Peter Fisk

As part of the Business Recoded project, and my new book, I profile one of the most inspiring business leaders shaking up today’s world. He embraces the opportunities of relentless change, the power of disruptive technologies, and the courage to create a better future in his own vision. In the book, I explore the stories of many of the world’s most fascinating leaders right now, and develop 49 codes that help you redefine the future of your business, and yourself.

The Leadership Code of Tobi Lütke 

Shopify is taking the world’s retailers online. As the world locked down amidst pandemic, stores great and small lost their entire footfall. Overnight, many turned to the Canadian tech company for the tools that allowed them to relaunch, not just with a virtual store, but with the marketing, warehousing, payment and distribution infrastructure too. A small town store could instantly transform itself into a global player.

Shopify now supports over 1.6 million websites in 175 countries, and handled over $120 billion in sales during 2020. Its own revenue grew 86% to $2.9 billion over the last 12 months, and its market capitalisation from $46 to $137 billion in one year, making it Canada’s most valuable company.

40 year old Tobias Lütke grew up in Koblenz, Germany, and started writing code when he was 11 on his Schneider (aka Amstrad) computer. Dropping out of school at 16, he found an apprenticeship with Siemens. His boss was a guy named Jürgen Starr who Lütke idolised. “He was a long-haired, 50-something, grizzled rocker who came to work on his BMW motorcycle and wasn’t wearing a suit like he was supposed to” says Lütke. He immediately gravitated to him and his little group of rebels. “Jürgen was a master teacher. With him, I had 10 years of career development every year”.

Lütke met his wife Fiona in Canada on a snowboarding trip, and in 2002 moved to Ottawa to be with her. Without a degree, he couldn’t get a work permit, but could start a company, so launched an online snowboard shop,Snowdevil, with the financial support of Fiona’s parents (still his largest shareholders, and now billionaires). He struggled to find software to build his site, particularly one that went beyond a catalogue grid, and focused on the stories of snowboarding enthusiasts. Eventually he taught himself to code in Ruby, an open source language, and launched in 10 weeks. He soon started to get more enquiries about his site than his snowboards, people wanting to license his software.

In 2006, Snowdevil was relaunched as Shopify, licensing Lütke’s online store software, and also creating an API (application programming interface) platform that enabled other developers to offer additional tools through the Shopify app. In 2008 he headed to San Francisco at the invitation of several investors, although wasn’t sure he needed money as most of the programming was done by himself. Investors wanted him to move to Silicon Valley, but he refused, saying location is irrelevant to a modern business. However when the global financial crisis struck, he struggled to pay his small team turning to his father-in-law for support again. The silver lining came with a huge growth in customers during the downturn, as many people turned to starting up their own businesses.

In 2010, he launched a Build-a-Business competition, using his own toolkits, with significant cash prizes, and Richard Branson and Eric Ries as mentors. The business grew rapidly, partly by acquiring other software design businesses, and focusing on improving systems for everything from payments to flash sales, warehousing to distribution. In 2015, a year after finally moving out of his parent-in-law’s home, Shopify went public. It also became Amazon’s recommended partner for its Amazon Webstore merchants, while also developing new digital tools for physical stores too.

In 2018 Shopify opened its first physical space in LA, offering workshops and support to small businesses that use Shopify tools. In particular, it has retained a retail vision far beyond transactions, investing in creative studios to help retailers to develop new types of content, from blogs and movies to gamification including esports, and also to embrace social platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Shopify Balance enables farmers, craftsmen and small retailers to manage every aspect of their business online, from their smartphone.

Despite his success, and $9.8 billion net worth, Lütke still shares the passion of Shopify’s entrepreneurs, and is even said to have his own secret Shopify-built store, selling socks.

Facebook is planning to start its return to in-person work in May, after over a year of working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Bloomberg. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced remote work plans near the start of the pandemic that promised around half of his employees could work remotely in the next five to 10 years, but until then, in-person work, at least in a limited capacity, is in the company’s immediate future.

Uber is hoping to get back to in-person work even sooner. The ride-sharing company announced that it’ll reopen its Mission Bay, San Francisco headquarters on March 29th, with a limited 20 percent capacity, according to Reuters. Uber plans to follow similar COVID-19 restrictions as Facebook, requiring face coverings, regular cleanings, and asking employees with sick family members to stay home. Prior to this reopening plan, Uber was letting its office employees work from home until mid-September 2021.

Twitter took a big step and made working from home indefinitely an option for all employees at the start of the pandemic. The company doesn’t have a set date for when it will reopen its offices, however, but “it will be gradual, office-by-office, and at a 20 percent capacity to start,” a Twitter spokesperson tells The Verge.

Amazon issued a statement to employees  saying: “Our plan is to return to an office-centric culture as our baseline. We believe it enables us to invent, collaborate, and learn together most effectively.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the new work-from-home age, then. Part of the hesitancy is that although many employees want more flexibility, it’s still not at all clear what kind of model works for the companies.

 

“What it Takes” is the memoir of Steve Schwarzman, cofounder and CEO of Blackstone, one of the world’s largest investment firms.

He talks about why leaders need clarity of purpose, to dare to think big, and realise the profound impact of AI. One of his favourite sayings is that “it is just as easy to do something big as it is to do something small”.

Schwarzman grew up in an entrepreneurial family selling curtains in Philadelphia. His father was content with owning one store, but Steve was not. He had more ambition. At high school he wanted to bring the best bands to play. At college he started a dance society to meet more girls. He joined Lehman as a trainee, where he learned about finance and discovered his real strength. In 1985 he co-founded Blackstone with friend Pete Peterson, and grew it to hold over $500 billion in assets under management.

He believes that leaders in today’s complex and uncertain world need clarity of purpose, to dare to think big, and realise the profound impact of AI, saying “it is just as easy to do something big as it is to do something small”.

He believes that successful leaders must have the confidence and courage to act when the moment seems right. They accept risk when others are cautious and take action when everyone else is frozen, but they do so smartly. This trait is the mark of a leader. “To be successful you have to put yourself in situations you have no right being in. You shake your head at your stupidity, but eventually it gives you what you want.”

Having courage

Courage, according to my dictionary, is the choice to confront agony, pain, danger, uncertainty” and includes moral courage, “the ability to act rightly in the face of popular opposition”. Creating the future take courage.

Courageous leadership is what every employee hopes for and what every company needs. A courageous leader guides their people, empowers them by example, gives everyone confidence to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

Do you dare to create the future? The answer might seem obvious, but it means letting go of today, of what has worked over time, and what may still be delivering fairly good results.  Of course, there are ways to mitigate risks, and to do both, but it is typically a leap forward.

Courageous leaders have a strong belief in themselves, and whilst the future may still seem uncertain, you need to believe in the choices you make. Yet if they succeed, they leave a legacy of progress, which is far more satisfying than just maintaining the status quo.

Courage comes in many forms. It starts from inside, asking yourself if you are courageous enough. It requires you to put yourself out there, to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, grasping difficult issues, confronting things directly, grasping the “elephant in the room”, and seeking higher standards

Whilst courage requires boldness and energy, it also demands empathy and humility. Listening carefully to others, revealing your vulnerabilities, saying you don’t know if you don’t, delegating and giving credit to others, standing behind people in moments of failure, admitting mistakes and changing direction when needed.

Consider the three types of courage required of leaders in the workplace:

• “Courage to try” … which is the courage to take the first step. If you are doing something for the first time, it takes courage. It requires energy to overcome inertia, bravery to beat shyness, guts to give it a go. You might fail, you might get it wrong, or you might do something completely incredible
• “Courage to trust” … which is required to relinquish control. As a leader, you will need this courage in order to delegate to your employees, to give over control to staff, and to show your team that you trust them. It not only shows people that you trust them, but also that they can trust you not to micromanage their work;
• “Courage to tell” … which is needed to speak up, openly and with conviction, about your beliefs and ideas. It is about being assertive, confident, and caring. It’s not about sitting there, biting your tongue, or agreeing to disagree, it’s about speaking the truth, saying what needs to be said, stepping up.

Courageous leaders set the stage for others to follow, to accelerate progress.

Vulnerability and confidence

Courage is about leaders having the confidence to stand naked in front of their people, and to declare that they all need to do better, says Brene Brown in “Dare to Lead.”

Brown says that the biggest barrier to being a courageous leader is not fear. Everyone is afraid of change, complexity and uncertainty. The question is how we address fear – do we put up our shields in defence, or do we step forwards to tackle it?

She says that, for many leaders, their defensiveness limits their courage. They become more concerned about image than action, about being right, than making things better.

Brown describes four ways in which we can grow our courage

• Being vulnerable: having the courage to take part even if we can’t control the outcome, opening ourselves up to people, taking on difficult conversations.
• Living values: standing up for what we believe in, whether it be expressing a strong opinion on a controversial topic, or following through with actions.
• Trusting people: being the first to trust others, having the vulnerability and courage to have well-judged faith in people, and they will then reciprocate.
• Rising up: how we respond to fear or failure, when things don’t go according to plan, using our “growth mindset” to rise up to do better.

Whilst you need to step up to look beyond, you need to step forwards to take action.

Yet the future fills many of us with trepidation. It’s the unknown, and we don’t like not knowing. 54% of CEOs said that the uncertainty was their single greatest obstacle to creating the future, in a recent survey by EY, while IBM found only 41% of organisations believed they had the leaders to execute business strategy in today’s uncertain world.

Embracing uncertainty

We need to embrace uncertainty, and the opportunities it offers. We have grown to depend on precise knowledge, and detailed analytics based on the past. We prefer to make decisions based on certainty, to minimise risks and to maximise efficiency. When we are faced with incomplete information, high uncertain and therefore much higher risk, it is easy to feel paralysed. What can you do?

• Jump in: without embracing a challenge, you will never understand it, so better to start somewhere, to get started, to make sense of the situation. Actually the biggest part of making decisions, is understanding the problem.
• Accept you don’t know: you’re unlikely to have all the data, so start to explore the options and consequences of taking them, evaluate them the best you can within the context of what you are trying to achieve.
• Make the best choice you can: no decision will be perfect, because there are no right answers, and many decisions will have both upsides and downsides. 60% confidence that it is the right choice is good, 80% confidence is great.

The CEO Genome is a research project by Elena Botelho and Kim Powell, seeking to understand the common attributes of leaders. They found that much of what people assume to be the route to leadership, is actually wrong in today’s world.

Whilst we might think of leaders as the most ambitious in our team, over 70% of CEOs never had designs on the top job until much later in their careers. And whilst an elite education used to get you places, only 7% of leaders went to top-tier universities, 8% didn’t seek any higher education at all.

Most leaders have had to overcome some form of adversity in their journey, which may not create a “perfect” resume, but does equip them better to lead in the real world. Adversity in upbringing, adversity in previous jobs, adversity in their personal life. These are the moments that flex are muscles, but more importantly our minds. They are the moments that give us hunger, and determination, and courage.

