Peter Fisk

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.

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 Anne Wojcicki

Anne Wojcicki grew up on the campus of Stanford University, destined she thought to become an academic like her father. Instead she found herself on Wall Street, fascinated by businesses and in particular healthcare. The combination of an academic father, a love of data and analytics, and a passion to reinvent healthcare in a more democratic, accessible and personalised way led to 23andMe.

The human genome was first sequenced in 2003, exciting scientists by the potential of understanding and applying its code. Wojcicki met up with a biology undergraduate Linda Avey who was working on a research program, and together they formed the business in 2005. At the time it cost around $300,000 to sequence an entire human genome (which had fallen from $50 million two years earlier).

23andMe sought to dramatically reduce this cost by using a technology called genotyping, which spot checks specific parts of a gene for mutations know to be linked with certain diseases, instead of a creating a full sequence. They launched the brand to consumers in 2007, with testing packs available by mail order for $999, and later directly from the pharmacy’s shelf.

The revolutionary genetics business combined ideas of new genome technology and crowdsourced funding, into a model that has since reduced the cost of DNA profiling to $99 and want to go much further in the future. For customers, it might be about discovering your ancestors, or exploring your future health prognosis, and in some case, like her ex-husband Sergei Brin, taking radical action.

Regulation was an obvious challenge. Initially there were no rules for such activities, enabling rapid innovation, but also making regulators more cautious. They were concerned about accuracy of tests, and how people might misinterpret information. She saw the regulators as partners rather than adversaries, working together to create a better, safer solution for everyone.

Business model innovation enabled her to continue to reduce costs and make it available to everyday people. She simplified the analytics to make them comprehensible to consumers, and cross-funded individual testing by selling the aggregated data to corporates.

The biggest challenge of all, was that consumers did not understand genetics, or the consequences of knowing their DNA. Explaining 23andMe’s approach in a relevant and human way was key. Ancestory was a quick win, tapping into an established curiosity of people, and then flipping the analysis forwards to predict what health issues the consumer might encounter in their life.

Wojcicki’s vision goes far beyond analytics, with her eyes particularly focused on personalised advice – helping people to interpret results, understand the consequences, and make shifts to a healthier lifestyle. 23andMe is already working with partners to offer diabetes counselling, whilst exploring AI-enabled apps to encourage people to drink more water, and eat certain foods, based on their genetic profiles.

New drugs are another future development. In 2015, 23andMe’s therapeutics group agreed a $300m investment by GSK to explore new drug concepts, in a 4-year exclusive partnership, sharing costs and profits. The deal enabled GSK to access the aggregated data from 23andMe’s databases, where consumers had given their consent. Most do. However, pharma development is notoriously difficult, 86% of drugs fail clinical trials, and are expensive. Personalisation of drugs is even more difficult, but the dream.

In 2020, the therapeutics team had developed a portfolio of research programs across multiple disease areas. They recognised that whilst maintaining ownership of the IP, they needed partners to develop and test the potential drugs. Wojcicki turned to a smaller Spanish pharma company, Almirall, which specialises in skin therapies as her first development partner.  She called it a seminal moment. 23andMe now had a database of over 10 million consumer tests, “a treasure trove” to create the future of healthcare.

© Peter Fisk 2020. Business Recoded is available now.

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

The Leadership Code of Pat Brown

10 years ago, Patrick Brown, a 56 year old biochemistry professor at Stanford University walked out of his job, frustrated at the world’s increasing inability to save itself.

He concluded that the best platform to create a better world, was not government or academia, but business. He recognised the uniquely powerful, inspiring potential of brands, to engage consumers through their everyday actions, to do good.

Brown decided that the environmental threat was the most profound challenge which he could personally add value to, and in particular, the use of animals to make food.

Beef farming has caused huge destruction to rainforests, and the animals themselves significantly add to the world’s carbon emissions – more than the entire world’s transportation systems. He organised a conference on “the role of animals in a sustainable global food system” and was frustrated by nice words but little action.

He established Impossible Foods with a mission “to completely replace animals in the food system by 2035.” He calls it “the most important and urgent problem in the world.” To visualise the challenge, he created an ad campaign (below) where an astronaut returns to Earth in the next decade, to find a planet starved of much of its natural habitat.

He resolved that the best strategy would be to create a product that competed against animal foods commercially. “Why does meat smell, feel, cook and taste like meat?” he challenged his small team of scientists.

They found their answer in heme, the iron-containing molecule in blood, a component of haemoglobin.

