Peter Fisk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to “The Ministry Of Common Sense“.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where’s the Covid?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BS or AH?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Introduction

Business needs a new code for success

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

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

Part 1: Aurora … Recode your future

How will you reinvent your business for a better future?

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

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

Part 2: Komorebi … Recode your growth

Where are the best opportunities to grow further and faster?

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

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

Part 3: Transcendent … Recode your market

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

How will you reshape your market to your advantage? 

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

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

Part 4: Ingenuity … Recode your innovation

What does it take to drive more radical innovation?

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

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

Part 5: Ubuntu … Recode your organisation

How can people achieve more together?

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

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

Part 6: Syzygy … Recode your transformation

What does it take to transform your business effectively?

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

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

Part 7: Awestruck … Recode your leadership

Do you have the courage to create a better future? 

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

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

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

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

Inspiration 1: Eliud Kipchoge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the marathon, he became unbeatable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiration 2: DeepMind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He calls AlphaZero, and other such beings, cyborgs.

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

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

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

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

Inspiration 3: Tan Le

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiration 4: Satya Nadella

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiration 5: Mary Barra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiration 6: Jack Ma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiration 7: JK Rowling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Fisk 2020.

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

© Peter Fisk 2020

“Business Recoded” by Peter Fisk is available now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

North American Winners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asian Winners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Winners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

South American Winners

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

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

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

Sources: FT, Bloomberg, WSJ. Images: Unsplash

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

A bit like WalMart meets Instagram meets Disneyland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you the courage to create a better future?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blackrock: Megatrends

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

The Economist: The World in 2021

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

Ericsson: Hot Consumer Trends 2030

Euromonitor: 10 Global Trends 2021

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

Fjord: Trends 2021

Forrester: Predictions 2021

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

Themes include

The Future Laboratory: Future Forecasts 2021

Future Today Institute: 2020 Signals

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

IFTF: After the Pandemic

Marian Salzman: Zoomsday Predictions

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

NTT: Future Disrupted Tech Trends

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

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

Richard Watson: Post-Pandemic Scenarios

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ross Dawson: Accelerating past to future

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

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

Trendhunter: Top 18 Trends

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

Homes are our personal cocoons, our places to relax and recover from the challenges of a fast and challenging world, to connect with family, to eat and sleep, to be ourselves.

Yet the Covid-19 pandemic has also made homes our windows on the world, a place for work, for learning, for entertainment, for exercise. When lockdown first struck we enhanced our hardware, now we are reimagining homes for good.

Changing how we live

More generally we see global “megatrends” changing where and how we live:

• shift towards urbanisation, in search of better lifestyles and services, although balanced by a desire to escape dense populations.
• changing demographics, as populations live longer, care and support matters more, as do trends in singles and people marrying much later.
• sustainability has become a priority, environmentally in using less and cleaner energy, and socially in supporting local communities and others.

While these megatrends may not happen overnight, they are the big shifts in our wider world, that will ultimately transform the ways in which we live.

Covid-19 has accelerated many of these trends, as we rush to reprioritise what matters in our lives, and also cope with the effects on our economies, work and health. It has driven:

• changing work, enforced working from home will evolve into more virtual organisations, more gig working, and more fused home-work styles.
• changing towns, the huge shift to online shopping and entertainment and education, will have lasting impact on the role and feel of towns, malls, schools and shops.
• changing communities, our interests are shared less by people who live in physical proximity, but by those who connect socially online, for sport and much more.

So what is the future of homes, towns and cities?

Smart cities

The rush to “smart cities” has been driven by technological possibility – the ability to create clean energy-powered, intelligent service-providing new urban settlements.

A smart city, according to Forbes “is one that leverages technology to increase efficiencies and improve the quality of services and life for its residents. Smart city initiatives can cover anything from power distribution, transport systems, street lights, and even rubbish collection. The idea is to use data and technology to make everyday life easier and better for the people who live and work in the city, while maximizing the use of resources.”

From Masdar to Neom we imagined huge new technological metropolises.

 

More and more of us are living in cities – the UN predicts that 68 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050. And this means our cities are facing growing environmental, societal, and economic challenges. By making cities smarter, we can overcome some of these challenges and make cities better places to live. One report by McKinsey Global Institute found smart city technology can improve key quality of life indicators – such as the daily commute, health issues, or crime incidents – by 10 to 30 percent.