Dare to be more

Leadership demands confidence and conviction. As a leader you suddenly have a constant stream of decisions coming at you, some strategic, many tactical. Whilst delegation is an essential tool, for many questions, the buck stops with you. You need to be decisive. You need to be reliable. You need to be adaptive. And you need to be bold.

Whilst many leaders can speak eloquently, can engage with their people, say all the right things about the need to focus on customers, to believe in people, and to drive profitable growth, the courageous leader is able to do much more. They have:

• Courage to inspire people to reach for new levels
• Courage to challenge the status quo
• Courage to take big decisions despite many unknowns
• Courage to innovate in areas or ways not done before
• Courage to act rapidly and decisively
• Courage to initiate difficult conversations
• Courage to take blame, to listen to everyone
• Courage to be open, honest and admit mistakes
• Courage to give credit where it is due

Leaders can always take the path of least resistance, they can maintain the status quo and not rock the boat, they can avoid addressing the real problems and instead seek temporary solutions, they can seek only small changes and avoid strategic risks, they can play politics and blame others, and seek to see out their term with the promise of a good pension. Or they can realise that in a world of relentless change, this will simply lead to quiet stagnation, to gradual decline, for themselves and their organisations.

Now is the time

Now is the time for leaders to step up – to have the courage to reimagine the future, to drive change and transformation, to take their organisations to a new place. As we emerge from the pandemic, there is no going back to where we were. We need to find a new place, a better place, and shape the future to our advantage.

Now is the time for leaders need to dare to be more – to be bold, brave and brilliant.

© Peter Fisk 2021

The pandemic pivot to digital, in some cases a decade of change in just 12 months, is perhaps most obvious in the rise of a new generation of integrated, mobile-centric service businesses known as “super-apps”. One of the most popular is WeChat, particularly in China where everyday life centres around the single app.

In recent months, there’s been a huge development in functionality and popularity of these super-apps. WeChat evolved from a social media platform into much more. GoJekand Grab both evolved from taxis to deliveries and payments. China’s Meituan started in food deliveries, and then mushroomed. As did Colombia’s Rappi. There is Line in Japan, Sea in Singapore, Bolt from Estonia, and Jio’s phenomenal free phone-driven growth in India.

Super-apps are sometimes likened to the Lord of the Rings’ mythical “one ring to rule them all”. They create more value for business by offering more ways to engage with existing customers, more often, more profitably. Customers can easily move from food orders to fashion, utility bills to movie tickets, taxis to games, in one click. No need to enter new passwords or payment details. As a result, there are huge efficiencies in customer acquisitions, technology infrastructures, and management. Investors love them too.

 

WeChat … from Chinese social media to mobile payments, launched by Tencent in 2011, and with 1 billion monthly users by 2018. It includes a diversity of messaging and video conferencing services, video games and photo sharing. User activity is tracked by the government, who also use it for government services, public information and social “credits” (or fines).

Gojek … launched in Indonesia as a motorbike taxi and delivery service in 2009 (“Ojek” means motorbike taxi), then rapidly spread into over 20 services and across nearby countries. GoRide, GoShop. GoPay. But also GoMed (healthcare), GoTix (tickets), GoClean (cleaning), GoGlam (hairstylist), GoAuto (car repairs), Go Bills (utilities), and even GoMassage.

Rappi … the Colombian super-app, has spread to over 200 Latin American cities over the last 5 years. It has a similar diverse range of services, some of the most popular being cash deliveries (from ATM to home) and dog walking. Also in demand during the pandemic have been RappiMall and RappiEntertainment, including live music and sports.

The term “super-app” was coined by Mike Lazaridis, the founder of RIM (Research in Motion, the Canadian company behind the Blackberry). In 2010, Blackberry was the market leader in smartphones, with a 42% global share. At the Mobile World Congress 2010 he introduced Super Apps, describing them as integrated, contextual, and seamless “apps that once you start using, you wonder how you ever lived without them”.

Key to this integration is the payments engine, which most have developed themselves, and in many cases that has meant essentially becoming banks too. Alipay, now evolved into Ant, is a powerful example. Indeed, Piyush Gupta, CEO of Singapore’s DBS bank recently said that payment platforms like GrabPay are their biggest challenges.

This also starts to explain why many tech platforms in more developed markets, like Europe and North America, have not evolved into super-apps. There is more established competition, delivery networks and payment services. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft offer diverse content, but not the same range of transactional services like deliveries, transport, and utilities, as many of these rising stars of the developing world.

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

What are the best ideas for business leaders to drive growth?

It’s been a difficult time. Growth has certainly not been the first word on most executive minds over recent months, as the impact of the pandemic have challenged every business, every industry, every part of the world.

However it has also been a time of incredible shake-up, shaking out those companies who were living on borrowed time (like Hertz who just didn’t evolve, or WeWork’s failed business model), and waking up those struggling to survive in a changing world.

Other companies have done remarkably well, accelerating innovation and growth, as consumers and industry structures have adapted and evolved (Tesla is the poster child with 690% market value growth last year, but many others too, digital platforms like Amazon and Pinduoduo, but also those that work with them, like Adyen and Visa).

So what are the best ideas for growth?

Each year I spend time looking for what is new, what matters and what works. I’m looking for practical tools that make a difference. They might come from thinkers, as typically collated by the like of Thinkers50 and Strategy-Business, but might equally come from practitioners, the most innovative companies around the world. I’m focused on the ideas that have impact, not just the intellectual concepts or personalities. Ideas that help you grow.

Here are the top 10 ideas:

Reimagining Capitalism … The drive for a more enlightened approach has been coming for sometime – stakeholder capitalism, shared value, purpose and profit – now really is the time to redefine why we do business, and what’s the real goal. Rebecca Henderson, born in London but now based in Boston, has a huge passion for this topic, and a great new book.

New Power … The shifts in power are obvious in some ways – look at the economic growth of Asian markets in recent years, or the influence of social media on consumer decision making – but in other ways are more subtle. Crowd power and collaboration are transforming how we invest, how we innovate, and the impact we have. Heimans and Tims show us how.

Managing Complexity … Sensemaking has become a crucial part of growth, understanding the complexity of growth drivers, and how new opportunities will really emerge. Clearfield and Tilcsik do a great job showing how everything is connected, but so do the likes of Kotler and Sarkar with their Wicked 7 project to address the world’s biggest problems.

Seeing around Corners … S curves are a simple representation, prompting much discussion about how markets evolve and businesses grow. Finding the inflection points enables us to know when new opportunities take offer. Look to outlying consumers, changing behaviours, market disruptors and parallel markets, to find the signals of change.

Self-tuning strategies … This could do the likes of McKinsey out of business, yet by harnessing the power of data, there’s no reason why a company can’t actively manage growth strategies themselves, and adapt them every day rather than once a year. Ming Zeng pioneered this approach at Alibaba, then wrote the book about it.

More is not better … Most businesses are obsessed about size, look at how many companies will drive revenue growth at any cost, and look to market share as the key metric. Ultimately they realise that such volume-based growth is limited and up squeezing more and more costs out of business. By growth, we mean profitable and sustainable growth.

Growth Portfolios … there are lots of useful ideas from Osterwalder and team, but the most valuable is probably the idea of thinking about innovation and growth in terms of portfolios – to exploit today, and explore tomorrow. Complex and uncertain markets mean we need more ideas, more options, more eggs in our basket. To survive, and also thrive over time.

Future Faster … I often say that we will see more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years. Diamandis would suggest we will see 1000 times more growth in that time. His passion is for the unlocking of exponential technologies. We’re all familiar with exponentials, but the key to driving them is the multiplying impact of using network-effects and his 6Ds.

Pivot to the Future … At some point you need to make the shift, from old to new world (like IBM most famously did, from computers to consulting). Pivots are becoming more common, in every kind of business, not just something start-ups do as they search for a meaningful business. When do you jump to new markets, develop new business, and shift your core?

Rocket Science ... Ok, this is fun in some ways but Ozan Varol takes his ideas as a scientist (creating the Mars Rover vehicle) and applying it to business. It brings together lots of the established ideas, from questions and lean thinking to moonshots and experimentation, to accelerate your mind to bigger opportunities in your “explore” portfolio.

These are the first 10 ideas in my overall framework, 50 Best Ideas for Business Leaders. These form an inspiring keynote session, or practical workshop for you and your teams. The ideas are constantly updated and published each year.

Download:

• 10 Best Ideas for Growth 2021 by Peter Fisk
• 50 Best Ideas for Business Leaders 2021 by Peter Fisk
• The New Agenda for Business Leaders 2021 by Peter Fisk

“How come every Zoom call lasts exactly 1 hour no matter how mundane the call is? And why did all the toilet-breaks disappear as Zoom became everyday work life in our bedrooms?”

“Why has a simple action like buying office equipment turned into a 6-people-committee decision followed by a 5-level approval process?”

It’s time to get rid of the wasted time red tape, to remove the silly rules and recover common sense to serve our customers better,  says Martin Lindstrom, aka the Lego kid.

Growing up in Denmark, he was so obsessed with the brick-building brand that he made himself a bed out of it. A few years later, Lego made him their youngest employee, recognising that they needed to get to know their most fanatical customers better. How can smart-suited and profit-seeking executives really understand what kids want?

Over more recent years he has written some fabulous books – from BrandChild to BrandSense, and more recently the fabulously named Buyology and Small Data – he has focused on bringing a passionate customer perspective to the challenges of brand building, strategic marketing and business growth.

Now he goes a step further as he seeks to “reposition” himself as a cultural transformation guru, with a message for the whole business, not just marketers. Of course, that’s all part of his message. We all need to work together. Customers aren’t just here to engage with your marketing, they are the whole purpose of your business. You could say everyone is a marketer, or you could just say it’s just common sense.

That’s why his new book is a rant against the complex and crazy bureaucracies that stop companies doing the obvious, the red tape that ties-up customers and employees in knots, the bullshit that gets in the way of doing what matters, what’s useful, and what works.

Welcome to “The Ministry Of Common Sense“.

Of course, because it’s Martin (who I have known as a fellow author and speaker for almost 20 years), this is not a boring business book (although his publisher did strike out his use of the full BS word!). Instead this is a book packed with crazy anecdotes from his personal travels around the world.

“No scissors. No knife. No fingernails. No teeth. I’m about to be at 30,000 feet with no way to open and remove my new headphones from its heavy plastic package.”

“There I was with my new $400 headphones mocking me through a hard plastic bubble, daring me to attempt prizing it open. I took the challenge, hoping for an easy victory as my flight had already been called and time was running out. An epic common sense fail!”