Brown started exploring how he could source the molecule in alternative ways from nature. He found heme in abundance in the roots of clover, and later also in soybean.

5 years later, and with $300 million funding, he launched the Impossible Burger, a burger that looked, smelt, sizzled and tasted just as good as a traditional beef version. Even better when you consider its wider impact on the world. 0% cows, 95% less land, 74% less water, 87% less emissions.

His decided not to target vegetarians, but to win over meat-eaters, by understanding what drives them to choose meat – taste, smell, texture – and then offer those benefits in a better way. Indeed, he defines his non-animal burger as “meat” saying “animals are a food production technology, and plants are another” he says, and so seeks to frame his product not as alternative, but as better.

Impossible Foods is now focused on developing a much broader portfolio of foods, including plant-based pork, chicken and fish. While beef farming is the most damaging to the environment, fishing is a close second. The total population of fish in oceans and rivers is less than half of what it was 40 years ago because of overfishing, and some species have declined in numbers by 90%.

In an interview with Time magazine, Brown reflected “Right now, the dominant relationship between humans and animals is exploitative. Replacing animals as a food production technology will absolutely change that. Hopefully, rather than looking at animals essentially as a technology for producing food, we’ll appreciate them more for the role that they play in making this a beautiful planet to live on.”

© Peter Fisk 2020. Business Recoded will be published in December 2020. Order your copy now.

The biggest challenges face by business, or indeed society, cannot be solved by a few people working in traditional organisations. They can be better addressed by breaking out of traditional approaches and collaborating with others.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and recipient of a recent lifetime achievement award by Thinkers50, calls these traditional approaches “thinking within castles”.

In her new book Think Outside the Building, she writes, “Castles are any set of institutional structures that loom large and feel permanent. Castles are monuments to the past and to past thinking, museums of preservation.” Moving outside of these castles is the beginning of innovation.

For example, “health is equated with hospitals, education with schoolhouses, news with newspapers, spirituality with the church, a city with city hall.” And we look to these institutions for solutions. But the solutions lie outside the “castle.”

“Health isn’t the hospital or even the doctor’s office. Health might be a function of nutritious food, clean air, or stress-free work. But behemoth establishments dominate health care, including rival fiefdoms such as providers and insurance companies, full of fortification and defenses, sometimes shutting out alternatives for treatment or blocking routes to wellness.”

The same can be said of educational systems, city governments, and other institutions that we look to for answers. Kanter says the best way to deal with these entrenched systems is not to attack them head-on, but to go around or under, or even start something new that is so attractive that others flock to it.

Advanced Leadership

To encourage this kind of action, professors Kanter, Rakesh Khurana, and Nitin Nohria co-founded the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative as a third level of education to bring together experienced leaders who could then go and address some of the world’s most challenging problems. But the Advanced Leadership is not specifically about older, more experienced people, but a level of thinking that takes leaders of any age, out of the building, “beyond boundaries, across silos, and outside established structures.”

Advanced Leadership is a different mindset than single-minded leadership furthering its own goals within a single organization. “Complex, messy, ambiguous, contentious institutional problems require more of leaders than exercising the authority inherent in their roles; they take entrepreneurial hustle. That also requires a larger pool of leaders willing and able to tackle them.” We need more Advanced Leaders.

Kaleidoscope Thinking

A different kind of thinking, kaleidoscope thinking, is required. “Creativity is a lot like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope.

“Innovators shake up their thinking as though their brains are a kaleidoscope, permitting an array of different patterns out of the same bits of reality. Leaders who take on big, intractable systems problems must be able to break out of prevailing wisdom in order to move beyond it.

Prematurely settle on an idea because of work overload or deadline pressure, and it is likely to resemble what already exists.”

The fragments of your kaleidoscope as built over time. Experiences, frustrations, and observations waiting to be connected when the time is right. Digital innovator John Taysom said, “Dream your worst nightmare, then invest in it,” or “see the thing that upsets you and use it as an opportunity for change.”

Get out and experience the new and truly different to shake the kaleidoscope into new possibilities. “What differentiates advanced leaders from noninnovators is that they can see further because of their quality of preparation and attention. They zoom out to see the big picture; they tune in to the context and read the zeitgeist.”

Advanced leaders are always looking. Look for what’s not there. Look for the gaps.

Advanced leaders must learn to tell a different story in order to gain support. “If you don’t like how things are going and want to lead change, tell a different story.” Reframe the problem to illuminate possibilities.

“Stories can’t be fairy tales. Narratives should be evidence-based, meeting a plausibility test. Marshalling the evidence sometimes requires creating new evidence through pilot programs—something that people can see and touch, something that has “street cred” (visible on the street. Prototypes are fundamental.?

