Peter Fisk

2021 was a year of acceleration.

While Covid-19 raged across the globe, and our physical lives were stagnated, it was a year of changing attitudes and agendas, and of rapid adoption of new technologies.

In the very first week of 2021, the first Covid vaccinations were given to the public, having taken only 5% of the time to develop compared to previous vaccines; supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol while Twitter banned the defeated president for “incitement of insurrection”; North Korea’s Kim Jong-un admitted that his 5-year plan had failed;  and Storm Filomena hit Spain with a year of snow falling on Madrid in 24 hours.

The year continued at pace.

Stock markets surged, globally delivering a third year of double-digit growth. US tech companies raced ahead, Apple nudging $3 trillion in market cap, while $1 trillion Tesla dominated the EV market, which is maturing rapidly. Climate change joined Covid as the world’s big agendas, the metaverse became as hyped as the space race to Mars, Alphafold transformed bio science and Squid Game brought Korean mayhem to small screens.

Here are my personal anecdotes of a year when “more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years” seemed entirely reasonable:

January 2021: A glimmer of hope

• 22 year old poet Amanda Gorman wowed the world with “The Hill We Climb” as Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th US president, and Kamala Harris the first female VP. Amidst all the recent turmoil, a glimmer of hope.
• Citigroup announced Jane Fraser, a 54 year old from Scotland, as its new CEO, and the “First Lady of Wall Street”. In her first email to staff she called for them to seek 3Cs in a changing world – curiosity, creativity and courage.
• Business Recoded, my new book, was published together with an inspiring 5 module program for business leaders “ready to step up, ready to create a better world”. It has since been shortlisted for CMI Business Book of the Year.
• Working with business leaders from Electrolux across Asia Pacific, I led a program that explored rapidly changing business models – from Pinduoduo to PingAn – fuelled by a creative fusion of GenZ, digitalisation and sustainability.

February 2021: Explorers to Mars

• GameStop, the troubled US retailer, saw its shares soar by 1,700% as millions of small investors, encouraged by social platform Reddit, put a “short squeeze” on Wall Street. Yet another example of the crowd, and of social influence.
• NASA landed its space vehicle Perseverence Rover on the surface of Mars, while China and the UAE both joined in with their own missions to the red planet. As Elon Musk puts the final touches to his SpaceX Starship, colonising Mars doesn’t seem so crazy.
• 31-years old Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of the “female first” dating app Bumble, became the youngest woman to take a tech unicorn public, and in doing so become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.
• Financial services is a platform for so much more, was my challenge to Sompo Group, Japan’s largest insurance company, as they defined a new vision to create “a Disneyland of consumer services” that reduced risks and enhanced revenues.

March 2021: The crazy world of NFTs

• Impossible Foods’ exponential growth strategy to transform the world’s diet, led my Stanford professor Pat Brown was a highlight of my “Innovation Safari” with UAE’s Prime Minister’s Office and other leading UAE companies.
• Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) made headlines when Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist known as Beeple, sold an NFT of his “photo montage” work for $69 million at Christie’s. NFTs are ownership certificates of digital items like jpegs and posts, secured by blockchain.
• Evergiven, a 400m-long container ship, caused a global supply chain meltdown, when it got wedged across Egypt’s Suez Canal, blocking one of the world’s busiest trade route for over 6 days, demonstrating the fragility of just-in-time supplies.
• Reimagining a port operator as a global supply chain enabler was the theme of my innovation program for DP World, delivered in partnership with Headspring, driving new new strategic innovation projects.

April 2021: Sustainability is the new cool

• Adidas partnered with New Zealand’s Allbirds to create the world’s most sustainable running shoe, the Futurecraft Footprint. The shoe also features a carbon footprint metric, written on the outer sole, and typically 90% less than most sports shoes.
• Europe’s leading soccer teams – from Chelsea and Manchester United to Inter Milan and Real Madrid – got together to form an exclusive, super-rich Super League – but were met by outrage from fans, and the plan soon collapsed.
• Ravensburger is a classic German toy maker, most famous for jigsaw puzzles. I worked with them to reimagine their business in a digital world, however that is less about digital selling and gaming, and more about enabling better human experiences.
• Mylo is a new leather-like material made from mushrooms by Bolt Threads. It’s already being used in a new generation of sustainable Gucci handbags, Stella McCartney couture, and Adidas’ classic Stan Smith trainer.

May 2021: Future proof your business

• Apple and Epic Games, the owner of Fortnite, locked horns in a US courtroom over what Epic said was the restrictive business practices of the App Store, taking what they said were excessive cuts of the revenue, and limiting other sales. Apple won.
• Engine No.1, an activist hedge fund owning 0.02% of Exxon Mobil stock, was able to mobilise other investors and remove three board members at the oil giant’s AGM, saying they weren’t driving change fast enough.
• Working with Deloitte Africa, we brought together government and business leaders to take  deep dive into the best innovation practices in both private and public sector – from Amazon to Tesla, to the government programs of Estonia and Singapore.
• Globally, the next 10 years will see 40% growth in over 60s population, which is driving new thinking, not least in China, where the government introduced a new “three children” social policy, compared to the one child of old.

June 2021: Innovate the whole business

• SPACs are the new hype of business finance, where a shell company is listed on a stock exchange in order to acquire another. Anne Wojcicki’s 23andMe, the consumer DNA business, was quick to merge with Richard Branson’s SPAC, VG Investments.
• Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Company ranking is my go to list for new insights – this year headed by Pfizer and Moderna’s with their blockbuster mRNA vaccines, Shopify and SpaceX redefining their industries, Spinghill and Epic Games disrupting conventions.
• Gulf Bank engaged me to help them transform their Kuwait-based business for the future, bringing together executive team and top 250 managers from across the business, to focus on digitally-enabled platforms for GenZ and entrepreneurs.
• Circklo is a sustainable innovation network which I was delighted to join as advisor and coach – working with entrepreneurs and evangelists, technologists and transformers, to help solve the world’s biggest sustainability challenges through new technologies.

July 2021: Entrepreneurs and astronauts

• Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO exactly 27 years after founding Amazon, having created a business now worth $1.6 trillion, and over 1.3 million jobs. New CEO, Andy Jassy, former boss of Amazon Web Services, has big shoes to fill.
• Alphabet’s Deep Mind is making its revolutionary AlphaFold freely available to everyone – the source code of every single protein in the human body, as well as for the proteins of 20 additional organisms
• Virgin Galactic “won” the billionaire space race, when Richard Branson flew VSS Unity into sub-orbital space, a few weeks before Bezos flew his Blue Origin spacecraft even higher to reach the Karman Line, 100km above sea level.
• Segovia, the Spanish world heritage city, was a remarkable setting for this year’s Global AMP with IE Business School. A diverse group of leaders and entrepreneurs joined me in a 13th century monastery to explore the future of business, brands and beyond.

August 2021: Code red for humanity

• Microsoft became a $2 trillion business this month, doubling its value over the last two years, as CEO Satya Nadella’s revolution to AI and cloud technologies is matched by a more human, collaborative, and inclusive approach to business.
• As wildfires raged in Australia and USA, a new IPCC report issued “a code red for humanity” saying that global warming of 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless rapid and deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur.
• Philip Morris CEO Jacek Olczak said that he is ready “to kill the Marlboro Man” and transform the tobacco company to a “smoke free” future, with more than half of net revenues generated from smoke-free products by 2025.
• Tokyo’s 2020 Olympics were a year late, and held in empty stadia, but athletes like Sydney McLaughlin and Karsten Warholm set the track alight with world records, overcoming limited preparation, and enhanced by shoe technology.

September 2021: Crazy Koreans go hypersonic

• Netflix launched “Squid Game” which is a South Korean survival drama where 456 players, all of whom are in deep financial debt, risk their lives to play a series of deadly children’s games for the chance to win a $40 million prize. It is the world’s most watched TV series.
• Hypersonic became a new buzzword, meaning anything that can travel faster than five times the speed of sound, after China reportedly fired two hypersonic weapons around the earth, leaving US military “stunned” by the technological advance, according to the FT.
• Porto was the beautiful setting for this year’s QSP Summit, where I joined Malcolm Gladwell and other speakers to explore a rapidly changing future. It was great to be back at a physical event, however the video of my “WaveRiders: Exploring the Megatrends” keynote gained over a million online views.
• Fashion is at a cross roads – from fast to slow, disposable to sustainable, sold to shared, created to upcycled. It is the world’s second most polluting industry, a symbol of progress to some but superfluous frivolity to others. FashionX was my call to action for the world of textiles and fashion, a 30 minute keynote broadcast live on Bloomberg TV.

October 2021: Welcome to the metaverse

• Mark Zuckerberg chose his best avatar to introduce Meta Platforms – a new parent for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus – and a focus on building the metaverse, a digital extension of the physical world by social media, augmented and virtual reality.
• Coldplay promised a future of net-zero concert tours – powered by solar power, vegetable oils, static bikes, and a battery storage system developed with BMW. It will also install a “kinetic floor” so the more fans jump, the louder the music gets.
• Finland’s Posti engaged me to explore “the quantum store“, the future of retail. ePosti has already developed a series of physical hubs across the country – to send, collect and return goods – but also to give digital brands a physical presence.
• From freezing Helsinki to baking Jeddah, I started working with the board of Savola, the Middle East’s leading food and retail business, to explore future growth potential in existing and new markets, to develop a future roadmap, investment portfolio and business transformation.

November 2021: Enabling teams to thrive

• Amy Edmundson was crowned the world’s leading business thinker. The Harvard professor is a pioneer of psychological safety, articulated in her book “The Fearless Organisation” about creating teams and cultures where creative ideas can thrive.
• Haier’s Zhang Ruimen, founder of the world’s largest home appliances business, stepped down after 36 years. He transformed a Qingdao refrigerator business into a global leader with smart factories, brand ecosystems and his “Rendanheyi” organisation model.
• UN’s COP26 in Glasgow brought together 120 world leaders to address the climate crisis, seeking to reach “net zero” by 2050, and eventually agreeing to “phase down” coal, responsible for 40% of CO2 emissions.
• Suntory, the leading Japanese drinks business, is inspired by “Mizu To Ikiru”, a rich philosophy of growing in harmony with people and nature. We explored how to “grow for good” by harnessing the power of consumers, brands, digital and sustainability.

December 2021: Curious, creative and courageous

• Elon Musk was Time’s Person of the Year, as Tesla hit $1 trillion and dominated the global EV market, SpaceX launched 31 times with its exclusive NASA contract, and Neuralink’s computer brain interface sews chips into brains, giving him a personal $250 billion.
• As the metaverse hype spread hypersonically, Fortnite launched “Party World” for music concerts and brand launches, Gucci Garden sold virtual handbags for more than real ones, H&M partnered with Animal Crossing to launch a new vegan fashion range, and Nike acquired virtual shoe designer RTFKT.
• The Great Resignation saw record numbers of people (40% are said to be considering change, according to FT) voluntarily quitting their jobs in 2021 – in response to re-evaluating lifestyles and priorities during Covid-19, and a desire for more flexible working.
• My year ended with a series of online events for thousands of Oracle leaders across the world – making sense of change, identifying new opportunities, and rethinking what it means to be a leader today. Curiosity and courage emerged as their key words.

Quite a year. After that crazy first week, the pace kept accelerating. Change is driven by technology – we haven’t even touched on quantum computing or Web3 – but it is more driven by changing human attitudes and behaviours – what matters most, to us, and our business, and our worlds.

Making sense of this change is not easy, shaping and leading this change is even harder.

Some of the other keynotes and consulting projects this year have sparked new thinking. Hosting the European Business Forum, I worked with Orsted and Schneider, the world top two most sustainable companies in 2021, learning from their strategies and business models. Hosting the Future Book Forum, I interviewed Andy Hunter, founder of Bookshop.org, an antidote to Amazon.

Inspiration is all around us, from local start-ups to innovators in every part of the world.

