn’t have all the answers, with “I try to make the right choices, but you never know exactly where you are going, or if doing your best” but is also an infectious optimism “The future is not hear yet. We have the chance to create it, to co-create it.”

As for Mendes, he recently found himself at a conference in Dubai listening to world champion F1 driver Lewis Hamilton. When it came to questions at the end, Mendes’ hand immediately sprung up. He challenged the world champion to a race, using brainwave-controlled cars. Hamilton, a lover of new technologies, accepted. The race awaits.

Change happens fast … the dramatic progress of AI is challenging our minds, a new disruptive generation of brands are shaking up markets, multiple destructive conflicts rage across the globe, ever more extreme weather driven by our reluctance to really address the carbon crisis, and millennial consumers growing up quickly … from the adoption of electric vehicles to gene-edited healthcare, the world looks very different from even a few years ago.

• 2023 was a nexus of change, a year of innovating and transforming everything
• Ideas drive the world forwards, the coming wave, and achieving great things

2024 is Olympic year, and the Stade de France is ready to witness a host of world records, as super shoes transform the performance of human beings. Adidas’s Noah Lyles and Nike’s Faith Kipyegon will battle for superstardom on the athletics track. Meanwhile 4.2 billion people will vote in over 70 national elections this year, the most in history, with technology likely to play a key role in targeting and influencing outcomes.

• Future Radar: Exploring the emerging trends and opportunities, and making them happen
• Trend Kaleidoscope 2024: Curating all the best trend reports, What should you do next?

Western economies did better than expected in 2023 but significant challenges persist, and higher interest rates will be painful for companies and consumers alike. China’s growth has slowed, tensions rise over Taiwan, but companies will find it hard to reduce their supply chains’ dependency of old. East and West will increasingly turn to the “middle powers” of the global south, and the imagineering states of the Middle East, shifting from oil to culture, knowledge and tourism.

• Generative AI: from Anthropic to Inflection, Gemini to Perplexity, do you “grok” it?
• Think like a futurist, to make sense of change, find new opportunities, make smarter decisions

The exponential progress of AI will continue, in some ways a race to shape the future of AGI, by a reenergised OpenAI and many others like Anthropic and Perplexity. Businesses will prioritise initiatives to embrace it, initially for efficiency but increasingly for competitive advantage, Quantum computing will accelerate progress, while regulators struggle to cope. Unexpected uses and abuses will become frequent, from its disruption of jobs to potential for election meddling.

• Achieving Peak Performance: find your future flow, play to your strengths, build endurance and agility
• Imagineering = Imagination + Engineering … How Disney keeps the magic alive

The clean-energy transition is creating new green superpowers and redrawing the energy-resources map. Lithium, copper and nickel matter much more, while oil and gas, and the regions that dominate their supply, matter less.  Competition for green resources is reshaping geopolitics and trade, and creating some unexpected winners and losers. As the recent Earthshot prize winners demonstrate, there is a shift to regenerative economies, doing more with what we already have.

“In the past, you made a decision and that was it. Now, you make a decision and you say, ‘What happens next?’ There’s always a next”. That was Alvin Toffler in Future Shock.

Much of my work – from keynotes and workshops to strategies and transformations – is with companies like Adidas in sportswear and Airbus in aerospace, Saudi Arabia’s STC in technology to Japan’s Sompo in financial services. In the past, boards and executive teams would seek my help on optimising performance – today they seek help to make sense of emerging futures, how to shape new visions and strategies, how to transform, while also delivering today.

IMF, another of my ongoing clients this year, see in their IMF Economic Outlook 2024 a continued stagnation of growth in western markets (1.2% in Europe, 1.5% in USA) but higher in Asia (4.4% in China, 6.1% in India), and 2.9% average globally in 2024. The EIU’s Industry Outlook 2024 reflects on the turbulence of recent years for most companies from the pandemic to soaring commodity prices, high interest rates and political disruption.

The last 12 months has certainly sparked enthusiasm for AI startups, investment and innovation – from the launch of ChatGPT to the implosion of OpenAI, and the rise of a host of new rivals like but at the same time (a legacy of pandemic, and antidote to digitalisation) is the desire to be more human – more personal, empathic, and in search of real experiences, from in-store immersions to meditative moments and travel adventures.

• What every executive needs to know about AI by Bain
• The CEO’s Guide to the Generative AI Revolution by BCG
• The state of AI, generative AI’s breakout year by McKinsey

Technological innovation is taking us in two directions – sustainable improvement and synthetic reality – to address the problems of the past (most significantly, the huge and difficult effort to decarbonise old industries – although energy transition has stalled because of the greed of higher oil prices) – and also a huge rise in new synthetic innovations, from gene-editing and mRNA in healthcare, to alternative foods and VR gaming.

You can read all the trend reports in my Trend Kaleidoscope 2024, but the point is not the clever ideas and catchy phrases, it’s knowing which trends to embrace, and how they catalyse, guide and accelerate a transformation towards the future you seek. See the bigger picture, the Future Megatrends, and align your growth trajectory with purpose and innovation.

That’s the real skill of the most innovative companies, typically emerging from the margins to the mainstream. Their ideas, business models and leaders are inspirations to all of us. I call them the Trailblazers.

In the last quarter of 2023, BYD became the world’s top selling electric vehicles company, outperforming the hype of Tesla and its most recent launch, the Cybertruck.

“Build Your Dreams” was founded in 1995 by Wang Chuanfu,  a Chinese chemist, who has became a billionaire entrepreneur. After more than 27 years of high-speed growth, BYD has established over 30 industrial parks across 6 continents and played a significant role in industries related to electronics, auto, renewable energy and rail transit. Like Tesla, it does not define itself as an auto company, but an energy business. With a focus on energy acquisition, storage, and application, it offers comprehensive new energy solutions with zero-emission.

BYD is one of my 250 Innovative Companies to learn from, alongside 100 Inspiring Leaders.

Here are some of the most innovative businesses who are likely to deliver rapid progress in 2024, some of them established market leaders rapidly reinventing themselves, while others are start-ups and growing disruptors. All of them are distinguished in some way by their innovative business models, which are engaging audiences and reenergising markets in their own ways:

• Authentic Brands, (ABG) is a brand development and licensing company headquartered in New York City. The company was founded by Jamie Salter, a seasoned entrepreneur and brand strategist. Salter has a background in acquiring, managing, and licensing consumer brands – from Mohammad Ali to Elvis, Reebok to Ted Baker.
• Crispr Therapeutics is a Swiss–American biotechnology company headquartered in Zug, founded by Nobel Prize winner Emannuelle Charpentier. It was one of the first companies formed to utilize the CRISPR gene editing platform to develop medicines for the treatment of various rare and common diseases.
• Holcim is a multinational building materials company that specialises in the production and distribution of cement, aggregates, and ready-mix concrete. The company was originally founded in Switzerland in 1912 and has since grown to become one of the largest cement producers in the world, and a leader in green cement and urban regeneration.
• Lanzatech is turning carbon crisis into feedstock opportunity with the potential to displace 30% of crude oil use today and reduce global CO2 emissions by 10%. Its carbon recycling technology is like retrofitting a brewery onto an emission source like a steel mill, but instead of using sugars and yeast to make beer, pollution is converted by bacteria to fuels and chemicals.
• Lilium, is a disruptive aviation start-up based in Munich, founded in 2015, dedicated to develop and build the world’s first fully electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) jet. An estimated range of up to 300 km and a top speed of 300 km/h, along with zero emissions make it the most efficient and eco-friendly individual means of transportation of our time.
• MercadoLibre, the Amazon of Argentina, seeks to democratize commerce and financial services to transform the lives of millions of people in Latin America. One of the principles of the Mercado Libre culture is “in continuous beta”; permanently focused on innovating to bring the best experience to our users, and to extend our competitive advantages.
• Northvolt was founded to enable the transition to a decarbonised future by establishing a sustainable battery industry. To do this, the Swedish company is pioneering a new approach to battery manufacturing rooted in a commitment to fossil-free energy, sustainable sourcing of raw materials and recycling.
• Nubank from Brazil is the largest independent “neobank” in the world, with more than 40 million customers. Its first product, launched in 2014, was a no-fee credit card fully managed by a mobile app. Recently, Nubank was ranked as the most innovative company in Latin America.
• PingAn, the world’s largest insurance company, provides products and services through its five ecosystems in financial services, healthcare, auto services, real estate services and smart city solutions. With JEssica Tan as its co-CEO it is a model for how to create the future while also delivering today, unbounded by sector boundaries or old thinking.
• Rains, concept meets function in Nordic outerwear from Aarhus. Its collections blend a conceptual-meets-functional design approach, a strong urban inspiration, and a signature fabric identity. A coated waterproof fabric palette inspired by Rains’ first design – a contemporary reinterpretation of the classic rubber raincoat.
• Roblox is a digital platform where people come together virtually to share experiences – gaming, music, and much more. Every day, tens of millions of people from around the world come to Roblox to play, learn, work, and socialize in immersive digital experiences all built by a global community of creators.
• Schneider Electric purpose is “to empower all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability for all”. They call this “Life Is On”. The French company’s mission is to be your digital partner for sustainability and efficiency.
• SSAB, zero carbon steel from Sweden, stronger, lighter and more sustainable. Working with partners, SSAB has developed fossil-free steel and plans to create a carbon-zero value chain from the mine to the end customer. it will largely eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from operations in around 2030.
• Twelve the carbon transformation company, is a new kind of chemical company built for a world battling against climate change. Its breakthrough technology eliminates emissions by turning CO2 into essential products that today are made from fossil fuels. They call it carbon transformation.
• Vuori makes premium performance apparel inspired by the active Coastal California lifestyle; an integration of fitness, surf, sport, and art. Breaking down the boundaries of traditional activewear, we are a new perspective on performance apparel. Founded by Joe Kudla in 2013, it is based in San Diego.

These companies don’t process by hard work, alone. But by thinking differently. Dreaming and daring to challenge conventions and explore new futures. It requires new mindsets, new skills, and new organisations. Out this future mind emerges new opportunities, new market spaces, and innovative growth.

It requires a business brain, ready and willing to embrace new ideas and action.

Imagine that you are in Stade de France, Paris, on the 1st August 2024. You’re an Olympic athlete in the midst of competition. As you prepare for the greatest race of your life, you imagine the moments ahead, anticipate what might happen, consider alternative strategies. And maybe just dare to dream.

In reality, you need to be ready for anything. It’s no use overthinking. You are in the best condition of your life, and you have run many races before. In reality you are simply consumed by the moment, at one with your body, focused on the race.

When you are at your “peak”, your body and mind flow in unison, you know what to do.

Finding your future flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes that peak performance comes from inside, and that people have the unique ability to create environments that facilitate the development of a state of mind which he calls “flow”, or what some might call “in the zone”.

Flow is the experience I get when I’m working intensely on a project, the challenge is significant, the team around me are great people, the timeframes are tight, and the ambition is very high. Once I am into the project, I find I can work at great pace, there is a stream of consciousness, ideas emerge rapidly.

Under the stress and stretch of high octane situations, we can often do our best work.  Csikszentmihalyi  says “the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen”

It is a feeling of immersion, focus and concentration, removed from the repetition and distractions of everyday, you feel like you have more purpose, with heightened awareness of the situation and possibilities. Complexity seems less intimidating, and uncertainty less daunting. You are energised, you are empowered, you can achieve so much more.

Flow is achieved through an intensity of concentration and effort as you apply yourself to the task. You are energised by possibility, and released from the fear of failure. You rise above yourself, above the distractions of today. The experience of this flow is as good as the outcomes.

5 ways for business leaders to find their “flow” state every day are:

• Select tasks that are stimulating and engaging, they challenge you to the point of excitement. They are problems you would love to solve.
• Assemble a great team, people you love and trust, who you know that together you can do great things (or you, on occasions, you can also do this alone).
• Define audacious goals, that go beyond the accepted norms, 10x not 10% targets, and also a sense of what the rewards could be, personal or organisational.
• Focus your mind, a stream of consciousness towards the goal, eliminating the daily trivia, the distractions of the normal workspace
• Immerse yourself in the moment, active not passive, thinking ideas, doing tasks, making progress, building momentum, going for the goal.

The “flow” state of mind becomes the everyday state of business leaders. It becomes normal. Every day, working towards the future, whilst also delivering today. Your mind working overtime, connecting ideas, searching for progress, focused on the actions which will create a better tomorrow. Indeed, you can only ever do things today, even it is focused on a better future.

Playing to your strengths

 We have grown used to exploring the “strengths and weaknesses” of human character, or in this case of leadership behaviour. The problem is that this kind of diagnostic encourages us to focus on our weaknesses, to make them better, to be “good enough” at everything.

An alternative is focus on your strengths and how to make them better.

Yet few business leaders say they get to use their strengths in most of their work. The challenge in any team is to bring a diverse group of people together, where their combined strengths are irresistible. This means that as long as all the important attributes are covered, then the team will be strong in all areas, and amplify its impact far beyond that of  any individual.

Psychologist Martin Seligman studied cultures around the world to understand what they regarded as “strengths” in leaders. The research explored major religions and philosophical traditions and found that the same six virtues were shared in almost all cultures. Gallup’s StrengthFinder assessment model is one of the most useful tool for exploring the practical component of these virtues as 24 character strengths:

• Virtue of Wisdom: the more curious and creative we become, the more we gain perspective, knowledge and wisdom. Component strengths are creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective.
• Virtue of Courage: the braver and more persistent we become, the more confident we feel, and more courageous we act. Component strengths are bravery, perseverance, honesty and vitality.
• Virtue of Humanity: the more we approach people with respect, appreciation, and interest, the more engaged they become. Component strengths are love, kindness and social intelligence.
• Virtue of Justice: the more responsible we are, embracing fairness and justice, the more stable community we can build for mutual benefit. Component strengths are teamwork, fairness and leadership.
• Virtue of Temperance: being forgiving, humble, prudent, and in control of our behaviours, helps us to avoid being arrogant, selfish, and unbalanced. Component strengths are forgiveness, humility, prudence and self-control.
• Virtue of Transcendence: never losing hope in humanity’s potential, appreciating nature and people, enables us to connect with a higher purpose. Component strengths are appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humour and spirituality.

Additional studies have shown that women typically score higher in interpersonal strengths, such as love and kindness, honesty and gratitude. Men tend to score higher on cognitive strengths, creativity and curiosity, hope and humour, but also highly on honesty. Whilst these differences are interesting, and largely conform to stereotypes suggesting that they might be shaped by culture, there are also many shared strengths.

Playing to your strengths not only enables you to perform better, and contribute more to a team, it can also result in feeling more engaged and confident, and enable you to progress faster.

The leader’s plastic brain

We used to assume that we each have our established ways of thinking and behaving, and as we get older the capability of our brain to learn and adapt declines.  Yet our brain can grow new neurons at any age. Each neuron can transmit up to 1,000 nerve signals a second and make as many as 10,000 connections with other neurons. Our thoughts come from the chemical signals that pass across the synaptic gaps between neurons: the more connections we make, the more powerful and adaptive our brain can be.

Tara Swart is a neuroscientist, practising medical doctor, and executive coach, with a background in psychiatry. I first met her on stage in Bratislava, where we both were delivering our “Big Idea” for Europe. Her first book, “Neuroscience for Leadership” was more of an academic text, while her new book is “The Source” is more populist, and claims most of the things we want from life – health, happiness, wealth, love – are governed by our ability to think, feel and act. In other words, by our brain.

Keeping the brain fit through exercise, continual learning and rich experiences, enhances your mental agility. In the past leaders relied more upon experience and procedure, in today’s world we need leaders who can make sense of new patterns, imagine new possibilities, thrive on diversity of thought and complexity of action. Leaders need to have a mind that is always ahead, seeing and anticipating what next.

“Think of the brain as the hardware of a computer” says Swart. “Your mind is the software. You’re the coder who upgrades the software to transform the data (your thoughts). You also control the power supply that fuels the computer — the food and drink you consume, when and how to exercise and meditate, who to interact with… You have the power to maintain or destroy your neural connections.”

Mindful activities such as yoga or meditation reduce levels of cortisol and increase the fold of the outer cortex of the brain, allowing the pre-frontal cortex to better regulate our emotional responses. Swart says just 12 minutes a day, most days of the week, will make a noticeable difference. New experiences such as travel, learning a skill, such as a foreign language, and meeting new people can stimulate the growth of new neurons.

There are some obvious ways to improve your brain function, such as drink more water, get more exercise, and don’t read from electronic screens in the last hour before bed. Sleeping less than seven to eight hours a night isn’t sustainable for most people, because that’s how long it takes to clear out toxins. Sleeping on your left side helps the brain to flush out toxins more efficiently, and downing a spoonful of coconut oil before a big meeting boosts brain power for about 20 minutes.

 

The journey ahead will have high and lows. Endurance demands physical fitness and emotional agility, but also taking moments to pause, and celebrate progress.

James Dyson took 15 years and 5127 attempts to perfect his bagless vacuum. When he succeeded, he created a revolution, but it required incredible persistence to get there. Not only is the future difficult to create, but everything keeps changing on the journey towards it.

The mental toughness, the grit to persist, is not just about keeping going, but the resilience to overcome challenges and obstacles. Sometimes, just the sheer volume of information – emails, analysis, reports, ideas, articles, books, meetings – will become overbearing. As a leader it’s easy to feel overloaded.

It’s also easy to feel you need to know everything, which you don’t, although you do need to prioritise what matters most. The biggest challenge for any visionary leader is not how to make ideas happen, but how to overcome all the people who say that they won’t. Critics and pessimists can be frustrating, and a motivational drain.

There will also be moments of great success, people might even call you a hero. It will feel good, even to the humblest, and you will inevitably remind everyone that it was a team effort. Yet the euphoria can quickly disappear, with the next challenge.

Leaders need endurance, resilience, and gratitude, to cope with relentless change; to be able to change your own mind, to stay on the rollercoaster of progress, to keep teams engaged, and to thrive at both work and in your life.

The endurance of leaders

Endurance is as much about mind as muscle power.

Like an athlete – runner, cyclist, rower – there are many physiological elements at play, from core body temperature to oxygen intake, plus psychological factors, such as perceived effort and pain tolerance. Each of these factors is significant in the level of athletic performance humans which any person is capable of, especially when testing the perceived limits of performance, such as setting new world records.

Almost every athlete will attest to faster recovery if they jump into an ice bath after a competition. Yet studies show that this practice doesn’t actually decrease inflammation levels, the thing the baths are intended to reduce. However most physiologists will still say that if there’s a method that helps you recover, even if it’s purely psychological, then it is useful because sometimes belief is just as influential as science.

In “Endure” Alex Hutchinson starts by retelling the race to break 4 minutes for one mile. For years, men across the globe had raced to within a second or two of the barrier, but never quite breaking the iconic time. When Britain’s Roger Bannister finally ran 3.59.4 in 1954, Australian John Landy who had been trying to run the time for years, went on to improve  Banister’s time by another second, only weeks later.

A number of important factors can help people, including business leaders, to endure more:

• We always have a little more to give. Watch how athletes pace themselves so that they always have one final effort at the end of a long distance event. And somehow an Olympic champion, despite a punishing race, can always rise to celebrate victory
• We can endure more than we think. Athletes have a higher than normal pain tolerance enabling them to push harder. They learn to cope with this by training at a “threshold” pace, learning to sustain oxygen debt, despite its searing pain.
• Fitness enables us to perform better. Athletic performance greatly relies on oxygen intake, which is enhanced through heightened fitness. Business leaders also need oxygen, and the physical fitness to sustain leadership performance.
• Fatigue reduces our performance.Having a tired brain can affect how much we can endure physically. A tired brain is one that doesn’t have a break, isn’t refuelled, doesn’t have variety, doesn’t keep learning, doesn’t get enough sleep.
• Stress stops us performing. Of the many factors, stress can be the killer. However stress comes in two forms – stress from outside, eg timescales, and stress we put on ourselves. External stress can stimulate us, internal stress we can control.

Hutchinson’s research led him to South Africa to work with Tim Noakes, the controversial sports scientist who first proposed the “central governor theory,” which argues that the brain limits performance well before the body has reached its maximum output. He also explores the research of another pioneering scientist, Samuele Marcora, who has developed a series of brain-training exercises to push that governor.

He also recalls talking to Eliud Kipchoge just before he ran the world’s first sub-2 hour marathon, when the Kenyan said he hadn’t really changed anything in his training. What then, he asked, would make the difference? “My mind will be different” replied the runner.  People he says, have a curiously elastic limit to what they can achieve, driven mainly be their mental toughness.

The resilience of leaders

Resilience is our ability to bounce back from adversity. It’s what allows us to recover quickly from change or setbacks, trauma or failure, whether at work or in life. It is the ability to maintain a sense if purpose, a positive attitude,  a belief in better, throughout times of challenge. Resilience sustains progress, whilst others might give up.

Angela Duckworth calls it grit. “Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term goals” she says. She compares it not to a marathon, but to a series of sprints combined with a boxing match. In business you are not just running but also getting hit along the way. As you seek to deliver on your strategy, to make new ideas happen, to transform the business, it’s not just about coping with the time and effort. It’s also about overcoming many challenges.

Grit keeps you moving forward through the sting of rejection, pain of failure, and struggle with adversity. “When things knock you down, you may want to stay down and give up, but grit won’t let you quit” says Duckworth.

Most entrepreneurs have tremendous resilience, because they’ve had to fight for the business through some of the most difficult times. The search for seed funding when every VC dismissed them with a laugh or smile, the long days in a bedroom or garage trying to make the first prototype or win the first contract, the growing pains of scale-up as they have to adapt to survive and thrive. Letting go of control as investors take over, making you wealthy but taking away your baby. Most entrepreneurs know about grit.

But then so do corporate leaders. If not from starting up, then from surviving the challenges of internal politics, of learning how to engage and influence people in a positive way, of progressing as a star individual whilst keeping colleagues and teams on side. Of balancing personal ambition with collective progress. Resilience demands that we:

• Have ambition:Knowing what you truly want, and are prepared to work hard and persevere in order to achieve it. Vision isn’t just a milestone, it becomes a pursuit. Whilst not everybody will know  your ambition, you will, and it will keep you striving.
• Have purpose: This is why you want to achieve more, it’s about what will be better when you achieve your ambition, not just for you, but your business, your family, your world. Purpose is how you contribute, what you fight for, why you get up in the morning.
• Have passion: You need to love it, to be great at it. Otherwise it’s not worth the sacrifices, the long hours, and the pain. Aligning your purpose and ambition allows you to find love, for your work, your team, your business, and the world you seek to impact.
• Have persistence: You will sometimes fail. Few things change without challenges. Failure doesn’t define you, it refines you. If you didn’t fail, you wouldn’t learn. There is always another way. Stay confident and stay strong.

Nelson Mandela was a great example of resilience. He was sent to prison as a young firebrand who believed in taking up violent resistance when the justice system failed him in apartheid South Africa. 27 years later, he walked out of Robben Island prison advocating peace and reconciliation. During his long confinement, Mandela mastered what he later called self-leadership. He took great inspiration in the poem “Invictus,” written by William Ernest Henley, which ends with the lines “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”

• Future Makers: accelerated leadership development, issue-driven, action-driving
• Innolab Workshops: strategic consulting, insightful, creative and collaborative
• Keynote Speaking inspiring, topical, engaging, customised and actionable

Happy new year!

2023 was a year of many turning points. Polycrisis, maybe. Uncertainty, certainly. A nexus of change.

The year started a few weeks early for me. I was in the film studio in late December, recording a series of new videos for business leaders. Actually it was a full-on brain download of short (120 x 10 minute) clips about changing markets, the new challenges for business, a new breed of disruptors, and new inspirations for business leaders.

One mega-program is called WaveRiders, on strategic rethinking and building your future-ready business. The other, Better World, is about sustainable innovation. They’re also available as inspiring keynotes and practical workshops.

And then everything changed.

In a filming break, I glanced at the news headlines. OpenAI, a previously low-key think tank driven by Elon Musk and now by Sam Altman, had launched ChatGPT. Within weeks, every business headline was about Generative AI. Within two months, it had 100 million weekly users (Instagram took 2 years). It really was a gamechanger. As the year progressed, AI developed exponentially.

For many people in business, 2023 has felt like a perfect storm—battling inflation, the impact of global conflicts, supply chain breakdowns, and how to get to grips and embrace the new tech.

Every leader I met said that not just change, but accelerated transformation, was top of their agenda. Dynamic markets. Relentless change. Certain uncertainty. Crisis meets opportunity, and innovation is the only way forwards. In a survey by PwC, 39% of CEOs said they do not think that their companies will be economically viable within a decade if they continue on their current path.

Seize control of your destiny, shape the future you envision, now.

January 2023 : Circular innovation in Istanbul

I started the year in Istanbul, Turkey, in the snow. I was back working with the board and executive team of Aster Group, an innovative textiles and fashion business, reviewing the strategy we developed 5 years ago, and rethinking the future, again. This time with a greater focus on premium brands, intelligent fabrics, sustainable processes, and profitable growth in fashion and beyond.

Sustainability is now a given (fashion drives 5% of carbon emissions, consumes 98 million tonnes of non-renewable resources every year, and uses 93 billion cubic metres of water annually). We explored everything from Bolt Thread’s mushroom-based fabrics to regenerative subscription models, new global suppliers and consumer personalisation. The Kocali family (Ali and Ismael, below) remain ambitious and intrepid. Family businesses have much more agility to innovate and grow in new ways.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang ranked as the world’s best CEO, in the Brand Guardian Index 2023, taking into account business reputation and sustainability, alongside growth and value creation. Netflix “No Rules, Rules” CEO, Reed Hastings, having grown and transformed the business from DVDs by mail to streaming content, seemed to run out of steam, and stepped down. A milestone for female leaders was achieved, with 10% of Fortune 500 leaders now women. Maybe, the future is female.

Innovations continued at pace. Liquid Death stood out as one of the most distinctive brand launches,  a punk rock attitude, to promoting fresh, bottled water from the Austrian Alps. In Spain, the Kings League, broke the rules of soccer, with a crazy 7-a-side league concept developed by former Barcelona star Gerard Piqué. In Sweden, a revolution in sustainable battery technology is being led by Northvolt, and in Switzerland a subscription to On running shoes enables you to get a new (regenerated) pair of Cloudneos as often as you want.

February 2023 : Pioneering the future of Airbus

It was even colder in Malmo, Sweden. “Friends of Executive” is a fabulous CEO network created by Jimmy Olden a decade ago. All the top Swedish business leaders want to be part of the FoE community, learning from and collaborating with each other to think smarter and innovate faster. I was their provocateur – exploring how to “Recode your Business“. There is no shortage of inspiration nearby, my ranking of Swedish Innovators included ABB to Doconomy, Essity to Klarna, Oatly to Polestar.

Flying south to Toulouse, France, I was impressed by the Airbus 320 Neo. I was working with the corporate strategy team at Airbus. Bringing together all of their strategic thinkers, we explored what it meant to be “Pioneers and Transformers” in today’s world, and in a large organisation with intimidatingly huge challenges to decarbonise. Airbus, now the market leader, wants to lead the aviation world to green hydrogen by 2035. To do that, it might just have to become the world’s largest hydrogen company too.

Onwards to Washington DC. I love how the Europe to USA time difference makes it easy to get up before sunrise, for a fabulous 10km run around the National Mall (photo above), in particular to watch the sun rising over the Capitol towards the Lincoln Monument. Alone with Abraham Lincoln at 5am, bathed in golden spring light. Wow!

Innovations continued at pace. Patagonia, maker of those wonderful fleeces, realised it had a problem in micro-plastics, and collaborated with Samsung to eliminate them, 35% of the world’s plastic waste. Sustainable innovation comes in many forms, including the Allbirds MO.ONSHOT, the world’s first zero-carbon shoe. Meanwhile, Temu, the online discount store owned by the e-commerce giant Pinduoduo, is rapidly disrupting fashion retail, and now more popular than Shein, just 4 months after launchin

March 2023 : Arabic Pearl Divers and French Viagra