Kanter explains the need, the process, and the trials of advanced leadership in the face of “castles” through example after example of those who are outside the building trying to make a difference. It is an instructive and inspiring book. It is a call to action into the unknown with a distinguished guide.

“The nature of change challenges, whether inside corporate offices or beyond the walls, increasingly requires more than traditional hierarchical leadership skills guiding teams inside the building; the new challenges require advanced leadership. For institutions that are threatened with disruption and displacement, this kind of leadership is essential because they simply can’t keep singing variations of the same old refrains with a digital note added here or there. And as the routinized parts of jobs are replaced (or augmented) by technology, increasing numbers of people will find themselves working on tasks outside the building. ”

 

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 Katrina Lake

Katrina Lake, founder of Stitch Fix, is reinventing how we shop.

She has always loved fashion. “Classic with a twist” is how she describes her style, a twist that was stimulated by the regular one-off clothing samples she would receive from her sister who worked as a fashion buyer. She loved the eclectic pieces and couldn’t understand why so many fashion retailers still focused on average seasonal ranges,  particularly in a world of big data and AI, where more personalisation was surely possible.

Having initially worked for Polyvore, a now-defunct social media start-up that was more like a virtual mood board of ideas and fashion, in 2011 she set about creating an online retail platform that “pairs an army of stylists with an arsenal of data to deliver clothing”.

Stitch Fix actually started in a small Boston apartment, whilst Lake was still studying for a Harvard MBA at the time, along with her co-founder Erin Flynn who was a former buyer for J Crew. “We cobbled together things you could do online for free,” says Katrina. She started by doing lots of free online surveys to find out what potential consumers might want.

“I felt so strongly that the way people were shopping was not going to be the future. I was like, there’s no way that the future of buying jeans is going to be spending a day at the mall or even searching online. Searching online for jeans is a ridiculously bad experience.” She recently told New York magazine.

Stitch Fix quickly took off. “It was 30 people, then 50 and then 120, and kept growing. As a female entrepreneur, a big challenge was raising funds from the male-dominated investment community. “I didn’t have the trust of a lot of investors, and for me the biggest reason was around the lack of diversity in the venture capital world,” she says. “Male investors would say things like ‘I can’t see myself wanting something like this’, and I’d be, ‘Ok, well you’re a Caucasian male who is very wealthy, and maybe this isn’t the service that you would use.'”

Consumers order “fixes” of five items, selected for them by professional stylists, as a one off or by subscribing to regular deliveries of their chosen intervals. On receipt of their fix, have three days to choose which items they want to keep, and others to return. The genius of the approach is that algorithms quickly learn about the likes and dislikes of individuals, and send more personalised selections each time. And of course, once in receipts of items, the customer is more likely to hold on to them, rather than just browsing through an online site.

Stitch Fix essentially combines data science, personalised marketing and a platform-based business model to drive growth.  Chris Moody became Stitch Fix’s lead data scientist. He also has a PhD in astrophysics focused on using supercomputers to simulate how galaxies crash into each other.  He uses the same analytical rigour to fine tune the perfect selections for each Stitch Fix subscriber. He describes the business more like an online personal styling service combining Netflix-style algorithms with human intuition and curation supported by a team of around 100 data scientists and 3,000 in-house stylists who fine-tune each fix.

In 2017, at the age of 34, Lake became the youngest woman to take a company public. The IPO raised $120 million and valued Stitch Fix at $1.46 billion. As she appeared at the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York for the company’s first day of trading, she held her 14-month-old son in her arms. The images went viral. She was quickly seen as a role model for women, and mothers, in business. “It felt like a really meaningful moment for me, and hopefully for others as well,” she told CNN.

Lake become not only a pioneer for better shopping, but for a better workplace too. With a mother who was a Japanese immigrant, she is focused on promoting diversity within her company, both women and people from ethnic minorities. But ultimately, Stitch Fix is a fusion of passion and science “When you think of entrepreneurs, you think of somebody who is super risky and stays up for all hours tinkering with something in their garage.” Instead she prefers a smart business plan, clever technology, good people, and sleep.

There is so much about leadership that we can learn from sport.

It’s popular to talk of leaders as coaches today. Most business leaders here that and think it all takes is an occasional sit down for a performance review. But think about sports coaches. They prepare their athletes over many months for the special moments of competition, but when the game starts or the gun fires, the athlete is on their own.