Latin America, for example, is becoming a hotbed for innovations, which I explored at Adlatina’s CMO Forum – from Brazil’s Nubank for the unbanked to Argentina’s Mercado Libre retailer, Chile’s plant-based NotCo and Colombia’s Rappi superapp. In the Middle East I found the same, in Asia I found the same. Ambition and ideas shaping a rapidly emerging future.

2021 was a year of change, but also a glimpse of the future. 2022 will be even more exciting.

 

The metaverse is a digital world. Hugely hyped, but also with incredible potential.

Think how we engaged with the internet from the edge, interacting with a connected world from the remoteness of our screens. Instead the metaverse enables us to jump into that world, a 3D digital space where we are immersed in a virtual reality with the help of VR and AR, interacting with real people, with human experiences, and connecting to our real world.

Digital engagement has evolved from text to image to video. And this is the next step. Instead of searching and bringing selected world’s to us, we can go out and explore, we interact with other environments and other people, we socialise and work.

Just like Second Life sought to achieve two decades ago, we build our own digital identities, in the form of an avatar – our digital self. We can project our own image, or of our choice, select desired fashion, hang out in places and with people we like, engage in experiences from music concerts to educational experiences. Maybe do what we never could or would in the real world.

Tech companies are key to shaping these new environments, although gaming companies have been key to drive the early applications. GenZ are the early adaptors, shaping how they live their lives, priorities and aspirations, influences and outlooks. Why go to a rock concert, watch a sports game, go shopping, when you can jump into any of those spaces, instantly, on demand?

Examples of “metaverse builders” include:

• Meta … Facebook rebranded as Meta to “bring the metaverse to life” having acquired VR company Oculus in 2014. At its Connect 2021, it unveiled Horizon Home, your home base in the metaverse, and Quest, a collaborative workspace.
• Microsoft … Mesh allows people in different locations to join collaborative holographic experiences with the tools of Teams. Users can join as a customized avatar of themselves and build immersive spaces to meet and collaborate.
• Fortnite … gamers play games, but also interact with adjacent environments and events – music, sport, cafes, resorts.  It recently launched “Party Worlds”, 3D spaces designed solely for players to hang out and socialise with friends.
• Roblex … another gaming platform with many fashion collaborations. Vans created an interactive store where users can customize sneakers and attend virtual concerts.
• Decentraland … an example of a metaverse  environment beyond gaming – a plot of “real estate” similar to a New York townhouse recently sold for €2.1 million demonstrating the desirability of presence in a virtual world.
• The Dematerialised … a digital marketplace where customers to purchase digital fashion assets as NFTs that they can currently port into selected games, including Sansar, VR Chat and Decentraland.

Brands that seek to engage with GenZ, immersed in their digital worlds of Fortnite or FIFA, are waking up to the need to go to these consumers, rather than hoping that they will come to them – to the old models of physical stores, malls and even internet platforms. Brands need to go to their new audiences, and engage in their new contexts.

Examples of “metaverse brands” include:

• Gucci … the luxury fashion brand created Gucci Garden as a virtual representation of Gucci flagship stores, Gucci Museum in Florence, and more. Users explore current and past ranges, play games, buy virtual items, and exchange them for real.
• Nike … a partnership with Roblex enabled it to create a free virtual playspace called Nikeland.  the Jordan brand created Jumpman Zone with Fortnite, and Nike also acquired RTFKT, a virtual sneaker brand.
• H&M … 11 pieces from its vegan Co-Exist Story collection have been recreated in virtual form to be showcased on Animal Crossing. Gamers can also virtually download the clothes at the Able Sisters shop.
• Ralph Lauren … browse and try on limited-edition digital clothing in virtual Polo Shops on Roblox – interact socially, enjoy ice skating, drink hot chocolate, roast marshmallows – plus there’s a treasure hunt game, with bonus items every week.
• Dyson … the tech brand has created Demo VR, advanced virtual reality technology that enables customers to test out products, such as its hairdryer and Airwrap styler, in the comfort of their own home using an Oculus headset.
• NFL … American football has embraced the virtual gaming world in a big way, creating Avatar-playing versions of real life franchises, enabling users to immerse themselves in games as spectators or players, and compete globally.
• BTS … the Korean super band have joined the likes of Ariana Grande, Travis Scott, and many other musicians in launching new albums, and delivering concerts, primarily online. Fortnite is becoming the new rock stadium of the world.

Business for a Better World.

That was the theme of this year’s European Business Forum, which I was delighted to host once again, and took the form of a hybrid event with live studio audience, plus a much larger remote audience joining online.

And it was fabulous to bring together the world’s #1 and #2 “most sustainable companies” according to the annual ranking by Canadian analysts Corporate Knights.

In 2020, Danish energy company Ørsted was ranked as the global sustainability leader, recognising it’s 10 year transition from a state-owned, coal-fired utility into a publicly-listed, clean energy leader in wind power. It’s an amazing journey, including an IPO, many acquisitions, and significant growth across the world. Not just a “good” story, but a fantastic growth story too. Ørsted’s CCO Martin Neubert joined us to share the transformational journey “from black to green”.

This year, in 2021, Schneider Electric is #1. The French company defines its purpose as to “empower all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability for all”. They call this “Life Is On”. Behind their why is the how – providing energy and automation digital solutions for efficiency and sustainability. And the what – addressing homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industries, by combining energy technologies, real-time automation, software and services. Schneider Electric’s Michael Seremet described the business models that are driving the new global leader.

More generally we explored a wide range of businesses – from start-ups like sustainable fashion entrepreneur Malaika New York, minimising waste by making clothes in squares – to corporates in search of reinvention, like Philip Morris who are ready to kill off Marlboro Man in search of a smoke-free future. While environmental issues dominate, particularly inspired by COP26 in Glasgow taking place at the same time, they are matched by many broader social issues – like social inequality, accessible healthcare, and diversity and inclusion.

From these stories emerged a common theme. Not just about CSR and ESG, which are old words, and largely peripheral approaches, but about making sustainability a core business driver – how companies can grow better by being good – the shift from compliance to innovation, from reducing negatives to enhancing positives – and can ultimately engage consumers and amplify their positive impacts by becoming platforms for change. But this all starts with leadership – with leaders who have the courage to let go of the past, to create a better future.

You can also download my Business for a Better World: Leadership Playbook which I uniquely created for the event in partnership with a wide range of global thought leaders.

Here are some of the best moments …

Diane Holdorf, MD of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development:

“Business is our best opportunity to address the huge challenges of climate change, and more. Through better focused investment and innovation, business can create a more positive impact, and a better world.”

Lotte Hansen, CEO of HE Agenda, the sustainability think tank:

“The pressure on business to change is overwhelming – from customers who want to make better choices, from investors who see better options, and most importantly from GenZ, your future talent.”

Martin Neubert, CCO of Orsted, the world’s leading wind energy business:

“We need to transform our thinking from reducing negative impact, to adding more positive impact. Sustainability is now at the core of business, of strategic growth, of innovation.”

Malaika Haaning, founder of Malaika NY, sustainable fashion designer:

“In my small way, I am making a difference. We make fashion with zero waste. Actually, it becomes distinctive, making clothes without any cutting of fabrics. But we can do so much more. We need to change our entire industry.”

Tine Arentsen Willumsen, CEO of Above & Beyond, on diversity and inclusion:

“Diversity is a huge business opportunity – not simply to meet quotas of male and female, black and white – but to create organisations with diverse teams and perspectives – more curious, more capable, more creative.”

Mic Seremet, Head of Strategy for Schneider Electric, the world’s most sustainable company:

“The real opportunity is to reimagine business models. In the energy sector these are increasingly built around prosumers and microgrids, enabling people to consume and generate clean energy together”

Camilla Sylvest, Senior VP, Novo Nordisk, the world’s leading healthcare business for diabetes:

“We see a purpose-driven shift in how we do business. In particular to more services, where we can support people far beyond our products – educating, caring, connecting”

Mark Esposito, AI-based technologist, co-founder of Nexus Frontier Tech:

“AI is the most exciting of all the new technologies. People just haven’t yet got their heads around how AI can transform our understanding of weather, and ultimately address climate change” 

Anette Rosengren, CEO Nordics, Philip Morris International, on the end of smoking:

“We are ready to kill the Marlboro Man. He defined our business, he was our cash cow, but now the world is changing fast. We need the courage to let go of our past”

Hans Axel Kristensen, founder and CEO of Plastix, a leading circular recycling business:

“Recycling used to be a dirty industry, now it is about data analytics and science. We all need to embrace circular design – rethinking how we source, produce, consume, and dispose of everything.”

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, project director at GSK, global champion of project management:

“We need leaders who can create tomorrow. Chief Transformation Officers … Today everyone is a project manager. Say goodbye to functional roles, job descriptions. Even the COO can be automated”

Great media coverage in FINANS newspaper today …

“Sustainability at speed places completely new demands on the business leader … The next ten years will bring greater change than the world has seen for hundreds of years, predicts Peter Fisk, business professor and co-founder of the European Business Forum. Therefore, according to him, the top managers in the business world must stop spending time putting out fires and focus on the most important things …”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copenhagen is the venue for this year’s European Business Forum.

In recent year’s we’ve brought together many of the world’s top business experts at the European Business Forum – from the strategic wisdom of Harvard’s Michael Porter to the innovative canvases of Strategyzer’s Alex Osterwalder, peaking around corners with Colombia’s Rita McGrath and crossing cultures with Insead’s Erin Meyer, fighting over the future with Innosight’s Scott Antony and IMD’s Howard Yu, and shaking up leaders with Marshall Goldsmith and Whitney Johnson.

This year it’s about businesses in action. Businesses creating a better world.

I’m absolutely delighted that we’ll be bringing together the top two “world’s most sustainable companies” according to the annual ranking by Canadian analysts Corporate Knights. In 2020, they ranked Danish energy company Ørsted as the global leader, recognising it’s 10 year transition from a state-owned, coal-fired utility into a publicly-listed, clean energy leader in wind power. It’s an amazing journey, including an IPO, many acquisitions, and significant growth across the world.

Ørsted’s Martin Neubert joins us to share the transformational journey “from black to green”.

This year, in 2021, Schneider Electric is #1. The French company defines its purpose as to empower all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability for all. They call this “Life Is On”. Behind this why is the how – providing energy and automation digital solutions for efficiency and sustainability. And the what – addressing homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industries, by combining energy technologies, real-time automation, software and services.

Schneider Electric’s Michael Seremet will unlock the business model that has created a global leader

More generally we’ll be exploring a wide range of businesses – from start-ups like sustainable fashion entrepreneur Malaika New York, minimising waste by making clothes in squares – to corporates in search of reinvention, like Philip Morris who are willing to kill off Marlboro Man in search of a smoke-free future. While environmental issues dominate, particularly inspired by COP26, we’ll also be exploring broader issues like social inequality, accessible healthcare, and diversity and inclusion.

You can download my Business for a Better World: Leadership Playbook

Interview with Peter Fisk

Q: What, in your opinion will be the single biggest, common challenge, that the majority of business leaders face in 2022?

Accelerating their post-Covid futures … We are just at the beginning of a decade of phenomenal change, probably with more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years, and therefore more impact than the steam engine, automobile, telephone, space travel, and digital revolutions combined.

Covid-19 disrupted the start of this “great acceleration” but then catalysed its accelerated with new agendas – more local, more human, more responsible. Green tech is everywhere – energy to automotive, food to finance – but its how we use it to build better societies, better lives, that matters.

57% of companies are founded in a downturn, 90% of patents are filed in a downturn, and companies who innovate during tough times achieve a 30% market value premium in the following upturn. Therefore now is the time to accelerate your recovery, but with new imagination and broader impacts.

Denmark has some incredible companies driving this new revolution, putting sustainable innovation and growth at the heart of strategy. Mearsk’s transformation with blockchain-enabled logistics, Orsted’s transformation to wind power, Novo Nordisk in healthcare.

