Every market is shaken up, with new challengers and disruptive innovation, new agendas for customers and business. Marketers are the sense makers, the business innovators and growth drivers. The pioneers of your future business.

Consumer to consumer models are rapidly becoming the most effective marketing dynamics, social to superapps, collabs to communities. Brands are about people, their passions and communities, not about business and its products and services.

Markets have fundamentally changed

A new generation of businesses (new technologies, new business models, new leadership) is emerging to address a new generation of customers (new audiences, new geographies, new aspirations). Marketing exists to connect businesses and customers, in relevant and profitable ways.

A new approach to marketing is therefore required. Some of the new approaches, and maybe the language, will be familiar. But not all, and not joined up as a fundamental approach to driving business performance. Together, some call it Marketing 4.0 or Exponential Marketing, but whichever labels you apply, it involves a seismic shift in philosophy and practice.

It fundamentally challenges every marketer who still turns first to their strategic plan. And then to their advertising agency, or even their web developer. It is fundamentally digital in mindset, but human as well as technological. It demands analytical thinking, content and networks, but also vision and creativity. It requires new types of leaders, and a new mindset for every marketer. It is built around 7 transformations.

These are the new rules of marketing:

  • Strategic Agility … Forget strategic planning that is slow, structured and stable – instead think of strategy like a portfolio of fast and relentless experiments, seizing and shaping the best opportunities for growth. It still needs direction and choices – a vision still matters, making sense of change, having a clarity purpose, and a defined context in which to hack. Strategy becomes agile and creative, outside in, big ideas and small experiments, driven by changing markets and customer aspirations, rather than fixed by your own capabilities and products.
  • Customer Precision … Forget mass-market segmentation, whether geographic, demographic or anything else. People are individual, and don’t want standardised solutions. The power of big data, connecting and interpreting, automating and exploiting – together with more qualitative and creative insights through customer immersion and “design thinking” – is used to focus, engage, customise, deliver, support, enable the right customers over time. Linking to the agile culture, is the ability to keep learning, about people, about yourself, and what works.
  • Market Innovation … Forget innovation around a product, or even a service. Think strategically about how you can shape the market, in particular the platform that engages buyers and sellers, suppliers and distributors. Business model innovation, channel innovation, price innovation, then follow. Innovation is about shaping the market and all its dynamics to your advantage, whilst also personalised for each individual through micro-innovation – collaborative and customised solutions and experiences.
  • Purposeful Brands … Forget brands built around who you are – brand logos, slogans and ownership. People engage with brands about them, brands that reflect their aspirations, and brands that connect them with other people who share their values and aspirations. Brand stories are living fables, encouraged by the company, but interpreted and spread by people to people. Content must be realtime and relevant, and keep moving forwards. Encouraged but not controlled. Inspiring, human and memorable.
  • Social Communities … Forget advertising, whether a TV campaign with 30 second slots, or even personalised mailings – people are not listening, and they don’t trust you. Instead they trust people like them, friends and peers. Word of mouth in a digital world, PR and celebrity endorsement is replaced by Instagramers or Youtubers who they trust. Brand stories, advocates, and community building help to guide and shape this influence.
  • Enabling Experiences … Forget customer experiences as a semi-automated series of incentivised touchpoints built around the “sale”, think instead from a customer’s perspective. Think about the experience they have – the outcomes, not the inputs, what they do not what you do. Which is usually more about how they use, apply and exploit the products and services which they buy, rather than the purchase itself. Use their language, think about their experience, and how they use, store, apply and even dispose of products and services. Enable them to achieve more.
  • Future Growth … Forget an obsession with sales volumes, even revenues, which are the short-term measure of sales people. Marketers should be focused on growing the business – profitably and sustainably – creating a better business future, and a long-term platform and guide for customers. Think profitably. Think growth. Think economic value creation. Exponential growth is now the expectation of investor, achieved by harnessing the power of branded networks, social influence and agile business models. Fast, exciting and rewarding.

These new rules of marketing, and specifically the 7 transformations, are the cornerstones of my next book and also of a new range of inspiring keynotes and practical workshops. We explore each mantra in detail, with detailed case studies together with the tools and partners for action.

Whilst of course, every market and every business is different, the 7 mantras are a provocative challenge for change. Of course, solutions are not black and white. Every business still has a mix of structured and hacked strategy, uses a box of earned and paid media, and has a balance of push and pull. But it is a rapidly changing area, a revolution.

Marketing is the driving force of business – it moves the business forwards, shapes the future, engages the customer and aligns the organisation to deliver. It is the growth engine, the innovation catalyst and customer champion. Markets are changing at incredible speed, requiring new agility and new capability.

There has never been a more exciting time for marketing, or to be a marketer.

Future shapers, business innovators and growth drivers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In more detail, here is the shift we need to make:

Here’s my manifesto for marketers:

Growth Drivers

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

Change Makers

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

Business Innovators

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

Value Creators

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

Of course this is a development challenge too. I spend much of my time working on leadership development, and particularly on the T-Shaped development of functional experts as they step to become business leaders. At that point, typically when they enter the C-suite, they shift from the vertical (the focused, functional expert who has all the answers), to the horizontal (the open-mind business leader who asks all the questions). This is is a tough transition for many leaders to make, and is more about awareness and confidence as about capability or skill, but when they can let go of their vertical past, they can thrive.

Bringing together other perspectives on the future of marketing

Peter Fisk has over 30 years of marketing experience, from his first job as a brand manager in the airline industry, through many roles in developing marketing strategies for the likes of Adidas and Asahi, Cartier and Coca Cola, Mars and Microsoft, P&G and Pfizer, Santander and Suntory, Vestas and Virgin. In 2002 he became the CEO of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, with over 60,000 global members, member of the World Marketing Council, a fellow of the Marketing Society, and judge of the annual Marketing Excellence Awards. His bestselling book “Marketing Genius” has been translated into 35 languages, and explores “the left and right brain of marketing thinking, how to be the Einstein and Picasso of brands, combining intelligence and imagination”. He now leads GeniusWorks, a specialist market-driven innovation firm, and is a professor of strategy and leadership at IE Business School. His new book “Business Recoded” was reviewed by FT with “Wow, this is the book you have to read now!”

How many everyday products have the power to change lives? 

Books can.

While most publishers seek to maximise sales volumes by churning out as many titles, pages, and copies as possible – and then selling them at prices cheaper than a movie ticket – the best books can change how you see the world. They make you think, they educate, they entertain, they inspire. The best books empower you to change your life, and even those of others.

Sustainability is about much more than reducing your negative impact.

Yes absolutely, we need to reduce emissions, reduce transportation, reduce waste. And there is plenty of scope to do that in book publishing. Consider, for example, that around 40% of all books are returned unsold and pulped. Consider, for example, that many of these books are shipped around the world from cheapest print location to book store, and then back again. Consider for example, that many books are still made from unrecycled paper, printed with toxic inks, and bound with toxic glues.