Looks like you need to call in the Ministry, which comes with three big ideas:

• Purpose. Companies have become so entangled in their own internal issues, and further beset by reams of invisible red tape, that they’ve lost sight of their core purpose.
• Simplicity. The Ministry of Common Sense is all about forcing stumbling organisations (and some of the world’s biggest appear in the book) to revisit the ever lost common sense
• Transformation. Shows you how to instantly remove unproductive BS, unblock innovation, and create an amazing culture. Ultimately reinstalling common sense.

He’s also a master of his own marketing. Now based in Australia, he has swapped his Lego for more expensive pop art, but retains a love of dressing in black, with an infectious smile and passion.

I particular love his story of how his book came about. The challenges of Covid-19, but also a tale of red tape in the world of publishing too. A little story every book publisher (who he calls “wonderful people in bureaucratic straitjackets”) should read:

“The time was 5pm, and I had one hour left to meet the deadline for my next big book.

Don’t be mistaken, this wasn’t my first deadline. Not that I’d missed the first deadline. In fact, I’d already delivered the manuscript, had it all signed off, witnessed the legal folks scrutinise every line, had the book typeset, and waited while 50,000 copies went through the printing press. Then Covid-19 arrived.

Writing a timely book is a delicate balancing act – unless the book itself creates the news. The publishing machine swallows nearly a full year, not to mention the time required to write the book. As a result, any brilliant thoughts you may have come up with face the risk of losing relevance and brilliance as the world, in the meantime, decides to move on.

I found myself stuck between a great idea and the biggest pandemic since 1918, with thousands of cartons of books in a large warehouse outside New York City (or so I thought).

Where’s the Covid?

In early March, as the first wave of Covid paralysed the world, I found myself on back-to-back calls with journalists. I’d planned on discussing my book, but one reporter after another asked me to reflect on the pandemic. I did my best, whilst aware that my book didn’t refer to Covid. Not one single time. In the beginning, I brushed off my book’s neglect of the topic that was on everyone’s mind. I denied it all, then began bargaining with myself. “No one will notice,” I told myself. Then a severe depression kicked in, somewhat resembling the five stages of loss.

After 50 interviews that were supposed to be about the book and turned into conversations about Covid, my only option was to cook up a lie. By early 2020, the publisher still hadn’t sent me a final copy of the new book. Left wondering, I used the excuse of needing a copy for a press photograph. I shot my editor an email asking for a copy. Not that I actually had a press photograph scheduled. We were all in lock-down mode, so no one had photos on our schedules. At first my email was greeted with silence. Then, some weeks later, I received a note saying, “We’ll look into it.”

A few months later came an apologetic note. The book hadn’t been printed after all. My lucky day, I remember thinking. I sent the editor an email: “Let me rewrite the entire book.” The response: more silence. Lots and lots of silence, for a very long time. Then, in August, good news  and some less than good news arrived. “Please rewrite the book – and do it in two weeks.” I suppose this was to be expected. A couple months of pondering, followed by a do-it-now deadline. I wondered why no one at the publisher had spotted this opportunity on their own.

But I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Common sense and publishing mix like oil and water.

Don’t get me wrong. I love books, bookstores, and the many wonderful publishing people I’ve dealt with since writing my first book some 20 years ago. With seven titles, 60 languages, and a few lucky New York Times bestsellers, I’ve had hundreds of interactions with the industry over the years. And, frankly, what I’ve encountered is a lot of wonderful people stuck in a bureaucratic straitjacket.

Did I write “oil and water’? Ironically, my day-to-day job is to help the largest companies adapt to change.

You can imagine my frustration when legal asked me to delete a less-than-flattering reference to a hotel. “Legal won’t carry the risk,” I was told.

“Risk?” I replied. “What’s the difference between me ranting on TripAdvisor or in a book, if I have it source-checked and backed with evidence?”

BS or AH?

Or how about my story about “one of the big-five credit card companies” completely messing up a customer interaction? “You can’t write, ‘one of the big five’,” legal told me. “Please change the sentence to ‘a credit card company’.” So you think Company X will sue me because they think they’re one of the five biggest in the world? As I exchanged multiple messages with legal, I recall writing, “I suggest your lawyer read the book a couple of times and get acquainted with the actual content.”

One thing I haven’t mentioned: the title of the book is The Ministry of Common Sense: How To Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate BS.

If you wonder why I ended up with “BS” in the book’s subtitle, I can only say: pick your battles. One of my publishers informed me that booksellers might be upset and not sell the book at all if it featured the letters in that word between the B and the T. “But what about the international bestseller The No Asshole Rule?” I asked. Robert Sutton got away with that title. He even blurbed my book, and his quote on my book jacket includes – you guessed it – the word “asshole”.

Sometimes I think of the publishing industry as a foreign object, landed on Earth from a distant planet called Gutenberg. I guess that’s somewhat ironic, as the very same industry commissioned me to write The Ministry of Common Sense.

Change has never been this fast – and it will never be this slow again.

News breaks across the globe within minutes. Glued to our little screens, we label anything older than a day “old news”. The president of one of my clients, Lowes Foods, recently said to me, “Those who go through Covid without completely changing didn’t get the message.” Some industries have used the pandemic as their opportunity to reinvent themselves, and other industries have completely derailed.

I will be forever grateful that my publishers, along the way, were willing to remove the straitjacket. Talking with them today, after we’ve shared the rewrite, I know they are, too. Please, dear publishing industry, please don’t put that straitjacket back on once the world has turned normal again.”

The old codes of business don’t work. It’s time to recode your business.

My new book “Business Recoded” is just published, and available now with 20% discount. You can also download a free sample.

This is my seventh book, not including those written collaboratively, and again published by Wiley. My previous books have done quite well – starting 15 years ago with “Marketing Genius” and “Creative Genius”, and others, then more recently “People Planet Profit” and “Gamechangers”.

To be honest, I don’t particularly enjoy the writing process, but I absolutely love exploring new ideas, taking the opportunity to think, interpret, and learn more – to make sense of what’s happening in the world right now, to bring together new theories, in practical and applied ways.

My books are built on practical insight, from talking with, usually working with, some of the most interesting business leaders around the world. Over the last year I learnt from more than 50 incredible leaders and innovators. They described their business fantasies and failures, how they work as organisations, and personally. It made me appreciate how fast the best approaches evolve, and that many business haven’t kept pace with a changing world.

 

Most business are just not fit for the future. And that was before Covid-19 … 9 months later, I could never have imagined how important it would be to reimagine your future, to reinvent your business, to recode how you work. Business Recoded is really about three things:

• Inspiring leadership: having the courage to step up, to look further ahead and shape a better future; more farsighted to make sense of change, more ambitious to embrace a higher purpose, and more energising to deliver that better future together.
• Strategic innovation: reimagining markets and how they work, how brands reengage with customers, and enable people to achieve more; and equally reimagining organisations, business models and ways of working in order to deliver this.
• Positive impact: developing business as a platform for change, and force for good; leveraging its power to address the big social and environmental challenges, aligning to create greater, long-term economic value, shared more equally between stakeholders.

This is set in the context of a changing world. New values and priorities, new generations and markets, new power and technology. More change in the next 10 years, than the last 250 years.

The old codes of business don’t work anymore. It’s time to recode your business.

It starts with leadership. We dive deep into the minds of some of today’s most inspiring people – like marathon running barrier-breaker Eliud Kipchoge and boat refugee Tan Le, but also courageous entrepreneurs like 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki and Impossible Food’s Pat Brown. There’s also the personal stories of healthcare pioneer Devi Shetty caring for Mother Theresa, and how the world’s top chef Rene Redzepi loves to forage in local forests.

More famous leaders feature, like Satya Nadella and Mary Barra, Jeff Bezos and Reed Hastings. And I explore physics with Haier’s Zhang Ruimin, learn about the personal transformations of Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Ping An’s Jessica Tan, Danish school teacher turned craft beer king Mikkel Bjergso, and the world’s “least powerful CEO” Supercell’s Ilkka Paananen.

“The New Leadership DNA” is the result of a huge study I did into how the leaders of the most innovative organisations see their role, and behave. They are “heads up” leaders, curious and collaborative, creative and courageous.

However I was also struck by some of the most interesting new approaches and techniques. Frederic Laloux’s “soulful” organisation model can be found in companies like Haier and Hydec, but when combined with the “fearless” teams of Amy Edmundson and the All Blacks, becomes much more powerful.

Similarly, the innovative approaches of the likes of Dan Heath’s upstream problems, Safi Bahcall’s loonshots, and Alex Osterwalder’s portfolio building, are even more exciting when connected with Scott Anthony’s dual transformation and Chris Rangen’s growth journey. Add to that the new psychology of change, Brene Brown’s courage, Alex Hutchinson’s endurance and Susan David’s emotional agility, then you have something which really does become effective, maybe even invincible.

What emerged were 7 mindset shifts, the new ways of thinking which will enable leaders to build organisations fit for a very different, but incredible future. The 7 shifts are:

• Aurora … Recode your future, from profit machine to enlightened progress, exploring your future potential, defining more purpose, and starting future back.
• Komorebi … Recode your growth, from uncertain survival to futuristic growth, riding the megatrends, to find new opportunities, and build a growth portfolio.
• Transcendent … Recode your market, from marginal competition to market creating, shaping new marketspaces, new customer agendas, and new brand models.
• Ingenuity … Recode your innovation, from technology obsession to human ingenuity, fusing man and machine to create more significant, enabling and impactful solutions.
• Ubuntu … Recode your organisation, from passive hierarchies to dynamic ecosystems, diverse and collaborative teams, inside and out, achieving more together.
• Syzygy … Recode your transformation, from incremental change to sustained transformation, building agility and responsiveness, performance and positive impact.
• Awestruck … Recode your leadership, from good managers to extraordinary leaders, heads up not heads down, the courage to create a better future.

These 7 mindset shifts are underpinned by the 49 codes, the practical building blocks towards a better strategy, organisation and future. Collectively they define “the new business DNA”, a blueprint for a better future business.

You can explore each of these 49 codes, and what they mean for you, in the book which is available now. And there’s also a range of keynote presentations, team workshops, practical tools, case studies and more too. Event organisers can secure bulk discounts too, so that every participant online, or in person, can walk away with a practical handbook for action. And there’s a new Business Recoded advanced leadership program, online and offline, for business leaders too:

You can find more details here: Business Recoded: Advanced Leadership Program. It can be delivered online or in person, and also customised to your sector and business.

It’s great to get some very nice feedback too, in particular from clients who I have worked with over recent years, and other leading business thinkers. Here are some of their comments:

• ‘Business Recoded is a great source of inspiration for leaders who want to explore, shape and prepare themselves for the future.’ … Alex Osterwalder, author of Business Model Generation and The Invincible Company
• ‘It is not often that we have moments of magic in any business. What Peter has given us is more than just ideas and inspiration, but a whole way of thinking about how we could reinvent our future, and start making it happen tomorrow,’ … Alberto Uncini-Manganelli, GM and SVP, Adidas
• ‘With energy, enthusiasm and a deep reservoir of fantastic examples, Peter Fisk maps out what each of us needs to do in order to re-calibrate ourselves and our organizations to create the future. Business Recoded is persuasive and compelling.’ … Stuart Crainer, founder, Thinkers50
• ‘Peter Fisk’s excellent new book, Business Recoded, will help ‘recode’ your business by tapping into the minds of some of the world’s most brilliant business leaders. It’s a must-read for anyone in need of a quick fix of inspiration and tried-and-tested advice.’ … Martin Lindstrom, author of Buyology and Small Data
• ‘Peter Fisk is a terrific storyteller with an encyclopaedic grasp of best business practices across the globe. If you want to disrupt the future of your business, this book is your decoder ring.’ … Whitney Johnson, author of Disrupt Yourself
• ‘A brilliant collection of practical guidelines intended to refresh and reinvent our mindsets, from a global thoughtful leader with vast experience in management development.’ … Santiago Iniguez, President of IE University.
• ‘Business Recoded is definitely a must-read for leaders that want to succeed with their organizations in our fast-changing world” … Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, author of The Project Revolution

You can download a free sample of the new book here: Business Recoded

Contents

Introduction

Business needs a new code for success

• Why do we need to recode?
• What are the new codes?
• The new DNA of business
• The new DNA of leadership
• Have the courage to lead the future

• Inspiration 1: Eliud Kipchoge
• Inspiration 2: DeepMind
• Inspiration 3: Tan Le
• Inspiration 4: Satya Nadella
• Inspiration 5: Mary Barra
• Inspiration 6: Jack Ma
• Inspiration 7: JK Rowling

Part 1: Aurora … Recode your future

How will you reinvent your business for a better future?

• Code 1: Explore your future potential
• Code 2: Have a future mindset
• Code 3: Imagine a better business
• Code 4: Find your inspiring purpose
• Code 5: Create your future story
• Code 6: Deliver more positive impact
• Code 7: Be the radical optimist

• Leader 1: Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe
• Leader 2: Elon Musk, SpaceX
• Leader 3: Patrick Brown, Impossible Foods
• Leader 4: Larry Fink, BlackRock
• Leader 5: Yves Chouinard, Patagonia

Part 2: Komorebi … Recode your growth

Where are the best opportunities to grow further and faster?

• Code 8: Ride with the megatrends
• Code 9: Find new sources of growth
• Code 10: Embrace the Asian century
• Code 11: Harness technology and humanity
• Code 12: Start from the future back
• Code 13: Accelerate through networks
• Code 14: Build a growth portfolio 

• Leader 6: Masayoshi Son, Softbank
• Leader 7: Emily Weiss, Glossier
• Leader 8: Wang Xing, Meituan Dianping
• Leader 9: Danae Ringelmann, Indiegogo
• Leader 10: Mukesh Ambani, Reliance

Part 3: Transcendent … Recode your market

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=part+3+business+recoded

How will you reshape your market to your advantage? 

• Code 15: Explore the market matrix
• Code 16: Disrupt the disruptors
• Code 17: Capture the customer agenda
• Code 18: Create new market spaces
• Code 19: Build trust with authenticity
• Code 20: Develop brands with purpose
• Code 21: Enable people to achieve more

• Leader 11: Bernard Arnault, LVMH
• Leader 12: Maria Raga, Depop
• Leader 13: Ali Parsa, Babylon Health
• Leader 14: Hooi Ling Tan, Grab
• Leader 15: Mikkel Bjergso, Mikkeller

Part 4: Ingenuity … Recode your innovation

What does it take to drive more radical innovation?

• Code 22: Be ingenious
• Code 23: Search for better ideas
• Code 24: Embrace a designer mindset
• Code 25: Create unusual connections
• Code 26: Develop new business models
• Code 27: Experiment with speed and agility
• Code 28: Dream crazy

• Leader 16: Rene Renzepi, Noma
• Leader 17: James Watt, BrewDog
• Leader 18: Jensen Huang, Nvidia
• Leader 19: Devi Shetty, Narayana Health
• Leader 20: Katrina Lake, Stitch Fix 

Part 5: Ubuntu … Recode your organisation

How can people achieve more together?

• Code 29: Build a butterfly ecosystem
• Code 30: Work as a living organisation
• Code 31: Collaborate in fast projects
• Code 32: Do human, inspiring work
• Code 33: Align individuals and organisations
• Code 34: Create energy and rhythm
• Code 35: Be an extreme team 

• Leader 21: Reed Hastings, Netflix
• Leader 22: Zhang Ruimin, Haier
• Leader 23: Cristina Junqueira, Nubank
• Leader 24: Jos de Blok, Buurtzorg
• Leader 25: Ari Weinzweig, Zingerman’s

Part 6: Syzygy … Recode your transformation

What does it take to transform your business effectively?

• Code 36: Transform your business
• Code 37: Exploit the core, explore the edge
• Code 38: Start outside in, and inside out
• Code 39: Engage people in change
• Code 40: Build rocket ships to the future
• Code 41: Create a circular ecosystem
• Code 42: Have the strategic agility to never stop

• Leader 26: Jeff Bezos, Amazon
• Leader 27: Bob Iger, Disney
• Leader 28: Jessica Tan, Ping An
• Leader 29: Piyush Gupta, DBS
• Leader 30: Javier Goyeneche, Ecoalf

Part 7: Awestruck … Recode your leadership

Do you have the courage to create a better future? 

• Code 43: Step up to lead the future
• Code 44: Have the courage to do more
• Code 45: Develop your own leadership style
• Code 46: Achieve your peak performance
• Code 47: Stay resilient, stay strong
• Code 48: Create a better legacy
• Code 49: Be extraordinary

• Leader 31: Jim Snabe, Maersk
• Leader 32: Daniel Ek, Spotify
• Leader 33: Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani
• Leader 34: Zhang Xin, Soho China
• Leader 35: Ilkka Paananen, Supercell

Business Recoded is about having the courage to create a better future. This can take many different forms.

The book starts with 7 short stories from very different people, in very different worlds, from business and beyond.  The stories are all about mindset, about the courage to do better, to achieve more, to break barriers, to be extraordinary.

Inspiration 1: Eliud Kipchoge

The humble Kenyan says that “no human is limited” and, despite his Olympic gold medals and world records, set himself a much more audacious goal.

“I don’t know where the limits are, but I would like to go there” said Eliud Kipchoge as dawn broke over the Danube river in Vienna.

Two hours later he stood in the middle of the tree lined Hauptallee, having just sprinted to the finish of the Ineos 1:59 Challenge, the first human to break two hours for the marathon. “That was the best moment of my life” he said, standing exhausted but still smiling at the finish line. The clock above him stopped at 1 hour 59 minutes and 40 seconds.

Having followed the Kenyan runner throughout his 20-year career, I watched his iconic record attempt in awe. Around him, some of the world’s greatest athletes, from Olympic 1500m Champion Matt Centrowitz to rising star Jacob Ingebrigtsen and the highly experienced Bernard Lagat, cheered and took selfies with the record breaker, pacemakers to the great man, happy to be part of history.

“Today we went to the Moon and came back to Earth” he said.

Back at home in Kenya, people were crowded round televisions, cheering for their runner. But Kipchoge lives a humble life, with the greatest clarity of purpose.

Every morning, just before 5am, in the small village of Kaptagat in western Kenya. He rolls out of bed, wipes the sleep from his eyes and gets ready to run. By the time the sun rises over the ochre red, dusty roads of the Rift Valley, he is well into his stride. Joined by dozens of ambitious young local runners, he strides past farmers heading for their fields, children waiting for their school buses.

This is just his first 20km, his first run of the day. Every day.

On returning to his training camp, it might be Kipchoge’s turn to make breakfast. Most likely it will be a simple bowl of ugali, a Kenyan staple made each day in a big pan from maize flour and water, plus whatever fruits are in season. Afterwards, he will probably hand-wash his running kit, ready for the afternoon session, and then take a nap. On other days, it might be his turn to head to the local farm for provisions, or to clean the communal toilets.

It is a frugal existence, particularly for a global champion, and self-made millionaire.

Yet for Kipchoge, the Olympic champion and world record holder, it is the only way of life that he has known. His wife and young children live in a much more spacious house in the town of Eldoret 40km away, but during his most important training periods, he prefers the simplicity of his spartan camp.

For 15 years, Kipchoge has been chasing a dream. I remember first seeing him run as a teenager, his bulging eyes fixed on the path ahead, always with a smile on his face. He showed early promise, beating world record holders Kenenisa Bekele and Hicham El Guerrouj to become the 1983 5000m world champion whilst only 18 years old. Over the next decade he won many medals but couldn’t call himself the best. As he reached his 30th birthday, he decided to move up to the marathon. To astonishing effect.

In the marathon, he became unbeatable.

In 2017, his sponsors Nike created a project to see if it would be possible to break 2 hours for the marathon. At the heart of their project was the Olympic champion, Kipchoge. They searched the world for the perfect location, choosing Monza’s Formula 1 motor racing circuit in Italy, the perfect conditions, the perfect pace set automatically by a Tesla car, and the perfect shoe. In the cool dark morning he set off, slipstreaming in behind a squadron of world-class pacemakers.

As his colleagues succumbed to the brutal and relentless pace, one man continued alone against the clock, although missing the historic barrier by 25 seconds. Kipchoge was unphased, delighted but determined to do better. He went back to Kenya and set about improving himself.

Listening to him, dressed in a dark suit and tie, as he addressed the Oxford Union later that year, it struck me that he is perhaps one of the most thoughtful, intelligent athletes you will ever meet. Constantly seeking to challenge himself as a way to progress. Always curious, always listening, wanting to read more and learn from others.

He is even a fan of motivational business books. In particular he regularly rereads Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People saying it taught him the importance of working hard, treating your profession as seriously as you can, and how to live alongside other people. He also likes John Maxwell’s 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth.

Why does he think he has become the best? Because of his mental toughness, he says. “Many of my peers train just as hard as I do. But success is more about having the right attitude”. Maybe unexpectedly for an African marathoner, he likes to quote Aristotle. “In any profession, you should think positively. That’s the driver of your mind. If your mind is really thinking positive, then you are on the right track. ‘Pleasure in what you’re doing puts perfection in your work.’”

Kipchoge is sometimes called the philosopher, sometimes even the Buddha. “No human is limited” says the rubber band that he wears around his wrist. “The mind is what drives a human being,” he says “If you have that belief – that you want to be successful – then you can talk to your mind. My mind is always free. My mind is flexible. I want to show the world that you can go beyond your thoughts, you can break more than you think you can break.”

What keeps him motivated, having achieved Olympic titles and world records? It was actually when he visited Iffley Road, the small Oxford running track where Roger Bannister had broken his 4 minutes for one mile, back in 1954, that Kipchoge became truly fixated by 2 hours, as a challenge and a legacy. He says “The world is full of challenges and we need to challenge ourselves. For me it is to run faster than anybody else in history.”

You might assume that once he found a winning formula, he would keep doing what he does. Not Kipchoge. A surprising supplement to his training schedule before Vienna was the introduction of aerobics and pilates. Seeing the highly tuned athletes working out to Pharrell Williams’ Happy soundtrack seemed almost surreal. “Constantly seek and embrace change” he says. “I know it is not really comfortable to adopt change but change in life of a human being or life of any profession is really important.”

He constantly asks himself what he could have done better, and what can he do in the future. He describes a tree planted near where he lives. “There is a sign next to it saying that the best time to plant a tree is 25 years ago. The second-best time is today.”

At the end of his 2-hour barrier-breaking run in Vienna, Kipchoge talked selflessly about how he hoped his moment would inspire others, not just to also beat the 2 hour barrier, but also for people to believe in the spirit of humanity, to rise above conflict and doubt. “We can make this world a beautiful world, a peaceful world, a running world”.

Inspiration 2: DeepMind

Whilst we marvel at extreme feats of human performance, we also know that technology has the potential to outperform humanity.

The ability to process huge amounts of data at incredible speeds, to learn through repetitive process, and to harness the strength and agility of robotics challenge many of the ways in which humans used to excel.

The game of chess has long served as a benchmark for AI researchers. John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence” in the early 1950s, once compared it to the way in which the fruit fly is used to understand genetics.

In 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer embarked upon a series of chess games against Garry Kasparov, the world champion. Deep Blue eventually beat Kasparov, marking the first time a machine had defeated a world champion.

Within a few years computing technology was consistently beating chess grandmasters.

However, AI developers knew that they needed greater challenges, searching for more complex games to test their increasingly sophisticated algorithms. They turned their attention to the ancient Chinese strategy game of Go, which is both deceptively simple to play, yet extraordinarily complex to master.

The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. It was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured aristocratic Chinese. Go has a larger board than chess, a 19×19 grid of lines containing 361 points, and therefore with many more alternatives to consider per move.

It took another decade of machine learning development until scientists were able to create a truly competitive AI-based Go player.

In 2014, a team at London-based DeepMind Technologies started working on a deep learning neural network called AlphaGo. Two years later a mysterious online Go player named “Master” appeared on the popular Asian game platform Tygem. The mysterious player dominated games against many world champions.

Eventually it was confirmed that the “master” was in fact created by DeepMind, since acquired by Google, and now a subsidiary of Alphabet.

The master was replaced by a grandmaster in 2017. AlphaZero, an enhanced version of the original system, embraced an even more sophisticated algorithm designed to learn as it progressed through games. The system simply plays against itself, over and over, and learns how to master whatever game it has been programmed to work with. Searching through 80,000 positions, a fraction of what other predictive software had used, it had perfected the game in 24 hours using an AI-type of intuition.

AlphaZero achieved two things: autonomy from humans, and superhuman ability. Scientist and futurist James Lovelock calls this “the novacene”, translated as “the new new” in Latin and Greek, where a new form of intelligent life emerges from a human-initiated AI-based machine into one which no longer requires human intervention.

He calls AlphaZero, and other such beings, cyborgs.

In his book “Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence”, Lovelock suggests that AI-based entities can think and act 10,000 times faster than humans (and to put that in perspective, that humans can think and act 10,000 times faster than plants). He then reflects that maybe AI-based life would be rather boring, considering that a flight to Australia using physical transport would currently take 3000 AI-based years.

The real point of a cyborg, a term first coined by Austria’s Manfred Clynes to describe an organism as self-sufficient as a human but made of engineered materials, is that it is able to improve and replicate itself.

Which quickly takes us to a future beyond what Hungarian John Van Neumann called “the singularity”, the point at which intelligent technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible. Both physicist Stephen Hawking and entrepreneur Elon Musk have warned of the profound implication of autonomous AI.

Of course, we already have many devices that learn and improve continually. Take Google Maps, for example, which constantly learns from all its users about realtime traffic situations, and the more users it has the better the information becomes. Or consider Google Nest, an intelligent thermostat which takes control of the temperature in our homes. For now, they are useful tools, to help us live better.

Inspiration 3: Tan Le

The Vietnamese boat refugee who found a new beginning in Australia, qualifying as a lawyer, then creating Emotiv, a world-leading neurotechnology company.

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

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

Fortune came in the shape of a British oil tanker, which offered to rescue them. After 3 months in a refugee camp, the family were offered a flight to Australia. As the plane flew across the unknown country, she was struck by the huge emptiness of the land, and later reflected on it as symbolising the new opportunities which she could never have imagined. On landing, her mother told her to kiss the ground, as this was a special place.

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

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

She started to look beyond her mum’s dream of her becoming a doctor or lawyer. With a degree from Monash University she qualified as a lawyer, but quickly turned her attention to software engineering, exploring how brainwaves can control digital devices.

It was all about understanding the brain in context, and how it could be directed to do more productive work, to engage consumers more deeply with brands, to help people with disabilities. Her early work included the development of EEG (electroencephalography) headsets by which you can control a car, or drone, or game, with your mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiration 4: Satya Nadella

The Indian-born CEO says he doesn’t want to be cool, but to make other people cool, inspiring Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable business, again.

Technology’s impact on our lives is still in its infancy. From mobile phones to social networks that bring new connections and instant gratification, to the reinvention of every industry. This is where Microsoft sees its future.

After 15 years of Bill Gates’s visionary leadership in the emergent technological world, “putting a computer on every desk”, Microsoft declined under the heavy-handed control of Steve Ballmer. Until in 2014 when Satya Nadella took over, and in his words, “hit refresh”.

His first speech as CEO did not even mention the word “Windows”, the company’s proprietary operating system, and cash cow. Instead he said “the world is about cloud first, mobile first” setting out his new priorities for growth.

Within five years he had more than quadrupled the company’s value, and with a focus on how a new generation of technologies, most significantly AI, can enable other companies to transform themselves, with the help of Microsoft.

“We don’t want to be the cool company in the tech sector,” Nadella says, “We want to be the company that makes other people cool.” By which he means that his mission is to build Microsoft as the enabling force behind today’s business world. Whilst his predecessors burnt their fingers trying to create branded hardware, most notably acquiring Nokia’s mobile business, Nadella is happier to create the smart insides of other people’s solutions.

To be the partner, the enabler, to empower others to be great.

At Microsoft’s huge Redmond campus, just outside Seattle, there is a revolution in attitude and practice. Gone is the ego-driven, insular thinking of old. Boardroom strategies are replaced by hackathons where anyone can shine. Elitist developers are usurped by ideas that can come from anywhere. Collaboration with partners, even Apple and Amazon, is the new normal. And big human and ethical dilemmas are top of the company’s agenda, how to control intelligent machines, how to address global healthcare and inequality.

But this is not a cult of leadership, or a hierarchy of command. Nadella is a very modern leader, recognising that his role is not to be the expert, or the hero, or the decision-maker – but to be the facilitator, the connector, the enabler. Behind that behaviour is his belief in the idea of a “growth mindset. Nowhere will you find this approach to leadership more clear, applied and powerful than in today’s Microsoft.

“Growth mindset” is a simple but powerful concept that I use constantly in my work with business leaders. One of the biggest problems companies run into, and the successful ones even more so, is that they keep trying to perfect their existing world. Instead, it’s probably time to let go. As the world changes, ever more dramatically, leaders need to change too – looking forwards not back, experimenting with new ideas, rather than seek to optimise the old. Efficiency savings won’t create your future, but ideas and imagination just might. Move from diminishing returns to exponential opportunities.

“Don’t be a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all” Nadella loves to say. “In 2014, we cancelled our company meeting where our leaders would tell employees what was important, in favour of having a hackathon that lets our employees tell our leaders what’s important,” recalls Jeff Ramos, head of the Microsoft Garage, where employees with a bright idea can come and experiment, build, hack, and see if there ideas have potential.

I recently watched Nadella take to the stage at Microsoft Envision, a huge event where the company brings together many of the world’s leading CEOs to explore the future, there was a real energy in the room. From him – a great beaming smile, an uplifting speech, an entirely positive demeanour – but also from his team too. He believes in a new business world – one where teams beat hierarchy, where collaboration beats competition, where humanity is always superior to technology, and where dreams outperform numbers.

In November 2018, Microsoft became the world’s most valuable company again, after a gap of 16 years. 7 months later the business soared through the trillion dollar market cap mark. At the end of 2019, Nadella was named Financial Times’ Person of the Year, saying that “Microsoft was at risk of technological irrelevance but Nadella has presided over an era of stunning wealth creation.”

Inspiration 5: Mary Barra

She challenged the traditional culture of GM in dramatic style, rejecting complacency and embracing new tech, on a mission to reinvent her industry.

Car making is far from a luxury business, particularly in the decimated heartlands of the American car industry. The arrival of better, cheaper brands like Toyota from Japan, and more recently others from China and South Korea, fundamentally challenged local makers. Globalisation was killing the local industry.

Mary Barra grew up just outside Detroit, at a time when the city and car making was booming. Her father Ray Makela worked as a dye maker for 39 years at the Pontiac car factory, whilst Mary started working in the industry at the age of 18, checking fender panels and inspecting hoods to pay for her college education.

“My parents were both born and raised in the Depression. They instilled great values about integrity and the importance of hard work, and I’ve taken that with me to every job” she says.

When studying at the General Motors Institute, her tutor recalled how he taught her many aspects of car design, including how to make windscreen wipers work. He said she was always the leader, taking charge of mostly-male groups, balancing her strong technical knowledge with her easy-going communication skills.

She joined GM full time and worked through the ranks, becoming VP of Global Manufacturing in 2008, and then of Human Resources. In 2014, with the business increasingly struggling to survive, and uncertain about a future that looked electric and driverless, she became CEO.

Today she is a woman on a mission, to save GM and to reinvent her industry.

In her first year as leader, GM was forced to recall 30 million cars due to safety issues that resulted in 124 deaths. She was called before Senate to explain the problems, and brand reputation plummeted to an all-time low. The recalls, however, also demanded significant change in work practices. She introduced new policies for employees to report problems, and a new culture of openness and determination to fight back was born.

Over the next five years Barra pushed GM to transform itself, to embrace innovation and new ways of working, both operationally and strategically. In particular she wanted to seize the leadership in new technologies such as hybrid engines and automated driving.

Asked by CNN what it takes to transform a traditional business she said “It takes a lot! You need the right people, the right culture and the right strategy. To be truly great, your team must have diversity of thought and be willing to collaborate constructively.”

“Your company culture should empower and inspire people to relentlessly pursue the company’s vision, always with integrity.  A strong strategy is the roadmap to achieve your vision, but you need strategies for this year, as well as the next five, 10, and 20 years — and they all may need to work in tandem. Our vision at GM is a world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion, and everyone on the team knows we are committed to putting the customer at the centre of everything we do.”

“At GM we live and work by a set of seven behaviours, one of which we call Innovate Now. This means ‘I see things not how they are but how they should be.’ So, we empower our teams to innovate and create, while also understanding macro trends.”

In 2016 Barra splashed out over $1billion to invest in Cruise, a software business for driverless cars. She put it at the heart of her revolution. Her acquisition gave the old business an injection of new capabilities, but also new courage and creativity too.

“My definition of ‘innovative’ is providing value to the customer” she adds.

Her move was worth $20 billion of market value in investor confidence alone. Soon revenues started to grow back, employees and customers both believed in a new future. The Chevy Bolt, a car with no steering wheel, suddenly made autonomous dreams real, and the GM brands started to become desirable again.

Inspiration 6: Jack Ma

The Hangzhou teacher on $12 a month built Alibaba into a $400 billion global technology leader over 20 years, before retiring to become a teacher again.

Technology, of course, is not everything. Whilst machines might eclipse 30% of the human jobs of today, there will still be a need to achieve more than speed and efficiency. This demands that humans rise up to harness their more distinctive assets, to be creative and intuitive. To go beyond the technology.

Ma began studying English at a young age, spending time talking to English-speaking visitors at the Hangzhou international hotel near his home. He would then ride 70 miles on his bicycle to give tourists guided tours of the area to practice his English. Foreigners nicknamed him “Jack” because they found his Chinese name too difficult to pronounce.

In 1988 he became an English teacher earning just $12 a month, and describing it years later whilst speaking at the 2018 World Economic Forum, as “the best life I had”.

From teaching, he soon had ambitions to do more. He applied for 30 different jobs and got rejected by all. He wanted to be a policeman but was told he was too small. He tried his luck at KFC, the first one to arrive in China. Famously he retells the tale “24 people went for the job. 23 were accepted. I was the only guy who wasn’t.” He applied to Harvard Business School, but was rejected 10 times.

He persevered, seeing every step as a learning experience. In 1994, Ma heard about the Internet. One day, when searching online for the different beers of the world, he was surprised to find none from China. The world’s most consumed beer brand, Snow beer, is of course Chinese. So he and a friend launched a simple Chinese language website called China Pages. Within hours investors were on the phone, and within three years he was generating over 5,000,000 Chinese Yuan.

“My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.”

Interviewed at the World Economic Forum he said “I call Alibaba 1001 mistakes. We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn’t know how we’d make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us.”

Over the next two decades he built Alibaba into a $400 billion organisation. In 2017, to celebrate the internet giant’s 18th birthday, Ma appeared on stage dressed like Michael Jackson, turning the event into a “Thriller” performance. His passion for his company, and for his audience of employees, shone through.

Looking back he reflected “The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you’ve got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don’t give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.

And about himself, often quoted as a supporter of the “996” work mindset (working from 9am until 9pm, 6 days a week), he adds “I don’t think I’m a workaholic. Every weekend, I invite my colleagues and friends to my home to play cards. And people, my neighbours, are always surprised because I live on the second floor apartment, and there are usually 40 pairs of shoes in front of my gate. We have a lot of fun.”

On Alibaba’s 20^th birthday, himself now 54 years old, and worth over $40 billion, he decided to retire saying “teachers always want their students to exceed them, so the responsible thing to do for me and the company to do is to let younger, more talented people take over in leadership roles so that they inherit our mission ‘to make it easy to do business anywhere’.”

“Having been trained as a teacher, I feel extremely proud of what I have achieved,” he wrote to his colleagues and shareholders” before adding “I still have lots of dreams to pursue. I want to return to education, which excites me with so much blessing because this is what I love to do. This is something I want to devote most of my time to when I retire.”

He spoke passionately about the challenges for the future of education in Davos saying: “A teacher should learn all the time; a teacher should share all the time. Education is a big challenge now – if we do not change the way we teach 30 years later we will be in trouble. We cannot teach our kids to compete with the machines who are smarter – we have to teach our kids something unique. In this way, 30 years later, kids will have a chance.”

Inspiration 7: JK Rowling

Harry Potter was the culmination of her own story from poverty and rebellion to fame and fortune. “It matters not what you are born, but what you grow to be.”

The power of our imagination, to drive creativity and innovation, to engage people with empathy, and to inspire their dreams, was the theme of Joanne Rowling’s speech to graduating students at Harvard University in 2008.

The bestselling author, better known as JK Rowling, told how she used her experiences of working as researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International to imagine the stories that became her much loved books.

She conceived the idea for her “Harry Potter” books while on a delayed train from Manchester to London in 1990, and started imagining a story of a young wizard who went to wizard school. Without anything to note down her ideas, she rapidly set out an entire plot in her head, then tried to write it down on arriving home.

The next 7 years were tough, with the death of her mother, birth of her first child, and divorce from her first husband. Having lost her job, because she sat dreaming about her plots, she decide to move to Porto where she briefly married a local TV journalist, before heading to Edinburgh to be with her sister.

In 1995 she sent her manuscript off to every publisher she could fund, but was rejected by all, being told that her story was too long, too elitist, and too complicated. Eventually the CEO’s daughter at Bloomsbury, a children’s imprint, read that story and couldn’t put it down. Her influence on her father resulted in a £4000 advance to Rowling. The only catch was that they felt her pen name needed more style, so she borrowed a middle initial from her grandmother, Kathleen.

“Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was published in 1997 to rave reviews. What really changed her life, was when the publishing firm Scholastic came in to buy the American rights to the book for a sensational $105,000. The book sold 80,000 copies in the first year, and hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Over the years since it has become the most financially successful novel in history with 400 million readers, and generating $10 billion of sales.

Her own story, a little like Jack Ma’s, was one of rags to riches, as she progressed from living on state benefits to being the world’s first billionaire author. She lost her billionaire status after giving away much of her earnings to charity, but remains one of the wealthiest people in the world.

She wrote her first book “Rabbit” when she was six years old, about a rabbit who lived in her village of Tutshill in Gloucestershire, who got sick and was cared for by a bumble bee called Miss Bee. She was convinced she could be a writer, even though she lacked confidence otherwise.

When Rowling was at school her parents didn’t want her to pursue her dream of being a writer because they worried it wouldn’t pay a mortgage. She ignored them, saying listen to your friends, family, and those who care about you, but remember it is your life. “If you have a gift, talent, dream, then pursue it. There’s no way anybody knows how it will turn out, but if you love it and you put all your energy into it, your chances of success are great.”

Her editor at Bloomsbury, the publisher who took a huge gamble on the unknown author, says that Rowling’s great strength is that she has “a microscopic and macroscopic view of the world” which enabled her to tell such imaginative tales in such engaging detail.

Passing exams, she said to the new Harvard graduates, does not determine your success. Whilst she admitted to having a knack for taking tests and passing exams, she also said that it was her failures that had taken her further. “It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously, you might as well not have lived at all– in which case, you fail by default.” Rather than seeking to avoid failure, we must be willing to accept that it is going to come and be ready to build our lives off it.

“To get through life without failing,” she said, “would not be a life worth living.”

“Imagination is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared” says Rowling, proclaiming that imagination is crucial for life. Without it, we ignore the one truly unique quality that differentiates us from all other species, effectively claiming that we are human.

Perhaps we should also remember the words of the Rowling’s great wizard Dumbledore, headmaster at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, who said “It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”

© Peter Fisk 2020.

“Two characteristics that make Peter Fisk one of my favorites thought leaders in the strategy field are his ability to make complex matters simple and his positive views about the future, focusing, through real case studies, on the opportunities laid ahead, rather than the hurdles. His new book, Business Recoded, is definitely a must-read for leaders that want to succeed with their organizations in our fast-changing world”.  Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez,  author of “The Project Revolution” and “The Focused Organization”.

© Peter Fisk 2020

“Business Recoded” by Peter Fisk is available now.

2020 was a year of turbulence so seismic in scale and rapid in impact that we are only starting to recognise the consequences. Every market has been shaken up, challenging the old models, and accelerating the new. It has seen a dramatic “recoding” of almost every industry, and phenomenal growth by companies who opened their eyes to the opportunities of change.

As the world locked down and moved online, tech companies boomed. Amazon invested $4 billion to secure its operations, and accelerated its strategy to become the logistics partner of the digital age, with a $700 billion benefit (79% growth in 2020). Apple did even better, having taken 42 years to reach $1 market cap, it soared to its second trillion in just 21 weeks.

However tech was not the only sector with seismic shifts in performance. End of year analysis by FT and Bloomberg identified which companies performed best in terms of market value, as shown above, in terms of 12 month % value growth, and market capitalisation at end of year.

Tesla’s mind-boggling growth, dominating the automotive market, is not just about cars. With a purpose to “accelerate the world’s transition to clean energy”, Musk and his team are most interested in the batteries that power the cars, with the moonshot goal of a “million mile battery” dominating research at his “gigafactories” in Berlin and Shanghai.

Toyota, the second most valuable auto business, lags far behind, valued at $240 billion. It sells 20 times more cars, but at half the price, although with similar gross margins. The future trajectory, of course, massively favours Tesla. Chinese luxury EV brand Nio, founded by William Li, is now the #4 most valuable company, valued at $88 billion – double BMW’s value.

Retailers are obviously seeing a huge transformation too, but it’s not simply digitalisation, more a convergence of related activities – shopping, gaming and socialising. Take Huang Zheng’s Pinduoduo, for example, the Chinese online shopping concept combines social interaction, gamified engagement, and huge discounts. Singapore’s Sea Group, led by Forrest Li, has a similar business, combining retail and gaming. And social media platforms, from Pinterest Pins to Instagram Shops, have all rapidly embraced “social shopping”.

The dramatic, Covid-accelerated transformation of markets is also obvious in the energy sector. The last 12 months have seen the demise of every oil major – Aramco, Exxon, Shell, and many more – rapidly replaced by a new generation of renewable energy companies, like USA’s New Era, Italy’s Enel and Denmark’s Orsted, as shown by this Bloomberg chart:

Here are the “winning” growth companies of a turbulent, in many cases terrible, but also incredible year (ranked by region, and by % growth in market capitalisation over the 12 months):

North American Winners

1. Tesla, USA … (787% increase in market value, $669bn at end-2020) … Some people thought Tesla’s $75bn valuation at the start of the year was too much. By the time Musk’s business entered the S&P 500 in December it was almost 9 times more valuable — more than the world’s next 7 car manufacturers combined. Tesla expects to have produced about 500,000 in 12 months, half what Musk projected in 2016, but it has now recorded a profit in five consecutive quarters, the industry shift to electric vehicles continues to accelerate.

2. Zoom, USA … (413% increase in market value, $96bn at end-2020) … Eric Yuan’s Zoom became synonymous with communication during the months of Covid-19. In the space of a year, the number of business subscribers with at least 10 employees using the service jumped x5. Big tech was left behind, although Google Hangout and Microsoft Teams now have Zoom in their sights, and Yuan will need to continue innovating, potential with more collaborative work tools, once the lockdown is lifted.

3. CrowdStrike, USA … (367% increase in market value, $47bn at end-2020) … Demand for the cybersecurity software has soared as companies are forced to work virtually, and accelerate their move of data to the cloud. CrowdStrike, which floated in June 2019, made its name after exposing Russian hackers inside the servers of the US Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election.

4. Pinterest, USA … (291% increase in market value, $41bn at end-2020) … The online pinboard app’s popularity has grown rapidly during lockdown as entertainment-starved youth turned to it, drawing advertisers as brands took advantage of the “social retail” boom. Innovations such as Product Pins, Pinterest Predicts, and more, have accelerated a new approach to online shopping between friends. Monthly average users grew by 40%, and revenues by almost 60%.

5. Twilio, USA … (279% increase in market value, $51bn at end-2020) … Twilio’s fast growth has not received much attention, however the San Francisco-based company’s APIs (application programming interfaces) plug into the computer code behind popular apps such as Instacart and Uber, allowing them to communicate with customers through text and voice. Demand has risen rapidly during the pandemic, with 51% revenue growth in the first 9 months of 2020, though it is still losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

6. Square, USA … (265% increase in market value, $98bn at end-2020) … consumers switched cash for cards.

7. Snap, USA … (226% increase in market value, $75bn at end-2020) … mini streamed video and wellbeing.

8. Chewy, USA … (221% increase in market value, $37bn at end-2020) … online auto-replenished food for pets.

9. The Trade Deck, USA … (279% increase in market value, $51bn at end-2020) … adtech, shaking up ad agencies.

10. Docusign, USA … (212% increase in market value, $41bn at end-2020) … from edocs to AI-enabled transactions.

Asian Winners

1. Sea, Singapore … (446% increase in market value, $102bn at end-2020) … South-east Asia’s most valuable company remained strong in all three of its core businesses: gaming, shopping and digital payments. Garena’s Free Fire mobile game won millions of new players in 2020 while its Shopee platform has become the region’s most downloaded shopping app. Forest Li’s business is now moving deeper into finance after recently obtaining a coveted digital banking licence in Singapore. But the company is still struggling to become profitable, with net losses widening in the third quarter.

2. Pinduoduo, China … (396% increase in market value, $218bn at end-2020) … Colin Huang’s gamified online retailer’s rise was accelerated by the pandemic as hundreds of millions of Chinese shoppers turned to their smartphones rather than malls. The downturn drove demand for ultra-cheap goods, with revenues up 70% in the first nine months of the year. It also swung closer to profitability as it reined in discounts.

3. BYD, China … (359% increase in market value, $78bn at end-2020) … Chinese electric automaker BYD recovered rapidly from a Covid-induced slump in sales after the July release of its sporty Han model, a competitor to Tesla’s popular Model 3. It is the first BYD model to use the company’s recently developed “blade” battery, a smaller and more energy-dense power pack. It has helped the Warren Buffett-supported company, the world’s largest electric car producer by volume, regain ground lost to Tesla and Chinese start-ups.

4. Shanxi Xinghuacun Fen Wine Factory Co, China … (346% increase in market value, $50bn at end-2020) … The Chinese spirits maker known for its broad product line, Xinghuacun Fen benefited from China’s post-Covid recovery. The company, once a regional player in the northern province of Shanxi, has also benefited from expanding nationally. In Shanghai, one of the nation’s most competitive liquor markets, Xinghuacun Fen reported a more than 50 per cent jump in revenue in 2020.

5. LONGi Green Energy Technology, China …(296% increase in market value, $53bn at end-2020) … The world’s largest producer of silicon solar wafers had a strong year, riding high on expectations that China will rapidly increase the amount of solar energy to meet its climate change commitments. In December, President Xi  said the country would grow the share of non-fossil fuels in its primary energy consumption to 25% by 2030, with a target of more than 1,200GW of wind and solar capacity — compared with just over 200GW of cumulative solar energy capacity at the end of 2019.

6. CATL, China … (265% increase in market value, $98bn at end-2020) … lithium ion batteries for car makers.

7. China Tourism Duty Free, China … (239% increase in market value, $84bn at end-2020) … China’s largest chain.

8. Wuxi Biologics, China … (230% increase in market value, $37bn at end-2020) … contract pharma R&D and production.

9. Xiaomi, China … (227% increase in market value, $108bn at end-2020) … Lei Jun’s low-cost Android smartphones.

10. Chongqing Zhifei Biologics, China … (211% increase in market value, $35bn at end-2020) … China’s vaccine maker.

European Winners

1. Adyen, Netherlands … (189% increase in market value, $71bn at end-2020) … The Dutch payment processor continues to rise in one of the most hotly contested spaces. Its technology, which allows customers such as Nike to use one payment platform across all their global storefronts, has led to rapid top-line growth and 60 per cent profit margins — a rare combination in a world of loss-making tech startups.

2. Vestas, Denmark … (142% increase in market value, $48bn at end-2020) … the world’s largest maker of wind turbines from Aarhus has seen revenues and profits rise. The Danish manufacturer’s revenues have grown 50% over the past two years as volumes increased, even though the price of wind turbines fell. The growth has put Vestas in expansion mode, retaking control of its offshore wind subsidiary (spun out as a JV in 2013).

3. EDP Renewables, Spain … (138% increase in market value, $24bn at end-2020) … stands out as a “pure play” renewables group with 11.5 gigawatts of installed wind and solar capacity in the US, Europe and Brazil. Energias de Portugal, its parent company, has invested more than €20bn in renewables since 2006 and plans to lift green energy generation to 90% of output by 2030

4. Siemens Gamesa, Spain … (132% increase in market value, $28bn at end-2020) … The Bilbao-based wind turbine manufacturer enjoyed a steady climb during the pandemic, benefiting from governments’ plans to focus economic recovery plans on renewable energy. Following several legal disputes between the main shareholders, Siemens in February cemented control of the business, buying out Iberdrola’s 8.1 per cent stake for €1.1bn to take its own holding to 67 per cent.

5. Zalando, Germany … (125% increase in market value, $28bn at end-2020) … From locked-down fashion mavens to shoppers avoiding crowds, pandemic-era retail was such a boon for Zalando that it raised its profit forecast twice in 2020. Europe’s largest online fashion retailer now expects full-year earnings before interest and tax to be more than double the €166m it reported previously. The Berlin-based group is investing €50m, including waiving commissions until March, in an effort to triple the number of brands that sell across its platform in the coming year.

6. Spotify, Sweden … (123% increase in market value, $98bn at end-2020) … wellness podcasts and instrumental music kept us sane.

7. EQT, Sweden … (121% increase in market value, $24bn at end-2020) … private equity company snapping up Covid victims.

8. Sartorius Stedim Biotech, France … (116% increase in market value, $33bn at end-2020) … driven by Covid vaccines, treatments and testing.

9. Worldline, France ... (110% increase in market value, $27bn at end-2020) … online payments booming through ecommerce.

10. Neste, Finland… (110% increase in market value, $56bn at end-2020) … oil refiner who shifted to renewables.

South American Winners

1. Mercado Libre, Argentina … (194% increase in market value, $84bn at end-2020) … Thanks to the burst in online shopping since the outbreak of Covid-19, MercadoLibre (or “free market” in Spanish), has become the biggest company in Latin America. The region’s answer to China’s Alibaba is now worth $83bn on Nasdaq having more than doubled its value over the past year. Founder Marcos Galperín says that his company would keep growing for at least another decade, given that the digital transformation of retail is at an early stage in Latin America.

2. StoneCo, Brazil …(134% increase in market value, $26bn at end-2020) … As Wirecard collapsed, payments upstart StoneCo was flying as it shrugged off the Covid-19 turmoil to almost double its market capitalisation in 2020 to $26bn. Founded in 2012, the start-up floated on Nasdaq six years later with backing from investors including Warren Buffett. Focusing on small and medium-sized retailers in Brazil, Stone has thrown down the gauntlet to the country’s big banks by expanding into other services such as credit.

Here is an FT graphic illustrating the winners/losers in absolute market value terms:

Sources: FT, Bloomberg, WSJ. Images: Unsplash

“Pin-duo-duo” translates as “together, more savings, more fun”. It is the world’s fastest growing technology platform, according to Gartner, seeking to create a shopping experience that is much more collaborative and fun, as well as giving consumers access to incredible discounts on everything from toys and toiletries to Teslas.

A bit like WalMart meets Instagram meets Disneyland.

Founded in 2015 by Huang Zheng (aka Colin Huang), Pinduoduo is already the second-largest online marketplace in China, and the world’s leading “interactive” online retailer. It is said to be the world’s fastest growing technology platform.

In 2020 it had a phenomenal year, growing its market capitalisation by 396%, to a valuation of $218 billion by the end of what was for most people a difficult and turbulent year. But also a year of opportunity as consumer behaviours changed rapidly.

Pinduoduo’s so-called “dynamic retail” experience is a combination of social influence, gamification, community building, team purchasing and a platform-based ecosystem of suppliers.

Here’s a great report explaining the model in more detail.

Huang, a 40-year-old former Google employee, recently became China’s third-richest person on the back of Pinduoduo’s phenomenal rise. Explaining his vision for the company before its flotation on the Nasdaq, he described Pinduoduo as a mixture of “Walmart and Disneyland” that combined bargain products with compulsive entertainment.

The brand targets young and mid to lower income Chinese consumers, using WeChat (with 1.2 billion users) to share details of products which they like with friends and family. Fun images and meme videos spread quickly.

The more people interested in buying the item, the bigger discount. And if you can’t get your existing friends interested, then you can recruit new ones.

The business model has supercharged Pinduoduo’s growth. It now has 683 million active users and 50m orders per day.

With sales margins incredibly thin, most of its profits come from advertising, as the site encourages people to visit often, in the same way as a physical shopping mall becomes a place for socialising and entertainment.

Unlike online retailers like Amazon, Pinduoduo holds no stock, products are shipped directly from the seller, who also has to cover shipping costs. That also creates a challenge in managing quality and authenticity, fake brands having become a major challenge to consumer trust for online marketplaces.

Huang, who earned a masters degree at the University of Wisconsin, joined Google as an intern in 2004, aged 24, and then worked there for 3 years as an engineer, and then also worked with Microsoft. He stepped down as CEO this year, handing over to new CEO Lei Chen, but remains chairman. He is Pinduoduo’s largest shareholder, with a 29.4% stake worth $34 billion.

Have you the courage to create a better future?

What will shape your future? How will you ride the waves of change, be farsighted to turn disruption and discontinuities into innovation and impact?

Some of the best ocean surf lies just along the coast from Lisbon in Portugal. The beautiful fishing village of Cascais seems a world away from the dramatic waves, and extreme surfers who seek to catch the ultimate ride.

I remember sitting outside one of the many fish restaurants, back in early 2020. Before Covid. Enjoying calamari then seabass, a glass of vinho verde, I looked up to the imposing Citadel which towers above the small harbour. It has probably seen much change since its construction, shortly before Christopher Columbus passed below on his way to seek new lands. Yet it has remained largely unchanged.

In a similar way, despite all the turmoil of a global pandemic, many of us continue with our business as usual. We focus on getting back to where we were, recovery of the old world, based on what we used to know best, and assuming the world is unchanged. We rarely have time to pause and look for the bigger picture, the tectonic shifts that are likely to transform our world in the coming years. Particularly in the urgency of huge shake-ups. Threat or opportunity, we ignore them at our peril.

Surfing the waves of a changing world enables us to keep pace with change, to understand how the world is being shaken up right now, to see the opportunities ahead, and to prepare to embrace them.

My new book “Business Recoded” explores how you can embrace the challenges and opportunities of a changing world. Is your business fit for purpose, are you fit for the future? How will you embrace the seismic disruptions of the current world, to reimagine a better future for your business, and society?

In many ways, what happens next – how we respond to the pandemic, how we seek to emerge – will shape the decades to come, maybe the 21st century. Over the last 20 years, business has largely sought to extend and enhance the old models of success, now we need to reimagine the role and process of business more radically. The future starts now.

So let’s take a look at some of the best ideas around right now, a time of year when many organisations seek to capture the zeitgeist in trend reports and emerging insights – catalysts to create a better future:

Blackrock: Megatrends

Blackrock CEO Larry Fink was one of the first business leaders to call for a rethink of business, starting with his letter to the CEOs of all the companies he invests in, demanding them to consider their purpose before profit. Now the investment says “The traditional business cycle playbook does not apply to the pandemic. We see the shock as more akin to that of a large-scale natural disaster followed by swift economic restart. Early in the crisis, we assessed that the ultimate cumulative economic losses – what matters most for financial markets – would likely prove to be a fraction of those seen in the wake of the global financial crisis.” Before diving into detailed financial forecasts, here are Blackrock’s 5 megatrends:

The Economist: The World in 2021

“The World in 2021 will start to look beyond covid-19: to the launch of an asteroid-smashing space probe, the next step in the fight against climate change and China’s supremacy at the box office.” Here are five stories to watch out for:  00:39 – Democracy under threat 04:17 – The electric revolution revs up 06:55 – A chance to turn a corner on climate change 10:39– China v Hollywood: battle of the box offices 14:40 – Defending the planet

Ericsson: Hot Consumer Trends 2030

Euromonitor: 10 Global Trends 2021

Euromonitor says resilience and adaptability are the driving forces behind the top global consumer trends in 2021. The pandemic created, influenced or accelerated each of these 10 trends, forever altering consumer behaviour. Despite the hardships faced in 2020, consumers have not given up. They continue to find their voice and push forward to advocate for a better tomorrow.

Fjord: Trends 2021

Forrester: Predictions 2021

“2021 will mark a turning point. The business landscape has fundamentally shifted. Success will depend on firms’ ability and willingness to harness disruption to drive meaningful change.”

Themes include

The Future Laboratory: Future Forecasts 2021

Future Today Institute: 2020 Signals

• Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of the CRISPR-Cas9 genetic engineering technology, which has revolutionized biomedicine.
• The DeepMind team (parent company is Google) solved a complex problem in biology. Its system, AlphaFold, solved the infamous “protein folding problem,” a breakthrough that will help other researchers understand disease, develop new medicines and create new biotech tools.
• Expanded Amazon Care, its telemedicine unit, to a broad range of employees and started pitching the service to outside employers, which could start to upend the current provider/ insurer market.
• Uber couldn’t make its own self-driving business work. So it invested $400 million in Aurora and handed the division over to it, and will license whatever technology Aurora is able to make.
• Neuralink demonstrated a prototype of its BMI that works in pigs. Ex-employees worry the timelines are rushed.
• TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, had 850 million MAUs in 2020. It should reach >1 billion MAUs sometime next year. TikTok is now #2 for global user spend (as of Q3 2020).
• The Arctic’s ozone hole closed.
• Bitcoin hit $21,000 on Dec. 16, a nearly 200% increase year-over-year. Bitcoin previously hit a high value of $19,873 in 2017.
• Companies like Microsoft, AT&T, Overstock.com and Twitch have adopted bitcoin as a form of payment. PayPalannounced in October that it had launched a new service for users to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency on the platform.

IFTF: After the Pandemic

Marian Salzman: Zoomsday Predictions

Salzman is one of a number of futurists, some prone to getting a little too surreal, but at the same time, without the hidden agendas to sell consulting projects or IT implementations, like many of the report publishers. She certainly has the best report name – Zoomsday. I love the idea of Zooming in and Zooming out (see my TED Talk video from a few years ago!). Salzman calls her trade “future sighting”. And starts “Just as the wearing of face masks in public became common in some East Asian countries post-SARS, the practice will linger in parts of the world post-COVID-19. Now that we have come to regard public transit and crowded stores as petri dishes for all sorts of disease, it will be hard for some of us to return to our old, unprotected ways.”

NTT: Future Disrupted Tech Trends

“The gravity of the Covid-19 pandemic and its widespread impact over the course of 2020 hasn’t been witnessed in most people’s lifetimes. But while for us, it’s an unprecedented situation, history tells us that it will spawn a transformation of society. NTT believe that technology will be the core enabler of this metamorphosis.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri1s0TJ2iEM&feature=emb_logo

Richard Watson: Post-Pandemic Scenarios

Famous for his future maps, Richard’s Now and Next blog is always a great read, including his Trends for 2021 which sound a little gloomy but real, and still areas of opportunity to support people:

• Fatigue
• Empathy
• Purpose
• In-person interactions
• Disconnection
• Localisation
• Automation
• Religion

He followed this up on a more positive with 10 reasons why things are better than many people think which builds on some of Hans Rosling’s great statistics and upbeat message, including:

• Life expectancy: During the first industrial revolution, people in Europe generally died before they were 40 years old. Now the average is around 70 rising to 80+ in some nations.
• Infant mortality: 100 years ago, childbirth was a hugely risky undertaking. Even 50 years ago, 2 in 3 parents had a child die before its 5th birthday.
• Income inequality and poverty: There is still much work to be done here, however in 2000 the UN pledged to halve extreme poverty by 2015. The goal was achieved early, in 2010.
• Democracy. There are challenges, not only in China and Russia, but in countries such as Hungary and Poland too. However around 50% of us now live in real democracies.
• The world is a safer place. Over the last 100-years, it’s become 96% safer to travel in a car, 95% safer to go to work and it’s 89% less likely to be a victim of a natural disaster.

Richard is also a great exponent of scenario thinking, and with a great sense of humour too. In his blog he usefully describes the building blocks towards a scenario planning activity for your business. He also explores the influence of nature, society, politics, economics, culture, and technology in what he calls “The 12 Apostles of Change”:

• Natural systems change (organic/disruptive)
• Generational views toward the environment (organic/disruptive)
• Social orientation (me vs. we)
• Dynamics of community relationships (physical/virtual)
• Growth of surveillance states (high/low)
• Trust in politicians/experts/media/elections (high/low)
• Focus on Economic Growth vs Social Wellbeing (high/low)
• Dynamics of the economy (physical/virtual)
• Social orientation (empathy v antipathy)
• Consumerism (self-centred/convenience vs sustainable)
• Impact of AI on the workplace (job substitution/job expansion)
• Human longevity (organic/disruptive)

Take a few minutes to read his Now and Next blog including these recent articles

• https://toptrends.nowandnext.com/2021/01/13/trends-for-2021-2/

Ross Dawson: Accelerating past to future

“The crucible of 2020 has transformed us, not into a “post-pandemic” future, but one which has accelerated and amplified many existing trends of the pre-2020 world, flipping us into a new era for humanity which we will forever see as forged by the intense fire of 2020. The announcement of multiple COVID-19 vaccines has given hope to populations besieged by the virus, but coronavirus is highly unlikely to be fully vanquished for the foreseeable future, with delays in rollouts, many vaccine sceptics, and stiff containment measures in response to even limited outbreaks leading to an irregular rhythm in and out of lockdowns and optimism in cities and nations around the world.”

• “Although it is impossible to predict when the next pandemic might occur, its occurrence is considered inevitable.” (Global Influenza Strategy 2019-2030, World Health Organisation)
• 42% of Americans and 13% of Australians say they will NOT get a COVID-19 vaccine. (Gallup, October 2020; Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, November 2020)
• U.S. plant-based sales are growing 14 times faster than total food sales. (Good Food Institute, September 2020)
• 41% of Americans reported an adverse health mental condition related to COVID-19 (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, June 2020)
• 69% of U.S. manufacturing and industrial companies “are likely to bring manufacturing production and sourcing back to North America”.  (Thomas, August 2020)
• In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, 32% of Americans gave directly and 48% gave indirectly by supporting local community. (Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University)
• 87% of office workers want the ability to choose whether to work from home or office, and manage their hours, even when offices open up. (Cisco Workforce of the Future Survey, September 2020)
• In December 2020 Greece established a digital nomad visa that seeks to attract remote workers by halving their income tax.
• International travel revenue in 2020 will be $191 billion, less than a third of revenue in 2019, with the airline industry losing $118 billion this year. (IATA)
• In 2020 three missions to Mars were launched: NASA’s Mars 2020, China National Space Administration’s Tianwen-1, and UAE’s Emirates Mars Mission, while Elon Musk’s SpaceX aims to send a Starship to Mars in 2024.
• 45% of Americans would support a Universal Basic Income, including 69% of those under 30. (Pew Research Center)
• Globally, High Net Worth Individuals plan to allocate 46% of their portfolio to sustainable investing by 2021. (CapGemini World Wealth Report 2020)

Trendhunter: Top 18 Trends

Jeremy Gutsche loves gadgets, so not quite trends – as in the pathways to the future – but more symbols of fringe, fun and futuristic behaviours which people love to marvel at. You’ll need to interpret the trends from the hype, including 20. Gen Z Creative – 0:10 19. Modern Beekeeping – 0:43 18. Model-Free Runway – 1:15 17. eSports Nutrition – 1:43 16, Dark Stores – 2:09 15. Smart Testing – 2:38 14. Skin Hunger – 3:02 13. Milkman Model- 3:30 12. Millennial Move – 4:02 11. Home Professional – 4:40 10. Bio Furnishings – 5:05 9. Un-Isolated Senior – 5:30 8. Post Hospitality – 6:00 7. Robot Retail – 6:25 6. Non-Binary Tech – 6:54 5. Black-Owned Support – 7:12 4. P2P Support – 7:36 3. Distance Design 8:06 2. Distance Design – 8:23 1. Environmental Community – 8:57