But there is also a vibrant entrepreneurial spirit in Denmark – like Plastix, recycling sea waste plastics in Odense, or Malaika no-waste fashions based in New York, and of course Too Good To Go. Many of these businesses have not been afraid to leap into global markets, to make a bigger impact faster.

Q: Your work has been focused around monitoring new trends and trying to learn from the companies who have proven to be world leaders in mastering the tools necessary to benefit from these trends – what has been your primary new insight in the field of sustainable business during the latter months?

Sustainability is not simply about reducing bad things – reducing emissions, reducing waste, reducing inequality – but more importantly, about enhancing good things – better access, better health, better opportunity.

Businesses can be “platforms for good” – mobilising their huge resources, from brands and networks, to capital and relationships, employees and consumers – to make a bigger difference faster. By using sustainability as a catalyst for innovation – they create better solutions for customers, better products and services, that customers want, that generate profits, but equally have more impact for society and the environment.

Look at how Danone has transformed itself from nutrition to health, how Adidas pours huge creativity into sustainable materials and designs as well as building a “Run for the Oceans” movement to encourage social change, how Phillip Morris has declared it will be “smoke free” in coming years and is acquiring health businesses to help. And then we have fast-growth good-growth companies like Tesla, Impossible Foods, and Next Era.

New technologies also give is new ways to solve the big problems – indeed finding a big human/social problem to solve is actually one of the best starting points for a strategy. And then engaging everyone, inside and outside the organisation, in pursuit of co-created solutions to get there. That means harnessing the creativity of customers, start-ups, competitors, governments, charities, and more.

Another big shift in recent times is how sustainability is now core to strategies – forget words like CSR and ESG, where sustainability was an add-on to business as usual. Now it is core to what companies do, and how they win – its driven by customers, it drives competitive advantage, and in many cases can also deliver more significant profitability and growth – as well as the wider positive impacts.

There are plenty tools, which can sometimes seem like gimmicks – but having a real sense of purpose, for how you can make the world better, really does work. Equally using the 17 SDGs as a checklist for how you can do better. Equally measuring the carbon footprint, cradle to grave. But it starts with a passion, to make the world better in some relevant way. To fight the injustices, to solve the big problems, and to inspire people to be better.

Q: The theme of the European Business Forum is “Business for a Better World” – why have you chosen this theme at this exact point in time?

As I just described, Covid-19 was an incredibly difficult time, but also a catalyst for new thinking, and accelerated change. The shift from reducing negative impact to enhancing positive impact. The shift from sustainability as a separate agenda to “sustainable innovation” as core.

I believe that business has the power to solve our big challenges better than any government or NGO. I also think that sustainability, because in its many different forms – from climate to wellness, equality to inclusivity – can be the best source of profitable growth.

Core to this is the idea of “sustainable innovation” – creating better products and services that are also better for the world – and quite often, by looking at these broader solutions, the original products can become better, more desirable, and more profitable too. I remember when Nike created no-waste “FlyKnit” production, they also created the most comfortable shoes.

Here are some more examples

• Adidas – from Parley shoes made from ocean waste, to global movements seeking to change society
• Blackrock – demanding that companies put purpose before profit, if they want investment
• Cemex – a purpose that seeks to build better communities rather than just deliver cement
• Danone – transforming itself from food to health, with new benefits and new services
• Ecovative – harnessing mycelium, the root of mushrooms, to reinvent packaging solutions
• Impossible – plant-based meat on a mission to eliminate animals from the food chain
• Natura – the Brazilian cosmetics giant that seeks to make the rainforests shine again
• Patagonia – corporate activism personified, seeking to save the planet
• Syngenta – its good growth plan is helping farmers to farm better to feed the future 9 billion
• Tesla – more than a mobility company, a purpose to accelerate the shift to clean energy
• Unilever – sustainable living, from Dove’s campaign for real beauty to Ben and Jerry’s Justice Remix’d

Q: Cop26 is held in Glasgow at the same time – why should the Danish business community prioritize EBF, when the world’s leaders are discussing a yet unknown, new framework for the very same issues?

EBF on 9th November comes at almost the end of two weeks of the world’s leaders exploring the big issues. We already know what they their agendas, and most points of view.

We will kick-off with a live link to Glasgow, and talk to Diane Holdorf, Managing Director of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) who will summarise the mode, debates and outcomes from Cop26, to ensure we fully build on the moment.

Actually, I believe that this year’s EBF is at the perfect moment to take the raised profile and new commitments from Cop26 and fast-forward it onto their business agendas. It is the perfect time to introduce the thinking to boardrooms, to investors, and to customers.

Q: The concept of the EBF this year is a mixture between talks and interaction amongst the participants – why this new format?

I see three big drivers of this in any organisation – Imagination, Acceleration and Transformation.

And for that reason we have designed this year’s European Business Forum, around three high-energy, high-participation “labs” in which every participant will develop their own playbook for sustainable innovation and future growth.

Each of these three labs will have four speakers – each given just a short moment to share their big ideas, like a creative catalyst – and then work with the participants in applying the ideas to their own business.

Who are these catalytic speakers, well …

In the Imagination Lab, we will explore “How can business be a platform for change?”

• Diane Holdorf, brings a global perspective, representing the WBCSD, a network of over 100 of the world’s largest and most sustainability-driven companies
• Lotte Hansen, CEO of HE Agenda, will give that a more local flavour, sharing new research of which sustainability issues matter most in the Nordics.
• Malaika Haaning, founder of fashion brand Malaika New York will give us an exciting creative perspective from a Dane living in America.
• Martin Neubert, COO of Orsted, will reflect on his company’s transformation from state to private sector, local to global, and black to green.

In the Acceleration Lab, the focus is on “What does it mean to be a sustainable innovator?”

• Camilia Sylvest, EVP at Novo Nordisk, will share some of the brilliant work which they have been doing to care more for people around the world.
• Michael Seremet, from the world’s most sustainable company in 2021, Schneider Electric, will focus on global platforms and new business models.
• Tine Arentsen Willumsen, CEO of Above and Beyond, then brings her huge passion for diversity, to build a better organisation – one as amazing as the people inside it.

In the Transformation Lab, we reflect on “How can you transform your business for good?”

• Mark Esposito, from Nexus Frontiertech, is an AI technology expert who works with Harvard and the UAE Government to accelerate transformation across entire industries.
• Anette Rosengren, MD Nordics of Philip Morris, will explain why she is about to “kill off Marlboro Man” in pursuit of a non-smoking, healthier future.
• Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, Head of GSK’s sustainable transformation, will focus on his passion for better project management, making transformation projects work, faster.
• Hans Axel Kristensen, CEO of Plastix, will leave us with his own personal story, of creating a business that puts saving our natural environment at its heart.

Q: What should participants expect to gain from attending the forum this year?

I know that there is no shortage of ideas and information right now. I also know, how busy everyone has got in recent months.

But that’s why we all need a burst of enlightened acceleration.

This will not be like a normal conference. It’s not about snoozing in your seats and rubbing shoulders with celebrity names. We need to get real. We need new ideas, and we need to ensure we apply them faster and smarter to our businesses, right now.

And we have the world’s most sustainable companies in 2020 and 2021 – who better to learn from, in terms of the strategies and implementations towards becoming a company that really can make the world better – and be a successful business.

It’s going to be challenging, but inspiring, and great fun!

Saudi Arabia has thrived on its oil, but recognising that it needs to look towards a future beyond it.

KSA’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), has announced plans to convert an oil rig into a 150,000 square metre “extreme park” and resort located in the Arabian Gulf.

The oil rig will be comprised of three hotels and 11 restaurants across a number of connected platforms, as well as roller coaster rides and adrenaline-rush activities like bungee jumps and skydives.

Artistic impressions of the planned attraction show how it aims to “provide a multitude of hospitality offerings, adventures, and aquatic sporting experiences.”

“This project is a unique tourism attraction, expected to attract tourists from around the world,” said  the PIF. It believes that the concept will be particularly popular with visitors from the Gulf region.

Described as the “world’s first tourism destination inspired by offshore oil platforms,” the upcoming attraction is being devised in line with the long-term Saudi Vision 2030’s strategy, which aims to reposition Saudi Arabia as a top international tourism destination and diversify its economy.

While millions of religious visitors make the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca every year, the country’s conservative laws restricting women’s freedoms, along with it troubling human rights history have made it a less than favourable destination for many international visitors.

The country is determined to reposition itself as an alluring global hotspot that can compete with the likes of nearby Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Oman. It aims to attract 100 million tourists each year by the close of the decade.

Earlier this year, KSA launched plans for a second national airline (the national flag carrier is Saudia, formerly known as Saudi Arabian Airlines, and to invest $147 billion into transport and logistics over nine years. There is also Neom, the planned futuristic smart city on the Red Sea, and Six Flags Qiddiya, a new destination being constructed as part of a new city situated outside capital city Riyadh.

Writing a new business book is really about sparking new conversations.

“Business Recoded” was published earlier this year, and over the last few months I’ve done some really thought-provoking interviews – at events, in newspapers, as podcasts, webinars, and much more.

From Argentina to Finland, Portugal, Turkey, and South Korea – from future megatrends and luxury brands to business transformation and courageous leadership):

• In Seoul (with Maeil Business News, South Korea’s Financial Times) we explored how to recode business across the 7 shifts in much more detail (with a big focus on Future Recode and Innovation Recode, how it relates some of the great Korean innovators like Coupang and Samsung, and others across Asia), and how to be ambidextrous!
• In Porto (at the QSP Summit, with 2500 participants) we explored the megatrends, and how Covid has accelerated new opportunities for innovation and growth – economic shifts, tech disruption, sustainability imperatives (and how companies like Haier, Maersk, and Microsoft are visioning).
• In Buenos Aires (in Adlatina’s CMO Clinic, the largest marketing platform in Latin America) we talked about how the pandemic has shaken up every market, from energy to finance, retail and entertainment (and of a new generation of Latin American innovators like Mercado Libre, Nubank and Rappi).
• In Istanbul (interviewed live on Bloomberg TV) we explored the fashion industry, and the crossroads it has reached between sustaining the old business models at rapidly declining markets, and rethinking fashion, in terms of product and process, channel and commercial (when TikTok meets StockX).
• In Helsinki (at the eCom Next 2021 event with 2000 retail participants) we explored the future of retail, and in particular “the quantum store” or the hyper-blending of physical and digital assets into richer consumer-driven experiences. Nor physical or digital but human, not transactional or entertainment but both. Where Shopify gets Spotify-ed, if you like!

And then there have been some great direct conversations with other thought leaders, people who host their own regular webshows and podcasts – exploring what “Business Recoded” really means, how every market, every business, has been shaken up, and what will happen next:

• Lancefield on the Line, is a great video and podcast series from strategist David Lancefield. You should watch every episode, but in this interview we talk about leading the future (see below)
• The Speaker Show interview with Maria Franzoni started with Einstein and Picasso, and how I used their left and right-brain thinking to develop my “genius” series of books and activities.
• Hack the Future is a brilliant podcast hosted by Terence Mauri. In this interview we talked a lot about courageous leadership, with insights from the 50 leaders featured in my new book.
• Unknown Origins podcast interview with Roy Sharples who I know from working with Microsoft. We talk about creativity, design and innovation in the digital world.
• Headspring’s Roundtable on the future of manufacturing was fascinating, from the smart factory of robotics to attracting GenZ to what they see as outdated industries.
• Lux and Tech, interview with Carlo Pignataro, explores the changing meaning and business models of luxury businesses, and what business transformation really means.

How to “recode” your future

Here’s the full interview with David Lancefield which I particularly enjoyed:

Think of an inspirational leader. What impact does she or he have on you? What have they done that you think is extraordinary?

They’ve probably created a leap forward in the positioning, performance and profile of the organisation you’re in. They’ve been bold enough to look at a situation with new lenses. More from the customer perspective. Or as an outsider. Or imagined what a “fiercest competitor” might do.