A coach therefore needs to be so much more, not just in developing physical talent, but developing emotional mindsets that have the personal motivation to perform at the highest levels, the mental agility to respond to any situation, and the confidence to make their own decisions, once the coach steps back.

Leaders as coaches are not the performers, their athletes are.

Patrick Sang was one of the world’s top runners, but not the best. When he retired, he took all the wisdom of his own career, and put it into coaching others. He found that he could be an even better coach than an athlete. Indeed leaders do not have to be “better” than their teams, they add value in different ways.

In this video, we meet Patrick Sang at his athletes training camp, in Kaptagat, Kenya. Here he brings together, many of the world’s top athletes – including Olympic champions and world record breakers like Eliud Kipchoge and Geoffrey Kamworer. At the end you see a special moment, when Kipchoge had just run the first sub-2 hour marathon in history. His coach watching.

Here, in an extract from SPIKES magazine, is a profile of Patrick Sang’s approach to coaching:

“It’s like opium,” says Patrick Sang, his eyes wide like an addict, though the affliction he’s talking about is far less harmful than narcotics. “Being active in athletics as a coach and previously as an athlete – it’s something I cannot do without. It gives me a big high when I see an athlete perform, especially one who went from nothing to something.”

At a hotel in central London, three days before his star protégé cruises to another facile win, the man who built the greatest marathoner in history is sharing the secrets of his trade, choosing his words with the considered wisdom of a preacher.

“The biggest organ that drives success in athletics is the mind, not the talent,” he says. “Many people don’t know that, but an athlete who is not disturbed mentally and is talented can go very far.”

His most famous athlete is proof of that. After all it’s almost five years since Eliud Kipchoge has lost a marathon, and ever since taking a shiny gold piece of excess baggage home from the 2016 Olympics, the world has become well-versed in his story. But what is less well known about the 33-year-old is how lucky he was to grow up where he did, as a farm boy in rural Kenya with Sang as a nearby neighbour.

His first coach, his only coach.

“He has taught me the morals of life, how to really concentrate and be happy and not go off course,” says Kipchoge. “He’s a mentor, a sports coach and my life coach.”

But Sang’s success extends far beyond Kipchoge. From two-time world cross country and three-time world half marathon champion Geoffrey Kamworor to 2012 Olympic marathon champion Stephen Kiprotich, he has produced champion distance runners with unrivalled frequency over the last decade.

His first ever athlete, though, was the man in the mirror.

Learning the Ropes

Back in the early 90s, Sang was a self-coached 3000m steeplechaser, winning silver at the world champs in 1991 and 1993 – beaten on both occasions by Kenyan great Moses Kiptanui – and in 1992 he took Olympic silver in the same event in Barcelona.

While still a competitive athlete in 1995, he agreed to coach some of his Kenyan compatriots, his first major success arriving in 1997 when Bernard Barmasai broke the 3000m steeplechase world record. Up until 2000 Sang relied on the knowledge gleaned from his own career, but then he got a call to say he’d been selected for a coaching programme being run at the IAAF Regional Development Centre in Nairobi.

Over the next five years, he progressed through the levels and in 2005 qualified with the highest coaching certification available.

“After that I realised coaching was not the way I knew, it’s event-specific,” he said. “Knowledge has to be applied, and the application of knowledge gives you a response from the athletes, whether it’s working or not.”

If there has been one key to his success, it is this.

“The biggest teacher to me is the feedback mechanism from the athlete. It can take a few months, maybe even just one month, to learn that.”

Sang is adamant his athletes arrange their lives in a way that allows him to apply a long-term approach. “We try to build a system with the athlete that their careers can be straight for 10 years,” he says.

Group training is a key ingredient, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

“The training fundamentals are the same across the board, but what is different is the abilities,” he says. “We try to train people to respond to their abilities – it’s an individualised training programme in a group.”

The bulk of Sang’s athletes are aligned with one of two agencies, One4One Sports or Global Sports Communication, and at his training base in Kaptagat the 54-year-old doesn’t just train athletes; he mentors them.

“The challenge is making them understand what coaching is all about,” he says. “Because you can have the best ideas as a coach but if the athlete is not evaluating the knowledge you’re trying to impart, then it’s not applied. Coaching is all-round; they have to be a parent, a physician – all the aspects that make an all-round person.”

Mind Games

All of Sang’s athletes come from humble backgrounds, many from poverty, so there’s an inherent risk that some could drift from the sport after a big win.

“Money is a big distractor,” he admits. “An athlete who is talented but not protected from social issues and all these challenges, even financial management, cannot perform. An athlete who is not strong mentally can easily be distracted by money.”

