Peter Fisk

Jeddah has a wonderful new waterfront, the perfect spot for an early evening walk, watching the sunset over the Red Sea, although perhaps not when the F1 Grand Prix is in town. It’s ultra-modern shopping malls and world-class restaurants are not far away. In other cities across the region, there is an energy and optimism to create the future.

In the boardroom of a leading business, we explore new opportunities for growth – the relative merits of fast growing Asian and African markets (compared to the stagnation of the west, to which companies used to aspire) – and new ways to innovate, leap-frogging old approaches to embrace the very latest technologies, new business models, and ecosystem partnerships.

Working with companies like Almarai, the leading dairy, and STC, the innovative telecoms and tech leader, it is obvious that ambition has no boundaries, and there is an expectation to innovate not just new products, but entire markets. NEOM, the world’s largest construction project, seeks to reimagine the entire concept of a city, and people’s lifestyles.

A short flight to Dubai, and the gleaming Ministry of Possibilities, a real government department where you are greeted by humanoid robots, symbolises the intent to create a new futures. The Museum of the Future looks forwards not backwards. Culturally, both KSA and UAE seek to fuse the best of Arabic heritage with high-tech progress.

Another short hop to Cairo, and the new Grand Egyptian Museum shimmers below the classical mirage of the ancient pyramids. Egypt is a huge market, and a symbol of the growth potential across North Africa and beyond. Cairo to Jeddah is now the world’s busiest international air route, and Riyadh to Dubai is second.

Having worked with many Middle Eastern countries, there is a huge sense of strategic renewal, and desire to grow worldclass talent to lead it. From NBK and Zain in Kuwait, to Al Ghurair and Chaloub in UAE, to Hungerstation and Savola in KSA, I have found a depth of talented leaders ready to shape the future of their region, but also to make an impact globally too.

Forbes’ Top CEOs in the Middle East

Many Middle East-based CEOs have more power and responsibilities than CEOs in other regions as they head companies that are monopolies or duopolies in the Arab world and market leaders globally.

This phenomenon is partly due to GCC countries investing their sovereign wealth into large domestic businesses. The region’s biggest banks, telecoms, industrial, oil and gas, mining, and even hospitality companies are owned by the government. This makes the role of the CEO even more challenging. As well as managing a profitable business, the CEO also needs to focus on the vision of the government. Many of these leaders also head government bodies, and some are also ministers or cabinet ministers.

In 2023, the region’s top CEOs have focused on sustainability, consolidation, and growth. Saudi Arabia, in particular, invested across sectors. Accelerated corporatization boosted economies, and the consolidation of government companies saw larger corporations emerge. A number of large IPOs in the region also unlocked value for companies. Global events also contributed to burgeoning corporate profits, including the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 and COP28 in Dubai.

Forbes’ third annual list of the top 100 CEOs in the Middle East features leaders representing 22 nationalities. Emiratis dominate with 23 entries, followed by Egyptians with 19 and Saudis with 18. This is a positive sign for localization, with most large companies now headed by local executives. The banking sector has the most entries, with 17, followed by real estate and construction with 14 and telecommunications with nine.

Among the CEOs on this year’s list are the head of the world’s largest oil company, the head of the world’s largest LNG producer, the head of the world’s busiest international airport, and the head of the world’s largest international airline. Combined, the 100 CEOs managed revenues of over $1 trillion in 2022. The companies are collectively worth more than $5 trillion.

Forbes’ Top 100 Listed Companies in Middle East

In 2023, the aggregate market value of the Middle East’s Top 100 Listed Companies has decreased marginally by 5%, from $4 trillion in 2022 to $3.8 trillion. However, the value of the aggregate sales for these 100 companies has jumped 38.5% to $1.1 trillion, with profits increasing by 37.7% to hit $277.7 billion. The value of their aggregate assets has also risen by 9.5% to $4.6 trillion as of 2022 end.

GCC countries dominate 91% of the list, with Saudi Arabia being the most represented with 33 entries, followed by the U.A.E. with 28, Qatar with 16, and Kuwait with nine.

The world’s largest oil and gas giant, Aramco, retains the top spot with $604.4 billion in sales and a market value of $2.1 trillion, followed by SABIC, Qatar’s QNB Group, and the Saudi National Bank. The U.A.E.’s International Holding Company jumped from the #12 rank in the 2022 list to the fifth spot this year, with $235.9 billion in market value and total assets of $62.1 billion.

Despite the fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the banking and financial services sector still dominates, with 42 entries holding a total of $3 trillion in assets and generating $45.4 billion in net income. However, the energy sector—led by Aramco—generated the bulk of the profits, hitting $162.4 billion in 2022.

Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in the Middle East

Innovation is bigger here than in Silicon Valley or South Korea. Every business seeks to innovate. And consumers to shareholders expect and demand it more than ever. There is a wealth of fascinating companies driving change in the region across various disciplines, from climate tech and advertising to healthcare and education. Here are just a few:

AIQ … for addressing the energy transition challenge through innovative tech

While we develop new energy sources to mitigate climate change and environmental degradation, improving the efficiency and sustainability of our current energy sources is imperative. AIQ is addressing the energy transition challenge through the innovative application of artificial intelligence and machine learning, big data analytics, computer vision, and other 4IR technologies, developing solutions and enabling it to deliver sustainable growth. Formed as a joint venture between global energy company ADNOC and Abu Dhabi’s technology leader G42, AIQ has assembled a team of over 100 data scientists and subject matter experts, leveraging the company’s industry data and knowledge to develop a portfolio of over 20 solutions. They have created an Advanced Reservoir 360 solution, an Al-driven reservoir visualization and performance application that optimizes the exploitation of oil and gas fields. Utilizing AIQ AI-Emissions Platform, a predictive analytics platform, enterprises are given detailed visibility into their carbon footprints and streamlining ESG reporting.

Chalhoub Group … for enhancing and transforming retail with emerging tech

Chalhoub Group accelerated in domains such as Web3, and Al in the past two years. For example, SOL3MATES, a web3-native sneaker brand, pushed the boundaries of innovation, creativity, and storytelling. Another achievement is the Christofle x Prince Roblox Collection, a collection of gaming wearables in partnership with Prince, a fashion brand by Boltable Studios. This NFT collection and a collection of wearables in Roblox meet the needs of the younger generation, and it introduced a crypto checkout option on Christofle.com. In 2022, the brand launched Reflaunt to enable customers to purchase luxury, second-hand pieces, sell their designer bags, shoes, and accessories through the Level Shoes website, and receive either cash or store credit. The group also implemented RPA for e-commerce product uploads, leading to a 50% reduction in the enrichment process time, streamlining operations, and enhancing efficiency, and ventured into the realm of Generative Al for e-commerce product imagery.

e& … for advancing smart and green digital solutions

Committed to driving digital innovation and rooted in a sustainability framework, e&’s approach encompasses securing a digital future for all, low-carbon operations, and a commitment to social betterment. Some of their achievements include providing sustainable edge data center solutions and implementing data technologies to empower companies to embrace sustainable agendas and reduce carbon emissions. On track to meet its 2030 net-zero target, it reduced energy consumption by 52% through energy-efficient radio equipment. It boosts green development initiatives with enhanced network capacity and efficiency for hyperscale cloud computing. It offers a wide range of solutions from its smart city portfolio, including solar energy, energy management, IoT solutions like intelligent buildings, and waste management.

Masdar City … for making sustainable living accessible

Masdar City, the sustainable community in Abu Dhabi, is addressing several global challenges facing sustainable development, such as pioneering a methodology that makes green buildings economically viable, even for developing countries, focusing on improving energy and water efficiency, driving technological innovation and growth through its free zone and clean-tech startup VC, and sharing lessons learned to help advance the real estate industry achieve net-zero. The Masdar City Square, over 29,000 square meters and features seven single and multi-tenant office buildings, will be the capital’s first net-zero office building. Masdar City is also home to The Catalyst, a venture arm focused on investing in climate-tech startups. These startups are developing innovative solutions to reduce waste and pollution, such as turning industrial waste into ceramic tile and organic waste into animal feed. Masdar Park, which uses recycled materials, is a key component of Masdar City’s “greenprint” for sustainable urban development, increasing open green spaces, public recreational facilities, and sustainable social infrastructure projects.

Pearl Semiconductor … for being a new chip on the block

With the growing importance of cloud computing and storage, and with 5G driving greater network density, the global market is seeing a surge in demand for high-frequency data connectivity that, in turn, requires ultra-low noise timing IC chips and programmability.

Egyptian company Pearl Semiconductor patented all-digital PLL technology for ultra-low-noise timing solutions. Its SpurFree architecture is critical in timing solutions for next-generation connectivity standards that will handle increasing data flow within and between data centers, including optical transmission networks and 5G backhaul. With the geopolitical situation between the US and China, the need for a non-US supplier of such devices is critical. The technology is the foundation for building a full-breadth line of products, including programmable reference clocks, multi-output clock generators, clock buffers, jitter attenuators, and network synchronizers

Pure Harvest Smart Farms … for delivering superior, sustainably-grown produce

Pure Harvest has leveraged technology to optimize indoor farming operations to ensure high-quality fresh produce year-round to meet consumer demands. By integrating cutting-edge automation, precise climate control, and data analytics, it enhanced crop yields, minimized resource usage, and reduced the environmental impact of food production. They are also pioneers of Advanced Controlled Environment Agriculture technologies in the GCC, enabling a high-tech, hybrid growing system that makes sustainable, economical, year-round production for locally grown produce possible. In July 2023, it expanded its product range by introducing over ten new products, including blackberries, raspberries, and sweet melons.