Examples of ways in which cities have embraced technology to be “smarter” include:

• Transport: Public transport routes can be adjusted in real-time according to demand, and intelligent traffic light systems can be used to improve congestion. In the Chinese city of Hangzhou, an AI-based smart “City Brain” has helped to reduce traffic jams by 15 percent.
• Resources: Telefonica has been investing heavily in smart city technology in its home country, Spain. In one example, sensors are attached to refuse containers to report, in real-time, how full they are – which means refuse collectors don’t have to waste time traveling to bins that are only half-full.
• Energy: As well as investing in clean energy sources, smart cities also use technology to help closely monitor real-time energy use and reduce energy consumption. For example, in Amsterdam, homes are being provided with smart energy meters that are designed to incentivize reduced energy consumption.
• Safety: Wi-Fi connectivity, IoT technologies, and CCTV cameras all help to improve resident safety and boost incident response times. In New Orleans, for example, real-time video data from Bourbon Street is analyzed in order to better track and allocate resources on the ground, and improve public safety.
• Community:  The Smart Citizen Kit can be placed in locations like balconies and windowsills to gather data on the local environment, including air pollution and noise. The data is streamed to an online platform, effectively creating a crowdsourced map of data from all over the world.

IMD’s Smart City Index 2020 again ranks Singapore as the world’s smartest city. 5 European cities – Helsinki, Zurich, Oslo, Copenhagen and Amsterdam – make the top 10, largely due a combination of digital connectivity and sustainable development, delivering both social and economic benefits to citizens and other stakeholders (business, investment, tourism, government, services).

Three specific reasons why Singapore is the world’s smartest city, according to IMD, are

• Healthier citizens make healthier cities … How a city’s leaders shape the future of healthcare will ultimately determine how the prosperity of the city itself and of its citizens. In Singapore, a key example of this is the development of Healthcity Novena – a masterplan for community-focused health in which infrastructure such as pedestrian walkways, underground car parks and outdoor green spaces exist to complement and ameliorate the citizen-patient experience.
• A house with a heart is a home …  Singapore’s Housing Development Board (HDB) offers all citizens access to free public housing. Furthermore, the country’s leaders have created public housing that is more than just an apartment space; it also stretches into larger community areas that integrate liveability, sustainability and growth. More than 80% of the country’s population lives in public housing, which means the provision and administration of housing is pivotal to the identity and character of a diverse city like Singapore.
• Mobility is a shared community experience … Transportation determines much of the quality of life for residents in a smart city. In late October, the city’s Land Transit Authority (LTA) expanded a pilot area for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to cover the whole of western Singapore. The LTA is building a system of transport infrastructure in which daily commutes can integrate active mobility modes like walking and cycling with public transportation services like mass rapid transit (MRT) and buses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NzZy36L2v4

Indeed, smart cities offer tech firms a “$2.46 trillion opportunity” according to Frost and Sullivan, who specifically focus on the technological implications of better urban living:

• Smart cities’ spending on technology in the next six years is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22.7%, reaching $327 billion by 2025 from $96 billion in 2019. Technologies like artificial intelligence and big data will be in high demand to combat the pandemic, with growing opportunities for crowd analytics, open data dashboards, and online city services.
• There will be more than 26 smart cities by 2025, with 16 in North America and Europe.
• More than 70% of global smart city spending by 2030 will be from the United States, Western Europe, and China. Smart cities in the US and Europe will continue spending on 5G and autonomous and robotic technologies. Almost all smart cities in the US and Europe have already invested in open-data initiatives during the pandemic. In addition, China has renewed investments in 5G, smart grids, AI, data centers, and other smart city-related areas through the “new infrastructure initiative” introduced in 2018.
• Growing demand for crowd management and monitoring in smart cities will lead the crowd analytics market to grow by 20%-25% by 2030. It had market revenues of $748.6 million in 2020. Crowd analytics can be used to access collective real-time data. It can help ensure proper public healthcare services, traffic movement, and security and surveillance services across the smart city.
• Investments in smart initiatives are expected to rise over the next two years. Smart cities have already invested in contact tracing wearables and apps, open data platforms, autonomous drones, and crowd analytics to fight the pandemic. Post-pandemic, investment in smart projects like smart grids, intelligent traffic management, autonomous vehicles, smart lighting, e-governance services and data-enabled public safety and security will gain traction.

Beyond smart cities

However there is much more for cities to be “smart” about. Cities like Amsterdam seek to embrace “doughnut economics” guided by ecological and sustainable living (as first described by Kate Raworth). Amsterdam’s new City DoughnutStrategy has been galvanised by the pandemic, and the need for communities to be more.

And cities aren’t necessarily the answer. I worked recently with Orascom in Egypt who are building new communities for people to escape the mass spawn of cities like Cairo. They describe their developments as “places to live, love and laugh”. El Gouna is one example of a more village-like development on the banks of the Red Sea, planned for a more human, natural, positive lifestyle.

Indeed there are many trade-offs in considering future environments, regardless of how smart they might be:

• Organised cityscapes v natural villagescapes
• Affluent havens v affordable homes
• Economic development v human wellbeing
• Inspiring architecture v functional efficiency
• Personal privacy v collaborative community

Architecture is an interesting one. While we have vanity projects like the Burj Khalifa, it has also acted to create an icon and central point for Dubai’s development. Equally Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim was symbolic in inspiring a reimagining of Spain’s old declined port of Bilbao. The same can work at local levels, and for homes.

Better homes

Indeed when we get to the point of homes, what happens inside, is just as important as what happens outside.

Aritco and Springwise worked together to suggest 18 innovations that we can expect to see in our homes in 2021 and beyond. The 36 page research paper Future of the Home offers a view of how our lives at home might be shifting in light of the pandemic. Examples of innovations include

• Air purification system disguised as a piece of art
• Windows that become solar cells when heated
• Home radiator that uses infrared radiation to save energy
• A bladeless ceiling fan that kills microorganisms
• Smart circadian lightbulbs that provide personalised body clock lighting

Ultimately we create new ecosystems, whether living in dense urbanisations or more remote villages. The need to work, shop, learn, socialise, exercise, travel, and much more depends on a rich ecosystems of many different partners. These can be designed around a core idea or not, integrated or evolve more organically.

Brands will seek to influence the evolving nature of the home – brands like Amazon, (not just for shopping but everything to manage and control your home, from energy to entertainment and security), or Haier, the Chinese home appliances company who seeks to become a leader in services (give the fridge away free, then manage shopping, nutrition, cooking). Technologies will be key to accelerating this commercially-inspired change – not only home shopping and virtual working, but 3D printers will transform supply chains, IOT sensors will predict and optimise our needs, and much more.

The role of governments, local authorities, private organisations, and citizens together, also becomes key in shaping the future lifespaces which we seek. These bodies can often have conflicting goals, but can also come together with a more enlightened purpose. We need to see where and how we live with much more circular impact, on the social and economic prosperity of nations, and of society at large.

 

An end to the Covid-19 nightmare of 2020 may be in sight, thanks to the passion and persistence of a Turkish-born migrant, who has championed an innovative approach to vaccine development, which he believes could transform the future of medicine.

Uğur Şahin is the 55-year-old doctor and business entrepreneur behind the recently approved  Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. He was born in İskenderun, an industrial town close to the Syrian border, but moved to Cologne in Germany when 4 after his father found work in a Ford factory. He grew up loving Jurgen Klopp’s Mainz soccer team, but with a fascination for science.

Şahin met his wife, Özlem Türeci, of similar Turkish origin, while they were both trainee doctors specialising in blood cancers in the early 1990s. They combined their hospital day jobs, with evenings in their research lab (even on their wedding day!), filing many patents that have become key to their recent breakthrough.

In 2001 Şahin and Türeci founded Ganymed, focused on anti-cancer drugs, developing a revolutionary approach which creates a synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA) to prompt the body to fight tumours in a much more personalised way. In 2016, they sold the business for $1.4bn.

In parallel, the couple formed BioNTech (the NT capitals referring to Novel Technologies) in 2008, to accelerate their development of their mRNA approach.  Sahin is the Mainz-based company’s CEO, his wife the chief medical officer. Interviewed by Deutsche Welle, Tureci said that Şahin is the dreamer, appreciating “the beauty of mathematics, science and biology”, with the belief in an approach which everyone else doubted, while she is the pragmatist.

Now, BioNTech is leading the fightback against a pandemic that has disrupted the entire world, socially and economically, and claimed 1.6 million lives.

Şahin kicked off his Project Lightspeed in January this year as soon as he became aware of alarming infection rates of a pneumonia-like disease in China’s Hubei province, two months before WHO declared a pandemic. He persuaded his investors that he should immediately refocus all resources on finding a Covid-19 vaccine.

As a small business they were able to move faster than most pharma giants, having a single-minded focus, making faster decisions, adding risks and avoiding politics, and developed over 20 possible Covid-19 vaccines by March.

Realising that they would need to scale rapidly, requiring significant funding and global partners, he turned to Wiley’s “Business Plans for Dummies” as a crash course in entrepreneurship. He also set about attracting the best talent and an ecosystem of ideas – creating a biotech cluster, and TRON, a non-profit for oncology research.

There were still few supporters for the mRNA platform, but Sahin remained convinced he had an effective response to Covid-19, and could have it ready before the year end.

BioNTech’s ability to create a completely new and approved vaccine that is 95% effective in combating Covid-19 in less that 12 months is phenomenal. Normally, a vaccine can take 5-10 years to develop (the previous fastest was 4 years for the mumps vaccine in the 1960s), and around 6 out of 10 vaccines which actually make it to trial stage are never approved.

Other Covid-19 vaccines are following rapidly, largely due to the international cooperation and huge investment by governments.  Moderna has adopted a similar approach to BioNTech, while Oxford/AstraZeneca’s approach is more conventionally derived from the common cold virus, at lower costs (€3 per shot, compared to BioNTech’s €17) and at normal temperatures, offering particular hope to developing countries.

Şahin believes that the technology BioNTech has developed could lead to a medical revolution, particularly in developing more personalised and effective cancer treatments.

The key advantage of mRNA is its ability to produce multiple versions of the molecule within days, rather than having to create cultures of live vaccines in a Petri dish. The chemical synthesis can also be adapted quickly to respond even faster to future viruses, as well as for cancers and other rare diseases.

Şahin’s ability to combine medical, education and business acumen has been key to BioNTech’s success. The clinical trials database is being shared openly with other companies to support future research, while Pfizer gave BioNTech the ability to rapidly accelerate clinical trials and scale production of its BNT162b2 vaccine.

BioNTech’s own market value has grown rapidly too, by 230% since March, to around $27 billion by the end of 2020, with Şahin himself estimated to be now worth $5.6bn.

At a cancer conference in Berlin last year Şahin said that science and business need to intersect much better – saying that “exploit” is just as important as “explore” – both in terms of commercialising ideas faster, to reach more people and save lives, and in creating strategic platforms for ongoing innovation.

It’s 30 years ago since Peter Senge published his book The Fifth Discipline and coined the phrase “the learning organisation”.

He described it as “a group of people working together collectively to enhance their capacities to create results they really care about”, and more generally “an organisation that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself.”

The speed of change is faster and more dramatic than ever in today’s business world. The huge shake-up of a global pandemic, but more generally the turbulence created by a relentless stream of new technologies, new markets and new businesses.

In my new book “Business Recoded” I talk about how business leaders and their organisations need to fundamentally reimagine themselves to survive and thrive in this dynamic, uncertain but also exciting world.

It was therefore great to explore “the future of learning organisations” with Headspring CEO Gustaf Nordbäck last week. Headspring is a joint venture between Financial Times and IE Business School, bringing a more topical, action-focused approach to executive education and its emerging formats.

You can watch the “fireside chat” (well, that’s a nice evocative image, instead it was a nice Zoom call in these remote working times!), and consider some of the key ideas.

For me, five important themes matter:

• Continuous learning as the new competitive advantage
• Self-organising teams thriving on collaborative learning
• Metaskills that change mindsets, more than knowledge
• Self-tuning strategies sensing and responding to change
• Fusing technology and humanity to act smarter and faster

Over the last 12 months I’ve seen at first hand how organisations like Alibaba and Haier, Microsoft and Pfizer, are fundamentally transforming the ways in which they organise and work, learn and perform, building on these new principles.

Here’s an extract from my new book “Business Recoded” which goes further:

Consider the changing nature of work and organisations: 

• Organisations in which employees perceive meaning at work are 21% more profitable. However only 13% of employees worldwide feel engaged.
• The ideal team size is between 4 and 9, with an optimal 4.6 people. Such teams bring diversity but can also make fast decisions and get things done.
• Around 30% of useful collaborations typically come from only 4% of employees. Women are 66% more likely to initiate collaboration.
• Companies where women are at least 15% of senior managers have more than 50% higher profitability than with less than 10%.
• Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity were 35% more likely to have financial returns above national industry medians.
• Migrants make up just 3.4% of the world’s population, but they contribute nearly 10% of global GDP.51% of CEOs of billion-dollar “unicorns” are migrants.
• 75% of millennials want to work from home or from another location where they feel more productive.
• Of the children entering primary school today, 65% will end up working in job categories that do not yet exist.

Do more human, inspiring work

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

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

Value mattered to Joe. And the premium, exotic specialities he brought together were complimented by his low-priced own-label ranges which combined quality and quirkiness. In 1979 Joe sold his brand to Theo Albrecht, better known for his low priced Aldi food stores in Europe. Aldi and Joe both believed in keeping things simple. No discounts, points cards, or members clubs. With a limited range the stores drive a better supply deal in return for bigger volumes, and can be more responsive to market trends.

Storytelling is everywhere at Trader Joe’s, from the hand-written signage and rustic displays, to the free coffee and sampling, the radio ads and chatty check-out dudes. Whilst most competitors focus on automation and speed, this store is real and human, worth coming just to chill out. Even if you never get to visit a store, sign up to the Fearless Flyer online. With off-beat stories and cartoon humour, unusual recipes and showcased products, it’s an intriguing read.

Rise of the superhumans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what is the future of work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Completely new jobs in specific industries will emerge such as

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

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

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

More human, more creative, more female

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Fisk 2020

In an exclusive extract from my forthcoming book Business Recoded, meet one of the most inspiring business leaders, shaking up today’s world. She embraces the opportunities of relentless change, the power of disruptive technologies, and the courage to create a better future in her own vision. In the book, I explore the stories of many of the world’s most fascinating leaders right now, and develop 49 codes that help you redefine the future of your business, and yourself.

The Leadership Code of Hooi Ling Tan

Tan grew up in Kuala Lumper before travelling to Europe to study engineering at the University of Bath. She took a year out from her studies, to work for Eli Lilly in Basingstoke. It made her realise that even in a world of fast-changing technologies, the real decisions and future strategies in business are made by management not engineers.

She returned to Malaysia and joined McKinsey, although her long days meant that she would rely upon the city’s notorious unlicensed taxis to get her home after dark. Her worried mother sat at home, seeking regular text updates, waiting for her daughter’s safe arrival home. Little did she realise that her late-night journey home would come to have a much more significant impact on her career than her consulting work by day.

McKinsey sponsored her to go to Harvard where she was taken by how to build a sustainable business, and realising the opportunity to serve the many more under-served consumers at “the bottom” of the pyramid, rather than just seeking the elite. She also met another Malaysian at Harvard, Anthony Tan, who would become her future business partner.

The two Tans bonded over the idea of making taxis safer in their native south-east Asia, developing a business plan which won £25,000 in HBS’s New Venture Competition 2011.  Using their winnings, and personal funds, they set about launching a mobile app, initially called MyTeksi a year later, and then renamed Grab. It helped that Anthony’s family were the largest distributor of Nissan cars in the country, and they soon had a fleet of taxis and motor bikes on the streets of KL. However, Hooi-Ling had to return to McKinsey in return for funding her education, but spent every vacation flying back to help develop her fledgling start-up.

In 2015 she returned full-time to Grab, and took on the title of COO – focused on product development, customer experience, and HR. In reality though, she became known as “the plumber” because of her pragmatic operational focus on problem solving, unlocking bottle necks and reshaping the business model, to deliver on their customer dream. Progress depended on building many partnerships, where there were rarely any rules to follow. Partners trusted the pair, she says, because of their passion to help make life better.

Grab became known as the Uber of south-east Asia, locked in a battle with GoJek to be the leading provider of ride hailing service. The business grew rapidly to become a $10 billion platform-based business that now operates in over 225 cities across Asia, with over 100 million users. In 2018, Grab acquired Uber’s $6bn regional business, including UberEats, which sparked the move into food delivery, and many other sectors.

Thousands of Grab’s green-jacketed motorbikes, cars and helicopters now wait to deliver anything anywhere, faster than anybody else in south-east Asia.

In an interview with Marie Claire magazine Tan says “As a woman leading an organisation, you are typically in a minority, so it is never an easy path, but take pride in leaving a legacy that makes it easier for generations of women to come. At the same time, never feel you have to do it all alone. Learn to fail and iterate quickly and find good partners who respect you for you.”

“With Grab, I was fortunate to find a true co-conspirator in Anthony. As an introvert, I’ll typically pause, reflect on why I am feeling doubt, and reset so that I can focus on what to do next. I also discuss these doubts with my trusted confidantes to stress-test my assumptions and source ideas on how to approach a situation better. And I intentionally stretch myself beyond my comfort zone. That helps me develop the muscle I’ll need for those inevitable moments of self-doubt.”

Tan is particularly excited by the growth potential of the region, describing it as the world’s fourth largest economic region (after China, USA and EU). It is a patchwork of nations and cultures, islands and languages, but with many shared challenges of infrastructure. It is 600 million people, including a huge emerging middle class, and great desire to leap-frog other nations in its progress through technology.

She says success for a start-up is when the company no long depends on its co-founders.  However she is a constant innovator, fusing ideas from other places, typically through partners, including an e-wallet, a peer-to-peer paying system and insurance. Indeed she sees payments as the fuel that powers her “super app”, enabling it to become the most convenient, integrated and trusted source of anything.