Yes, absolutely we can do better. And indeed, when consumers, wake up to these bad practices, there will be huge pressure to transform. Just like in the energy or automotive sectors, the companies who are not thinking radically differently now, will be left far behind.

The real opportunity of sustainability is to enhance your positive impact.

Books can change lives. For people of every age, every walk of life, books educate and enable us to do better, but they also bring joy and happiness, and inspire new possibilities.

Actually, the content, more than the book.

Bringing together more diverse, more interesting authors. Addressing more important, crucial subjects. More personal, more topical, more accessible, more connected. Designing content in more engaging, applicable ways. Delivering content across multiple platforms to increase its reach, accessibility and usefulness.

If we think content first (or even better, audience first), then its relatively easy to see the opportunities for change, rather than being limited by our old lazy practices, and book-first prejudices.

Creating sustainable and profitable growth is the opportunity.

Sustainability used to be a compliance issue – and in some ways ESG metrics are little more than the CSR mantras of old. Today, sustainability is becoming core business. It’s at the heart of your competitive advantage, the key to your innovation and growth.

That’s because it has become a key demand and aspiration of the majority of customers. And employees. And investors. Sustainable businesses attract the best customers, who often pay more, typically around 25-50% more. (How much do you pay for organic food?). They attract the best talent, particularly young people. And more investment. (The world’s 100 most sustainable companies – led by Vestas, Autodesk, Schneider – outperform stock market averages by around 40%).

The opportunity is to be sustainable, and use that as the catalyst for innovation and growth. And to develop value propositions, and business models, which ensure that the growth is more profitable too. I would call this “good growth” – growth which profitable but not sustainable is not enough, but also growth that is sustainable but not profitable is not enough either. The “sweet spot” is do both, sustainable and profitable. That requires a new leadership mindset, disruptive innovation, and business transformation.

Coming together to create a better future. Future Book Forum 2022.

This year’s forum brought together publishers from over 30 countries, and many other partners in the book ecosystem. Organised by Canon, leaders in digital print technologies, it is the most thought-leading, practically collaborative, forum for publishing leaders. 10 years ago, I sat down with Canon’s Joerg Engelstaedter, and we asked ourselves how we could help this industry to change, innovate and grow. Over the last decade we have together explored all the big topics, from content and communities, sustainability and business models, to reimagining the entire DNA of a book.

Finding new opportunities for sustainable, profitable growth.

We started by looking beyond our own industry, to a world in which every business in every sector knows it needs to change. To reinvent itself in response to changing audiences and agendas. Sustainability is obviously one of the driving forces. However when you combine that challenge with the opportunities of new technologies, the growth of new markets, the different attitudes of GenZ, then radical change emerges. The entertainment world is now dominated by the likes of Epic Games, Netflix and Spotify. The automotive world is championed by EV pioneers like Tesla and Nio – where Toyota makes 10 times more cars, yet Tesla is 10 times more valuable. And BMW and Volkswagen now wish they had changed 10 years ago.

Adidas has transformed its business through purpose and sustainability.

Matthias Rippel, Adidas Global Director of Brand Strategy, joined us to talk about how Adidas rose to the challenge and opportunity of sustainability. Adidas, by coincidence has a purpose statement, remarkably similar to books – “through sport we can change lives” – the only difference is the product. 2015 was a seminal year for the global sportswear business, when it joined forces with Parley to address the challenge of ocean plastic waste – and creating a new range of premium-priced shoes made from the recycled waste. It changed mindsets, and demonstrated new ways in which they could compete, innovate and grow.

Since then, Adidas has worked to find new materials – for example working with Bolt Threads to create Mylo, a form of “vegan” leather. Every pair of Adidas Stan Smith’s will now be made from mushrooms.  They also collaborated with their most sustainable competitors like Allbirds to achieve more together, creating the new Futurecraft Footprint which has a total carbon footprint of just 2.93kg (written on the sole), almost 10 times less than normal. Just this week Adidas launch “Run for the Oceans” where over 5 million people signed up in the first days to take part – for every 10 minutes they run, Adidas recycle the equivalent of a plastic bottle of waste.

As Canvas8’s social scientist Jemima Cox said “Make it simple. Make it positive. Make it desirable.”

Growth Accelerator: Finding “good growth” in book publishing.

At the heart of each year’s Future Book Forum is practical, innovative action. This year’s Growth Accelerator saw 10 teams of industry leaders explore what “good growth vs bad growth” really means for the future of publishing. First they explored ways in which book publishers could reduce negative impacts across each aspect of the value chain, and then how to enhance the positive impacts.

The real opportunity was then to explore initiatives which could both be sustainable and profitable for book publishers – either by taking sustainability challenges (like addressing excessive waste from returned orders, or paper usage, or toxic pollutants) and innovatively rethinking the business model – or by focusing on the key profit drivers (such as blockbuster authors) and thinking how to sustainably do more with them (for example, through innovative use of content across platforms, personalised storytelling, and focusing on key issues).

Key opportunities for “good growth” which publishing industry leaders chose to focus on included

  • Harnessing the power of storytelling as a way to inspire people to explore and address key sustainability issues, in more engaging, motivating and practical ways.
  • Addressing big issues, bringing together more diverse audiences, and using social aggregation platforms to create collective thinking, responses as big problem solving.
  • Better data analytics to forecast sales opportunities, and then “print on demand” to achieve smaller order sizes, or respond to customers as required.
  • Distributed production, to enable this print on demand functionality anywhere in the world, through networks of printers, and avoid excessive transportation.
  • Addressing big issues, bringing together more diverse audiences, and using social aggregation platforms to create collective thinking, responses as big problem solving.
  • Personalised content, which could be user-generated, and used across platforms, in more valuable and applied ways – building on the success of photobooks and greeting cards.
  • Building a pre-loved marketplace of second hand books, and also utilising the backlist of older titles which can easily be printed on demand.
  • Eliminating book returns, changing the industry practice of accepting unsold books back from retailers, which are typically then pulped
  • Reducing the amount of physical sales visits, the number of inspection copies sent out, and instead harnessing digital marketing, social influencers, and new platforms.
  • Eliminating the use of toxic inks and glues in the production of books, and particularly handbook formats, and being more open to content-first hybrid versions, rather than print first.
  • Enabling customers to achieve more themselves – creating networks or communities of readers who can take book ideas into practice collectively, and apply their impact.

One of the most effective frameworks for developing a sustainable business is the B Corp assessment and certification model, which also provides a useful, comprehensive benchmarking model. It identifies global leaders in every industry. Cuento de Luz, the wonderful small publisher developed by Spain’s Ana Eulate, is the world’s most sustainable book publisher. She says “stories that take the imagination on a journey, care for our planet, respect differences, promote peace.”

Bringing this all together, we launched a new initiative, Publishing 2030, which seeks to build a collaborative approach to more sustainable, profitable book publishing. This will include the development of a manifesto for better books, and become an initiative in which all participants in the Future Book Forum community can participate. The progress will be tracked in the next forums.

  • Can we predict the “irrational” behaviour of customers?
  • What drives preference, desire and loyalty to brands in today’s connected world?
  • How do we rebuild corporate trust and reputation in society?
  • Why are GenZ rejecting corporate employment in record numbers?
  • How can we design jobs to be more inspiring, enriching, and productive?
  • What creates psychological “safety” in high performance teams?
  • How do you “nudge” customers to change behaviours?
  • Why would people choose the same product but when it is 10 times more expensive?
  • How does storytelling change the way you explain strategies to investors?
  • What creates the “flow” state of heightened performance, when working intensely?

The business world thrives on technological innovations and operational efficiencies, but it is also intensely human. And as machines free people from processes, customers become more diverse and discerning, and creativity drives competitive advantage, then harnessing the potential of humanity matters more than ever.

In my new book Business Recoded, I focus on the world of being “more human” in a world of technology and change. This demands that leaders increasingly become the business pyschologists – how to really understand what makes people tick, how to engage and influence them effectively.

And it’s not just about employees, and how they more effectively work inside the organisation – its equally about customers and how to influence them (look at the growth of “behavioural economics” over recent years), crucially about investors and how they interpret value potential in a complex uncertain world, and most profoundly about society and how they perceive business in world where agendas such as climate and inequality, fairness and geopolitics, can seem at odds with the pursuit of profits and growth.

As a result “Brain Business” has become a useful and practical approach to applying psychology principles in all aspects of business, from strategic thinking and leadership development, to brand propositions and everyday work.

The Business Pyschologist

Today, every business leaders needs to become an expert at understanding and influencing human motivations and behaviours. There are many dimensions and components to this.

Daniel Goleman gave us emotional intelligence, where “EQ beats IQ” in developing employee behaviour, while Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point explained how ideas spread. Dan Ariely has helped reinvent customer propositions like Lemonade Insurance, while Richard Thaler taught us how to “nudge” customers into new behaviours. Freakonomics showed us just how unexpectedly markets behave, and success emerges.

Business applications of psychology have tended to focus on internal work behaviours – known as IO, or industrial and organisational psychology in the States, or occupational psychology in the UK, or in other places WO, work and organisational psychology. Yet the biggest non-articulation has been on customer behaviour, for example understand seemingly irrational behaviours, and how to influence them.

Areas which have yet to be explored, from a psychological perspective, lie in the attitudes and behaviours of investors – from private equity to stock markets, how they perceive the value of business ideas and strategies, how they balance risk and opportunity, and therefore drive trillions of dollars impact. Equally, in society at large, how we perceive corporations, and their negative and positive impacts on our broader world.

Freak Behaviours

Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt has sold over 4 million copies.  Incentives have been dangled in front of your nose all of your life. From “if you finish your plate you’ll get some pudding” as a child to “if you sell 100 cars this quarter you’ll get a 25% bonus” all the way to “if you don’t stop harassing the cleaning lady, we’ll put you in a home, grandpa!”

An incentive is meant to get you to do more of a good thing or less of a bad thing, and is used by anyone who tries to influence your behaviour. They say there are three kinds of incentives: Economic – usually involving gain or loss of time and/or money. Social  – when chances are you’ll look good in front of your peers or be isolated from them. Moral – appealing to your conscience and inner drive to do the right thing.

The more types of incentives are combined, the more powerful the incentive gets. For example, the disincentive (a negative incentive, the stick from the carrot and stick approach!) to commit a crime is pretty strong. You could lose your job, house and personal freedom (economic), it is one of the most morally reprehensible things you can do (moral) and of course, you’d lose your friends and your reputation would go down the drain (social).

Growth Mindsets

Concepts like the Growth Mindset, have been adapted from other fields, and are now increasingly common and incredibly powerful in driving business behaviours and performance.

When Carol Dweck was a graduate student in the early 1970s, she began to study how children cope with failure, she quickly realised that cope was the wrong word, they realised. Now a psychology professor at Stanford, she has spent several decades studying this dichotomy which she initially termed “incremental theory”. She eventually found a better language – the “fixed” and “growth” mindset. Her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success became a bestseller.

Dweck applies the concept to every walk of life – from children’s education and parenting, to sports coaching and mental performance. She argues that a growth mindset leads to higher achievement, whilst a fixed mindset actively plateaus an individual’s progress. She also applies the idea to teams and organisations. Those who for example, like to single out star performers are more fixed in their mindsets, rather than embracing everyone with their different contributions over time.

Psychology starters

Just as starters, here are 5 simple and well known psychological theories that every leader should know, essential to understanding the fragile yet complex minds of human beings, and to influence better performance and collective success:

  • The Hawthorne Effect …  being observed leads to higher productivity, employees are more motivated to work harder when more attention is paid to them, be it in feedback, collaboration or rewards.
  • Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs ... starting from the basic human needs, once these are satisfied, you can influence people in more intangible, emotional ways – from belonging to self actualisation.
  • Authentic Self-Expression … the secret to making employees happy is by encouraging self-expression and letting new employees bring their unique values and perspectives to the job.
  • Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory … job satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not opposites; satisfaction comes from higher-level factors like recognition and autonomy; dissatisfaction is about lack of basics.
  • Group Think … the search for harmony and conformity leads people to not innovate and not express their true opinions; which usually leads to poor decisions being made.

They are the easy ones, familiar to most people with a foundation in understanding people. But the topics go much deeper. To stretch your thinking a little more, here are some of my favourite books on these topics:

12 Great Books on Psychology for Business

Atomic Habits, by James Clear

How to change your habits and get 1% better every day. If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves not because you don’t want to change but because you have the wrong system for change. This is one of the core philosophies of Atomic Habits: You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. In this book, you’ll get a proven plan that can take you to new heights.

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell

The power of thinking without thinking. Intuition is not some magical property that arises unbidden from the depths of our mind. It is a product of long hours and intelligent design, of meaningful work environments, and particular rules and principles. The Canadian journalist, who can still run a mile in under 5 minutes (that impresses me!), explores how the power of blink could fundamentally transform our relationships – the way we consume, create and communicate, how we run our businesses, and even our societies.

Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath

Why do disproved urban legends persist? How do you keep letting newspapers and clickbait sites lure you in with their headlines? And why do you remember complicated stories but not complicated facts? Over ten years of study, Chip and Dan Heath have discovered how we latch on to information hooks. Packed full of case histories and incredible anecdotes, it shows how an Australian scientist convinced the world he’d discovered the cause of stomach ulcers by drinking a glass filled with bacteria; how a gifted sports reporter got people to watch a football match by showing them the outside of the stadium; how pitches like ‘Jaws on a spaceship’ (Alien) and ‘Die Hard on a bus’ (Speed) convince movie execs to invest gigantic sums even when they know nothing else about the project. By demonstrating strategies like the ‘Velcro Theory of Memory’ and ‘curiosity gaps’, the book offers superbly practical insights.

Contagious, by Jonah Berger

Why do ideas catch on, and others don’t? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It’s more influential than advertising and far more effective. Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.

Drive, by Dan Pink

Drive explains the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today’s world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and the world. To motivate employees who work beyond basic tasks, Pink argues that supporting employees in the following three areas will result in increased performance and satisfaction: Autonomy — Our desire to be self directed. It increases engagement over compliance. Mastery — The urge to get better skilled. Purpose — The desire to do something that has meaning and is important. Businesses that only focus on profits without valuing purpose will end up with poor customer service and unhappy employees

Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman

Does IQ define our destiny? Goleman argues that our view of human intelligence is far too narrow. It is not our IQ, but our emotional intelligence that plays a major role in thought, decision-making and individual success. Self-awareness, impulse control, persistence, motivation, empathy and social deftness: all are qualities that mark people who excel, whose relationships flourish, who can navigate difficult conversations, who become stars in the workplace.

Freakonomics, by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt

At its roots, economics is simply the study of incentives. It’s all about how we use our limited resources in an attempt to satisfy our unlimited wants and needs. It’s about the trade-offs we make each day. For example, we’re incentivised to go to work and trade our time (limited resource) to get money to buy the things we want. When we’re a toddler, we’re curious to see what’s going on up there on the stove so we reach up and touch it, but when we get burned we’re incentivised not to touch it again. Our parents praising us for a good score in our 4th grade maths test is an incentive to do some extra homework the night before the test.

 

Give and Take, by Adam Grant

Everybody knows that hard work, luck and talent each plays a role in our working lives. Grant focuses on the importance of a fourth, increasingly critical factor – that the best way to get to the top is to focus on bringing others with you. Give and Take changes our fundamental understanding of why we succeed, offering a new model for our relationships with colleagues, clients and competitors. Using his own cutting-edge research as a professor at Wharton Business School, as well as success stories from Hollywood to history, Grant shows that nice guys need not finish last. He demonstrates how smart givers avoid becoming doormats, and why this kind of success has the power to transform not just individuals and groups, but entire organisations and communities.

Mindset, by Carol Dweck

Dweck explains why it’s not just our abilities and talent that bring us success-but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset. She makes clear why praising intelligence and ability doesn’t foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. With the right mindset, we can motivate our kids and help them to raise their grades, as well as reach our own goals-personal and professional. She reveals what all great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know: how a simple idea about the brain can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area.

Nudge, by Richard Thaler

Every day we make decisions: about the things that we buy or the meals we eat; about the investments we make or our children’s health and education; even the causes that we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. We are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions that make us poorer, less healthy and less happy. And, no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way. By knowing how people think, we can make it easier for them to choose what is best for them, their families and society.

Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely

Why do smart people make irrational decisions every day? The answers will surprise you. Predictably Irrational is an intriguing, witty and utterly original look at why we all make illogical decisions. Why can a 50p aspirin do what a 5p aspirin can’t? If an item is “free” it must be a bargain, right? Why is everything relative, even when it shouldn’t be? How do our expectations influence our actual opinions and decisions? Behavioural economist Dan Ariely cuts to the heart of our strange behaviour, demonstrating how irrationality often supplants rational thought and that the reason for this is embedded in the very structure of our minds.

The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg

Why do some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight? Duhigg visits laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. And he uncovers how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King. He argues that the key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive or even building revolutionary companies is understanding how habits work. By harnessing this science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.

Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Why is there more chance we’ll believe something if it’s in a bold type face? Why are judges more likely to deny parole before lunch? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices: fast, intuitive thinking, and slow, rational thinking. Kahneman reveals how our minds are tripped up by error and prejudice (even when we think we are being logical), and gives you practical techniques for slower, smarter thinking. It will enable to you make better decisions at work, at home, and in everything you do.

Find out more, and for keynotes and workshops, by emailing me at peterfisk@peterfisk.com

It’s easy to think of the over 60s consumer as old … white-haired grandparents, slowing down, retired from work, declining health, drinking cups of tea, gazing into the sunset.

In 35 years of marketing, it constantly annoys me that most marketers – particularly ad agencies, and therefore the clients and brands they work with – are largely uninterested in this market.  Most creative outputs focus on youthful audiences – look in any fashion store, travel brochure, supermarket – youth is sexy, aspirational.

Young creatives identify with their own, inevitably, and lazily.

We all know that older consumers have most of the money. And are also the growth market. And they are certainly not the “old grannies” of our prejudiced stereotypes. Perhaps, my 35 years gives you a clue to my outrage. 60 years old does not seem so far away!

A few weeks ago I watched Sting on his current world tour. The Police frontman, global rock star, leather pants and bass guitar, looked and sounded better than ever. Having just celebrated his 70th birthday.

Tom Cruise turns 60 this year. There is still no mission impossible beyond him. So does Demi Moore. Think about Barack Obama shooting basketball hoops, Madonna still singing and gyrating to her erotica, or George Clooney, or Kim Cattrall, or Bono walking on stage to front U2. Julianne Moore, Colin Firth, Christie Brinkley, Jeff Goldblum, Denzel Washington. All over 60.

Perhaps we should stop thinking of age.

“Stage (Not Age)” is a new book focused on this $22 trillion opportunity, which Susan Golden argues can be unlocked only if you rethink everything you think you know about people over 60.

“In the time it takes you to read this, another 20 Americans will turn 65. 10,000 people a day are crossing that threshold, and that number will continue to grow. In 15 years, Americans aged 65 and over will outnumber those under age 18.”

Across the world, nations are getting older. My recent research into “megatrends” indicates a 40% increase in the number of over 60s by 2030. Think of the implications for everything from pensions to healthcare. Think about the opportunities for leisure, travel, entertainment, work, nutrition and so much more.

“Nearly everywhere in the world, people over 60 are the fastest-growing age group. Longevity presents an opportunity that companies need to develop a strategy for.”

Estimates put the global market for this demographic at a whopping $22 trillion across every industry you can imagine. “Entertainment, travel, education, health care, housing, transportation, consumer goods and services, product design, tech, financial services, and many others will benefit, but only if marketers unlearn what they think they know about this growing population.”

The key is to stop thinking of older adults as one market.

Like every demographic, over 60s are a deeply diverse population. “They’re traveling through different life stages and therefore want and need different products and services” says Golden.

We need to reset our understanding of what an “old person” is. To consider the diverse attitudes and behaviours, needs and wants involved.

Source: Wavemaker

The ageing population is most significant in Asia, with longer lifespans and declining birthrates. A recent article in Campaign Asia focused on the opportunities of the Over 60s market in Asia, saying “Marketers need to wake up to their spending power, and that they are just as dynamic as younger shoppers.”

“By 2050, one in four people in China will be aged over 65. Japan is already the oldest society on earth with a quarter of the population over 65, set to rise to 40 percent by 2060. The Japanese are ageing in such numbers, in fact, that the government has categorised those aged 65 and above as “pre-old”, 75-plus as “old”, and the over-85s as “very old”.

“Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand also have a rapidly shrinking share of working-age population, and the UN predicts that in the next 30 years, the number of people aged over 60 in Asia will increase dramatically from 11 percent of the total population to over a quarter.”

“There is no doubt that this is the largest, fastest-growing, wealthiest segment of population in most developed markets of the world,” says marketing consultancy Silver Group. “And in Asia-Pacific, 54% of high-net-worth individuals are over 56 years of age, according to Cap Gemini and Merrill Lynch.”

Nielsen says ‘baby boomers’ in the US spend close to half of all FMCG dollars, yet less than 5% of advertising is geared towards them.

  • During the pandemic, JD, China’s second-largest ecommerce platform, realized that senior consumers consumed 51%+ cosmetics over the same period last year.
  • On Alibaba-owned Alipay, the leading online payment and finance platform in China, the number of elderly users in has doubled 4.5 times over the past 3 years.
  • 36.7% of the users on Meituan, China’s largest online-to-offline platforms providing food delivery, travel, entertainment services, were born in the 1960s.

Mintel says “there is the assumption that over 60s tend to live life the old-fashioned way, without aspiration.”   In China, Mintel’s research found that after spending on health, almost half of consumers aged 55 to 74 said they wanted to spend money on being entertained and on social events. They also wanted to spend more time travelling than shopping.

However, Mintel found the majority of brands currently targeting China’s 55-plus age group fell into categories such as dairy products (particularly milk formula), cereals, or hot beverages.

As well as positivity, consumers aged over 60 also crave authenticity. “Older consumers are the most experienced consumers. After all, they’ve been sold to for longer. As a result, they tend to see beyond the ‘cheap tricks’ of marketing and look for genuine value in brands.

One brand doing well in engaging with older consumers is L’Oréal, with its use of authentic and popular older models, such as (70 year old!) Helen Mirren, and age-friendly taglines like: ‘We’ve still got it, and we’re still worth it’. Another successful brand launch was the contemporary-looking Sixties’ Bamboo Charcoal Toothpaste, which was reformulated and designed for senior consumers in China, marketing specific benefits for the older age group.

Reebok also made headlines when it appointed 80-year-old actor Wang Deshun as its brand ambassador in China. Wang also stars in Reebok’s latest Chinese video campaign ‘Be more human’. Apparently Wang only got into sport in his 60s and is an example to prove that people are never too old to pursue their goals.

More

New: Value Creation in the Metaverse, by McKinsey.  

$54 billion per year is currently spent on virtual goods, almost double the amount spent buying music, says a new report, that goes beyond the hype to explore the real business potential of what we interchangeably term Web3 and the metaverse. Another report, by Meta Platforms, suggests that overall, the metaverse could be a $3 trillion opportunity for business by 2031.

JP Morgan’s new report on “Opportunities in the Metaverse: How businesses can explore the metaverse and navigate the hype vs. reality” argues that “the elements of a new digital age are converging at scale” and that “the metaverse is the driving force bringing these elements together in a unified, immersive experience.”

First some definitions, as amidst all the jargon and hype, it’s not easy to understand what we are actually talking about.

“In the simplest terms, the metaverse is the internet, but in 3D,” says Deloitte. “It’s a form of digital interaction where connected, virtual experiences can either simulate the real world or imagine worlds beyond it. Many of the metaverse ingredients are with us now – think interacting with lots of people and content made by them, in persistent, immersive worlds across many devices, including virtual reality. The more these components intertwine, the closer we get to a fuller version of the metaverse.”

“Many of the metaverse ingredients are with us now – think interacting with lots of people and content made by them, in persistent, immersive worlds across many devices, including virtual reality. The more these components intertwine, the closer we get to a fuller version of the metaverse

JP Morgan’s definition goes further: “The metaverse is a seamless convergence of our physical and digital lives, creating a unified, virtual community where we can work, play, relax, transact and socialize. The metaverse is still early in its evolution, and there is no singular, all-encompassing definition to which people can turn. Themes of what the metaverse is and could be, however, are emerging. A key point is that there is no one virtual world but many worlds, which are taking shape to enable people to deepen and extend social interactions digitally. This is done by adding an immersive, three-dimensional layer to the web, creating more authentic and natural experiences. The metaverse even has the promise of facilitating accessibility from the comfort of the home, breaking down boundaries and democratizing access to key goods, services and experiences.

Before diving deeper into the metaverse, it’s important to lay the foundation between features of today’s metaverse—Web 2.0 characteristics, and the emerging Web 3.0 characteristics. While the JP Morgan table below highlights our assessment of the key metaverse features between the two, the lines are blurring as more and more traditional virtual worlds are adopting elements of the blockchain-based worlds.”

Some interesting anecdotal stats from JP Morgan include

  • Every year, $54 billion is spent on virtual goods, almost double the amount spent buying music
  • Approximately 60 billion messages are sent daily on Roblox
  • GDP for Second Life was about $650M in 2021 with nearly $80M USD paid to creators
  • Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) currently have a market cap of $41 billion
  • Price of a parcel of virtual land doubled in 2021, from $6k in June to $12k by December
  • In-game ad spending is set to reach $18.41 billion by 2027

The concept of a metaverse is not a new one. “In many ways this is a linear progression. Online, multi-player, role-playing worlds like The Sims or Second Life have been around for nearly 20 years, with players spending an average of 20 hours per week in these worlds.9 Modern equivalents like Minecraft, World of Warcraft and Fortnite have hundreds of millions of users, and huge supporting economies.”

Here is a useful timeline from JP Morgan’s report, showing development over the last 20 years (it seems a long time since I was designing my avatar to live in Second Life!):

We are now at an inflection point, where “metaverse” talk seems to have reached peak hype. This is fuelled by tech companies and media, but also due to a convergence of emerging trends.

A number of new technologies have come together to enable this vision of the metaverse. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets have become cheaper and more powerful, improving the user experience. Blockchain has enabled digital currencies and NFTs. The new methods to transact and own digital goods are allowing creators to monetize their activities through tokens. In addition to monetization, and as a means to exchange value, token-holders can also participate in the platform’s governance (e.g. vote on decisions). This democratic ownership economy coupled with the possibility of interoperability, could unlock immense economic opportunities, whereby digital goods and services are no longer captive to a singular gaming platform or brand.

Credit Suisse, in a new report “Metaverse: A Guide to the Next-Gen Internet” says “the metaverse is best understood as an evolution of the internet into a more spatially immersive, compelling, and frictionless 3D web, viewable by virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), along with traditional compute devices, with three key aspects: presence, interoperability and standardisation. There are five key vectors for metaverse advancements, in our view: (1) hardware; (2) infrastructure; (3) content; (4) community; and (5) currency/settlement mechanism.

Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable, a Live Game Services platform, is a prominent industry commentator on the topic of the metaverse. His prior work has focussed on online communities, internet media and computer games. He sees the metaverse as composed of seven layers:

  • Experience: The experience layer is where users do things in the metaverse including gaming, socialising, shopping, watching a concert or collaborating with co-workers. The metaverse experiences do not need to be 3D or 2D, or even necessarily graphical; it is about the inexorable dematerialisation of physical space, distance and objects. When physical space is dematerialised, formerly scarce experiences may become abundant.
  • Discovery: The discovery layer is about the push and pull that introduces people to new experiences. Broadly speaking, most discovery systems can be classified as either inbound (the person is actively seeking information about an experience) or outbound (marketing that was not specifically requested by the person, even if they opted in). The discovery layer could include the curated portals, online agents, rating systems and advertising networks drawing users to discover different areas.
  • Creator economy: Not only are the experiences of the metaverse becoming increasingly immersive, social, and real-time, but the number of creators who craft them is increasing exponentially. This layer contains all of the technology that creators use daily to craft the experiences that people enjoy.
  • Spatial computing: Spatial computing has exploded into a large category of technology that enables us to enter into and manipulate 3D spaces, and to augment the real world with more information and experience. The key aspects of such software includes: 3D engines to display geometry and animation; geospatial mapping; voice and gesture recognition; data integration from devices and biometrics from people; and next- generation user interfaces.
  • Decentralisation: The ideal structure of the metaverse is full decentralisation. Experimentation and growth increase dramatically when options are maximised, and systems are interoperable and built within competitive markets. Distributed computing powered by cloud servers and microservices provide a scalable ecosystem for developers to tap into online capabilities without needing to focus on building or integrating back-end capabilities. Blockchain technology, which enables value- exchange between software, self-sovereign identity and new ways of unbundling and bundling content and currencies, is a large part of decentralisation (this area of innovation can be called Web 3.0).
  • Human interface: Computer devices are moving closer to our bodies, transforming us into cyborgs. Smartphones have evolved significantly from their early days and are now highly portable, always- connected powerful “computers”. With further miniaturisation, the right sensors, embedded AI technology and low-latency access to powerful edge computing systems, they will absorb more and more applications and experiences from the metaverse. Dedicated AR/VR hardware is also coming into the market, and in the coming years will likely evolve significantly. Beyond smartglasses, there is a growing industry experimenting with new ways to bring us closer to our machines such as 3D-printed wearables integrated into fashion and clothing.
  • Infrastructure: The infrastructure layer includes the technology that enables our devices, connects them to the network and delivers content. This includes the semiconductors, battery technology, cloud servers and storage, and 5G and Wi-Fi transmission required. The infrastructure upgrades on compute, connectivity and storage supplemented by AI should dramatically improve bandwidth while reducing network contention and latency, with a path to 6G in order to increase speeds by yet another order of magnitude.

 

Meta Platforms, having staked its future on evolving its fading Facebook social media platform into the driving hear of a future “metaverse” by 2030, has just published a new report with Analysis Group titled “The Potential Global Economic of the Metaverse”, that also seeks to quantify the economic opportunities in Web3, suggesting an estimated a “gross metaverse domestic product” of $3 trillion in 2031.

“One way to think about the metaverse is as a set of interconnected digital spaces, including immersive XR experiences that combine the digital and physical worlds, in which individuals can easily move between different spaces and experiences as well as interact and collaborate with other people who are not in the same physical space,” the Meta-sponsored research says. “Some of the early components of the metaverse and the experiences and activities it is envisioned to support or enable are already in exhibit, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, blockchain, and non-fungible tokens.”

Since reinventing itself as Meta, Zuckerberg’s company lost $3 billion in Reality Labs, in the first quarter of 2022. Reality Labs is its division that experiments with virtual and mixed reality and other tech. The report cautions that the path to the metaverse will not be smooth. It also compared the metaverse to the rise of mobile devices saying “While it is possible that, like many other previously ‘hyped’ technological innovations, the metaverse never comes to fruition as currently envisioned, the goal of our analysis is not to predict whether the metaverse will be successful,” but “to focus on measuring the potential economic impact of the metaverse if it were to evolve like prior successful technologies.”

Find out more

  • Metaverse Myths and Magic: New Keynote by Peter Fisk
  • Winning with the Megatrends, Markets and Metaverses: Keynote by Peter Fisk
  • Business Recoded: Have you the Courage to Create a Better Future? by Peter Fisk
  • The Future MBA. Everything you need to Lead the Future: 3-day workshop by Peter Fisk
  • Purpose, Vision and Strategic Roadmap: Facilitated consulting led by Peter Fisk

Contact peterfisk@peterfisk.com

Human skills will grow in value – complex problem solving and creativity, emotional intelligence and partnership building. Let machines do the simple, repetitive tasks.

In a world obsessed with the potential of technologies, it is human ingenuity that will drive real progress – both in unlocking the power of tech, and in being simply human. Here are 4 extracts from my new book “Business Recoded” exploring what it means to be human in today’s digital world.

Trader Joe’s

When it comes to grocery stores, there’s nothing quite like Trader Joe’s, which has amassed a cult following across America. Every time I walk into the store, my eyes light up with the colourful interiors, handwritten notices, quirky stories behind the foods, genuine interest of the staff, most dressed in outlandish styles, and their eagerness to help. I always emerge with a smile.

Joe Coulombe was the original Trader Joe, and having started out as Pronto Market convenience stores in 1958, created his own stores. Joe did things differently, and his stores reflected his love of Hawaiian beach culture with walls decked with cedar planks and staff dressed in cool Hawaiian shirts. Most importantly, he started putting innovative, hard-to-find, great-tasting foods in the “Trader Joe’s” name.

Value mattered to Joe. And the premium, exotic specialities he brought together were complimented by his low-priced own-label ranges which combined quality and quirkiness.

In 1979 Joe sold his brand to Theo Albrecht, better known for his low priced Aldi food stores in Europe. Aldi and Joe both believed in keeping things simple. No discounts, points cards, or members clubs. With a limited range the stores drive a better supply deal in return for bigger volumes, and can be more responsive to market trends.

Storytelling is everywhere at Trader Joe’s, from the hand-written signage and rustic displays, to the free coffee and sampling, the radio ads and chatty check-out dudes.

Whilst most competitors focus on automation and speed, this store is real and human, worth coming just to chill out. Even if you never get to visit a store, sign up to the Fearless Flyer online. With off-beat stories and cartoon humour, unusual recipes and showcased products, it’s an intriguing read.

Rise of the superhumans

The world often seems to be working against humanity. We build walls across the borders of America, fence people in who seek to migrate in search of a better life to Europe, apply deep surveillance policies in China, prefer to be an isolated island than a connected continent in UK, automate our factories and workplaces for speed and efficiency, prefer to date online rather than in reality, and to chat with social media friends rather than local communities.

At work, we are told that machines, from AI to robotics, will affect at least 30% of the current activities of at least 70% of job roles. It is the most repetitive tasks that are likely to be automated, robots on production lines, chatbots instead of call centres. Knowledge-based jobs from accountants to lawyers, air traffic controllers to investment bankers are likely to be some of the most disrupted.

When Elon Musk declared that “in the future robots will be able to do everything better than us, I mean all of us”, few experts disagreed.  However, more recently he has shared a more thoughtful view, saying that “automation is not the future, human augmentation is.”

Augmented humanity be a key driver of the future work, enhancing what we can do:

  • Assisted humanity: The interface between people and machines is evolving rapidly from keyboard to voice, to eyes and brains. Digital assistants like Alexa and Siri are already common on our phones and in our homes, and will increasingly navigate us through unattended store. Everyone at work will have their own assistant.
  • Intelligent humanity: As interfaces change, machines learn more about our thought processes and behaviours, using algorithms to predict what we need and to enhance our knowledge. They will help us to solve complex problems, consider more options and risks, and to make smarter decisions.
  • Connected humanity: Collaborative working becomes easier and continuous whether we are together or apart, distributed working at home or around the world is no impediment to working together, as knowledge flows seamlessly, and individual tasks are joined up intelligently.

Virtual reality tools like Google Glass augment how we work, for example engineers being able to read instruction guides through the lens of their eyewear whilst simultaneously working on machines, or surgeons being able to operate whilst also getting realtime diagnostic data on the patient’s organs and vital statistics

At the same time this augmentation can be physical too. In Odense, at the SDU’s Athletics Exploratorium, I came across engineers simulating the use of exoskeletons to help dockyard workers carry loads which would have previously required cranes, craftsmen to have tools connected to their bodies.

Technology won’t replace us, but it could make us “superhuman”.

The future of work

By 2025 the majority of workers will be freelance individuals working around the world, independent of distance or background. They will apply their human, emotional, and creative skills to solve ever-more complex problems. They have the hunger to keep learning throughout their lives, the agility to keep adapting and updating their skills, and the open-mindedness to see things differently.

Modern and high-tech working environments are enhanced by a community feeling with shared facilities and resources. Many of the workers are not even employed by the companies, instead they are happier to remain freelance “gig-workers” working on projects that require specialist inputs. New ideas, new skills, new innovations and new opportunities swirl around in the creative atmosphere, and new partnerships often emerge out of the fusion. This is the new world of work. No jobs for life. Few permanent roles. Fluid job descriptions. Multiple jobs at the same time. And companies working together.

Some of the jobs of the future will be highly technical, whilst others will be much more human. In exploring the jobs of the future, Ben Pring from Cognizant explores 4Es to consider the skills required:

  • Eternal skills: Some human skills have existed since our very beginning. No matter how brilliant our technologies become, these human skills, along with many others, will be of value through eternity.
  • Enduring skills: The ability to sell has always been important. Other such enduring abilities – being empathetic, trusting, helping, imagining, creating, striving – will always be needed. Such skills will be central to jobs of the future.
  • Emerging skills: New skills for the future relate to the complexity, density and speed of work. The skill to use a 315mb Excel spreadsheet, or to navigate a drone virtual cockpit. These will enhance our ability to utilise new machines.
  • Eroding skills: Many skills that used to be special are now normal, to manage a social media platform, to product a fantastic presentation, whilst others are redundant like photocopying or replaced like data entry.

However the World Economic Forum suggests that more jobs will be created than lost, 133 million created and 75 million lost over the 5 years to 2025, as we see a huge evolution in the workplace of what people do, as well as how they do it. Top emerging jobs will include:

  • Data analysts and scientists
  • AI and machine learning specialists
  • Software and application developers
  • Sales and marketing professionals
  • Digital transformations specialists

Beyond technology, data and AI, many new roles will also emerge in the broader aspects of engineering and sustainable development. The growth in elderly will drive a boom in care work, and many more creative roles will emerge through relentless innovation and more human pursuits, like sport and entertainment.

Completely new jobs in specific industries will emerge such as

  • Flying car developers
  • Virtual identity defenders
  • Tidewater architects
  • Smart home designers
  • Joy adjutants

Analysis by BCG in 2020 shoes that 95% of most at risk workers could find good quality, higher paid jobs, if they are prepared to make the transition. This shift also offers the opportunity to close the wage gap, with 74% of women and 53% of men likely to find higher paid roles.  It suggests that around 70% of those affected will need to make a significant shift in job, requiring a huge skills revolution.

At the same time, it is not just about refitting people for new jobs. The “dandelion principle”, embraced by organisations like SAP, starts by hiring great people with a diversity of backgrounds and skills to create a richer talent base. It then seeks to build jobs around people, rather than people around jobs, in a more symbiotic way.

More human, more creative, more female

As machines take on our more physical skills, the opportunity is for people to be liberated from the drudgery of repetitive tasks to add more human, creative and emotional value. Imagination will drive progress, whilst machines sustain efficiency.

Human skills matter not only within the workplace, but also in engaging with consumers. In a world of automated interfaces, brands will differentiate  on their ability to be more intuitive, empathic and caring. The roles of people, assistants in stores, nurses in hospitals, teachers in classrooms, will be to add-value with premium levels of service.

Creative skills are not only in demand in the areas of communication, marketing and innovation, but also in rethinking how organisations can better work, how business models can be transformed, and machines themselves deployed in better ways.

Typically these “softer” skills are what we could call more “female” attributes. Of course, that is to stereotype genders, but it certainly requires more empathy than apathy, intuition than evidence, influence than instruction, care than control. At the same time it requires men to adopt these behaviours too, and in general to embrace inequalities and diversity.

BCG’s 2020 research suggests that analytical and critical thinking skills will be crucial to the future of the work, alongside more emotional intelligence and social influence. Learning and creative capabilities will be the most significant growth areas for development in the coming years. They identified these priorities:

  • Analytical thinking and innovation
  • Active learning and learning strategies
  • Creativity, originality and initiative
  • Technology design and programming
  • Critical thinking and analysis
  • Complex problem-solving
  • Leadership and social influence
  • Emotional intelligence
  • Reasoning, problem-solving and ideation
  • Systems analysis and evaluation.

Meta skills, rather than technical or specialist skills which we may have trained for or focused on in the past, will become more significant. These are the more enduring skills which  allow us to evolve and adapt to relentless change. Sensemaking, learning to learn, coping with uncertainty and change.

Sometimes this will require us to unlearn first, to let go of old assumptions and prejudices, and open our minds to new possibilities and perspectives.

In “The 100 Year Life” Lynda Gratton recognises that as life expectancy moves beyond 100, most of us will work for longer, and transition more often, with around seven different phases in our career journeys – not just new jobs, but entirely new vocations.

“Technology advances are making tech more … human.”

From the blockchain, to the metaverse, to emotional AI, digital technologies are rapidly advancing at a time when enterprises face more pressure than ever to innovate to gain a competitive advantage. Human behaviours and intelligence are informing the design of new machines, and everything we knew about innovation and strategy is being turned upside down.

How will you apply these human-centric technologies to transform the future of your business? Radically Human, a new book by Paul Daugherty and James Wilson, offers business leaders an easy-to-understand breakdown of today’s most advanced human-inspired technologies and an actionable IDEAS framework that will help you approach innovation in a completely new way.

Their “radically human” approach seeks to turn assumptions about the basic building blocks of innovation upside down. Taken together, this upending of reigning assumptions about IDEAS – Intelligence, Data, Expertise, Architecture, Strategy – offers a new innovation framework for companies to chart a new course to the future, turbocharge revenue growth, and prepare to compete in a world where the human, and the humane, will be the means by which companies will succeed and the measure by which they will be judged.

They explore how industrial giants and startups alike are drawing on this IDEAS framework to differentiate themselves along four key dimensions: talent, trust, experiences, and sustainability. These four key areas will be critical for companies to compete successfully in the radically human future.

Over the past five years, three truths have emerged: all companies are now technology companies; companies have proved that they can wield technology to innovate and change with unprecedented speed; and in the human-technology nexus, the human is in the ascendant. This means as people’s skills, experiences, and, in some senses, humanity evolve in tune with new technologies, the technologies and their design will need to further adapt.

These truths, combined with a set of unprecedented global circumstances, have brought society to an inflection point–a once-in-a-generation opportunity to actively shape our future from the ground up. At this moment of truth for technology and for people, companies that fully embrace their newfound power to reimagine everything from their talent to data, architecture, and strategy will lead the way in business performance and to a future that works better for everyone.

Airbnb was on a roll.

Born out of the financial crisis of 2008 when three young guys decided to offer airbeds to rent on their apartment floor, with a bowl of breakfast cereal thrown in as added value, to become a serious alternative to the world’s sterile and standard hotel chains, it had come a long way.

It then started to get bolder ambitions. A brand reimagination, told a story that enabled people to “belong anywhere”, to immerse themselves in local neighbourhood cultures, to embrace the quirky eccentric nature of every home and its location, and then added a diverse range of brand extensions, from trips to luxury.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and Airbnb almost went bankrupt.

Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO says “2 years ago, our business dropped 80%, our IPO was put on hold, and some didn’t think we’d make it at all. As bookings were wiped out, Chesky was forced to make many of his close-knit employees redundant.

He famously wrote an incredibly human letter, incredibly offering to let everyone take their laptops with them, as they least he could do to help them.

Then he started to adjust to a locked-down world. Cookery courses, salsa dancing, and many more entertaining yet practical types of content became popular as Airbnb became a place where people could learn and live anywhere, meaning locked in their own homes, yet connected online.

It kept some employees and a hardcore of loyal customers engaged , but struggled financially.

Yet as travel restrictions were lifted, Airbnb quickly saw a new boom. Staycationing, or the trend to vacation close to home, meant many people searched out an independent place to rent. And many others were all too happy to rent out spare bedrooms or homes, to make up for lost earnings.

 

So how did Airbnb turn things around? Chesky picks up the reinvention:

  1. First, we simplified our business. We got back to our roots, prioritizing the everyday people who host their homes and offer experiences
  2. We cut the vast majority of our projects, shuttered our business units, and made the painful decision to do a layoff
  3. We significantly improved our cost structure, decreasing our cost of revenue (merchant fees and servers), and tightly managed our fixed costs
  4. Next, we changed our approach to marketing. When travel stopped, we paused all performance marketing and shifted our focus to PR (there have been 1M+ stories written about Airbnb since then)
  5. By 2021, we started investing in brand marketing again, but reduced our overall marketing spend from 34% of our revenue in 2019 to 20% in 2021
  6. Soon, people weren’t just traveling on Airbnb, they were living on Airbnb.

And what has changed since the pandemic? Chesky says:

  1. In 2021, around 20% of our nights booked were for stays of a month or longer, and nearly 50% for a week or longer.
  2. These trends continue to this day. And now, urban and cross-border travel, which were the majority of our business before the pandemic, are back to 2019 levels
  3. In 2021, we completely overhauled our product as the world became more flexible.
  4. We made 150+ upgrades and improvements, including launching the “I’m Flexible” feature, which has been used more than 2 billion times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwEVkakitNc

How Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies.

When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.

Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance since his codiscovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.

The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code.

Should we use our new evolution-hacking powers to make us less susceptible to viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! And what about preventing depression? Hmmm…Should we allow parents, if they can afford it, to enhance the height or muscles or IQ of their kids?

After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Her story is an “enthralling detective story” that involves the most profound wonders of nature, from the origins of life to the future of our species.

The story is now captured by Walter Issacson in the new book “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race”. Fabulous, inspiring.

Doudna delivered her Nobel Lecture on 8 December 2020. She was introduced by Professor Claes Gustafsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry:

Purpose defines what the business contributes to the world, or equally, why the world would be a lesser place if the business did not exist.

Purpose creates an enduring cause which the business is willing to fight for. For some this might be an urgent call to action, for others it might be a more personal inspiration. Saving then planet, or achieving your potential, with Nike, or seeking happiness, with Coca Cola.

Tesla exists to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”, Starbucks to “inspire the human spirit”, Dove to “help the next generation of women realise their potential”, Microsoft to “empower people to achieve more”, and Swarovski to “add sparkle to people’s everyday lives.”

Why do purpose-driven companies do better?

Purpose creates a richer sense of meaning in your business, inspiring employees to raise their game, to transform and grow themselves and the organisation. It encourages a strategic focus, to rise above the distractions of today, to align on bigger goals and to innovate more radically. Productivity and performance typically follow.

We get it. But how do we make it happen, practically and profitably?

Here is a diverse range of tools to help:

Purpose tools

Sustainability tools

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion tools

Wellbeing tools