ZainTech … for bringing expertise across technology horizontals

Launched in 2021, ZainTech’s products and services portfolio spans six key areas: Cloud hosting and advanced cloud management, security and cyber products, digital product offerings with mass market appeal, pre-built and customizable digital solutions for smart cities, data policy governance, and drones and robotics. ZainTech utilizes Zain Group’s advanced communications infrastructure across its operations, including 5G, fiber, and microwave links, and has positioned to be the digital transformation partner for enterprises and governments in the MENA region, across operations in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Iraq, and the UAE. The company has created a value proposition tailored to solve customer challenges by providing a global offering with a local presence.

The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.

Incredible technologies and geopolitical shifts, complex markets and stagnating growth, demanding customers and disruptive entrepreneurs, environmental crisis and social distrust, unexpected shocks and uncertain futures.

For every business leader, the challenge is about making sense of today’s rapidly changing world – and how to prepare for, and succeed in, tomorrow’s world.

“Future Radar” is not science fiction, or even futurology. It is about exploring and learning from the new businesses, and behaviours, emerging on the edges of markets right now.

• How will your marketspaces evolve over the next 5-10 years? Where are you best opportunities?
• Which companies will shape this future? What can you learn from them and their strategies?
• What are the next agendas for customers and investors? How can you shape and lead them now?

We explore how to reimagine business, to reinvent markets, to reengage people – to survive and thrive, and move forwards to create a better future. We consider what it means to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact.

We learn from the innovative strategies of incredible companies, leading today, and shaping tomorrow – from Aerofarms and Amazon, to Biontech and Bolt, Canva and Carbon, Darktrace to DBS, Glossier and Gymshark, Notpla and Northvolt, On and Orsted, Patagonia and PingAn, Rappi and Revolut, to Zipline and Zozo, and many more.

Examples of Future Radar

These are examples from recent projects. Our live research tracks the emerging trends and most innovative companies in each different sector. This is then focused and customised for specific client interests – keynote speeches, strategy workshops, etc. It is typically used by companies to rapidly accelerate knowledge in a sector, focus investment choices, and drive innovation …

• Learn from 250 innovative companies shaping the future
• Be inspired by 100 inspiring leaders rethinking business possibilities
• Explore the most significant future megatrends and trend kaleidoscope 2024
• Consider all the best new research in business futures project and sustainable futures project

Embracing the megatrends of change

We live in a time of incredible change. Dramatic, pervasive, and relentless. More change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years. Incredible technologies, expectant consumers, climate crisis, social distrust, and much more. How will you embrace the megatrends? Disruptive technologies, connected and intelligent; economic power shifts, 80% of the middle class in emerging markets; resource scarcity, where water is the biggest risk; demographic change, where markets are older, demanding and mobile; and rapid urbanisation, 33 of the 45 megacities in Asia.

• Every market is shaken up, how pandemic accelerated the future
• Asia to AI, GenZ and gene-editing, sustainability and the super-apps
• Megatrends, markets and metaverses, and what they mean for me
• What it means to be “digital” in a tech, human, changing world?
• Customers around the world, and the new agendas and behaviours
• What can we learn the world’s most innovative companies right now
• Turning challenges into opportunities, driving exponential growth.

Creating a better future for your business

The old codes of business don’t work anymore. The most innovative companies – from Amazon and Bytedance, to Coupang and Deepmind – succeed with new codes. So what are the new ideas to win in a fast and dynamic world of Asian renaissance, entrepreneurial supremacy, social conscience and smarter machines? What can you learn from Jio’s revolution in India, DBS’s transformation of banking, PingAn in insurance? How can you be inspired by courageous leaders like 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki, Haier’s Zhang Ruimin and Citigroup’s Jane Fraser?

• Finding purpose, driving moonshots, starting from the future back
• Turning purpose into strategy into innovation, for relentless change
• Business model, platforms and digital ecosystems
• Exploring companies like Orsted to PingAn
• The new DNA of business and leadership
• Growth mindset, driving change and business transformation
• Having the courage to lead a better future

Accelerating Change

We live in a time of great promise but also great uncertainty.

Markets are more crowded, competition is intense, customer aspirations are constantly fuelled by new innovations and dreams. Technology disrupts every industry, from banking to construction, entertainment to healthcare. It drives new possibilities and solutions, but also speed and complexity, uncertainty and fear.

As digital and physical worlds fuse to augment how we live and work, AI and robotics enhance but also challenge our capabilities, whilst ubiquitous supercomputing, genetic editing and self-driving cars take us further.

Technologies with the power to help us leap forwards in unimaginable ways. To transform business, to solve our big problems, to drive radical innovation, to accelerate growth and achieve progress socially and environmentally too.

We are likely to see more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years.

• Markets accelerate, 4 times faster than 20 years ago, based on the accelerating speed of innovation and diminishing lifecycles of products.
• People are more capable, 825 times more connected than 20 years ago, with access to education, unlimited knowledge, tools to create anything.
• Consumer attitudes change, 78% of young people choose brands that do good, they reject corporate jobs, and see the world with the lens of gamers.

However, change goes far beyond the technology.

Markets will transform, converge and evolve faster. From old town Ann Arbor to the rejuvenated Bilbao, today’s megacities like Chennai and the future Saudi tech city of Neom, economic power will continue to shift. China has risen to the top of the new global business order, whilst India and eventually Africa will follow.

Industrialisation challenges the natural equilibrium of our planet’s resources. Today’s climate crisis is the result of our progress, and our problem to solve. Globalisation challenges our old notions of nationhood and locality. Migration changes where we call home. Religious values compete with social values, economic priorities conflict with social priorities. Living standards improve but inequality grows.

Our current economic system is stretched to its limit. Global shocks, such as the global pandemic of 2020, exposes its fragility. We open our eyes to realise that we weren’t prepared for different futures, and that our drive for efficiency has left us unable to cope. Such crises will become more frequent, as change and disruption accelerate.

However, these shocks are more likely to accelerate change in business, rather than stifle it, to wake us up to the real impacts of our changing world – to the urgency of action, to the need to think and act more dramatically.

The old codes don’t work

Business is not fit for the future. Most organisations were designed for stable and predictable worlds, where the future evolves as planned, markets are definitive, and choices are clear.

The future isn’t like it used to be.

Dynamic markets are, by definition, turbulent. Whilst economic cycles have typically followed a pattern of peaks and troughs every 10-15 years, these will likely become more frequent.  Change is fast and exponential, uncertain and unpredictable, complex and ambiguous demanding new interpretation and imagination.

Yet too many business leaders hope that the strategies that made them successful in the past will continue to work in the future. They seek to keep stretching the old models in the hope that they will continue to see them through. Old business plans are tweaked each year, infrastructures are tested to breaking point, and people are asked to work harder.

In a way of dramatic, unpredictable change, this is not enough to survive, let alone thrive.

• Growth is harder. Global GDP growth has declined by more than a third in the past decade. As the west stagnates, Asia grows, albeit more slowly.
• Companies struggle, their average lifespan falling from 75 years in 1950 to 15 years today, 52% of the Fortune 500 in 2000 no longer exist in 2020.
• Leaders are under pressure. 44% of today’s business leaders have held their position for at least 5 years, compared to 77% half a century ago.

Profit is no longer enough; people expect business to achieve more. Business cannot exist in isolation from the world around them, pursuing customers without care for the consequence. The old single-minded obsession with profits is too limiting. Business depends more than ever on its resources – people, communities, nature, partners – and will need to find a better way to embrace them.

Technology is no longer enough; innovation needs to be more human. Technology will automate and interpret reality, but it won’t empathise and imagine new futures. Ubiquitous technology-driven innovation quickly becomes commoditised, available from anywhere in the world, so we need to add value in new ways. The future is human, creative, and intuitive. People will matter more to business, not less.

Sustaining the environment is not enough. 200 years of industrialisation has stripped the planet of its ability to renew itself, and ultimately to sustain life. Business therefore needs to give back more than it takes. As inequality and distrust have grown in every society, traditional jobs are threatened by automation and stagnation, meaning that social issues will matter even more, both globally and locally.

The new DNA of business

As business leaders, our opportunity is to create a better business, one that is fit for the future, that can act in more innovative and responsible ways.

How can we harness the potential of this relentless and disruptive change, harness the talents of people and the possibilities of technology? How can business, with all its power and resources, be a platform for change, and a force for good?

We need to find new codes to succeed. We need to find new ways to work, to recognise business as a system that be virtuous, where less can be more, and growth can go beyond the old limits. This demands that we make new connections:

• Profit + Purpose … to achieve more enlightened progress
• Technology + Humanity … to achieve more human ingenuity
• Innovation + Sustainability … to achieve more positive impact

We need to create a new framework for business, a better business – to reimagine why and redesign how we work, as well as reinvent what and refocus where we do business.

Imagine a future business that looks forwards not back, that rises up to shape the future on its own terms, making sense of change to find new possibilities, inspiring people with vision and optimism. Imagine a future that inspires progress, seeks new sources of growth, embraces networks and partners to go further, and enables people to achieve more.

Imagine too, a future business that creates new opportunity spaces, by connecting novel ideas and untapped needs, creatively responding to new customer agendas. Imagine a future business that disrupts the disruptors, where large companies have the vision and courage to reimagine themselves and compete as equals to fast and entrepreneurial start-ups.

Imagine a future business that embraces humanity, searches for better ideas, that fuse technology and people in more enlightened ways, to solve the big problems of society, and improve everyone’s lives. Imagine a future business that works collectively, self-organises to thrive without hierarchy, connects with partners in rich ecosystems, designs jobs around people, to do inspiring work.

Imagine also, a future business which is continually transforming, that thrives by learning better and faster, develops a rich portfolio of business ideas and innovations to sustain growth and progress. Imagine a future business that creates positive impact on the world, benefits all stakeholders with a circular model of value creation, that addresses negatives, and creates a net positive impact for society.

Creating a better business is an opportunity for every person who works inside or alongside it. It is not just a noble calling, to do something better for the world, but also a practical calling, a way to overcome the many limits of today, and attain future success for you and your business.You could call it the dawn of a new capitalism.

Explore more from Peter Fisk …

• Next Agenda of best ideas and priorities for business
• Business Futures Project collating all the best ideas
• Megatrends 2030 in a world accelerated by pandemic
• 49 Codes to help you develop a better business future
• 250 companies innovators shaking up the world
• 100 leaders with the courage to shape a better future
• Education that is innovative, issue-driven, action-driving
• Consulting that is collaborative, strategic and innovative
• Speaking that is inspiring, topical, engaging and actionable

Ideas drive the world forwards.

I remember telling my boss, a South African guy called Bruce Tindale, that back in 1999. He wasn’t convinced. He was a project management expert, focused on making solid things happen. But despite the world being in the grip of a fantastic new craze, called the Internet, people were still uncertain.

We’d just seen the initial crash of dotcom start-ups, who had lost sight of profit in a manic rush for eyeballs. This made him even more sceptical. But then we started talking about what made the winners different, companies like Amazon, who didn’t just want to automate old business models, but had new ideas. I also talked him through the rise of intangible assets – from brands to patents to relationships – which were increasingly displacing the old building blocks of value creation. He started to engage.

We then talked about investors, who look to the future not the past. We talked about leaders who need to go beyond the visions of their predecessors. We talked about brands that engage and inspire consumers with purpose and stories. We talked about innovations which start with the germ of a concept, but then need to be nurtured into something practical.

Eventually he was convinced. He asked me to set up a new business unit – about ideas – and specifically how to engage business leaders and their teams in the future, in possibilities, and to develop new ideas about strategies, innovations and delivery. Together with a colleague, Jonathan Hogg, we gathered a group of idea catalysts from inside and outside the company, and started our ideation journey. We devoured every book around, curating all the best ideas. We formed joint ventures with Pearson, SAP and Wiley. We got more ideas, and started to build a new business.

As for Bruce, a few years later he retired. I asked him what he was doing. He said he’d had a great idea, but never had time to make it happen. Inspired by the vineyards of his native South Africa, he wanted to create an English vineyard in the Surrey Hills near his home. Today I look back and see him thriving on his idea, the High Clandon Estate Vineyard, producing award-winning sparking wines.

Which brings me back to ideas.

And books.

So here are some of the most recent business books, and their big ideas to move the world forwards:

The Coming Wave

Synthetic biology, quantum computing. Everything is about to change.

Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.

None of us are prepared.

This is a ground-breaking book from the ultimate AI insider, Mustafa Suleyman, who was co-founder of London-based DeepMind, the AI business which is now part of Google. Recently he left Google to set up Inflection AI with Reid Hoffman, of Linkedin fame and fortune. They are working on a personalised AI called Pi. While ChatGPT will give standard answers to the world, Pi is more intimate, learning about you, and from you, and personalising its intelligence to you.

The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. He shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side and the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia?

 

Hidden Potential

The science of achieving great things.

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distances we ourselves can travel. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

Adam Grant, one of my favourite business authors, weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid story­telling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess – it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the charac­ter skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.

Adam’s book offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. He argues that anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

TomorrowMind

Martin Seligman is a visionary psychologist. He is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, director of the Positive Psychology Center. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, MD, has served as chief product officer and chief innovation officer at BetterUp, and pyschiatrist.

In recent years, workplace toxicity, industry volatility, employee isolation and technology-driven change have threatened the psychological well-being of employees. The rise of quiet quitting has shown that when we can’t flourish at work, both personal success and corporate productivity suffer.

As we sit on the cusp of some of the most turbulent economic changes in history many of us wonder if we can not only survive but flourish in our careers.

Based on the science of thriving, TomorrowMind proves we can, and provides essential plans and actionable advice for succeeding in the uncertain future of work. Build skills in resilience, foresight and creativity and help to cultivate workplace that fosters connection and meaning for yourself and your team. Engaging evidence shows how individuals, teams, and organizations that excel at these five key attributes will win in the whitewater of work every time.

Right Kind of Wrong

Why learning to fail can teach us to thrive.

We used to think of failure as a problem, to be avoided at all costs. Now, we’re often told that failure is desirable – that we must ‘fail fast, fail often’. The trouble is, neither approach distinguishes the good failures from the bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well.

The ideas around experimentation – test and learn – are not new. From Carol Dweck’s book Mindset which distinguished a growth mindset (loving change) from a fixed mindset (loving stability), to Eric Rise’ epic Lean Start-Up, business has increasingly embraced a more agile, experimental approach.

Now, Amy Edmondson – awarding winning Harvard organisational psychologist – frames it as how we get failure wrong, and how to get it right. She draws on a lifetime’s research into the science of ‘psychological safety’ to show that the most successful cultures are those in which you can fail openly, without your mistakes being held against you. She introduces the three archetypes of failure – simple, complex and intelligent – and explains how to harness the revolutionary potential of the good ones (and eliminate the bad).

And she tells vivid stories ranging from the history of open heart surgery to the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, all to ask a simple, provocative question: What if it is only by learning to fail that we can hope to truly succeed?

Build

This is an unorthodox guide to making things worth making.

Tony Fadell started his 30 year Silicon Valley career at General Magic, the most influential startup nobody has ever heard of.

Then he went on to make the iPod and iPhone, start Nest and create the Nest Learning Thermostat. Throughout his career Tony has authored more than 300 patents. He now leads the investment and advisory firm Future Shape, where he mentors the next generation of startups that are changing the world.

As Malcolm Gladwell puts it  ‘Tony has made more cool stuff than almost anyone else in the history of Silicon Valley, and in Build he tells us how.”

Fadell calls his book a mentor in a box. But he doesn’t follow the standard Silicon Valley credo that you have to radically reinvent everything you do. His advice is unorthodox because it’s old school. Because it’s based on human nature, not gimmicks.

Elon Musk

Love him, or not, he’s an enigma.

From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.

At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said.

It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?

Beijing Rules

This is the story of China’s two-decade quest for global dominance.

For several decades China’s ascendancy has been supported by an astonishingly broad and deep portfolio of quiet coercion. Stories of the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian reach are breathtaking – the gagging of sports stars and huge Western brands; Hollywood self-censorship; infrastructure deals in exchange for political loyalty in multilateral organizations; and of course – communications firms. But these are just the most visible examples.

Beijing Rules exposes the armoury of strategies with which China has exploited Western weakness to position itself as leader in the game of nations: tying market access to political acquiescence; punitive tariffs; online disinformation operations; use of private companies to spy on global users; leveraging vaccines for geopolitical gain; and the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong. With these weapons and dextrous manoeuvrings during the global pandemic, China positioned itself to take its place at the apex of world powers.

Bethany Allen, an internationally recognized investigator into China’s covert power, shows Western institutions have bowed to and even enabled Beijing’s coercion. As we come reeling out of a global pandemic and eyes are on a new war in Europe, this revealing analysis sounds the alarm about the most significant shift in the new world order, and what we must do to prevent the loss of freedoms we take for granted.

Going Infinite

The rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried.

From the author of The Big Short and Flash Boys, the high-octane story of the enigmatic figure at the heart of one of the 21st century’s most spectacular financial collapses

‘I asked him how much it would take for him to sell FTX and go do something other than make money. He thought the question over. “One hundred and fifty billion dollars,” he finally said-though he added that he had use for “infinity dollars”…’

SBF wasn’t just rich. Before he turned thirty he’d become the world’s youngest billionaire, making a record fortune in the crypto frenzy. CEOs, celebrities and world leaders vied for his time. At one point he considered paying off the entire national debt of the Bahamas so he could take his business there.

Then it all fell apart.

Who was this Gatsby of the crypto world, a rumpled guy in cargo shorts, whose eyes twitched across TV interviews as he played video games on the side, who even his million-dollar investors still found a mystery? What gave him such an extraordinary ability to make money – and how did his empire collapse so spectacularly?

Michael Lewis was there when it happened, having got to know Bankman-Fried during his epic rise. In Going Infinite he tells us a story like no other, taking us through the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own. Both psychological portrait of a preternaturally gifted ‘thinking machine’, and wild financial roller-coaster ride, this is a twenty-first-century epic of high-frequency trading and even higher stakes, of crypto mania and insane amounts of money, of hubris and downfall.

Of course, not all ideas are good.

Radius Recycling, previously known as Schnitzer Steel, is the world’s most sustainable company of 2023, followed by Denmark’s wind turbine business Vestas, and Australian furniture maker Brambles.

Radius is a story of how a one-man scrap metal recycler from Portland, Oregon, rose to lead the world, and demonstrate the importance of both the circular economy and low-carbon metals in the energy transition.

Steel, of course, is one of the world’s most carbon-intensive products (accounting for roughly 7% of human-produced CO2 emission). However Radius, originally known as Alaska Junk Company when founded by Sam Schnitzer in 1906, has become a global leader in the collection, processing and sale of the world’s most recycled product: steel.

The company generates most of its revenues from recycling steel and other metals. And about a third comes from forging recycled scrap steel into finished products in electric arc furnaces that are powered by hydropower, making the metal extremely low carbon.

The spark for its current performance came almost a decade ago when the company launched what it called a sustainability framework. “We’ve been recycling for about a century,” says Radius’ CEO Tamara Lundgren. “But how do we incorporate that into a framework that our employees, suppliers, investors and communities can identify with?

In 2019, the company set about bolstering its framework by adopting specific goals and metrics to track progress. These included reducing Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions from recycling operations by 25% from 2019 levels by 2025, and reaching net-zero GHG emissions for all operations (steel manufacturing, metals recycling and auto dismantling) by 2050.

Radius’ 2022 emissions were 24% lower than in 2019, its baseline year when it started tracking its GHGs. This reduction has come from the introduction of measures such as investments in best-available-technology emission control systems that, at the company’s Oakland, California, facility, reduce its Scope 1 emissions by around 3,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year. Other measures include improved energy efficiency, the use of alternative fuels and resource-conservation projects.

The approach to sustainability has ultimately paid off, with the company returning a top-quartile performance on a range of Global 100 indicators. It saw a 74% increase in energy productivity over last year and made significant improvements in water (69%) and carbon (55%) productivity. It also scored well for its proportion of non-male board members (five out of nine are women) and racially diverse executives, while it also saw a significant drop in its worker injury rate. The company’s ranking also received a boost by its linking of its CEO’s pay to the achievement of sustainability targets (11% of variable compensation is tied to reaching these goals) and its policy of offering paid sick leave.

Financially, last year was the second-best year in the company’s history. “Our people and planet goals are clearly not coming at the expense of profit,” Lundgren says. “For a company that is 116 years old and that many consider to be ‘old economy’ to be recognized as a leading force in sustainability is a great example of how sustainability principles can be successfully applied to an industrial company.”

Yet there is still a widespread ignorance of the importance of recycling steel, copper, aluminum and nickel – all of which Radius recycles using its advanced metal recovery systems – in the energy transition, Lundgren adds. “There has been underinvestment in metals and mining for years, and there are shortages of some critical ferrous and non-ferrous metals, which we recover and recycle,” she says. “We can’t eliminate these shortages, but we can alleviate them. Metals recycling is one of the foundational pillars for global decarbonization.”

Corporate Knights’ annual ranking of the world’s 100 most sustainable corporations is based on a rigorous assessment of over 6,000 public companies with revenue over US$1 billion. They are assessed across 25 key performance indicators, including % sustainable revenue, % sustainable investment, % taxes paid, carbon productivity, and racial and gender diversity.

It is the best-performing global sustainability index (ticker: CKG100), with more than 10 years of history. Since its inception in 2005, the Global 100 Index has generated a total investment return of 270.7% compared to 222.1% for All Country World Index.

Sustainable revenue contributes around half of gross revenue for the Global 100 compared to just 5% for most companies.  For every tonne of carbon they produce, Global 100 companies earn 33 times more revenue than ACWI firms.

Download the full rankings, an XLS evaluating the top 100 across the 25 indicators.

Some other highlights from the analysis include

• Spanish electricity company Iberdrola led all other Global 100 companies in terms of sustainable investments in 2022. It pumped €8.6 billion into green assets, such as renewable energy and EV charging, as well as energy storage and hydrogen production.
• Germany’s Commerzbank had the highest ratio of cash taxes paid over the 2017 to 2021 period, at 30% (down from 34.63% in the previous period). Of the top 10 companies in this category, five others were from Europe.
• Norway’s Storebrand has the lowest gap in CEO-to-average-worker pay. CEO Odd Arild Grefstad’s compensation increased to 9.32 million kroner in 2022, a ration of 6.5 to 1 to average salary.
• Xerox is the leader in gender diversity, in part thanks to the efforts of former CEO Ursula Burns. More than 58% of its execs are women, up from 43% last year.
• In 2020,  HP announced a goal of doubling the number of its executives who are black and African American by 2025. It is already well on its way to diversifying its leadership, as 58% of its executives are racially diverse, up from 43% in 2021.

With the largest LED screen in the world, the new $2 billion Sphere venue in Las Vegas blows your mind. When U2 opened the doors for the first time, then it just gets even better.

The New York Times headlined “this is peak humanity” while CNN just said “wow, wow, wow.”

Or as Bono said “First we played clubs, then we played the biggest stadia, and now we play cathedrals.”

Ever since the colossal satellite screens of Zoo TV first crash landed into our consciousness in the early 90s, U2 have consistently pushed the technological envelope to the very edge whether that be by erecting huge LED screens, giant lemons, and more.

Now, they’ve made the much hyped Las Vegas Sphere – a $2.3bn, 18,000 seater sci-fi structure which boasts 160,000 speakers and a 54,000 m²  wraparound LED screen you’ve ever seen in your life – their new home for the next few months.

Designed by Populous (the global architectural and design practice specialising in sports facilities, arenas and convention centres), the Sphere project started development in 2018, was disrupted by Covid, but finally opened today.

U2 will perform 25 dates at the venue through to December, with the Sphere’s future to include sports events, music performances and more.

 

When Lionel Messi lifted the World Cup for Argentina, it felt like a fitting end to a glorious career.

The football star, for many the GOAT (greatest of all time), had done it all – a record seven Ballon d’Or awards as the world’s best player. He had spent almost his entire professional career with Barcelona, where he won a club record of 34 trophies, including ten La Liga titles, seven Copa del Rey titles and the Champions League four times. For the last two seasons he had moved to Paris St Germain, and then finally in 2022, he captained his beloved Argentina to win the FIFA World Cup.

Since July this year, when the football player announced his move to new and underachieving  US soccer team Inter Miami, the city – and much of America too – has been gripped by the dazzling star. His flamingo pink club jersey has become ubiquitous.

Messi’s face is everywhere: on gigantic murals, billboards, public transport and television adverts. Messi wares are being hawked on street corners and in every novelty store and sports outfitter in the city. Beach bars are serving Messi Mojitos, the Hard Rock Cafe offers the Messi Chicken Sandwich and Messi Burger, and a local brewery is selling pale pink cans of GOAT 10 beer (he wears the No 10 jersey for Inter Miami, as he has for most of his career).

On the pitch, Messi, 36, has had an instant impact on the club, which plays in the Major League Soccer (MLS) league and is co-owned by David Beckham, himself once the biggest thing in US football. It took the former England captain years to mould LA Galaxy into contenders but Messi has already turned perhaps the worst team in the league into perhaps the best.

DRV PNK Stadium, the club’s temporary home in Fort Lauderdale while it scrambles to build its own, is sold out for every game and in the VIP suites the Beckhams are rubbing shoulders with the likes of  LeBron James, Serena Williams, and Puff Daddy.

Off the pitch, the Messi effect has proved even more spectacular. At the beginning of the summer, Inter Miami’s Instagram account had one million followers. It now has 15 million, not just more than any of its league rivals but more than any ice hockey, baseball or American football team and all but three US basketball teams.

Since Messi’s first game against Cruz Azul in July, where standing-room tickets started at nearly $900, average ticket prices have increased by more than 500%, from $110 to $690. That Messi effect extends across the league, at every stadium he travels to. Ticket prices for the match between Inter Miami and Los Angeles FC last Sunday set a record as the most expensive in MLS history — roughly $900 for the cheapest option. Official and knock-off Messi jerseys have been on backorder for months.

Messi has also transformed the business model of the MLS. His surprise move to the US was made possible with a unique deal. Would just offering money be enough to attract a player who ranked second in 2023 on Forbes’ list of the world’s highest-paid athletes at $130 million?

Messi’s 2½-year deal with Inter Miami is “worth up to $150 million total from his salary, signing bonus, and equity in the team” according to the club, securing a piece of the club’s ownership on retiring. However the real commercial sweetener was the commercial rights – Messi will get a significant share of all sign-up fees for Apple TV, the MLS streaming service, and also a share of all Adidas merchandise sales, Adidas being the existing sponsor of Inter Miami, and a long-time sponsor of Messi.

Before the American move, Messi had earned around $120 million annually, which placed hime marginally behind Cristiano Ronaldo in the football world. However Messi is a far more likeable personality, and with a move to the heart of America’s Latin community, he could really exploit his popularity.

Last year, in addition to his Paris St Germain salary of $65 million, GeniusWorks analysis shows that he earned around $55 million annually from brand endorsements (Adidas, Huawei, Gatorade, MasterCard, Lay’s, Pepsi, Hawkers, Ooredoo, Gillette, Turkish Airlines). That figure, now with additional deals and income streams, will grow significantly.

The 35 year old’s net wealth of around $600 million, is also bolstered by investments in his own branded merchandise, which can be bought at The Messi Store plus a property portfolio and digital investments.

Around his birthplace of Rosario in Argentina, for example, he has put money into the Azahares del Parana project (a set of gated communities out of the city) as well as an apartment building in the city centre. Other investments include dipping his toe into the worlds of cryptocurrency and NFTs, working in partnership with Ethernity.

More

• All About Brands 
• 250 Innovative Brands
• Brand Innovation by Peter Fisk
• Building Brands like Pixar make Movies by Peter Fisk
• The Brand World Cup 2022 by Peter Fisk

Bagsværd is a 25 minute drive northwards from Copenhagen’s Kastrup airport.

When you arrive, there is nothing but Novo Nordisk. A sprawling campus of the Danish pharmaceutical giant that has grown rapidly over the years as a world leader in diabetes care.

Novo Nordisk was founded in 1923. Novo’s origins can be traced back to the collaboration of two Danish pharmacists, August Krogh and August Kongsted, who established Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium (Nordic Insulin Laboratory). Over the last century Novo has become primarily known for its work in the field of diabetes treatments. It develops and manufactures a wide range of diabetes medications, including insulin, as well as devices such as insulin pens and pumps.

This week Novo Nordisk’s miracle weight-loss drug Wegovy gained approval for use in the UK: for private patients and, on the NHS, for those with a BMI over 35 (or in exceptional case,  over 30).

The Danish company’s market cap has dramatically risen to $428 billion, making it the largest company in Europe, overtaking the luxury goods giant LVMH, and bigger than the rest of Denmark’s annual GDP.

All because of an accidental discovery.

In 2017 its new drug for diabetics, Ozempic, was approved. But those taking it noticed their appetites seemed to disappear and they were losing weight. Ozempic contains semaglutide, which mimics a naturally occurring hormone, GLP-1, that makes us feel full after a meal, telling the body that no more food is needed.

Ozempic has transformed Novo, and potentially the future of millions of people too.

The market for weight loss drugs is estimated at $100 billion. Celebrities like Elon Musk have given it a go. In July 12 million units of Ozempic were sold. Yet demand far exceeds supply.  Diabetes patients faced shortages because so many more people wanted to get their hands on Ozempic. An estimated 415 million people have type 2 diabetes worldwide. Over 1 billion people are obese.

Wegovy, which delivers a different dose of the same active ingredient, was created by Novo Nordisk in response to this stratospheric demand. The rapid growth has also come with concerns about side effects, particularly as the communication has spread virally, beyond the normal medical world. There are also ethical discussions about who deserves the limited supplies most.

Other pharma companies have woken up to the opportunity too.  Eli Lilly and Pfizer have their own semaglutides. But the demand is so high, supply so short, that this should not damage Novo Nordisk any time soon. Indeed this could be just the beginning for semaglutides. They are also showing promising results when it comes to treating cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease and Alzheimer’s.

It sounds like a Hollywood movie, as an old and steady company suddenly discovers a wonder drug. How Novo can capitalise on the approach will be interesting.

The discovery reminds me of Viagra, another blockbuster drug, when the side-effects of another fairly routine drug development were realised to have huge applications in other areas. The brand Viagra was able to transform minds, business models, and sex lives. Of course there are few obese people in Denmark, but the small nation with a national GDP less than the market cap of Novo, is already feasting on one of its longest established companies.

Novo Nordisk also made it into TIME magazine’s most influential companies of 2023:

As the world changes, how do we move forwards?

Innovation has never been a more urgent or important challenge, in business and society. How can organisation reimagine themselves in rapidly changing markets, with new tech capabilities, new customer demands and social expectations? How can society embrace new thinking to solve the biggest challenges from climate change to healthcare crisis?

Yet for too many companies, a quick workshop on Design Thinking, and maybe a few Idea Sprints, feel like enough to convince them that they are innovating. Too often, these become the high energy workshops that can also be called Innovation Theatre. They look and feel good at first, but do they really deliver results?  Do they drive significant progress, and value creation?

Yes, we absolutely need energising and inspiring, but innovation also needs discipline. A disciplined process to capture fragile ideas, to ensure that are relevant to customers, to connect them into bolder concepts, to accelerate them into and within the market, to ensure they deliver commercial and user impact, for society too, and to sustain a portfolio of such concepts so they they keep flowing.

You can read more about my best new ideas for business, plus new innovation and future thinking here .

Here are some of the new books, research and projects that have inspired me this year:

The Performance Paradox: Turning the Power of Mindset into Action by Eduardo Briceño of Mindset Works tackles the counterintuitive phenomenon that if we focus only on performance, our performance suffers. To avoid falling into this trap, Eduardo sets out his innovative and refreshing framework of balancing learning and performing. He builds on the Growth Mindset principles of colleague Carol Dweck.

Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change by April Rinne, explores eight mindset shifts that flip conventional ideas about leadership, success, and wellbeing. These ‘flux superpowers’ include getting lost, running slower, and knowing your ‘enough.’ The book is all about helping individuals and organisations rethink and reshape their relationship with change and uncertainty. “When everything is in flux, like it is today, everything can benefit from a Flux Mindset” she says.

Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters by Stanford d.school’s Perry Klebahn and Jeremy Utley, which demonstrates how to establish daily creativity practice to unleash innovation within individuals and organisations. Innovation, they argue, is not event; it’s a practice. Ideaflow offers a tried and tested framework to boost the flow of ideas and breakthrough results to solve business problems.

Decision Sprint: The New Way to Innovate Into the Unknown and Move from Strategy to Action by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Atif Rafiq, presents a practical model for accelerating team-based problem solving. A roadmap for turning ideas into action, in Decision Sprint Atif debunks the belief that speed and accuracy need to be mutually exclusive and shows how business can move faster and smarter on their most important ideas.

Going On Offense: A Leader’s Playbook for Perpetual Innovation by Stanford’s Behnam Tabrizi, which explores the key ingredients that fuel the mindsets of firms dedicated to relentless experimentation. Drawing on his rigorous seven-year research, in Going On Offense Behnam reveals the transformative drivers of success in multiple innovative organisations, including several of the big tech giants.

Think Bigger: How to Innovate by Sheena Iyengar asks the timeless question, “How can I get my best ideas?” By debunking some of the popular concepts surrounding creativity, including brainstorming, Think Bigger provides a step-by-step framework for entrepreneurs, leaders, innovators – and everyone – to think more effectively and grow their ideas. As a roadmap for innovation and guide to creative thinking, Think Bigger lays the groundwork for addressing some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Autonomous Transformation: Creating a More Human Future in the Era of Artificial Intelligence by Brian Evergreen, former global head of Autonomous AI Co-Innovation at Microsoft Research, weaves together strategy, management thinking, economics, systemic design, and philosophy into actionable steps for managers seeking to harness AI for the betterment of their organisation and the world.

The Innovation Mindset: A Proven Method to Fuel Performance and Results by Jennifer Kenny focuses on practices that drive innovation across an entire business ecosystem, The Innovation Mindset argues that ‘human innovation’ is the missing link for enhancing individual and team innovation capacity. The book outlines Jennifer’s Six Step Practice Model, which starts with uncovering the innovative drive within yourself and then harnessing it to build a cooperative ecosystem designed to unleash new discoveries.

Beyond Disruption: Innovate and Achieve Growth without Displacing Industries, Companies, or Jobsby INSEAD’s Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, redefines and expands the existing view of innovation by introducing a new approach: nondisruptive creation. Just as Blue Ocean Strategy redefined the essence of strategy as creating not competing, Beyond Disruption provides a powerful new blueprint for how innovators and businesses can avoid destruction and create both economic and social value – to tackle new sets of challenges not addressed by existing industries, and for companies to grow whilst also being a force for good.

Engineering Our Dreams, is an active research project on AI, AR, and VR by Martin Lindstrom, who has engaged 1,000 volunteers in the metaverse for six months,  to better understand human behaviour, and the role of businesses, brands. A key finding of the research is determining how brands, branding, and the influence of brands over consumers will be forever altered, given the new insights into what typical lifestyles will look like in 2035 as a result of VR and AI.

We live in an incredibly dynamic world – technologies emerge at exponential speed, consumers gain new experiences and aspirations, new entrants and business models disrupt every market – and change continues to accelerate.

Apple recently soared beyond $3 trillion in market valuation, Tesla’s new supercomputer added $600 billion to its value, SpaceX now launches and returns rockets everyday, Virgin Galactic does it for fun, Temu is now the world’s largest retail brand, Open AI is now on its fourth iteration since ChatGPT, and AI supermodel Noonoouri has just launched her number one hit single.

Meanwhile in the banking world, there is much slower change.

In a world where data is key, where most of Apple’s 52% value growth in 2023 has been due to services (and consumer finance, with Goldman Sachs, including its savings account now has over $10 billion in consumer deposits), banks would seem like natural platforms to reinvent their own, and almost every other industry.

Some banks, like Singapore’s DBS, have gone a long way in this thinking, within its “invisible banking” strategy to embed banking (and therefore financial transactions, data and relationships) into every aspect of people’s lives (partnering with retail, transport, health) etc. More often, it has been start-ups like the superapps (Grab or Jio, Rappi or WeChat) that have realised the connecting potential of finance, and then developed a next generation of finance platforms.

But most banks have struggled to change. Largely through mindset, inertia, and arrogance. It amazes me how many banks still expect customers to come to them. Yes they want to make queues shorter, apps convenient, and brands seem friendly. But it’s still largely within the context that banks do what they’ve always done.

Add to this, is banks’ seemingly bizarre insistence on not seeing the new breed of banks – neo, mobile, fintech – as being of the same world. Fintech? Do retailers really call digitally-enabled stores as retail tech, or do they just recognise that they are real competitors, and ultimately every retailer needs to digitalise or die? Of course they do. There is no such thing as health tech, just health. There is no such thing as media tech, just media. And so on. Fintech? Pah ….

Maybe it’s not surprising that payment systems like Visa, and even Paypal, outperform almost every bank today in terms of value creation. Investors, despite coming from the same world, don’t apparently have faith in the future of banks.

So where do we see banking innovation?

Global Finance magazine is seen as one of the most recognised sources, and rankings, of the world’s most innovative banks. This is how it sees innovation, and who it sees innovating best in 2023:

“While innovation isn’t always tied to technology, in recent years developments in AI, distributed ledger and cloud computing have made tech the driving force of innovation, especially in the finance sector. Banks need to work smarter and provide a wider range of services to their customers. Financial institutions have been moving to address the challenge. Last year, the global retail banking industry was on target to spend $250 billion on technology, according to Celent, which projects that IT spend to rise around 5% per year, and hit $308 billion by 2027. The types of technologies that financial institutions are betting on are a blend of new and old, but the applications are unique. Many are focusing on artificial intelligence and in particular, machine learning. Whether in products developed in a lab, incubator, or accelerator, or through the bank’s own technology department, AI has been an integral tool in areas such as fraud detection, data security, call center management, and back-office processes like SWIFT messaging.

Banks are improving and simplifying processes so that they require less time and reduce carbon footprints. Processes and services increasingly incorporate biometrics to identify customers remotely. Others are aimed at eliminating paper and further embracing the digital world through digital know-your-customer (KYC) functions that facilitate opening new accounts for existing clients by leveraging existing customer data. Along with KYC functions, banks are innovating to assist anti-money laundering compliance as new laws tighten up, creating a need to align data security with the new legal regime.

Commercial customers need more services. Digital portals and cash management applications help them manage their finances, and banks with existing products are looking to add functionality such as access to third-party systems for enterprise resource planning and human resources and AI-powered insights into cash flows and reconciliations. Banks are also continuing to develop APIs that connect systems and data.

Financial institutions are looking  at ways to bolster the SME sector, critical to so many economies, including training entrepreneurs to successfully operate their businesses and obtain funding from banks. Many banks focuse on developing women entrepreneurs because research shows women’s engagement has profound impact on the wider economy and their communities.

Many established banks are embracing a startup culture, encouraging staff to think through new solutions to age-old problems and develop new products. It’s not just about making life easier for customers or eliminating pain points for employees; innovation often leads to savings in time and money for both employees and customers. Banks can do more with less.

Innovation doesn’t happen overnight, however. “It’s an iterative process, Nick Kerrigan, head of innovation execution at SWIFT, said during a recent LinkedIn Live session. “The more we can learn from each other, the better.”

World’s Most Innovative Banks 2023

• Bank of America
• DBS
• HSBC
• JP Morgan
• SEB

Last year, Bank of America (BofA) spent just over $11 billion on technology and enjoyed another record-breaking year for patents granted. BofA continued to push innovation, with 608 new patents—a 19% increase year over year—covering artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), information security, data analytics, mobile banking and payments, and making it one of our top five picks for most innovative bank of 2023.

BofA boasts 70,000 technologists globally—roughly a third of its workforce—yet it does not have an innovation lab. “We don’t want individuals to think innovation is just for a single group of people,” says Andrew McKibben, international head of BofA’s Technology & Operations. “Every person is empowered to innovate.”

BofA also promotes innovation by encouraging varied approaches to problem-solving. “If we create enough diversity [of thought], from a productivity perspective we will benefit,” McKibben argues. “We’re also really focused on neurodiversity conditions, as a broader selection of employees will often see problems in very different ways.”

BofA’s Global Transaction Services business has been particularly busy over the past year, implementing innovations for corporate treasury teams aimed at optimizing working capital.

“With so much innovation occurring, it takes a team like ours that is 100% focused on payments innovation to help identify the solution that could have the most impact on a company’s treasury operations and bottom line,” says Faiz Ahmad, head of BofA’s Global Transaction Services. “Not all companies are at the same point in their technology evolution.”

Last year, the bank introduced Pay by Bank, which enables customers of e-commerce companies, initially in the UK, to pay directly from their bank account; IXP (international cross-border payments), which uses distributed ledger technology to enable near real-time initiation and disbursement of low-value, high-volume cross-border payments; and a simplified sign-on method called CashPro QR Sign-on.

Meanwhile, BofA’s wealth management team is modernizing how people find a financial adviser with Merrill Advisor Match, because, as Jennifer Auerbach-Rodriguez, head of Merrill’s client acquisition and strategic growth initiatives, says, “not everyone has an adviser in their personal network.”

DBS

With wins in nine award categories this year, DBS has not lost its appetite for innovation. Even more impressive, the nominations honored multiple areas of the bank, putting this Asian powerhouse among the world’s most innovative banks yet again.

Middle-office technology rarely gets noticed but has huge potential for impact. Finding no off-the-shelf solution in the marketplace, DBS developed AutoFin (automated financial analysis), which leverages computer vision, natural language processing and deep learning technologies to ease the analysis and client writing tasks so that relationship managers can spend more time nurturing client relationships. The DBS Data Protection Analytics team now deploys ML and data visualization to detect misuse and abuse of customer information. And the bank’s Geolocation Real-Time Fraud Detection is an industry-first tool that cross-checks customer locations with the point-of-sale terminals where payment transactions occur.

User experience was another fertile area of innovation at DBS last year. The bank built an API to automate manual processing and provide instant updates to customers. The Intelligent Business Process Manager is the first API in banking to consolidate and incorporate different technologies, systems and platforms. The digitization of a consumer banking customer’s journey, meanwhile, is Singapore’s first digital application and onboarding vehicle for unsecured financial products such as renovation loans and debt consolidation.

Finally, the DBS Digital Currency Unit in the fall unveiled DBS Purpose Bound Money, Singapore’s first programmable money built on a public blockchain, which enables a client to program, launch and distribute conditional vouchers.

HSBC

HSBC launched three major innovations last year, covering market trading, bond issuance and trade finance—the three pillars of the bank’s core objective of “opening up a world of opportunity” for clients. HSBC AI Markets is the first natural language–based system that generates bespoke cross-asset data and analytics on the financial markets alongside pricing and execution, delivered over a variety of digital channels. The system aims address four pain points: access to liquidity and content, access to data, automation and insights. AI Markets provides on-demand analytics, execution and market intelligence to both internal HSBC staff and external clients.

Introduced in the fall, HSBC Orion is a proprietary tokenization platform that uses blockchain technology to issue digital bonds. Last fall, HSBC Trade Solutions (HTS) was launched in partnership with CGI, allowing clients to originate and manage all their trade finance products online. HTS leverages an API-native, modular design and flexible tech stack as the backbone of the bank’s market-leading trade offering, supporting $800 billion of global trade per year. Already deployed in the UK and Hong Kong, HTS is now being introduced to additional markets across the HSBC network.

JPMorgan Chase

JPMorgan Chase’s technology spend in 2022 was $14 billion, of which approximately half was dedicated to investments—a substantial commitment to developing new services for the bank’s 62 million digitally active mobile users.

In his annual letter to shareholders, Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said that AI and the raw data that feeds it will be critical to the bank’s future success. In addition to a 200-person AI research group headed by Manuela Veloso, who previously led the ML department at Carnegie Mellon University, JPMorgan employs over 1,000 people in data management, more than 900 data scientists and 600 ML engineers. The bank also boasts 300 AI use cases in production for risk, prospecting, marketing, customer experience, fraud prevention, payments processing and money movement systems.

“We’re imagining new ways to augment and empower employees with AI through human-centered collaborative tools and workflow, leveraging tools like large language models, including ChatGPT,” Dimon wrote. With that in mind, JPMorgan has spent over $2 billion building new, cloud-based data centers and modernizing many of its applications—and their related databases—to run in both public and private cloud environments.