In his experience, the champions who endure are those with a steely mindset, but Sang admits there’s little he can do in that department.

“Most of the time, the athletes come with it,” he says. “The ones who don’t have it, you try to do what you can, but sometimes they are very slippery because you don’t get to the end with them. An athlete with a strong mind, wherever they go they will always perform.”

For Sang, the most fulfilling successes are not always the high-profile ones, but when he moulds a new life for athletes who came to him with nothing. He cites the example of Philemon Rono, who grew up on a farm in Markawet District and whose athletic talent was, shall we say, not always apparent.

“If you see this guy, you’d never believe he could do it,” said Sang, demonstrating Rono’s diminutive stature. “But he did 2:06 last year to win in Toronto! Then what Geoffrey [Kamworor] did the last few years, knowing I picked him from nothing to all this, gives you a special satisfaction.

“I’ve never gotten a PhD but to me, this is like getting a PhD. You cannot quantify the feelings inside when that happens, and it’s got nothing to do with money.”

The Midas Touch

Perhaps the greatest demonstration of Sang’s ability came during the Breaking2 project, during which Nike spent millions to help three runners tackle a two-hour marathon in highly controlled circumstances in Monza, Italy. When their team of exercise physiologists visited Ethiopia’s Lelisa Desisa and Eritrea’s Zersenay Tadese, they made several adjustments to both athletes’ training, but Sang, they realised, was way ahead of them.

Without a treadmill, heart rate monitor or sweat sensor in sight, Kipchoge’s training was already perfect – the product of Sang’s intimate knowledge of both endurance training and his athlete’s tendencies.

“The feedback mechanism is like a current running between you and the athlete,” explains Sang. “When it’s established, the knowledge I have cannot make someone perform poorly.”

Sang was initially hesitant to allow Kipchoge take part, but was eventually talked around to the value of the idea and in the end, Kipchoge came up just 25 seconds shy of the two-hour barrier. “When a project like this comes and it’s new territory, it’s always a tough nut to crack,” he says. “You worry if you do this, will I endanger someone’s career? That crossed my mind with Eliud.”

In truth, things stayed much the same for Kipchoge during – and indeed after – the project, and despite all it took out of Kipchoge, Sang has since guided him to two dominant marathon wins, in Berlin last September and in London last weekend.

But what advice would he give to other coaches, those who hope – on whatever level – to build their own Kipchoge?

“To be successful is to have the knowledge of coaching, and to learn the abilities of the athlete very well so you do the proper training for that level,” he says. “With those two together – knowledge and understanding the athlete – you can never go wrong as a coach.”

Perhaps it’s best to leave the final word to the athlete who knows Sang best, who first met him almost two decades ago and credits him for what his career, his life, has become since.

“He is,” says Kipchoge, “the best coach in the whole world.”

Working in the UAE recently, I was invited to meet some of the nation’s leaders to discuss the impact of technology on future trends. I arrived at UAE’s new Ministry of Possibilities in Dubai to be greeted by a robot, and was soon immersed inside a merged reality space, combining governance, a diversity of collaborative innovation projects, and tech education.

Omar Sultan Al Olama, the UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence (how many nations have one of those?) had just launched BRAIN, the National AI Program, with an ambition for the UAE “to become world leaders in AI by 2031” and boost the local economy by $182 billion. A leap to the future, maybe, but a practical growth strategy too.

From Siri to self-driving cars, AI has the potential to transform our human capacity to embrace the power of technology, and solve the most complex problems, from climate change to eradicating disease, cybersecurity to neuro-controls. Whilst we image AI taking the humanoid form of Sophia, the human-like robot created by Hong-Kong based Hansen Robotics, AI comes in many forms, from Alphabet’s Deepmind to Tesla’s autonomous cars.

“The Age of AI” is a documentary series hosted by Robert Downey Jr. covering the ways artificial intelligence, machine learning and neural networks will change the world. Here are three of the episodes from the 8 part series:

AI and humanity

Can AI make music? Can it feel excitement and fear? Is it alive? Will.i.am and Mark Sagar push the limits of what a machine can do. How far is too far, and how much further can we go?

AI and wellbeing

The human body is not infallible, but through the wonders of AI research scientists are finding ways to address those imperfections. AI has the potential to heal, enhance and make up for the things our bodies lack.

AI and becoming superhuman

Through life changing accidents, and data minded through NASCAR, human beings are finding ways to rebuild one another so that we are better, faster, and stronger than ever before and all with the help of AI. