Peter Fisk is a global thought leader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to “recode” your future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now is the time to dare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should business leaders be focused on right now?

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

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

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

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

What is your big message, right now?

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

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

Creating a better world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The super-apps!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspired by Einstein and Picasso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I use a proprietary methodology, Innolab.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What interests you outside your professional work and why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CMOs should make the best CEOs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here’s my manifesto for marketers:

Growth Drivers

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

Change Makers

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

Business Innovators

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

Value Creators

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

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.

So who are some of the world’s more enlightened marketers, the CMOs who are customer champions but also business innovators and growth drivers? Here are some examples:

Stephanie Buscemi, Salesforce

Salesforce’s CMO talks about the strategic challenge of building value in organisations, about brand purpose and promise. That purpose was is interesting. It gets thrown around with abandon, usually result in some mash-up of keywords which are neither understood or inspiring. Instead need real purpose, how the business will contribute towards a better world (in whatever way, not only around social-type issues), and then translating this into brands with real purpose, and made relevant for each person.

Chris Capossela, Microsoft

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

Carolyn Everson, Facebook

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

Julia Goldin, Lego

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

Marc Pritchard, P&G

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

Phil Schiller, Apple

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example tools

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

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

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

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

POEMS is a method used to study people, objects, environment, messages and services within a specific context. POEMS is an observation framework that allows the observer/researcher to understand the five elements both independently and in a coherent system. With POEMS you can especially look beyond the core object to be observed (e.g. a product) and recognize in which relationships services, news, people and the environment are related to a broader context. Observing from a broader perspective makes it easier for teams to identify systems and exciting relationships.

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

South Korea is a fabulous country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The super-apps!

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

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

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

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

당신은 어떤 미래와혁신를 원하는가?

I first met Whitney Johnson in an Istanbul taxi. We were on the way to an event together. Our shared theme was disruption – I was talking about disrupting markets and brands, she was talking about disrupting organisations and people.

We quickly bonded. We had a shared outlook on life. Perhaps it was partly driven by our kids were a similar age, leaving school, entering college, and we were at that point where life was changing, and we were both asking “what happens next?”.

Whitney’s career path has been an unusual one. She started as a secretary on Wall Street, worked her way up in the firm’s investment banking group, and then stepped back to become an equity research analyst. Eight years later, she quit that job to produce a TV show and write a children’s book, but she ended up blogging about work/life issues and cofounding a hedge fund backed by a man she had met at church.

It’s not what you’d call a traditional corporate trajectory. But perhaps that’s the new normal.

Her great inspiration actually came from one of my heroes, Clay Christensen, who had famously articulated a model for disruptive innovation – following the “S curves” of business growth, and understanding how to disrupt markets to create new curves.

Whitney applied the same idea to people, and specifically to business leaders. What’s the S curve that you have been on – your development path that has led you to where you are. But as things start to plateau, what do you do next?

One sure thing, like in business more generally, is that what got you to this point, is unlikely to take you further. So how do you change, reinvent yourself, and what’s your next path, to take you towards a better future?

The point is that, in a world of relentless change, we all need to reinvent ourselves. But most significantly if you want to transform your business, it probably starts by transforming yourself – your mindset, your priorities, your actions.

You can buy the Disrupt Yourself book here. Since that was published she has also published two more book – Build an A Team, and Smart Growth – but I still think Disrupt Yourself is the best!

Preparing for Change worksheet
Build an A Team chapter one
Smart Growth chapter one

Here are some of the more detailed takeaways from the book Disrupt Yourself:

Disruption #1: There are many types of risk; some are more important than others for success.

Have you ever considered skydiving? Maybe you watched a video on YouTube and thought it looked like fun. But before you make that jump, it’s important to do your research and ensure you know what kind of risks you’re taking. This same philosophy applies to jumping into the world of business as well.

If you’re preparing to take a risky business move, it’s important to distinguish between competitive risk and market risk.

So what makes something a competitive risk? Well, let’s say you have an idea for a great product and it has tested well in a variety of studies and appears to have the potential for huge success. But, at the same time, you’re pretty sure that similar products are being developed by other companies that are aware of the demand.

By going ahead in this scenario you’re taking what’s known as a competitive risk, since you’ll be competing against others.

A market risk, on the other hand, is when you have a unique idea for a new product or service but are uncertain about its chances of success.

In this scenario you have no idea whether your company will generate revenue, but you are certain that your unusual idea will give you a head start on the competition.

While a competitive risk is seen as the safer route, since there’s a known demand for the product, the market risk is usually the best option if you’re looking to disrupt yourself.

In fact, studies show that start-up companies fare better when they take a market risk.

In 1995, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen conducted a landmark study on the computer industry. He determined that two kinds of disc drive companies had emerged between 1976 and 1993, and they’d either taken a market risk or a competitive risk.

Of these companies, it turned out that only six percent of competitive risk companies had reached $100 million in revenue, while 37 percent of the market risk companies had soared past the $100 million mark.

Disruption #2: To be successful, identify your distinctive strengths and pair them with unmet needs in society.

Everyone has a special strength that can make them stand out. Even the gentle and seemingly lazy koala has the unique ability to digest poisonous eucalyptus leaves, which no other animal can stomach.

To be successful in a highly competitive marketplace, you need to identify and develop your own distinctive strength.

To see how you can use your own unique abilities as a business advantage, let’s look at an example from the 2014 film The Hundred Foot Journey.

In the movie, an Indian family is forced to flee during political uprisings in Mumbai, India. They seek refuge in Europe and arrive in a small French village where the family acquires a rundown restaurant.

The family’s talented son, Hassan, is an expert in Indian cuisine, but the local villagers are suspicious of the new restaurant and not keen to try out the exotic fare. But eventually a French neighbor takes Hassan under his wing and teaches him the art of French cuisine.

Now Hassan has the unique power to fuse traditional French flavors with Indian spices, and once he puts this distinctive strength to work, the restaurant ends up becoming a great success.

Hassan’s food also opened an untapped market; likewise, you need to aim your strengths toward some unmet need in society.

For example, when Jayne Juvan started at the law firm Roetzel & Andreas in Cleveland, Ohio, she was a young female lawyer in a conservative male world. In order to prove herself, she needed to discover an unmet need in this society.

She looked around and saw that very few people were using social media, so Juvan began advertising the firm’s services on Twitter and Facebook and, before long, she was landing major clients.

Due to her ability to see the world around her and what was missing from it, her bosses quickly took notice of her strengths and Juvan was made partner of the law firm at the young age of 32.

Disruption #3: You can turn limited money and experience into great sources of motivation.

If you’ve ever stared at the thousands of options on Netflix and been unable to pick something to watch, you’re not alone. When it comes to decisions – in life and in business – sometimes limitations can be a good thing.

In fact, having a limited amount of money can force companies to get creative.

Real estate manager Nick Jekogian is well aware of this. Early on, when the budget was tight, his business flourished. During this time, employees knew that the company couldn’t afford mistakes, so they put in quality effort and worked hard.

Later on, in 2007, the company was a success and the budget was no longer a concern. And this is when the focus was lost and the company ended up in a downturn.

Nor is Jekogian’s experience an anomaly. In a 2007 study by Entrepreneur magazine, 72 percent of the most successful new businesses don’t have access to money from private investors or bank loans.

And though you may not think it, limited experience in your given field can also lead to success.

Athelia Woolley LeSueur was experienced in the field of international relations, but she had to give up this career due to health issues. That’s when she decided to venture into the unknown world of fashion.

LeSueur launched an online clothes shop called Shabby Apple, and her lack of experience actually worked out in her favor. Unfamiliar with the customary practices of hiring representatives and pricey wholesalers, she skipped all these steps and saved herself a lot of money and trouble.

These business partners are often unhelpful and not worth the difficult negotiations you have to go through to secure their services.LeSueur forged ahead on her own and today her company is worth $47.5 million.

Disruption #4: Feelings of cultural and intellectual entitlement are killers of innovation and leadership.

If you’ve spent any time in the business world, you may have met a boss that is surrounded by yes-men and people who don’t dare challenge the head honcho’s ideas. This kind of behavior can be deadly if you’re looking to disrupt yourself.

To disrupt, you need to discover new ideas and new people, and this won’t happen if you fall victim to cultural entitlement.

It’s natural for human beings to group together with like-minded people; if those around you share your cultural values and ideas, your own ideas will be understood and appreciated. But this can also lead to a feeling of superiority over other cultures and a sense of entitlement.

Research indicates that staying within your own social circle can make you less innovative.

The Kellogg School of Management looked at all the scientific papers that were published between the years 1990 and 2000. The papers were deemed either successful or unsuccessful, the criterion for success being how frequently the paper was quoted in other academic papers.

They found that the most successful papers were those that used a majority of well-established academic sources as well as a small amount – 10 to 15 percent – of unusual or alternative sources.

This means that the most successful authors had searched beyond their recognized circle of academic friends and sought out some unique voices for inspiration.

Another pitfall is intellectual entitlement, which can prevent a good leader from paying attention to voices of dissent.

This happens when leaders get so convinced of their own intellectual superiority that they don’t feel the need to listen to others.

Brooksley Born, who served as chair of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission prior to the 2008 economic crash, knows what it feels like to be ignored.

She repeatedly pointed out the need for regulations in the derivatives market. But the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, and the Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, were too experienced and entitled to listen to her concerns.

Disruption #5: Knowing when to make a career move is crucial, but this sort of decision should not be taken lightly.

If you’ve watched Olympic divers, you know how much skill it takes to keep from hitting the water with a tragic belly flop. Well, it takes just as much poise and control to successfully execute one of the dicier moves in business: stepping down.

It’s crucial to know when to take a step down in order to achieve success.

Carine Clark figured this out as a senior manager for online products at the software company Novell. After launching a wide-reaching $80-million marketing campaign, she felt she had accomplished everything she’d set out to do, so she decided to step down and start anew.

Clark joined Altiris, a small start-up that offered a platform for IT management assets, and her timing couldn’t have been better: A few years later, in 2007, Altiris was acquired by the $6-billion software company Symantec, and Clark was made CEO of the new company.

Even if you’re forced to step down against your will, it can still turn out to be a great thing.

In 2009, Clark had to step down after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. This caused her to spend several years out of the business loop, and when she recovered she decided it was time for another fresh start.

In 2012, Clark built her own small software company from scratch, which was acquired by MaritzCX in 2015. Again, she was selected to be head of the new company.

Carine Clark’s success story shows how important it can be to keep challenging yourself and recognizing when it’s time to start over and try something new.

When you look at your situation clearly, you can make the right business decisions, take the right risks and, like Clark, become a respected business leader.

Disruption #6: Intelligent people are often particularly afraid of failure, and yet failure is crucial to success.

It can be frustrating to see other kids breeze through school while you have to struggle just to get a passing grade. But all that hard work can actually give you an advantage.

After all, everyone is going to eventually hit a setback, and it will take hard work to recover.

We can see this in the studies done by child specialists Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller, who explored how different praise can affect our level of resilience.

First, they gave a group of fifth graders some easy problems to solve. After they successfully finished, one group was told how smart they were, while the other was praised for its hard work.

Then came the second round. They were all given very difficult problems that no one got right. Finally, in the third round, the children were once again given problems that were easy to solve.

In the end, the “smart” children did 25 percent worse in the third round than in the first round, while children who were praised for working hard showed a 25-percent improvement in the third round.

This shows us that the wrong kind of encouragement can actually set people up for failure when they hit a roadblock. Children should be taught that, as long as they work hard, it’s okay to fail.

In fact, a lot can be learned from failure, which can then be put toward future success.

Entrepreneur Nate Quigley wanted to create a Facebook spin-off called FolkStory, which would act as a blog for the whole family. But it never took off.

So his team came up with the idea for JustFamily, which would let families collect and share their photos on a cloud service. This also failed.

Still, they kept at it, reaching out to target users to find out what would work and finally coming up with Chatbooks, a service that compiles the social media photos and stories of various family members so that it can all be neatly printed out into a book. Unlike the previous ventures, Chatbooks was a huge success.

Disruption #7: The most successful careers are driven by a spirit of discovery and the most successful companies develop flexibly.

Every so often you come across someone who knew at a very early age what they wanted to be when they grew up. Such stories offer a certain narrative satisfaction – but don’t be frustrated if you’re still searching for your vocation.

Most successful people are actually driven by a restless spirit of curiosity.

Linda Descano is one such person. She started out as a geology student at Texas University, which got her work as an environmental consultant. This led to legal counseling work and her becoming an expert witness.

She then joined Citibank’s legal sector, where she looked at potential environmental risks and provided estimates. Then she became an asset manager before transitioning into the position of being Citigroup’s lifestyle blogger.

It should be noted that Descano didn’t plan any of these career moves. Rather, she remained curious and willing to discover new fields of work, and this can-do attitude eventually convinced her employers that she was fully capable of learning any new task.

Descano’s story also shows the importance of being flexible and adaptable.

In fact, research shows that 70 percent of all successful new companies end up with a different product or strategy than they started out with.

Take Millenium Pharmaceuticals, for example. They started out as a biochemical company treating genetic diseases before recognizing that treatments for other diseases, such as cancer, were more important to their target population.

Gradually, they branched out into researching and evaluating new drugs and, in May of 2003, Millennium produced a new drug called Velcade, a successful treatment for multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood.

This was a milestone achievement, and the company was convinced that they should focus on anti-cancer drugs as their main product from now on.

So remember, life is full of surprises. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t end up where you thought you would. You might end up doing things you never dreamed of!

Today the world is going through a very complex situation: the new normal as a result of the pandemic, how do these factors affect the Marketing industry? What are the points of no return? And, conversely, what remains?

The “new normal” is a world of increasing complexity, change and multiple challenges. We need to let go of the old world which was relatively simple and predictable.

We live in a time of incredible change. Of course, some of this is challenging – economic inflation, political uncertainty, global fragmentation. But with challenge also comes opportunity. We will probably see more change in this decade, than over the last 250 years.

This is fueled by the relentless pace of new technology, and in particular the connections of digital platforms, bio tech and nanotech, IoT and robotics, and the data and AI which emerges from it.

But in reality, tech is just the enabler of more dramatic change – of convergent, disrupted marketplaces; of changing customer attitudes and priorities; of new attitudes towards work and the role of organisations in society; and of new opportunities to innovate and grow.

In the old world, size mattered. Big companies, the largest customer bases, the highest revenue, and market share. None of that matters today.

In the new world, markets are fragmented and discerning. It’s about focus, relevance and speed.

Mass-marketing doesn’t work. Customers are not average. Transactions are not enough. People trust people rather than brands. Purpose matters. Propositions are more personal.

What matters to marketers? Customers, brands and innovation. Business needs marketers more than ever to unlock these crucial assets and capabilities, in order to make sense of rapid change, to actively shape the future markets, to respond to new entrants and disruptors, and bring the organisation together strategically and operationally to drive profitable growth.

What are the main challenges that Marketing specialists face today, taking into account the new consumer (omnichannel, digital, with social sensitivity, etc.) and the new market (more digital and technological, with more exhibition platforms)?

Marketers need to be both strategic and operational.

In the past the strategic focus has largely been on brand building. In steady-state markets, this was relatively easy. Market structures, competitors and customers, channels and prices, value propositions and business models, changed little. Brands competed on being slightly better, or slightly cheaper. This is now all shaken up.

Business needs marketers to be the “strategic guides” through a world of relentless market-driven change. Every market is being shaken up – by changing economics, customer agendas, disruptive competitors, new business models. And much more.

Strategically, marketers need to be the “sense-makers” of fast-changing markets – to identify the new opportunities for business growth, both in existing and new markets – to explore and shape emerging markets to their advantage – to drive innovation across every aspect of business.

This is particularly driven by the convergence of traditional industry sectors – for example, telecom companies become media companies, retail companies also become finance companies, accounting firms become consulting firms.

At the same time entirely new “market spaces” emerge like home delivery companies (and in particular quick-commerce), or online gaming companies, or plant-based food companies. This is all in the power of marketers!

Or think about geography, demographics, segmentation. Why do we still largely organize our business and marketing by country. Is there not more in common between GenZ, or old people, or SMEs, across Latin America, rather having to address them separately within each country?

Operationally, marketers need to be the “data scientists” of technologically-enabled markets.

Each customer seeks, expects, a more personal experience. Particularly when they know you have some much data about them. They expect the same level of intelligence as they get from shopping at Amazon, or the same level or personal service they get from a local café.

Unlocking the intelligent power of data is the key – to anticipate the needs of customers, to engage them individually, to resolve problems before they are even known. SEO is just a starting point.

The best companies now have huge data science labs, monitoring every post about a brand, every click by a customer. In retail, for example, GPS and iBeacons in a shop, mean that every customer experience is unique, every customer have personal incentives, pay different prices.

Given your experience working with big brands, what is the secret for “traditional” brands to become “current” brands without losing their essence and value?

Traditional brands have almost all the advantages – heritage, experience, scale, data, talent, capital – yet they lack the mindset of fast, entrepreneurial youthful brands. Start-ups have advantages too, most significantly less complexity, less process, less fear.

Companies like Nike, have shown that a 50 year company can be incredibly innovative – look at how they have shifted to being a primarily DTC business in a short period of time – have they have embrace social networks to build communities, to engage with new audiences and agendas, to constantly reinterpret value propositions and stay relevant.

The “secret” is simple, to stay focused on the customer, and the changing customer. Not just to meet their existing needs, but constantly explore new ideas, to innovate, to inspire them.

The best companies, traditional or new, interpret themselves not as product-centric but as customer-centric businesses. Of course, experts have being saying that for 40 years. Yet most companies still interpret customer-centric as “smiling faces” or “fast response”.

Instead, think about this. Do you define your brand around your business and product, or around the customer and application? …. Think about it … Don’t define yourself by what you do – you’re a food company, a sportswear company – but by what you enable people to do.

Nike is a sports company, not a sportswear company. Harley Davidson is not about the technically-mediocre motorbike, but about the freedom of the rider. Danone is not a food company, but a healthy living company.

And then everything else follows too – don’t focus on the sales transaction, the point of sale, advertising the product functionality, the price relative to production cost – think about what the customer seeks to achieve, how you can support them over time, engaging them in learning to use it better, and the price relative to the value they gain.

This is not rocket science. But it is still a wake-up to many marketers.

More strategically, it’s also about exploring what more you can do – don’t limit your growth to just finding more customers for existing products, or more products for existing customers – think about how you can go further – using your assets, capabilities and imagination in new ways.

Take PingAn for example. The Shenzhen-based insurance company is one of the largest in the world. It has a digital platform serving almost one billion customers. For boring insurance. What more could it do? It looked at where the growth opportunities are, the unexploited markets, and how its assets could help. Today, after just 4 years, Ping An is also the world’s largest healthcare platform.

What is the balance point between new technologies (for example, artificial intelligence) and the human component (contact with a “real person”)?

We are human. Real people. People trust people.

Technology is simply there to enable us to do better. AI, for example, helps us to anticipate and meet people’s needs better. Robotics helps us to improve the efficiency and accuracy of processes. Think of Kava robots in Amazon warehouses, or the Da Vinci robots which perform the majority of heart surgeries. Blockchain delivers solutions faster and cheaper.

We also need people to act in human ways – to interpret emotions, to engage with empathy, to build relationships, to share hopes and fears, purpose and passions.

If you are developing a new website, a new app, a new process for your business – think about this – how does it create a better experience – not just fast and efficiency, but more personal and human too. Similarly companies how seek “digital transformation” need to recognise that what they really need is “business transformation”, probably customer-centric, enabled by digital technology.

DBS is a great example of this. For the past 4 years, the Singapore business has been ranked the world’s most innovative bank. Their strategy is to “make banking invisible”.

They want people to “bank less, live more”. Their entire focus is on implementing better payment-related technologies into everyday life – shopping, entertaining, transporting, educating. They don’t want people to spend time coming to banks, or using separate apps for money, they want people to get on with life.

In line with the previous question and with a view to friction-free marketing, what do you consider to be the most appropriate customer journey for the short and medium term?

The biggest opportunity today is to become a C2C company. Customers connected to customers. Sharing their passions, supporting each other. Co-creating, co-selling, co-enabling what they do.

This is the best form of friction-free marketing. Where there is no company getting in the way. Of course, there is a brand – but the brand is about the customers, and their shared passion – not the company. The brand is more like a facilitator, helping customers to do what they want better.

Glossier is a great C2C example, created by Emily Weiss, and now one of the world’s fastest growing beauty brands. It is about customers sharing their love of beauty – including new ideas for products, recommending their best friends, and then sharing in the everyday use of the products.

Rapha is another great example. The cycling brand, which started in London with its first “cycle club”, which is a store but with a café in the centre, a bike store and workshop, and showers. Of course the store is where you can buy Rapha cyclewear, but more importantly it is where you meet people like you, to share your passion for cycling, to watch a race over a coffee, to go for a ride after work. Go on the Rapha app, its full of people sharing their love of cycling, as well as the products.

Given your extensive experience around the world, what are the most common mistakes that companies make when managing their brands in the face of new challenges?

It’s time to let go – let go of what made you successful in the past – and to explore and embrace, a different, but exciting, new future.

In the search for agility and speed, creativity and difference, organisations are focusing on the power of teams. Here, in an extract from my new book “Business Recoded: Have the courage to create a better future” I explore why and how extreme teams are the future of work.

Richie McCaw, the former captain of New Zealand’s “All Blacks”, is regarded by many as the greatest rugby player of all time.

His teams won a remarkable 89% of their 110 matches in which he was their leader, including two World Cups. He even played through one cup final with a broken foot, knowing that he was a key component of the team. Whilst he recognises that the team is always more than any individual, he also believes that a leader defines a team, brings together and creates great individuals.

After lifting the World Cup in 2015, McCaw said “We come from a small Pacific island, a nation of only 4.5 million, but with a winning mindset. At the start of each game, when we lock together in our traditional Maori haka, we know that we are invincible”.

Create your “Kapa o Pango”

The All Blacks have a bold and unwavering ambition to win, working on a 4-year cycle with a common team, and setting mini goals along the way to retain sharpness and evaluate progress. They search out the best players who bring each technical specialism, but equally who will work best together, whilst also retaining a search for new talent and skills.

Being part of the team is everything, with a sacred induction, and commitment to the higher purpose.

As a team they constantly evaluate, challenge and stretch, themselves. They search the world of sport and beyond for new ideas, ways to improve physiological fitness, mental agility or technical skills. Like most sports, whilst they have a coach to guide them and captain to lead them out. Their approach once in the game is that every one of them is a leader, all equal, all responsible, and all heroes when they win.

In his book “Legacy” James Kerr says describes some of their team beliefs

A collection of talented individuals without personal discipline will ultimately and inevitably fail.
A sense of inclusion means individuals are more willing to give themselves to a common cause.
The first stage of learning is silence, the second stage is listening.
High-performing teams promote a culture of honesty, authenticity and safe conflict.
If we’re going to lead a life, if we’re going to lead anything, we should surely know where we are going, and why.
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation or talent, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

McCaw talks about some of the distinctive beliefs which the team has embraced. These include many concepts from Maori culture, such as the “Kapa o Pango” which is the name of the haka, the traditional dance performed by the team before every match, and reflects the diversity of the nation’s Polynesian origins. Such rituals become important in bonding the team, but also in creating its identity to others.

Another Maori concepts is “whanau” which means “follow the spearhead” inspired by a flock of birds flying in formation which is typically 70% more efficient than flying solo. And finally “whakapapa” which means leave a great legacy, or translated more directly, plant trees you’ll never see by being a good ancestor.

The team always wins

Netflix has built a culture of “freedom and responsibility” which has helped it to dare to innovate more radically, and transform an industry. Pixar’s teams work together in wooden huts as an individual but collective workspace, embracing an openness of debate to turn initially mediocre ideas into billion-dollar hits.

Teams are where innovative ideas are most often conceived, futures shaped, projects implemented, and where employees experience most of their work. But it’s also where the biggest problems can arise in limiting the effectiveness of organisations.

Alphabet recently set about investigating what makes a great team, in what they called Project Aristotle, a tribute to Aristotle’s quote, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

Effective teams, they concluded, have a high degree of interdependence, more than just a group working on a project, or functionally aligned. They have a distinctive identity, and loyalty to each other. They plan work, solve problems, make decisions, and review together, and know that they need one another to achieve success.

Alphabet found that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together. In order of importance, they found that effective teams are:

Safe: this relates to people’s perceptions of the heightened risks of taking part, or reduced risks of acting together, determined by their confidence in each other.
Dependable: participants trust each other to embrace their individual responsibilities, deliver work of quality and on time
Structured: there are clear goals, with clear responsibilities of each participant, and an agreed way of working together.
Meaning: the team has its own sense of purpose, which is relevant to the organisation, but also to the values and ambitions of the team
Impact: each participant’s contribution is seen as important, whilst the real measure of impact is what the team can achieve together.

Each Whole Foods store manager can act largely autonomously, aligned by clear metrics but responsive to local communities and the passions of their local team. Zappos, the online fashion retailer, also now part of Amazon, embraces “weirdness and fun” as the ingredients to sustain their team success.

Fearless and fearsome

Amy Edmondson’s book “The Fearless Organisation” focuses on Alphabet’s top priority, that teams need to have psychological safety, and how teams create safe spaces in organisations for people to be open, creative and grow.

Organisations can easily become paralysed by fear, which reduces people to conformity, to easy compromises, to incremental developments, and mediocre performance. Leaders are responsible for creating such cultures of fear, and are equally responsible for creating an environment where people can be fearless, or even together, fearsome.

Psychological safety is created through 3 factors:

Positive tension: It’s not about always agreeing, about being nice for the sake of harmony, or constant praise. Creating an environment where tensions are constructive not destructive requires trust, allowing and respecting people for talking openly, with different perspectives, and conflicting opinions.
Complimentary styles: Team members will have different styles of behaviour, some extroverts and others introverts, some visionary and others pragmatic, some starters and other finishers. The team values these styles as complementary and equally important.
Collective attitude: Whilst trust is important between participants, the key aspect of safety is that it is valued by each person as important to the group’s ability to function well. Whilst team members are individually different, they acknowledge they are much less without the whole.

Extreme teams, like the All Blacks, take these traits to the limit. They seek great individuals who are prepared to work collectively, with commitment and courage. They seek more diversity, bringing together differences of capability and opinion. They thrive on dynamic conversations that can embrace extreme ideas. And they have a profound belief, that together they can achieve amazing results.

Interview with Peter Fisk on the future of organisations, and the ability to embrace new talent that drives diversity and creativity within traditional organisations. The article appears in the September 2021 edition of Fast Company magazine:

Fast Company: Is seeking out such swashbuckling, rule-breaking oddballs a sound strategy for upping the innovative IQ of an organization whose leaders don’t naturally think like innovators? Why or why not?

Organisations thrive in a world of uncertain yet relentless change on their “cognitive diversity” … much more than a agile mindset, this is the willingness to embrace ambiguity rather than wait for certainty, to embrace extreme insights and ideas over mainstream averages, and to resolve paradoxes with new creative fusions.

Innovation lies in “extreme teams” who have both the stretching challenge, and pyschological safety, to challenge conventions, and to embrace boldness. These become the new powerhouses of organisations, which have replaced formal hierarchies with self-organising organic networks, focusing on customers and opportunities, rather than organised for efficiency and continuity.

A great example is Haier, the Qingdao-based world’s leading home appliances business. In my new book “Business Recoded” Haier’s CEO Zhang Ruimin describes his “rendanheyi” approach to organisations, an organisation of 1000 extreme teams, each essentially a micro-business of no more than 100 people, but each with the support of corporate resources and branded ecosystem.

The same approach to “extreme teaming” – the ability to bring together a juxtaposition of talents, skills, perspectives and experiences – demonstrates the real power of “diversity” in its broader sense, in organisations today. Google’s Project Aristotle recognised these qualities in its search for a perfect team, as did design company IDEO in recruiting eclectic teams of scientists, engineers, artists, and business people in its design teams.

Over the last decade as hierarchical organisations have stagnated, they have sought to embrace an entrepreneurial culture, perhaps through design thinking, corporate venturing, or seeking to follow Eric Ries’ start-up bible. Instead they should play to their strengths, using their scale to embrace much greater cognitive diversity – and ultimately portfolio of projects, innovations, and businesses – in a do what start-ups could only dream of doing!

Fast Company: In our experience, Rare Breed individuals don’t want to work in environments that are dull, repressive, or where they feel they cannot be themselves. They also are more likely to be outside the mainstream in terms of racial and ethnic identity, gender identity, appearance, social interaction, and even hygiene. How can leaders evolve their cultures to be more enticing to such “fringe” people without chasing away the more conservative employees who also play vital roles in keeping things running?

Microsoft’s incredible value-creating rebirth under Satya Nadella will be written about in time, as the model of how large organisations finally reinvented themselves for a post-hierarchical age. Nadella really only used two tools to drive a cultural transformation – inspiring purpose (an empowering focus on what customers do, not the products themselves) and a growth mindset (to experiment, to break rules, to reject the old corporate model).

Today’s most enlightened organisations are becoming “platforms for talent” – creating the space, support and stories for individuals to unlock their full potential. That requires a radical shift in thinking. Of leadership understanding. Of strategic agility. And patience. It goes far beyond Google’s boot-legging or Lego’s creative play. It’s when organisations learn to play jazz, not to follow the classical score – to unlock their humanity, and human potential.

Of course, many organisations are not ready for that, or don’t have the capacity to cope with such chaos – smaller companies seek to retain single-minded focus, finance or pharma have their regulatory excuses – but ultimately they need to embrace such approaches. The Pfizer vaccine emerged out of an ecosystem of partners, most notably Biontech, who were prepared to go to extremes and pursue what seemed like crazy ideas.

The speed of transformation in so many markets around the world, requires this mental as well as physical agility, achieved by cognitive diversity – look at Jio in India, Grab in Singapore, or even more traditional organisations like Siemens in Germany, and Fujifilm in Japan. It is supported by an ambidextrous strategy – to deliver today, whilst creating tomorrow.

This requires dual transformation that builds a customer-centric portfolio of solutions for today, and a portfolio of innovative business ideas for tomorrow. “Fringe” people were only so-named when the organisations only focused on today, on the mainstream, on the core. Now there is more space, and more need. Jobs shift from function roles to projects, stability gives way to speed, crazy ideas and being different is the new human advantage.

Fast Company: Presumably, there are some people like this hidden in the headcount of any large company, afraid to show their true colors. Since it’s much easier to find and develop game changing talent in-house than to try to recruit it elsewhere, how can leaders spot and develop the people who “think around corners” who are already on their payroll?

Eliud Kipchoge is the world’s greatest marathon runner, the first man to break two hours, the double Olympic champion. 6 years ago, a fading track athlete, and having passed his 30th birthday, he was considering retiring. Instead he stepped up distance and took on the marathon. He knew he needed to change. He started doing yoga, he moved out of his nice home into a training camp, and he sought to learn everything from other sports like cycling.

He knew he needed to find something different to perform at a level nobody had done before. In the same way, organisations increasingly recognise that success in the post-Covid 2020s won’t be achieved go getting “back to normal” but by embracing difference. This is a mindset. It needs leaders with a “future mindset”, with curiosity and courage, who seek to find new directions. A mindset, that then becomes a culture in everyone.

Organisations of the future are not about status achieved through years of service, depth of expertise, or even historic performance. They bring together young and old, eclectic skills and attitudes, oddballs and misfits. To do so, they will need multiple contracting formats, and multiple working formats. This will be the great legacy of Covid-19’s disruption to the old ways of working, themselves a hangover from the industrial revolution.

At GM, Mary Barra used her acquisition of AI-driving system Cruise to symbolise and galvanise a rebirth of a bankrupt giant. Jim Snabe has done the same over the last few two years at Maersk, turning the world’s largest container shipping company, into a futuristic blockchain-based logistics network. These organisations thrive on transformational projects – forget functional roles, forget job descriptions, even forget old notions of employment.

I started my new book by saying “the next 10 years will see more change than the last 250 years”. We have already recognise the transformational impact of shifting markets, data-driven tech, and new agendas. But it’s organisations that will make the change happen – the new ecosystems of talent, led with a future mindset, fusing together as extreme teams, and the courage to create a different, better future.

In nature, few complex systems are organised through hierarchies. We need to develop businesses that are living, adaptive, “collectively conscious” organisations. In an extract from my recent book “Business Recoded: Have the courage to create a better future”, I explore the future of organisations.

Qingdao is the home of Haier, the world’s leading home appliances business. Over the years, the company’s CEO Zhang Ruimin has become an innovator not only of washing machines and refrigerators, but of organisations and entrepreneurship too.

Once a devotee of the “six sigma” approach, Zhang has developed his own management ideology: rendanheyi. By dividing a company up into micro-enterprises on an open platform and dismantling the traditional “empire” management system, rendanheyi creates “zero distance” between employee and the needs of the customer.

At the heart of rendanheyi is the cultivation of entrepreneurship – by removing the costly level of middle management (Zhang famously eliminated the positions of 10,000 employees), you encourage innovation, flexibility and risk-taking.

The quantum mechanics of business

On meeting, we quickly found a common background, having both studied physics, and specifically quantum mechanics. I was curious about how he had embraced the ideas of physical science into his vision of how Haier should work as an organisation. We quickly got into a passionate, and somewhat technical discussion about atomic structure and wave theory. Whilst I’m not sure atomic physics would be many business people’s ideal topic, I was intrigued.

“When I first studied physics, I was amazed by the perpetual motion of subatomic particles. Electrons and protons coexist in a dynamic equilibrium, created by their equal and opposite charges. This sustains a continual existence, it enables atoms to come together in many different formats as molecules, each with their own unique properties, and within these atomic structures is huge amounts of energy”.

The application to business becomes clear, and also much of the founding ideas behind why and how he has developed his rendanheyi model of entrepreneurial businesses.

“Applying this idea from physics to business” he says “small teams of people with different backgrounds, skills, and ideas, can co-exist incredibly effectively. It is the ability to create small diverse teams where ideas and actions are equally dynamic, that enables a business to sustain over time. They become self-organising and mutually enabling. Ideas, innovation and implementation are continuous. And they can easily link with other teams, like atoms coming together as molecules, for collaborative projects and to create new solutions.”

As a result, he challenges the old supremacy of shareholders in the value equation, putting a premium on employees, and the value created by them and for them. However, at the same time, he recognises the need to empower employees to be more customer intimate. As a result, the rate of growth has risen from 8% to 30% in recent years.

“People are not a means to an end, but an end in themselves. We took away all of our middle management. Now things are working much better. Zero signature, zero approval. Now we have only one supervisor, which is the customer.”

Haier’s evolution has been rapid and relentless, as Zhang has driven the company from an old refrigerator factory – where indiscipline and poor quality was so rife that he took to shock tactics, taking a sledge hammer to some of the products to demonstrate that such mediocrity was no longer acceptable – to a pioneer of digital tech.

In the 1990s, Haier focused on the Chinese market, building a portfolio of high-quality standardised products. The 2000s was about internationalisation, reaching across the world, and then adding more localisation and customisation. The 2010s have been all about digitalisation, embracing the power of automation and data, to the point where Haier is now one of the world’s leading producers of “smart” products, embedded with Internet of Things, IoT, and connected intelligently.

However, the implications are profound. Today, Haier is not motivated by seeking to create the best product. With a brand purpose that seeks to make people’s lives better, it looks beyond products to services, to how it can do more to help people live in their everyday lives, with a focus on the intelligent home.

“In a digital world of globalization, connectivity and personalization, there is no such thing as a perfect product. People will buy scenarios, or concepts, where the products might be free and act as enablers for services. Haier’s products embrace IoT to ensure that they connect with other devices, with other partners in our ecosystems, and with people and their homes. In the future, maybe the product will be free, and people will pay for services – from food delivery, to home entertainment, security or maintenance.”

Organisations as living organisms

The way we manage organisations seems increasingly out of date.

Most employees are disengaged. Too often work is associated with dread and drudgery, rather than passion or purpose.

Leaders complain that their organisations are too slow, siloed and bureaucratic for today’s world. Behind the façade and bravado, many business leaders are deeply frustrated by the endless power games and politics of corporate life.

Frédéric Laloux offers an alternative. In his book “Reinventing Organizations” he uses the metaphor of an organisation as a living system, with radically streamlined structures that facilitate active involvement and self-management.

He envisions a new organisational model, which is self-managed, built around a “wholeness” approach to life and work, and guided by an “evolutionary purpose”.

Wholeness means that people strive to be themselves, rather than putting on a mask when they go to work. This, he argues can only be achieved when they let go of the idea of “work-life balance” which encourages a compromise. By aligning personal and organisational purpose and passions, you have less stress, and contribute more.

Evolutionary purpose means that meaning and direction of the business is not defined from above but drawn from what feels right amongst people. It might be articulated in a manifesto which defines the actions most admired, the new projects that receive the most interest. And it is constantly evolving, as both the culture inside, and world outside, evolve too.

Laloux describes humanity as evolving in stages. Inspired by the philosopher Ken Wilber, he describes five stages of human consciousness, with associated colours, and proposes that organizations evolve according to these same stages. They are:

Impulsive (red): Characterised by establishing and enforcing authority through power, eg mafia, street gangs. For business, this is reflected in the functional boundaries, and top down authority.
Conformist (amber): The group shapes its own beliefs and value. Self-discipline, shame and guilt, are used to enforce them, eg military, religion. For business this means replicable processes, and defined organizations.
Achievement (orange): The world is seen as a machine, seeking scientifically to predict, control and deliver, eg banking, MBA programs. For business this means Innovation, analytics and metrics, and accountability
Pluralistic (green): Characterised by a sense of inclusion, to treat all people as equal, more like a family, eg non-profits. For business this means a values-driven culture, empowerment and shared value.
Evolutionary (teal): The world is seen as neither fixed nor machine, but a place where everyone is called by an inner purpose to contribute, eg holocracy. For business this means self-management and wholeness.

Most organisations today are “orange”, still driven by analysis and metrics, driving profitability and growth. Examples of “green” organisations include Apple, Ben & Jerry’s, Starbucks.

Examples of “teal” organisations in the USA include:

Morning Star – Californian tomato ingredient processor – Read more
Patagonia – Manufacturer of climbing gear and outdoor apparel, caring for the environment and, in their words, saving the planet.
Resources for Human Development – non-profit social services agency – Read more
New Era Windows & Doors – Workers without pensions or severance rights organised found another way to organise, by buying and running the company themselves.
Isthmus Engineering & Manufacturing – a worker-owned cooperative specializing in custom automation solutions and equipment.
Union Cab Cooperative – operates the largest taxi fleet in Madison

Examples of “teal” organisations in Europe include:

Buurtzorg – Dutch home care service, who decided they no longer wanted to be driven by corporate efficiency metrics – Read more
John Lewis Partnership – British employee-owned democratic organisation of 90,000 partners and famous for its slogan of “never knowingly undersold”
Evangelischen Schule Berlin – Germany
Heiligenfeld – German mental health hospital
Favi – French brass foundry within the car industry
We-Q – created a team diagnostic survey tool that facilitates transformational conversations in the direction of the key teal breakthroughs

The end of hierarchy

What replaces the old hierarchies of organisations?

Henry Ford built his organisation for stability, efficiency and standardisation. Clearly defined processes and controls ensured that it worked like a machine, no space for deviance or change. Some decades later, Kaori Ishikawa went further to systemise the approach with total quality management, seen as the secret of Japan’s industrial success in the late 20th century. Efficiency was the goal, not creativity.

However, today’s world requires a different approach. Business needs to be fast and adaptive to a world of change. Technology has transformed the roles of people inside organisations, automating processes, adding intelligent systems, and digital interfaces. The value of organisations lies in its ideas, reputation and reach. Organisations embrace the connectedness of the outside world, technology enabling knowledge sharing, fast decision making, and collaborative working.

Flat organisations became fast and agile, putting customers at their heart. Yet this is all structural, and did not in itself create difference. In a world where businesses could essentially do anything, they have become more purposeful, and also more distinctive in their character and beliefs.

Expert teams don’t need the old controls. Empowered and enabled, they become more self-managing, and teams collectively work together towards a higher purpose and strategic framework that guides but doesn’t prescribe. As a result, the business develops a human-like consciousness. It resembles a complex adaptive system, where there is a wholeness built on multiple non-linear connections, combining progress with agility.

Buurtzorg, like Haier, is a great example of self-managing teams. The Dutch healthcare business provides home support to elderly people. It recognised that local teams, which acted largely autonomously had a much great commitment to their work, than if they were managed centrally using standard efficiency metrics.

Haufe Group is an innovative media and software business in Freiburg, in the heart of Germany’s Black Forest. As an organisation they have long put people first, sharing in the development of strategy, and the rewards of success. When it came to appointing a new CEO, the company realised that this couldn’t just be imposed on such a democratic structure, and so now holds elections to find who amongst peers will be the leader.

If, as Peter Drucker said, “the purpose of an organisation is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things” then organisations must evolve to make this possible.

© Peter Fisk

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

The Lake Biwa Marathon is the oldest in Japan – this year’s edition saw 42 local runners break 2 hours 10 minutes for the distance, the most ever in one race, anywhere – the US Olympic trial saw one runner under that time, while in the UK there were none. Yet hardly any of these Japanese runners win gold medals, or are known outside their home nation.

Japanese culture focuses on teams rather than individuals, on contribution towards collective goals rather than personal fame and fortune.

This is illustrated by the Hakone Ekiden, a long-distance running relay, and Japan’s most popular televised sporting event. Traditionally run over three days between the ancient capital Kyoto and Tokyo, a distance of 508km, it now consists of a corporate race every New Year’s Day, and a student race on the two following days. The collegiate race is the bigger event, with 52.6 million tuning into watch this year, 40% of the population.

Every top Japanese athlete aspires to join a corporate team – becoming employees with extra time off for training. Japanese brands are seen as national icons, and representing one is seen as the highest accolade for the individual, rather than an athlete’s endorsement for the company. This year’s Ekiden winner was the Fujitsu team, followed by Toyota, Asahi, Hitachi, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nihon and Yakult.

Last summer, I read Adharanand Finn’s excellent book The Way of the Runner, about his year living in Japan, running with a corporate team. He also spent time with the “marathon monks” of Mount Hiei near Kyoto, who attempt to run 1000 marathons in 1000 days in search of spiritual enlightenment. Only 46 monks have succeeded in 130 years.

Finn realised that Japanese see sport as a route to personal fulfilment (indeed, many sports, like judo or kendo, end with the suffix -do, meaning “the way”). Marathon running, in particular, is seen as honourable, instilling the values of hard work and commitment. He gives the example of Toyota’s HR department which uses their running team as a showcase for teamwork and discipline, with runners acting as mentors to business leaders.

Shigetaka Komori, CEO of Fujifilm, highlights the Japanese word “majime” which means serious and hardworking, a person who can be trusted to overcome difficult challenges, and constantly drive progress. Most Japanese leaders are therefore seen as calm and stoic, rather than charismatic and passionate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN7-EsXKzUw

Fujifilm is a great example of an organisation that “never stops” innovating, from camera film to medical imaging, from anti-viral Covid drugs to Asia’s leading skincare brand.

Being a team player is also essential to Japanese leadership. Rather than being a figurehead and decision-maker, leaders exist to consult with teams, to find consensus. This drives hierarchical working, feeling the need to be involved in everything their teams do.

Combined with a great appreciation of tradition – the world’s oldest company is Kongo Gumi, a construction company founded in 578AD in Osaka – this is a culture that has incredible resilience, makes steady progress, but can also struggle to adapt in a world of rapid change. The world’s third largest economy, largely stagnated in recent years, is also ranked as the world’s fourth least entrepreneurial country in the world.

Seiko Hashimoto, President of the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee, is a 7-time Olympian, a former speed skater and track cyclist, who became a politician. She stepped in earlier this year to run the Tokyo Olympics, after the previous leader, 83 year old Yoshiro Mori, stepped down because of derogatory comments about women. Indeed women only make up 15% of senior management roles in Japan (compared to 29% globally).

Hashimoto said she hopes that despite all the challenges of the last 18 months, the Olympics will “spark a change in Japanese culture, combining historic values with a future mindset”. And that “delivering Tokyo 2020 in 2021 is a symbol of looking forwards”.