They look for stimulus inside and outside of their organisation, listening carefully to new voices and those who are at the margins. And then they have the courage to take the leap forward. That means letting go of the past – activities, mindset, even people – and identifying the limiting assumptions you make about the business or the space you compete in. So what do you need to do to “recode yourself” to make this leap forward?

Here’s a fast track to different parts of the interview:

• 0:00 : Start
• 1:48 : His process for selecting inspirational leaders – and his top pick
• 7:22 : Biggest obstacles that get in the way of leaders recoding their businesses.
• 9:30 : The first step leaders can take to explore new possibilities
• 13:38 : The most material shifts that deserve the attention of CEOs and Boards
• 18:24 : What helps organisations and individuals make big leaps
• 21:06 : How the CMO should evolve and relate to other C-suite roles
• 24:53 : Why he’s intrigued by developments in Asia and South America.
• 25:49 : How and what he has changed in the last 18 months
• 30:40 : How he measures his impact.

As David says “In this series of interviews I want to get under the skin of topics relevant to leaders – developing strategy, pursuing growth opportunities, responding to disruption, evolving their culture. I talk to executives, entrepreneurs and management thinkers from all over the world. I challenge them to be clear, precise and simple in what they say! And I want them to leave us with ideas we can action.”

Here’s my keynote “Wave Riders: Leading the Future Megatrends” at the QSP Summit, Portugal.

Now is the time to dare

Here are some more Q&A with Peter Fisk from interviews in various publications:

How do you see the business world right now? What should business leaders be thinking and doing as the world starts to move beyond the pandemic?

Now is the time to dare. Now is the time for leaders to have courage to reimagine their businesses. Now is the time to create the future of retail. Which is not just about digital technologies. Or social media. Or super speedy delivery. But fundamentally harnessing the power of the present to create a better future.

18 months of global health crisis has created a huge opportunity. Every market is being shaken up. In financial services, Visa and Paypal are more valuable than any bank. In automotive, Tesla outperforms Toyota despite selling 10 times less cars. In energy, carbon giants are displaced by Orsted and Schneider. Even in food and drink, Kweichow Moutai is twice as valuable as Coca Cola, or Unilever, or Diageo.

Of course, the pandemic has also been a difficult time, but like “wei-je” (the Chinese word for crisis) when translated means both danger and opportunity. 57% of Fortune 500 companies were created in a downturn, 90% of patents are filed in or just after a downturn. And many retailers describe how 10 years of transformation happened, in just a few months of lockdown.

My new book “Business Recoded” argues that the old codes of business don’t work. The maelstrom of change, driven by disruptive technologies, by economic power shifts, by new agendas like sustainability, and by consumer attitude change, have all been accelerated by Covid-19. We now need to reimagine, reinvent, recode our businesses for a better future.

What does “a better future” mean in this context? How have markets changed over the last two years and where are we headed?

Firstly, we are at the point now where every company is a digital business.

Take retail, for example. What’s important is to stop thinking of it in a separate way from physical formats. By that I don’t just mean omnichannel, but moving to a point where we create a truly “liquid” experience for customers, which embraces the best of physical and digital opportunities.

My expectation today as a consumer is that every retailer, however small or niche, will have a website. And from that website I can engage, ideally transactionally. But it’s more than that How can my mobile phone help me navigate the physical store? How can it become more personal by individual offers and advice? How can I buy online and collect or take back to store? Or buy instore, and get delivered to my home? None of this is rocket science, but is harder if we think in silos.

Look at the way in which Nike has transformed its distribution model over the last 24 months. The sportswear company has massively invested in its mobile platform – not just for incredible efficient and simple purchasing, but with a wide range of content to enjoy sport and engage audiences. VIP clubs, limited editions, celebrity events, dynamic pricing and relevant offers. But also its physical branded stores, which is equally a digitally-enabled, immersive-brand experience. Nike really is a direct-to-consumer brand today, and a great example of liquid retail.

I’m a big fan of Tobi Lutke, the German entrepreneur who followed his love of skiing to Canada. There, he created his own online snowboarding shop, but focused on what his consumers loved – the stories of snowboarding, not simply the products. This richer content engaged people more deeply, his brand became a community, and his physical store, a cult hangout for snow lovers.

Other retailers loved his online store so much that they wanted to create a similar brand experience. And so Tobi create Shopify, which is a cloud-based, subscription-based “e-commerce in a box” which provides everything from inventory and distribution, to payments and promotional tools. The smallest store in Finland can become a global business.

How has the global pandemic and these exceptional times influenced your thinking regarding your main topics of interest?

The pandemic has massively accelerated the application of digital technologies, for online transactions, and much more broadly in terms of brand building, supply chains, product and sales personalisation, inventory management, channel partners, local relevance, pricing models, and customer experience.

It’s also changing customer attitudes and behaviours forever. Banking, communication, entertainment, healthcare have all become digital-centric experience. But so has retail, and particularly in areas such as transport, hospitality, music, books, fashion and groceries. That’s not news.

But what is interesting, are the consequences. Social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are now significant retailers – click on a photo shared by a friend, and you can buy the same item instantly. Gaming platforms, like Fortnite, have become the new spaces to engage young people in new ideas, product launches and brands – Travis Scott just launched his latest album, and “tour” on the gaming platform.

In Singapore, DBS, the leading bank pioneered a strategy to “make banking invisible” and to embed its financial services within every other industry that matters to customers – not just for payments, but to manage money better. At the same time, Grab, which is a taxi and grocery delivery business, introduced Grab Pay, which has become a leading financial business.

In India, Jio was a phone company launched by the country’s richest entrepreneur – Mukesh Ambani, whose main business was in petrochemicals. He launched the phone with free calls and text, and became market leader with 3 months. He also became the leading advertising platform, the ad revenues subsidising the free calls. He then started using the phone to build Jio apps for different services – food delivery, taxi hailing, entertainment, grocery retail, healthcare and financial services.

Jio, Grab – and similarly others around the world like Line, GoJek, Rappi and WeChat – are super apps, which ignore the old boundaries of business sectors. Instead they focus on the customer, and see the world through their eyes. Indeed, by extension, every type of business can be a retailer today – banks and phone companies, manufacturers and game companies.

You have a unique perspective on markets around the world – nobody knows them better. How else have markets changed? Both in terms of the use of technologies and in new markets around the world?

Covid-19 has had huge impact on markets. Most significantly is the shift to digital platforms in work and life, from working and learning, to shopping and entertaining. Many retailers say we have seen a decade of change in one year.

However this is not simply about developing an online platform, it is about fundamentally different business models, that embrace a wide range of technologies. Big data and AI enable consumer experiences to be more personal and predictive. Robotics and 3D printing are rapidly transforming supply chains and manufacturing. This transforms sectors like retail and finance, but also transport and mining.

A great example of this would be Rappi from Colombia – the accelerated growth of the online delivery service, which is rapidly becoming a source for everything – not just grocery or restaurant deliveries. Other “super-apps” across the world, like Grab or Jio, have shown that once they embrace a financial engine, they become essential for everything to everyone. Mercado Libre is now starting to follow this model too.

Other examples would include PingAn, China’s largest financial services company, which extended into healthcare. It’s Good Doctor business now has a billion subscribers, offering AI-based patient diagnostics, video-streamed consultations, automated prescriptions and services, linked to physical clinics and hospitals. It is now the world’s largest online healthcare platform.

Your early career was in marketing. How has marketing changed during your career, and what should marketing leaders be doing now?

Too many marketers are too obsessed about communications, and many are still stuck in the old world of advertising, being guided by their ad agencies to spend the majority of their budgets on old media.

The biggest disruption is in markets – (1) changing customers – new audiences, new priorities, new experiences – (2) changing sectors – blurred boundaries, new competitors, new business models – (3) changing geography – more pan-regional, reaching new geographies, new ecosystems.

The business, the CEO and executive team, need the CMO to be the pathfinder, to make sense of these fast-changing, uncertain and disrupted markets – to take the business in new directions, to drive innovation and growth.

CMO’s should most importantly champion the “growth plan” of the business, both short and longer-term. That doesn’t just mean how to engage existing customers in existing markets, but how to find new opportunities, to innovate in new ways.

The impact of a CMO being a “strategic growth leader” can change the market value of the company by 100% in a year (look at companies like NotCo in Chile, Nubank in Brazil, or more globally like Alibaba or Amazon, Tesla or Tencent).

The impact of a CMO being a “advertising guy” is probably 10% at most.

The CMO of Tesla doesn’t just focus on advertising cool cars, he is focused on how to develop the mobility network of the future – in a world where cars are autonomous, and nobody owns their own vehicle, people will subscribe to mobility operator networks. How is Tesla positioned to become the leader in this? In fact Tesla actually defines itself as an energy company, and is also focused on developing smart energy solutions for homes and cities. These are probably more valuable markets than cars!

What are the challenges of digital transformation, how are the most innovative companies tackling it, and how can it be done better?

The biggest challenge of “digital transformation” is the description – too many companies seek to digitalise their existing strategies and business models. They don’t reimagine why, where or how to do business, they just automate the old model.

The challenge if therefore “business transformation” and understanding how the new technologies can enable things which were not previously possible. For example, how a big data enables the largest companies to offer personalised products and services as efficiently as it is to create the same product for everyone. Or consider how brands can now sell direct to customers, no longer needing intermediaries, creating richer customer experiences. Or consider subscription models, or co-creation models, or licensing models.

Digital technologies gives us the opportunity to reimagine business in so many ways. Take the Canadian company Shopify, which creates complete “solutions” for the smallest local business to become a global player – to create their online store, but also to manage their global inventory and distribution, marketing and administration. More generally, how can you be the Adobe, the Glossier, the Netflix, the Paypal, the Stitchfix, the Stripe, the Zozo, of your industry?

This is a challenge of strategic imagination – the choices of what your business could do, are virtually unlimited today. We need the creative, market-driven mindset to explore and find the best opportunities, to make the case for change, and then engage and align the organisation in transformation towards a better future.

What are some of your favourite examples of companies that are seizing the opportunities of change, and disrupting markets around the world?

Now is the time for every business – and particularly every retailer – to reimagine their future. What matters, is to not be limited by where you come from – whether you are big or small, physical or digital – but by the vision which you have. And that vision should not just be to “sell lots of stuff”, but to make the world better in some way – to help people to do what they seek to do better, be that run faster or build a better home, care for the environment, and more equality in society.

Don’t be limited by technology thinking, don’t be intimidated by its language and complexity. Focus on the future, and how you can create a better future for customers. Start from the future back, and the outside in. Think in a liquid way, about the human experience you want to create and how that can be enhanced physically and digitally.

Who are my favourites? Around the world, I love the rise of these new generation businesses – like StockX where consumers bid for purchases in an auction, most often focused on limited edition sneakers. There are so many great examples, which I will talk about. Like Pinduoduo, one of the fastest growing retailers in the world right now, which transformed itself from an online retailer to be a social-gamified-shopping experience. Imagine walking along a mall with friends, sharing things which catch your eye, playing games to win discounts, live-streaming your experience to friends. Or Stitch Fix, developed by Katrina Lake, which sells fashion by monthly subscription, sending you a box of clothes each month, and using data analytics to rapidly learn which clothes you will like best.  Or Bookshop, developed by Andy Hunter from Canada, with a business model supporting small independent physical bookstores, providing an collaborative online local-to-global sales platform, and an antidote to the power of Amazon!

In Europe, I’m a big fan of Rapha, which started in the UK, as a brand of premium cycle wear, rapidly opening stores across the world called Cycle Clubs, with coffee shops, showers and bike stores. Or Germany’s Zalando which has gone beyond simple transactions to build better product brand experiences within its platform, and to engage with people on the big sustainability issues in areas such as fast fashion, packaging, and deliveries.

What should business leaders be focused on right now?

Markets are the major source of change – rapidly disrupted and transformed. Marketers understand markets best, and should therefore be the catalysts and drivers of business change. (In the past, when markets were stable, most change happened internally, more driven by operational or culture leaders).

Also, sustainability has become much more important to customers and society, generally. The old model of sustainability was about reducing impact, about compliance and efficiency, now it is about using business and brands to create products and services. It is about creating brands as platforms for good, to engage customers, in changing behaviours, and driving more positive impacts. How can you have your product or service, and make the world better at the same time. A bit like the Toms shoes model, but applied in a commercial way to every kind of business.

Business leaders are the drivers of growth and transformation, they are the executives who can make sense of the future, and find the path from today to tomorrow. Therefore their role is in

• Inspiring leadership – sense making, vision shaping, growth finding, future defining, path finding, change driving, business connecting.
• Strategic innovation – reimagining how markets work, new market models, new business models – as well as new experiences, products and services.
• Positive impact – building brands as platforms for good, to enable customers to make a positive difference to their lives, their communities, and the world.

What is your big message, right now?

We live in an incredible time of opportunity – more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years – harnessing the power of technology to transform markets and business models, embracing sustainability to innovate everything from logistics to packaging, using the power of data to personalise in mass markets, and much more.

Now is the time to dare, for business leaders to have the courage and creativity to reimagine the future of their retail businesses, and to use this moment – as we emerge from the pandemic – to accelerate a better business future.

Creating a better world

Here’s my TED Talk which links to my theme for this year’s European Business Forum:

Q&A … ABOUT THE NEW BOOK … “BUSINESS RECODED”

Could you briefly tell us how the idea for your book ‘Business Recoded: Have the Courage to Create a Better Future for Yourself and Your Business’ originate? Was there a particular incident?

I started writing the book just as Covid-19 locked down the world. I was sitting at home, unable to travel, unable to work. Everyone was asking, what will happen next? For a long time we have talked about the ways in which business will change because of the rapid development of new technologies, the economic power shift west to east,  and the rise of social and environmental agendas. Now I could see they were happening faster than ever – accelerated by the pandemic. Business would not return as it used to be. There would be no going back to normal.

I started writing “There will be more change in the next 10 years, than the last 250 years”. That change has now been accelerated by Covid. Most businesses are not fit for the future. For too long business leaders have kept trying to extend the old models of success, with diminishing returns. We now need to think fundamentally differently. We need to think about new ways of working, new ways of competing, and new ways of measuring success. We need to “recode” business.

You illustrated seven shifts in the book. How did you come up with the seven shifts? Do business leaders need to go through all seven shifts to growing and creating better future for the companies?

I talked to 50 business leaders across the world. I particularly focused on those companies that are shaking up markets, exploring new possibilities, and creating the future. I wanted to understand what these companies were doing, how they were changing, and what they thought were the old codes – and new codes – of business success. Many of the companies are featured in the book.

The 7 shifts emerged out of categorizing the many different changes that are happening – and started with the highest level of “why” do companies exist. The shift was from the “old” mindset of achieving market share leadership and optimising profitability to shareholders, to a “new” mindset of achieving a higher purpose has positive impact for the world, and then understanding how all stakeholders can benefit. That doesn’t necessarily mean less profit, it could actually mean more. By doing more for society, by doing more for employees and customers, companies often find that they can be more profitable and valuable over the longer term.

The other shifts then followed, from old to new mindset:

• Recode your future… from profit machine to enlightened progress
• Recode your growth … from uncertain survival to futuristic growth
• Recode your market … from marginal competition to market creating
• Recode your innovation … From technology obsession to human ingenuity
• Recode your organisation … From passive hierarchies to dynamic ecosystems
• Recode your transformation … From incremental change to sustained transformation
• Recode your leadership … From good managers to extraordinary leaders

Together these 7 shifts begin to shape a better future for your business, delivered through the 49 codes. The 49 codes make up the chapters of the book, each with specific examples, and practical tools and approaches for change.

The first shift is “recode your future.” What are the specific ways business leaders can realize what their companies’ future potential is?

 Most companies are limited in their future potential, because of the way in which they look ahead. They look through the narrow lens of their current business – their current sector, their current business models, their current audiences. Indeed most companies view their strategies for growth, by doing more of the same – faster, cheaper, better.

Look at a company like Hyundai. It largely sees the future through the lens of vehicle production. However it is slowly waking up to the reality of a future where cars will be electric and self-driven, where people will not own cars but rent them, where mobility solutions will converge, and we will see cars like local, personalised trains, available on demand. Who will succeed in this future? Probably the mobility network providers who we most trust to provide an efficient integrated service of travel.

Therefore companies can increase their “future potential” by changing their perspective. By jumping to the future, then working backwards. By seeing the world from a customer’s perspective, not dominated by existing products. By “reframing” their marketspace, in a new or bigger way. Hyundai are not a car company, but a mobility company. Samsung is not an electronics company, but an entertainment company. Now where are the best opportunities for the future?

Once leaders realize their company’s future potential, what are the practical steps they can take to achieving the potential and bringing out performance(positive financial results)? If there is an example of a business leader that took the steps, could you share the story?

Lei Jun is the founder of Chinese electronics company Xiaomi. He initially sought to be a business that competed with Apple and Samsung – making phones and tablets for the Chinese market. By changing his perspective he realised that content was far more important than hardware. He realised that people maybe buy one device every two years, but they buy and use content every day. Content in many forms – news, entertainment, gaming, social media, retail etc. Now Lei Jun is one of the largest investors in the movie industry, with a particular focus on creating Chinese entertainment for his local consumers.

The second shift is “recode your growth.” One of the ways to doing so is to ride with the megatrends. Of the five megatrends you pointed out in the book, which do you think business leaders should be the most alert of in the current crisis? Has the COVID-19 crisis brought out new megatrends as well?

 These 5 megatrends are still the most significant pathways to the future, and a useful checklist for any business leader exploring their future strategy.

All five megatrends have been accelerated by Covid-19. The shift from young to old, particularly in providing healthcare. The shift from west to east, particularly in the rise of Asian businesses like Alibaba and PingAn. The shift from towns to cities, particularly in emerging markets in search of jobs and support.

However most significant have been the huge acceleration in shift to technologies – the digitalization of our lives, from education to work, from retail to entertainment. Many online retailers say they saw 10 years of change in 3 months. However this has not just been in shopping online, but also the convergence of shopping and entertainment. Look at Sea in Singapore, or Pinduoduo in China, the gamification and socialization of retail.

The other shift, towards a huge awareness of the fragility of our planet and society, has also been hugely increased by Covid-19. We have seen the impacts of extreme weather on the environment, but we have also seen the impacts of pandemic on society. Inequality of wealth, inequality of access to services. This is why we have seen such as growth in interest in companies having a greater purpose, and stakeholder capitalism.

One of the megatrends is the fast growth of Asia. In the book you mentioned that “The E7 will be larger than the G7 by 2030 and double their size by 2050). For clarification, do you mean that the GDP of E7 countries in total will double the amount that of G7 by 2050? If yes, what will be the drivers of the growth? Also, could you share the source for this data?

This was initially discussed by the World Economic Forum back in 2010. And yes, we are rapidly seeing a new world order, with the E7 growing far faster than the old G7. The general principle still holds true, although the definition of E7 – or the top emerging nations – has changed a little, for example Brazil becoming less successful.

The drivers of this growth? Population is one – predominantly in emerging markets. And in broad terms, the rise in personal incomes and living standards. As education has improved, so has business success – better standards of production, innovation and growth. The best ideas in business now largely come from emerging markets, not the developed markets. The G7 is largely stagnant, fading giants, trying to work out what to do next. The E7 are ambitious and energized, the new giants, plating a new game.

Next comes ‘recode your market.’ As you mentioned in the book, the terms market and industry has been overlapped. How do you define ‘market’? When you say ‘recode your market,’ what do you exactly mean?

Markets are blurring incredibly rapidly – the old boundaries and definitions of sectors are increasingly redundant, and many – perhaps most – companies now work in multiple sectors, and their solutions are combinations of multiple products and services.

I love the story of PingAn, which is the world’s second largest insurance company. They have a huge technological platform, and customer base of billions of people in China. How could they grow? Well by thinking outside of their old “market” definition. Jessica Tan tells how as COO, she developed PingAn’s new healthcare business, and now Good Doctor is the world’s largest healthcare platform offering online and physical services to over one billion consumers.

The best examples are probably the “Super-apps” that have emerged across the world, as online single-point to reach many different services – companies like WeChat from China, Jio in India, Grab in Singapore, GoJek in Malaysia, Line in Japan, Rappi in Colombia. Most either started as messaging platforms, taxi services, or online retail delivery services. Now they are also platforms for gaming, movies, healthcare, and most significantly financial services. Once they have a payments engine, or bank, they can become the core of almost every type of transaction you make. What sector are they in? Everything!

One of the ways business leaders can recode the market is by setting the market space. You argue that ‘a customer-centric mindset is the best way to setting market space.’ Could you elaborate on this? Also, how can business leaders change their mindset to a customer-centric mindset?

You can define your market any way you want, there are no rules, or limits!

Both in terms of what type of business you are in – transport can easily become mobility – and equally geographically. Increasingly, there are more commonalities between consumers across nations, than within a nation. Young people have more similarities with other young people in other countries, than with old people in their same country. Therefore why think in treating each geographical country differently, when you could develop different propositions by multi-national segments.

Taking a customer-centric mindset to define your marketspace is one of the most useful ways to reframe your market.

Take a pharmaceutical company – you could equally call it a healthcare company, which would give you the additional space to offer non-drug type of products and services, or you could even call it a “wellbeing” company, which would give you even more space to innovate and serve customers in areas such as nutrition and fitness. A drug company could become a sports company!

Or think about insurance. Most people inside insurance companies are obsessed about financials, about risks. When I take out car insurance, I actually want peace of mind, to enjoy driving. Therefore insurance companies, like Sompo in Japan for example, are no focusing on developing car driving services that enhance the driving experience. If these can also reduce the risk – for example, by encouraging safer driving – then they can directly benefit the core business, while also adding new revenue streams.

The fourth shift is ‘recode your innovation.’ Innovation starts with questions. In the book you explained Professor Hal Gregersen’s ‘Question Burst.’ Do you know any company that has implemented the ‘Question Burst’ method in its quest to recoding innovation?

I have worked with Microsoft over the last few years, helping them to strategically and culturally change their approach to the market. In the most simple terms this has involved a shift from product-thinking to customer-thinking.  In the past they were an organisation of salespeople selling billions of software licenses – Windows 365 to individuals, cloud computing to corporations.

Now, to grow further, and to add more value to their customers, they are focusing on understanding and solving customers problems. How can the software help their customers to do more? How can the Windows user be more effective at what they do? How can a small company in a small town become a global player, with the help of a cloud-based digital platform? The focus on problems, and exploring what the real problem is, is key to this.

Perhaps the most common ways companies recode their innovation is by developing new business models. Is there any new business model that you have recently learned about that impressed you?

The super-apps!

Do you think remote work will continue to grow? If yes, how can business leaders recode their organization as remote work expands? How can teamwork be created in the remote work environment?

Yes. But not in isolation from the real world. We will see almost every company moving to some form of hybrid working model. I actually prefer to call this a liquid model, because people will learn to move more fluidly between physical and digital modes. The same in education, the same in retail, the same in healthcare, etc.

Many organisations across the world have already stated that for many employees, they will continue to work 2-3 days/week at home. But this is more than home/office thinking. It is also about a more flexible, personalised lifestyle – something which young people particularly want. It will also drive a change in work contracts – we will see more flexible contracts, less permanent employees, more part-time, or short contract workers, maybe working for many companies at the same time.

Similarly, teamwork is not simply about being in the same place, or managers have sight of their people. In many cases, during Covid-19, team effectiveness actually increased, by people in different places – functions, or countries, or even companies – being able to easily join online meetings or workshops, and be involved in projects quickly and easily. Once we get used to the technology, and the ways of staying in touch socially too, then remote working will be an extremely positive force. But we are still human, and there are also times when it is better – and good for us – to be together physically!

When of the big areas I explore in the book is the rise of “extreme teaming”. This is largely about building teams that are more diverse, and more self-managed. Bringing together different types of people – age, gender, experience, attitude – drives greater creativity in teams. But also letting those teams have the power to define their roles, to manage their own progress, gives ownership and improved performance. Google and Netflix are great examples of this, as is Haier with its “rendanheyi” organisation model.

For companies to recode their transformations, ‘pivoting’ is essential. How can business leaders know how to pivot the business and when is the right time to doing so?

Innovation is a constant in business today, and so is transformation. Companies are constantly evolving. They therefore need to become much more “ambidexterous” – the ability to deliver for today, and create tomorrow, at the same time. One practical strategic way to do this is to develop a dual portfolio approach – a portfolio of innovations and businesses which will succeed in today’s world (to meet the needs of current customers, outperform current competitors, and generate profitability over 1-3 years), and also a portfolio to succeed in tomorrow’s world (future customers, competitors).

By working with two portfolios, business leaders can increasingly shift from today to tomorrow’s world. The “pivot” if you like, is the moment when the core business shifts from the old to the new. Take the earlier example of Hyundai, the today portfolio is about manufacturing better cars, the tomorrow portfolio about future mobility networks. The pivot comes when the core of Hyundai is no longer a car maker, but a mobility operator. Leaders need to judge when is the right time to make that shift.

Lastly comes “recode your leadership.” One of the ways to recode one’s leadership is to developing one’s own leadership style. What are the basic steps leaders take to developing their own leadership style?

I did a huge research study with IE Business School in preparation for writing the book about what are the changing characteristics of the most effective business leaders. I call this the new leadership DNA – and in particular it defines the critical role of leaders in creating better futures, making change happen, and delivering positive impact.

However there are many ways to be a leader. It is certainly not about standing at the top of the building and shouting commands! When we look at many of the leaders in the book – Anne Wojcicji at 23andMe or Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Piyush Gupta at DBS or Zhang Ruimin at Haier – they are all different. Yes they have incredible vision, they bring together great teams, they are problem solvers, and they have enormous courage to step up and make the future happen – but they are all different.

The biggest challenge in developing yourself as a business leader is in being authentic. And finding ways in which you can make your personal strengths work for you, and for others. There is no simple or single leadership model to follow. And indeed, leaders will need to behave in different ways at different moments. This is a real skill. But the leaders who can do this in an authentic way, will be more trusted by others, and will be more effective in themselves.

The book was written before the Covid-19 pandemic began. Apart from the 7 shifts you illustrated in the book, are there any additional shift that should be included in order for business leaders to creating and delivering a better future amidst the current crisis?

The biggest shift now is to create a better future. As every company emerges from Covid-19, it is not about getting back to normal, but about imagining better. Now is the moment when business leaders need the imagination and courage to step up, to think different, and to accelerate the changes that are necessary and possible.

What is the most important insight you want readers to take away from ‘Business Recoded: Have the Courage to Create a Better Future for Yourself and Your Business’?

The pandemic has given us this unique opportunity to hit the “reset” button. It has given us a reason to let go of many of the old ways of doing business, and it has demonstrated why new ways are urgently needed. Now is the moment when investors, employees and customers, are seeking and supporting leaders who are brave and bold. Now is the time to have the courage to step up, to create a better future.

Inspired by Einstein and Picasso

Here is the interview with Maria Franzoni for The Speaker Show:

 

You have a very interesting professional background, with many different projects and experiences around the world. Can you tell us a bit about your journey and your professional experience?

My journey started in a physics lab under the Swiss mountains, pouring liquid nitrogen into a test tube of materials, and then watching what happens for a week. I was studying for a PhD in superconductivity. It was fascinating, intellectually, to understand how the natural world exists, but also boring.

I decided to work in business, with people, with brands, and within 5 years I was managing the Concorde brand for British Airways. In marketing, people always gave me the analysis to do, which was fine but I preferred the creative stuff. Years later I wrote a book called Marketing Genius, all about combining your left and right brain, analysis and creativity, or being the Einstein and Picasso of today’s business world.

After that I worked for 10 years in management consulting, which is a fantastic way to work with many different companies on their most important projects. I worked on every continent, and almost every sector. It’s also a great way to build your personal toolkit, far better than an MBA to be honest, and learning to connect all the business disciplines.

I then co-founder a digital start-up, which exploring the future of business education, which led to becoming the CEO of a 500 person company, which is actually the world’s largest network of marketers. This really allowed me to talk about business, about the future, to a much wider audience.

That’s when I started writing books – and have now written 9 titles – “Marketing Genius” was translated into 35 languages. My other books explore the renaissance creativity of Leonardo da Vinci, in “Creative Genius”, how to innovate with purpose for positive impact, in “People Planet Profit”, and learning from the world’s most innovative companies, in “Gamechangers”.

And most recently I wrote “Business Recoded” which is all about having the courage to create a better future – for yourself, and your business.

Today I lead my own business, GeniusWorks, an innovative business accelerator, based in London. We do lots of interesting consulting projects, mainly working with business leaders and their exec teams on developing more innovative strategies for the future. This is really exciting, and I get to work on some amazing projects.

I am also a Professor of leadership, strategy and innovation at IE Business School in Madrid, where I am the academic director responsible for executive programs. I’m also a visiting professor at business schools in Cambridge, Singapore and Zurich. Teaching the next generation of business leaders is particularly rewarding, and exciting, particularly in such a fast changing world.

You work with large companies, helping them grow and develop innovative strategies. What does this process consist of and with which brands have you been working?

 I’ve got over 30 years of practical business experience, working with over 300 companies and 55 countries … from Adidas’ growth into new markets to Asahi’s consumer-centric innovation, Cartier’s redefined luxury and Coca Cola’s growth strategy, McKinsey’s leadership development to Microsoft’s new approach to strategic innovation, P&G’s direct to consumer strategy and Pfizer’s future scanning, Santander’s future bank vision and Sompo’s digitally-minded leaders, Takeda’s patient-centric healthcare and Tata’s growth as a global business.

I use a proprietary methodology, Innolab.

InnoLab is an approach to accelerated innovation – bringing together insights and ideas, creativity and design, development and commercialisation.

The approach has three phases which bring together many established, and some new, processes and activities for accelerating your ideas into practical action. Much of it can be done in-house, bringing together the right teams and disciplines from across your business, but it works best with a little added structure, facilitation and stimulus.

The approach has been developed through 20 years of practical experience – managing and facilitating problem-solving and innovation – in every type of category, organisation and culture. The detail is described in my new book “Creative Genius: Innovation from the Future Back”. The process is customised to the particular challenge, but there are typically three phases

• The Ideas Factory: Customer insights, future possibilities, and creative ideas
• The Design Studio: Shaping and connecting ideas, hypothesise and concepts
• The Impact Zone: Evaluating, developing and commercialising the best ideas

As an example, Philosophy is an inspiring cosmetics brand from Phoenix, Arizona, that has developed a cult following for its distinctive products such as “Hope in a Jar”. Recently acquired by Coty of France, the brand team wanted to rethink the brand for global growth. We developed a fast, high-energy series of workshops in New York brought the global team together to develop a new core proposition, growth platforms with focus on Asian markets. This included the development of a new brand strategy, core brand proposition, and how to combine the serious skincare products with fun bath range. It explored new opportunities such as how to leverage its deep community of users, for example through brand experiences and gifting, and prioritised horizons plan for extensions into new markets. It included a roll-out of new concept stores in Singapore and South Korea.

Another example is with Visa, which wanted to make more of its role as a global sponsor of the Olympic Games, to go beyond the conventional support of advertising and client hospitality. We explored the potential alignment with brand and business strategy, to understand how such a huge investment could be used more significantly. The team defined an ambition to make the Olympics a cashless games as a showcase of Visa’s new contactless and mobile payment technologies, bringing together its multiple new technologies to demonstrate how life really can flow faster, on and off the track.

How did you come up with the idea of founding GeniusWorks and what does the company consist of?

GeniusWorks is really built on my passion for strategic problem solving – to help business leaders to think differently, to have the courage to develop bolder and braver ideas, and to use their businesses as platforms to create a better world.

Sometimes, it is about strategic consulting. Sometimes it is an innovative project, like launching a new brand and developing a new product. Sometimes it is about creating inspiring events that engage people in new ways. Sometimes it is a keynote speech to contribute to highlight a conference, or to provoke and energise an internal team.

What I also think makes GeniusWorks special, is that we seek to curate ideas and insights from all around the world – in particular from emerging markets. In the west, we still underestimate how advanced the markets, and the companies, of Asia are today. We can learn so much from companies like Alibaba and Haier in China, DBS and Grab in Singapore, Jio and Narayana in India.

I also seek to be a curator of the best new concepts in business – every business school academic, every new business book, every interesting business report – I seek to bring them together, to highlight was is new and important, and to share them widely. Actually, a key thing is to connect them – so, for example, how do you connect Design Thinking with Blue Ocean Strategy with Business Model Innovation with Adaptive Leadership. And on.

What interests you outside your professional work and why?

My passion is running. I have run almost every day since I was 10 years old. I was inspired by the challenge of testing myself to run further and faster, but also by the love of feeling fit and healthy, and to run through the countryside or cities of the world and see everything at high speed.

I was inspired by the world’s great athletes, but also be legendary feats of endurance, like the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico who are able to run hundreds of miles everyday. Today I can’t run quite as fast for the mile or marathon as I could in my youth. But I still love the freedom, the friendships and the feeling of wellness and achievement by starting each day with a run.

You are a global business leader, best-selling author, professor and academic director. How do you manage all these roles? Is there any secret?

Passion. Curiosity. Relationships. Hard work. And trying to focus on where I can make the biggest difference. It’s a lot of fun too!

And what are your tips for anyone seeking to innovate and grow their business?

Go and spend time with your customers. Real people. Don’t ask them what they need or want. Ask them about their lives, how they work, what they are trying to do, how they want to be different, what stops them, and what they dream of. Then make it happen for them.

Most importantly, remember that we live in the most incredible time – more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years. So how is your business changing? How are you?

Never stop reinventing … never stop thinking, never stop listening, never stop exploring, never stop changing, never stop innovating, never stop growing. Never stop believing in your own potential.

CMOs should make the best CEOs.

Marketers have a deep understanding of markets, how the future is emerging, what the customers of today and tomorrow are demanding, how competitors are evolving, the best new ideas around the world, and therefore what it will take to drive future innovation and growth. Yet only 11% of CEOs come from a marketing-related background, far behind those who were CFOs or COOs. Finance and operations matter, but they don’t move the organisation forwards.

Too many marketers get caught up in the tactics – perfecting the creative execution of advertising, debating the intricacies of price changes, ensuring that their search engine positioning is optimised, a slave to quarterly revenues, or maybe even the sales team. The driver for ever great data analytics, the use of precision marketing tools, the desire for real time engagement, has dragged – or enticed – marketing leaders into this short-term. Yes, it matters, but it’s not everything.

Marketers should be stepping up to drive strategy, innovation, and change across the organisation. If not them, then who?

One of the most profound moments of my own marketing career was when working with Coca Cola, their CMO had a last-minute idea to rebrand his global marketing plan as the global growth plan. Suddenly everyone in the executive team wanted to see it, read it, be part of it. Suddenly it became a conversation not about reducing the marketing budget, but how to find more budget to fund additional growth. Marketers are the growth drivers, and actually create over 3x more economic value than any other function in the business (based on a research project I did with Philip Kotler’s input and a team of economists). And marketers have some indispensable tools – brands, customers, innovation – to achieve this growth.

The problem is that too many marketers live in an echo chamber.

Some examples. Too many marketers talk about marketing as “their industry”. It’s not. They are instead professionals contributing towards their business in its own industry – banking, retail or whatever. This tribal motivation can bond us as a professional community, and focus us on functional deliverables, but it diverts us from the real contribution marketers can make to organisations, and their close allegiance and integration with cross-functional colleagues. The exception are the leaders and their teams who have repositioned themselves more holistically as Customer Director, Chief Growth Officer, and the like.

Secondly. Too many marketers have a far too cosy relationship with their creative agencies. It’s like they outsource their creativity to the agency, who still largely take a myopic view (of course, there are many types of agencies, but the ad agencies still tend to dominate relationships despite the diminishing share of spend on traditional media). Ad agencies themselves describe their world as “adland”, a mythical place of long lunches and artistic platitudes (witness the headlines in Campaign). This symbiotic relationship, indulgence in each other, is what holds too many marketers and their businesses back. Creative agencies should be stepping up to contribute more, to make sense of a changing world, to challenge and stretch our collective imaginations.

Too many marketers don’t step up to think strategically, to become the future shapers, the innovation drivers, the change makers. Too many marketers are still obsessed with communications, at the expense of other aspects of marketing – not just product and service development, but channels and pricing can have a huge impact too, perhaps even greater than the most beautifully crafted ad campaign.

Instead marketers should be the visionaries behind how the future can be shaped, how markets will evolve, anticipating and driving change rather than just responding. They should be searching the world for new growth opportunities, for new consumer insights, for more innovative ideas. They should be the architects of new business models, and indeed, new market models. New ways for markets to work, new ways to unlock brands as the most valuable assets, new ways to achieve success. They should be the driving force of business futures, the catalysts and sage to the business leader, the instigator and enabler of change.

So here’s my manifesto for marketers:

Growth Drivers

• Marketers exist to drive the growth of a business. Yet few marketers have the confidence, or maybe capability, to define and drive the holistic innovation and growth strategies of their organisations
• The pandemic drove the biggest shift in consumer behaviour in our lifetime, yet few marketers really transformed their marketing in response, fewer still led a company-wide response to support or seize the opportunities it opened up.

Change Makers

• Change is driven by markets, yet marketers are rarely the change drivers, reimagining corporate strategies, business models and strategic priorities.
• Customer-centricity is obvious. Yet marketers persist in obsessing about defining purpose, brands, activities and results around old product-centric thinking.

Business Innovators

• Innovation is probably the most powerful word in business, yet few marketers seek to define and lead the innovation agenda and programs across organisations. Not just new products, business-wide innovation.
• Most companies seek to be entrepreneurial. Their biggest disruption comes from entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs are marketers. Few marketers are entrepreneurial.

Value Creators

• Marketing creates three times more economic value than their operational colleagues, yet few marketers can make this case, or lead the company’s dialogue with investors. Oh, and growth needs to be profitable and sustainble too.
• Customers and brands are probably an organisation’s most valuable financial assets, yet few seek to articulate their value on balance sheets, or to fully exploit their latent potential.

Chris Capossela, Microsoft

Microsoft’s CMO is “taking big swings: in the quest for success and discovering how failure is “the great instigator for growth.” What impresses me about working with Microsoft, one of my own biggest clients, is how they have real conscience, imagination and entrepreneurship. Their purpose is to enable customers to do more, not just sell products. This is where sales and marketing focus their effort (“your potential, our passion”) in tangible ways. They also truly embrace entrepreneurship – from design and lean thinking, to pizza teams and hackathons, debates on ethics and customers in their boardroom.

Carolyn Everson, Facebook

Facebook’s vice president of global marketing solutions leads the company’s relationships with top marketers and agencies. What’s interesting here is that Facebook is probably more of a media company than those associated with its agencies. In  some ways its roles are therefore reversed compared to the norm. But the real power of a tech platform like Facebook, and Instagram and WhatsApp too, lies in its data, its networks, and power as platforms. Look, for example, at the rise of Instagram Shops, the development for social interaction, to a dynamic, realtime, platform for commerce.

Julia Goldin, Lego

Lego’s CMO discusses how tech presents massive opportunity for innovation and Lego’s approach to digital transformation. Lego is a great example of digital transformation because it is classically not a tech company, and still has a heart in physical play. The ability to recognise the brand asset as far more than a product umbrella, enables it to develop in terms of new markets – from clothing to crafting, movies and theme parks – not as adjacencies but as one story. Brands anchored around ideas (led godt, meaning creative play) rather than products or categories, can achieve so much more.

Marc Pritchard, P&G

P&G’s Chief Brand Officer explores a future of  technology that is allowing brands to find new ways to reach the consumer. Pritchard recognises that with a portfolio like P&G’s he has the power and reach to do so much more in the world. His focus on sustainability, driving the entire organisation to transform its practices, but equally enabling customers to apply their own impact too, is worth copying. He achieves this as an organisational leader. People look to him for strategic direction, for business priorities, and for innovation. He also backs this up, by showing it matters, and the impact it makes. The focus is on profitable growth not just revenue or share (anyone can create share without profit), and linking it to DCFs and economic value creation. Ultimately he is the guy investors look to, and in the analyst reports, to understand the organisation’s future potential.

Phil Schiller, Apple

Apple’s outgoing SVP talks about the company’s role in empowering developers to create the future of technology. Schiller is stepping down after being the right hand man in a $2 trillion journey of growth. What is remarkable about Apple’s incredible performance of the last 10 years, is that it has grown to almost 10x the size of Steve Jobs’ era without a real focus on radical product innovation (yes they are great, but from a product perspective its been evolution than revolution). It’s more about how they evolved, particularly as an ecosystem – think App Store, or iTunes – and as a portfolio. Some innovations under Schiller, enabled by his phenomenal brand halo, include the AirPods, with a business model creating the equivalent of a $250 billion business.  Indeed as a brand, Apple has continued to shine, reaching across the world, and to all of our lives.

More than anything, marketing and marketers, have the potential to be so much more. The next 10 years will see more change than the last 250 years. Right now, as we slowly emerge from pandemic, every market is being shaken up, the rules rewritten, a new generation of brands emerging.

Now is the time to seize the seismic changes in consumer behaviour and aspiration, economic shifts and technological revolution. Now is the time to be the future shapers, business innovators and growth drivers. To be the energising, mobilising, progressive leaders of business. To be the change makers.

The Florence Innovation Project, also known as FLIP, is our online collection of methods and includes 562 methods & tools in 6 languages.

It is therefore an indispensable tool for anyone working with innovation or creativity methods.

• Which method do I use in which innovation phase?
• How can I design my Design Thinking Workshops more individually?
• What is the right micromethod in the current Design Thinking work package?
• What works well for inexperienced or even very experienced teams?
• How can I overcome typical obstacles that prevent me from achieving my goals?
• What material do I need?
• Which macro method is the right one for our challenge?
• and much more.

Example tools

The Five Human Factors method is about studying the physical, cognitive, social, cultural and emotional factors that make up a complete customer experience. The Five Human Factors support customer observations in the field during the observation phase of an innovation project. If we grasp the five factors in a structured way and think them through in detail, we gain a target-oriented, deep understanding of the customer experience. This holistic observation increases the likelihood of finding unresolved problems and unmet customer needs that demand an innovative solution. The method breaks down a customer experience into its individual components in order to better understand them. Then the entire customer experience is reassembled in order to clearly understand the cause-effect relationships that lie hidden within it.

Forced-Relationship is an intuitive idea-finding technique that goes back to the British author Charles S. Whiting. Similar to the Force-Fit game, Forced-Relationship works with so-called stimulus words and stimulates the imagination with unusual combinations of terms. Forced-Relationship focuses in particular on the areas of product and service innovations. Irritant words are either related or nonrelated products and processes/services. With the aid of forced relationship technology, new approaches to solutions can be found, especially for imprecise questions and problems.

The Stravinsky Effect is a creative technique based on mixing ideas within a group and is a further development or variation of brainstorming. The composer Igor Stravinsky was a radical innovator of classical music at the beginning of the twentieth century. He never lost his curiosity to try something new. His stage work The Soldier’s Tale was brought to life through the cooperation of artists from various artistic genres: dancers, instrumentalists and a narrator, among others, performed and the piece became the starting point for a new style of performance. The performing artists recreate the piece from the source material – not just once, but with each performance in which the performance can be reworked experimentally. This union (Michael Michalko: cluster) of people and ideas is transferred by the creativity technique to the largely silent work within a group. In Michael Michalko’s book “thinkertoys” The Stravinsky Effect is included in the chapter “Orthodox Brainstorming”.

Squiggle Birds is a fantastic way to open up and tune in participants at the beginning of creative sessions and before creative techniques. Especially when the creative session works with drawings and sketches (e.g. Poster Session) the method is a real hit. Important: Each participant discovers that anyone can draw. The method is based on the fact that our brains recognize patterns based on a few characteristics. The method comes from gamestorming.

My new book “Business Recoded” is published this week in Korean. It’s all about having the courage to create a better future – for yourself, and your business.

South Korea is a fabulous country.

In 2019, I had the privilege to address over 5000 business leaders in Seoul’s Olympic Park, talking about the future, and the opportunities of a world of rapid change. We all know of Korean giants like Samsung and Hyundai, but there are many more fascinating businesses too. Coupang, for example, which is out-innovating Amazon in retail. But most of all Koreans are an incredible passionate, optimistic and creative nation of people.

In 2020, just before the pandemic, I met Ban Ki-moon, the Korean-born former Secretary General of the United Nations. We were both speaking at the Global Soft Power Summit. He described his pride in the “Korean Wave” – giving examples of pop-supergroup BTS and Oscar-winning movie Parasite – in transforming the reputation of his nation, and influencing people across the world.

So it’s fantastic to have yet another book published in Korean.

To celebrate, I agreed to do an interview with South Korea’s leading business newspaper, Maeil Business News. The last time we talked, in an interview 5 years ago,  we explored the world of Gamechangers, about innovative strategies for growth. This time we talked about the more personal challenges of being a business leader, and the need for courage to create a better future. Here’s the interview:

First off, could you briefly tell us how the idea for your book ‘Business Recoded: Have the Courage to Create a Better Future for Yourself and Your Business’ originate? Was there a particular incident?

I started writing the book just as Covid-19 locked down the world. I was sitting at home, unable to travel, unable to work. Everyone was asking, what will happen next? For a long time we have talked about the ways in which business will change because of the rapid development of new technologies, the economic power shift west to east,  and the rise of social and environmental agendas. Now I could see they were happening faster than ever – accelerated by the pandemic. Business would not return as it used to be. There would be no going back to normal.

I started writing “There will be more change in the next 10 years, than the last 250 years”. That change has now been accelerated by Covid. Most businesses are not fit for the future. For too long business leaders have kept trying to extend the old models of success, with diminishing returns. We now need to think fundamentally differently. We need to think about new ways of working, new ways of competing, and new ways of measuring success. We need to “recode” business.

You illustrated seven shifts in the book. How did you come up with the seven shifts? Do business leaders need to go through all seven shifts to growing and creating better future for the companies?

I talked to 50 business leaders across the world. I particularly focused on those companies that are shaking up markets, exploring new possibilities, and creating the future. I wanted to understand what these companies were doing, how they were changing, and what they thought were the old codes – and new codes – of business success. Many of the companies are featured in the book. In Asia, it included companies like Grab from Singapore, Haier from China, and Coupang from South Korea.

The 7 shifts emerged out of categorizing the many different changes that are happening – and started with the highest level of “why” do companies exist. The shift was from the “old” mindset of achieving market share leadership and optimising profitability to shareholders, to a “new” mindset of achieving a higher purpose has positive impact for the world, and then understanding how all stakeholders can benefit. That doesn’t necessarily mean less profit, it could actually mean more. By doing more for society, by doing more for employees and customers, companies often find that they can be more profitable and valuable over the longer term.

The other shifts then followed, from old to new mindset:

• Recode your future… from profit machine to enlightened progress
• Recode your growth … from uncertain survival to futuristic growth
• Recode your market … from marginal competition to market creating
• Recode your innovation … From technology obsession to human ingenuity
• Recode your organisation … From passive hierarchies to dynamic ecosystems
• Recode your transformation … From incremental change to sustained transformation
• Recode your leadership … From good managers to extraordinary leaders

Together these 7 shifts begin to shape a better future for your business, delivered through the 49 codes. The 49 codes make up the chapters of the book, each with specific examples, and practical tools and approaches for change.

The first shift is “recode your future.” What are the specific ways business leaders can realize what their companies’ future potential is?

 Most companies are limited in their future potential, because of the way in which they look ahead. They look through the narrow lens of their current business – their current sector, their current business models, their current audiences. Indeed most companies view their strategies for growth, by doing more of the same – faster, cheaper, better.

Look at a company like Hyundai. It largely sees the future through the lens of vehicle production. However it is slowly waking up to the reality of a future where cars will be electric and self-driven, where people will not own cars but rent them, where mobility solutions will converge, and we will see cars like local, personalised trains, available on demand. Who will succeed in this future? Probably the mobility network providers who we most trust to provide an efficient integrated service of travel.

Therefore companies can increase their “future potential” by changing their perspective. By jumping to the future, then working backwards. By seeing the world from a customer’s perspective, not dominated by existing products. By “reframing” their marketspace, in a new or bigger way. Hyundai are not a car company, but a mobility company. Samsung is not an electronics company, but an entertainment company. Now where are the best opportunities for the future?

Once leaders realize their company’s future potential, what are the practical steps they can take to achieving the potential and bringing out performance(positive financial results)? If there is an example of a business leader that took the steps, could you share the story?

Lei Jun is the founder of Chinese electronics company Xiaomi. He initially sought to be a business that competed with Apple and Samsung – making phones and tablets for the Chinese market. By changing his perspective he realised that content was far more important than hardware. He realised that people maybe buy one device every two years, but they buy and use content every day. Content in many forms – news, entertainment, gaming, social media, retail etc. Now Lei Jun is one of the largest investors in the movie industry, with a particular focus on creating Chinese entertainment for his local consumers.

The second shift is “recode your growth.” One of the ways to doing so is to ride with the megatrends. Of the five megatrends you pointed out in the book, which do you think business leaders should be the most alert of in the current crisis? Has the COVID-19 crisis brought out new megatrends as well?

 These 5 megatrends are still the most significant pathways to the future, and a useful checklist for any business leader exploring their future strategy.

All five megatrends have been accelerated by Covid-19. The shift from young to old, particularly in providing healthcare. The shift from west to east, particularly in the rise of Asian businesses like Alibaba and PingAn. The shift from towns to cities, particularly in emerging markets in search of jobs and support.

However most significant have been the huge acceleration in shift to technologies – the digitalization of our lives, from education to work, from retail to entertainment. Many online retailers say they saw 10 years of change in 3 months. However this has not just been in shopping online, but also the convergence of shopping and entertainment. Look at Sea in Singapore, or Pinduoduo in China, the gamification and socialization of retail.

The other shift, towards a huge awareness of the fragility of our planet and society, has also been hugely increased by Covid-19. We have seen the impacts of extreme weather on the environment, but we have also seen the impacts of pandemic on society. Inequality of wealth, inequality of access to services. This is why we have seen such as growth in interest in companies having a greater purpose, and stakeholder capitalism.

One of the megatrends is the fast growth of Asia. In the book you mentioned that “The E7 will be larger than the G7 by 2030 and double their size by 2050). For clarification, do you mean that the GDP of E7 countries in total will double the amount that of G7 by 2050? If yes, what will be the drivers of the growth? Also, could you share the source for this data?

This was initially discussed by the World Economic Forum back in 2010. And yes, we are rapidly seeing a new world order, with the E7 growing far faster than the old G7. The general principle still holds true, although the definition of E7 – or the top emerging nations – has changed a little, for example Brazil becoming less successful.

The drivers of this growth? Population is one – predominantly in emerging markets. And in broad terms, the rise in personal incomes and living standards. As education has improved, so has business success – better standards of production, innovation and growth. The best ideas in business now largely come from emerging markets, not the developed markets. The G7 is largely stagnant, fading giants, trying to work out what to do next. The E7 are ambitious and energized, the new giants, plating a new game.

Next comes ‘recode your market.’ As you mentioned in the book, the terms market and industry has been overlapped. How do you define ‘market’? When you say ‘recode your market,’ what do you exactly mean?

Markets are blurring incredibly rapidly – the old boundaries and definitions of sectors are increasingly redundant, and many – perhaps most – companies now work in multiple sectors, and their solutions are combinations of multiple products and services.

I love the story of PingAn, which is the world’s second largest insurance company. They have a huge technological platform, and customer base of billions of people in China. How could they grow? Well by thinking outside of their old “market” definition. Jessica Tan tells how as COO, she developed PingAn’s new healthcare business, and now Good Doctor is the world’s largest healthcare platform offering online and physical services to over one billion consumers.

The best examples are probably the “Super-apps” that have emerged across the world, as online single-point to reach many different services – companies like WeChat from China, Jio in India, Grab in Singapore, GoJek in Malaysia, Line in Japan, Rappi in Colombia. Most either started as messaging platforms, taxi services, or online retail delivery services. Now they are also platforms for gaming, movies, healthcare, and most significantly financial services. Once they have a payments engine, or bank, they can become the core of almost every type of transaction you make. What sector are they in? Everything!

One of the ways business leaders can recode the market is by setting the market space. You argue that ‘a customer-centric mindset is the best way to setting market space.’ Could you elaborate on this? Also, how can business leaders change their mindset to a customer-centric mindset?

You can define your market any way you want, there are no rules, or limits!

Both in terms of what type of business you are in – transport can easily become mobility – and equally geographically. Increasingly, there are more commonalities between consumers across nations, than within a nation. Young people have more similarities with other young people in other countries, than with old people in their same country. Therefore why think in treating each geographical country differently, when you could develop different propositions by multi-national segments.

Taking a customer-centric mindset to define your marketspace is one of the most useful ways to reframe your market.

Take a pharmaceutical company – you could equally call it a healthcare company, which would give you the additional space to offer non-drug type of products and services, or you could even call it a “wellbeing” company, which would give you even more space to innovate and serve customers in areas such as nutrition and fitness. A drug company could become a sports company!

Or think about insurance. Most people inside insurance companies are obsessed about financials, about risks. When I take out car insurance, I actually want peace of mind, to enjoy driving. Therefore insurance companies, like Sompo in Japan for example, are no focusing on developing car driving services that enhance the driving experience. If these can also reduce the risk – for example, by encouraging safer driving – then they can directly benefit the core business, while also adding new revenue streams.

The fourth shift is ‘recode your innovation.’ Innovation starts with questions. In the book you explained Professor Hal Gregersen’s ‘Question Burst.’ Do you know any company that has implemented the ‘Question Burst’ method in its quest to recoding innovation?

I have worked with Microsoft over the last few years, helping them to strategically and culturally change their approach to the market. In the most simple terms this has involved a shift from product-thinking to customer-thinking.  In the past they were an organisation of salespeople selling billions of software licenses – Windows 365 to individuals, cloud computing to corporations.

Now, to grow further, and to add more value to their customers, they are focusing on understanding and solving customers problems. How can the software help their customers to do more? How can the Windows user be more effective at what they do? How can a small company in a small town become a global player, with the help of a cloud-based digital platform? The focus on problems, and exploring what the real problem is, is key to this.

Perhaps the most common ways companies recode their innovation is by developing new business models. Is there any new business model that you have recently learned about that impressed you?

The super-apps!

Do you think remote work will continue to grow? If yes, how can business leaders recode their organization as remote work expands? How can teamwork be created in the remote work environment?

Yes. But not in isolation from the real world. We will see almost every company moving to some form of hybrid working model. I actually prefer to call this a liquid model, because people will learn to move more fluidly between physical and digital modes. The same in education, the same in retail, the same in healthcare, etc.

Many organisations across the world have already stated that for many employees, they will continue to work 2-3 days/week at home. But this is more than home/office thinking. It is also about a more flexible, personalised lifestyle – something which young people particularly want. It will also drive a change in work contracts – we will see more flexible contracts, less permanent employees, more part-time, or short contract workers, maybe working for many companies at the same time.

Similarly, teamwork is not simply about being in the same place, or managers have sight of their people. In many cases, during Covid-19, team effectiveness actually increased, by people in different places – functions, or countries, or even companies – being able to easily join online meetings or workshops, and be involved in projects quickly and easily. Once we get used to the technology, and the ways of staying in touch socially too, then remote working will be an extremely positive force. But we are still human, and there are also times when it is better – and good for us – to be together physically!

When of the big areas I explore in the book is the rise of “extreme teaming”. This is largely about building teams that are more diverse, and more self-managed. Bringing together different types of people – age, gender, experience, attitude – drives greater creativity in teams. But also letting those teams have the power to define their roles, to manage their own progress, gives ownership and improved performance. Google and Netflix are great examples of this, as is Haier with its “rendanheyi” organisation model.

For companies to recode their transformations, ‘pivoting’ is essential. How can business leaders know how to pivot the business and when is the right time to doing so?

Innovation is a constant in business today, and so is transformation. Companies are constantly evolving. They therefore need to become much more “ambidexterous” – the ability to deliver for today, and create tomorrow, at the same time. One practical strategic way to do this is to develop a dual portfolio approach – a portfolio of innovations and businesses which will succeed in today’s world (to meet the needs of current customers, outperform current competitors, and generate profitability over 1-3 years), and also a portfolio to succeed in tomorrow’s world (future customers, competitors).

By working with two portfolios, business leaders can increasingly shift from today to tomorrow’s world. The “pivot” if you like, is the moment when the core business shifts from the old to the new. Take the earlier example of Hyundai, the today portfolio is about manufacturing better cars, the tomorrow portfolio about future mobility networks. The pivot comes when the core of Hyundai is no longer a car maker, but a mobility operator. Leaders need to judge when is the right time to make that shift.

Lastly comes “recode your leadership.” One of the ways to recode one’s leadership is to developing one’s own leadership style. What are the basic steps leaders take to developing their own leadership style?

I did a huge research study with IE Business School in preparation for writing the book about what are the changing characteristics of the most effective business leaders. I call this the new leadership DNA – and in particular it defines the critical role of leaders in creating better futures, making change happen, and delivering positive impact.

However there are many ways to be a leader. It is certainly not about standing at the top of the building and shouting commands! When we look at many of the leaders in the book – Anne Wojcicji at 23andMe or Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Piyush Gupta at DBS or Zhang Ruimin at Haier – they are all different. Yes they have incredible vision, they bring together great teams, they are problem solvers, and they have enormous courage to step up and make the future happen – but they are all different.

The biggest challenge in developing yourself as a business leader is in being authentic. And finding ways in which you can make your personal strengths work for you, and for others. There is no simple or single leadership model to follow. And indeed, leaders will need to behave in different ways at different moments. This is a real skill. But the leaders who can do this in an authentic way, will be more trusted by others, and will be more effective in themselves.

The book was written published before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Apart from the 7 shifts you illustrated in the book, are there any additional shift that should be included in order for business leaders to creating and delivering a better future amidst the current crisis?

The biggest shift now is to create a better future. As every company emerges from Covid-19, it is not about getting back to normal, but about imagining better. Now is the moment when business leaders need the imagination and courage to step up, to think different, and to accelerate the changes that are necessary and possible.

What is the most important insight you want readers to take away from ‘Business Recoded: Have the Courage to Create a Better Future for Yourself and Your Business’?

The pandemic has given us this unique opportunity to hit the “reset” button. It has given us a reason to let go of many of the old ways of doing business, and it has demonstrated why new ways are urgently needed. Now is the moment when investors, employees and customers, are seeking and supporting leaders who are brave and bold. Now is the time to have the courage to step up, to create a better future.

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