A partnership with QC Ware, a quantum-computing-as-a-service firm, is helping pave the way for the bank to incorporate quantum computing into its deep hedging activities. JPMorgan, Toshiba and Ciena Build, meanwhile, have joined forces to secure the bank’s mission-critical blockchain applications using the first quantum key distribution network.

Also last year, J.P. Morgan Wealth Management launched Wealth Plan, a free, digital money coach that gives clients a fuller picture of their finances and helps them plan, save and invest, and will be available for free to all Chase customers in the top-ranked Chase Mobile app and at Chase.com.

SEB

Sweden’s SEB established an innovation lab back in 2018, called SEBx and headed by Christoffer Malmer, who was broadly tasked with exploring new technology and building products. At the time, banking-as-a-service and embedded finance were not yet widely recognized concepts, he recalls, but this was exactly what SEBx developed.

“We put together a technology platform that we built in Google Cloud,” says Malmer. “It’s a cloud-native infrastructure, and we said from the beginning, whatever we’re building here, we should be able to share it both to internal distributors as well as external ones.”

The bank began using the platform to build a next generation of mobile apps for its younger customers and launched the external offering last year. Its first customer was Swedish retail conglomerate Axel Johnson, which wanted to build customer engagement for its various brands via a card loyalty scheme. Axel Johnson’s fintech startup, Humla, built the user experience, but everything banking related runs via APIs housed in SEB’s platform.

“We do the sanction screening, the financial monitoring, and the fraud prevention. We also constantly interact with [the customer] to make sure that things are in order,” Malmer says. “If you look at the retailer’s mobile app, however, you won’t see SEB mentioned anywhere: it’s an account-as-a-service, it’s a card-as-a-service, it’s a payment-as-a-service.”

SEB sees embedded finance as a natural development, since the technology has moved to a point where it can be implemented in a seamless, easy-to-use way. Driving the process is customer behavior and, to some extent, regulation. “When you take an Uber ride, you don’t pull out your wallet,” says Malmer. “You don’t make any payments, not even an approval. You just take the ride and step out of the car because that transaction is completely embedded, which is tremendously convenient.”

More new value propositions will be hitting the marketplace in relatively short order, Malmer predicts, noting a flurry of activity from fintechs aimed at facilitating embedded finance. SEB has an advantage, he adds, since it has the balance sheet, the capital, and is used to dealing with regulators, which add up to a higher risk tolerance and high standards for integrity and security. “We aspire to blend the best of both worlds,” he says.

The Middle East regional winner, Mashreq digitized its operations, developing new capacities in compliance, marketing and sales, and enhanced efficiencies. The bank’s digital onboarding product requires just a single page and one-time signature, obviating the need to provide documentation for each new account. Mashreq is the first bank in the UAE to onboard clients using this process, which is particularly useful for large clients with multiple businesses who may have dozens of accounts.

Internally, Mashreq leverages AI to identify prospects based on their transactions and to identify relationships between groups or buyers and suppliers. This information boosts network and relationship-building by creating a source for qualified leads that can be segmented by geography, industry sector and banking category (conventional or Islamic). Mashreq further uses AI to curate news so that employees can keep abreast of specific sectors to make better-informed decisions.

Finally, the bank’s FIKYC and paperless eKYC products are the first of their kind in the UAE. FIKYC centralizes the KYC function for financial institution clients. Now, Mashreq maintains one record for a financial institution that has multiple accounts across its global network; and the bank automatically emails customers when there’s missing information or documentation. Customers undergoing the KYC process can submit their forms through a secure digital portal and receive automatic notifications when their KYC certification is about to expire.

Latin America edged ahead of many other regions in its embrace of blockchain technology, and Colombia’s Banco Davivienda is one of its leading practitioners. In September 2022, it became Latin America’s first bank to issue a financial bond on a blockchain—a collaboration between Davivienda and the Inter-American Development Bank, with additional support from the Central Bank of Colombia and the Financial Superintendence of Colombia. The $110 million issuance in the primary market was underwritten by Davivienda. It followed a proof-of-concept exercise conducted with JP Morgan in 2019. The technology—basically a decentralized, digital ledger—allows full traceability over the bond’s life and includes a nonfungible token that is a digital representation of a physical bond.

And somewhat related to this, Davivienda became in September 2022 the region’s first platform to accept cryptocurrency bitcoin as payment for household, health and real estate services. Most local merchants don’t accept cryptocurrencies, nor are they widely used for payment in Colombia. In the bank’s view, this represented a new opportunity and now it offers a fast and secure way to pay for these household services with bitcoin, starting at 10,000 Colombian pesos (about $2.13).

World’s Most Innovative “Fintechs” 2023

• JUMO
• MONET
• Pomelo
• SmartStream
• Thought Machine

A South African technology company that develops tools for next-generation financial inclusion in emerging markets, Jumo in October launched VELA, a pioneering asset management engine built to give investors access to social-impact investments with a high standard of governance and control. ­­

Underpinning VELA are Jumo’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, which enable it to allocate multicurrency funds—US dollars and cryptocurrency—to select portfolios. Qualified investors can put money to work alongside pan-African banks and watch it perform in real time.

Working with pan-African banks and mobile money partners in six African markets, Jumo is helping supply capital to small businesses in Africa. To date, the Jumo platform has been used to make 130 million loans, totaling $4 billion, to more than 20 million people and small businesses in Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Côte d’Ivoire.

The branded content industry—everything from sports uniforms to Disney figurines to print advertising campaigns to celebrity endorsements— is estimated to be worth $100 billion worldwide, although there is no agreed-upon definition for this constantly evolving space. Digital brand creators, who canny brands have discovered are far nimbler than slow moving advertising agencies, thanks to their ability to garner cyber clicks have to fight a lot harder for timely payment of brand dollars.

This is where MONET, a UK-headquartered B2B fintech player comes in—offering a modern invoice factoring platform for creator businesses who earn online via brands and monetization platforms.

In May of 2022, a beta launch of Monet’s revenue-based lending platform offered dedicated Creator Business debit cards and accounts for creators, providing an infrastructure for advertising agencies and influencer platforms to extend working capital finance to their globally distributed suppliers, and earning MONET a spot among the world’s most innovative fintechs.

Facilitating MONET’s platform is Weavr, an embedded finance specialist that provides business banking and payments infrastructure. MONET pays creators upfront on what they are owed from brand deals and platform earnings, pushing funds directly into the creator’s dedicated MONET current account, where they also receive 1% cash back on all business spending. MONET’s white label EarlyPay product, meanwhile, enables agencies and platforms to pay creators early, in their own branded solution.

Over 300 creator businesses joined the beta launch in the first month, while 7,500 creative businesses are on the wait list.

Founded in April 2021, Pomelo is building Latin America’s first regional fintech infrastructure platform, allowing companies to launch digital accounts and issue prepaid, debit, credit, crypto and corporate cards—among others—to their users and business customers. The Argentine company currently operates in six markets—Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Peru. It serves over 100 clients, including banks and tech unicorns such as Bitso; a Mexican crypto exchange; Rappi, a Colombian on-demand delivery startup; and Stori, a fintech that offers credit card products to underserved populations.

“Pomelo was designed to remove the largest pain points in the industry,” says Gastón Irigoyen, CEO and co-founder, “while allowing for modern use cases and meeting the technical requirements of technology companies and large enterprises operating in more traditional industries such as banking, retail, energy, real estate and agriculture.”

Pomelo’s infrastructure enables companies to launch and scale financial services within weeks, he says, “dramatically improving their go-to-market as well as saving years of work, thousands of people and millions of dollars. A single API-based integration with Pomelo allows any company to develop a regional fintech business with the highest standards of cybersecurity and compliance.”

Pomelo’s platform attracted $60 million in investment in the company’s first 18 months. The attraction is its promise to solve many of the problems that nag Latin America’s expensive, highly fragmented payments infrastructure, providing a better experience for end users and helping the region’s fintechs to grow.

SmartStream Air V.7.0 was launched in the fall by the London-headquartered financial transaction management solutions provider of the same name. It uses AI technology for an intuitive, easy-to-use automated version of a common back-office function: reconciliations for exception management.

While UX is the mainstay of front-end operations, the back end is often overlooked, and Air V.7.0 made Smartstream the first recipient of a Red Dot Design Award for back-office financial applications.

Elena Savitskaya, director of User Experience and Design at Smartstream, points to the currently pressing challenges of cost reduction and talent retention at a time when “the quality of digital experiences we have come to expect outside of work is now also expected at work.” Self-service back-office platforms help employees achieve more, she adds, “all while having a positive experience within the solution, removing friction and frustration.”

Better UX in the back office means staff can focus on work with higher added value, Savitskaya says, while a gentle learning curve facilitates employee development, reducing workforce churn. “High user adoption rates driven by outstanding user experiences ultimately support the increasingly difficult-to-manage human factor in digital transformation success.”

Vault Core, Thought Machine’s cloud-native core banking platform, enables banks to build and launch any financial product. Launched last year, Vault Payments provides a single platform on which institutions can run all their payments for every method, scheme and region worldwide—a bold move for a fintech. The goal, says COO Gareth Richardson, is to “significantly optimize the entire payment lifecycle for banks and their end customers.”

The London-based fintech’s larger aim is to extend Vault Core’s model into the payments space, which Richardson says it can transform in the same way it has core infrastructure. “Customers now expect digital-first, real-time, personalized services,” he notes. “Only by moving to modern, cloud-native technology will banks be able to meet these demands and stay ahead of the competition.”

Built from scratch as a cloud-native payments processing platform, Vault Payments is scalable, highly configurable and can operate in real time, according to Richardson. It represents payments as ISO20022 messages, he adds, and its rails-based configuration approach will support any payment type, card or payment scheme as compatibility expands. The platform can integrate any financial product with the Mastercard network through a payment routing mechanism and can be adopted as a standalone product and integrated into a variety of core banking systems.

World’s Best Financial Innovations 2023

• CargoWALLET by CargoAi
• Use of blockchain to advance responsible AI by FICO
• Fioneer Embedded Finance as a Service by SAP Fioneer
• Interlinking CBDCs for seamless cross-border payments by Swift
• OneKey Banking by Treasury Prime

Launched in 2019, Singapore-headquartered CargoAi remains the first and only air freight booking platform that uses data and AI to provide air cargo digital solutions for forwarders, airlines and general sales agents (GSAs).

While making a real-time cargo reservation online has become much easier in recent years, bureaucracy and other obstacles made it difficult to pay for the space—until CargoAi launched its unique payment solution, CargoWALLET, in February.

Founder and CEO Matt Petot says it took two years to design, build and test the platform. CargoWALLET connects with modern banking and payment providers to collect more than 30 currencies at the same cost as a bank transfer, providing supply chain financing solutions to freight forwarders with up to 60-day payment terms. CargoWALLET is a standalone solution that has been first validated on the company’s marketplace, CargoMART, but can be integrated into any airline, GSA or freight forwarder process flow.

CargoWALLET is tailored to empower small to medium-size freight forwarders. Shipments can be booked and paid for without an International Air Transport Association (IATA) Cargo Account Settlement Systems number, without an air waybill (AWB) and without any bank guarantee. Airline schedules, including cargo capacity, are displayed on CargoMART and freight forwarders can check schedules and compare rates in real time, then request quotes and make bookings via the platform.

“Not only does air cargo booking become more seamless, but the entire procurement from search, quote, booking and now payment can be done within minutes on just one interface,” says Magali Beauregard, chief customer officer at CargoAi. That means stakeholders of all sizes can “connect with each other in the digital air freight ecosystem and stay ahead in digital adoption.”

Data analytics provider FICO has been awarded 12 patents related to digital decisioning in the areas of blockchain model governance, AI and ML technology. Better insights result in better decisions, the company believes, and its patents pipeline shows how to keep pace with advanced analytics while maintaining a responsible approach to AI and ML.

Efficient Association of Related Entities identifies and tracks associations between related entities in a distributed computing environment to determine those known to be involved in fraud. Blockchain for Data and Model Governance is a shared ledger that tracks end-to-end provenance of the development, operationalization and monitoring of ML models in an immutable manner. Providing Insights About Dynamic Machine Learning Models encompasses the use of visual indicators of features and training data, along with global or local explanations, to provide a broader summarization of an ML model’s behavior.

Other new FICO patents address missing data, systems security and money laundering detection. Facial Recognition for User Authentication describes a system that continually scans facial movements indicative of the user’s liveness, as opposed to static representations. Deployment of Self-Contained Decision Logic delineates a process for generating executable code associated with a decision logic and making it amenable to storage in a repository.

A culture of innovation has helped FICO to develop unique intellectual property in AI operationalization, model governance and ML, driving “the operationalization of responsible AI capabilities,” says Scott Zold, the company’s chief analytics officer. That, in turn, “powers better decisions, increases revenue and provides more rewarding customer experiences for businesses worldwide.”

SAP launched Fioneer Embedded Finance as a Service (EFaaS) in March; it is the first B2B embedded finance platform that facilitates orchestration between SAP users and financial service institutions. The latter connect to SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes, enabling customers to develop innovative embedded finance solutions tailored to their corporate clients’ specific needs, all on one centralized platform.

“As B2B trade is increasingly digitized, the expectation is to embed relevant financial services natively within the context of that business transaction,” notes Vishal Shah, head of Embedded Finance at SAP Fioneer. This trend is fueling innovation across both physical and financial supply chains. “Traditional financial institutions leverage these B2B channels as cost-efficient distribution channels,” says Shah. “Emerging fintechs unlock new business models. And this timely and efficient access to a much-needed financial service ultimately helps companies remain financially and operationally resilient.”

EFaaS support several use cases, including buy now pay later (BNPL), request to pay (R2P), purchase order finance and invoice finance. “B2B payment offerings that help improve accounts payable and accounts receivable operations are proving the most popular,” says Shah. “Now, financial institutions are focused on delivering more digital and on-time financial services to the corporate treasury.” As a next step, he predicts, financial institutions will extend their offerings to enterprise sales and the procurement function.

Innovations at SWIFT come thick and fast. But with 105 countries currently exploring centralized digital currencies, SWIFT’s efforts to devise an interoperable transactions process for both central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and existing financial infrastructure and to enable asset tokenization stood out from its other innovations last year.

Following a successful eight-month trial involving the technologies and currencies of several central banks and commercial banks, SWIFT announced in October that it had solved the problem of interoperability in cross-border transactions by bridging different distributed ledger technology (DLT) networks and existing payment systems, “allowing digital currencies and assets to flow smoothly alongside, and interact with, their traditional counterparts.” SWIFT then deployed the new solution in a sandbox environment and opened it up to 18 central and commercial banks to test it over a 12-week trial period.

“Innovation is always an iterative process,” Nick Kerrigan, head of innovation execution at SWIFT, said during a recent LinkedIn Live session. “So, the more we can learn from each other, the better.”

SWIFT aims to forestall fragmentation of the digital payments system, Kerrigan says, as central banks look to CBDCs to solve social and economic challenges, variations of technology standard protocols and even differences between retail and wholesale banking.

“Interoperability should be designed from an early stage, rather than thought about afterward,” Kerrigan argues, “because we don’t want to have disconnected digital islands. We want to have instant and frictionless payments, and for that to be smooth—whether it’s with a CBDC or whether it’s with some other form of digital currency or a traditional form of fiat currency.”

SWIFT also carried out a successful, separate trial with Citi, clearing house Clearstream and Northern Trust on “tokenized’ assets,” demonstrating how traditional assets such as stocks and bonds can be transformed into digital tokens that can then be issued and traded in real time.

Treasury Prime is a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) company based in San Francisco that connects banks and fintechs through an API. The launch of OneKey Banking in March enables Treasury Prime customers to use instant cross-bank transfers (network transfers) to access a bank network that consists of over 15 financial institutions.

As companies mature, their growth can outpace their BaaS solution. OneKey Banking allows customers to develop embedded banking solutions with multiple bank partners, manage deposits among banks and diversify risk, all via a single, unified API interface. Enterprises can choose the best banking partner for a particular product or service and move money between banking partners instantly.

“OneKey Banking brings us that much closer to our vision of creating a de facto banking standard for our partner banks,” says Chris Dean, Treasury Prime CEO and co-founder. “An enterprise can treat its partner banks as a true network.”

If a customer is building a product at their current sponsor bank that is missing a critical feature, they can simply try another Treasury Prime banking partner. Similarly, if a company requires more deposit capacity to support its growth, it can get it by accessing another Treasury Prime banking partner.

With thanks to Global Finance.

 

Ask this to any business leader, and there is a long silence.

But it’s probably the most important question you could ask.

Investors are desperate to know where companies are heading, not just how they are surviving. Wouldn’t you if investing your money? Employees want to know there is hope amidst chaos. Customers want to know what’s next. Society wants to believe that business is will and wants to do better.

How do you see the future?

Where to start? With the positive or negatives? A quick rundown of the existing business strategy, which they probably have less and less confidence in? Or a deep-sigh, followed by the challenge of leading in an uncertain world. Volatile, complex, where focus, making choices, delivering results, are ever harder.

Most organisations, and their leader, are not future-ready.

Uncertainty is normality. The world is not going to miraculous stabilise, find a new steady state. The disruption of technologies, its implications for business and customers, but also geopolitical power and economic dynamics, is profound. And will continue to grow. Exponentially.

So while “thinking like a futurist” may sound nice, it is now a necessity.

In business we get obsessed with numbers, seeking to support decisions with highly-tuned business cases. But uncertain futures are qualitative not quantitive. Trying to put accurate numbers on it is pointless. Better is to combine imagination and intuition with logic and interpretation.

However futurists are not dreamers, astrologers, or sci-fi writers.

They are real navigators, using insight – or let’s call it foresight – anchored in the emergent patterns of today. Newness typically occurs in the margins, so this is where deviant behaviours – or rather early adaptors and innovative ideas – emerge. Connect them together and you start to get patterns.

Pattern recognition is the foundation of sense-making.

Futurists don’t predict the future, but they do help you make sense of it. They uses trends and signals to articulate patterns. They build scenarios of potential future states, and thereby help decision makers to understand the alternatives, the risks and benefits, and therefore make better decisions.

Trends

Here are some more resources which may help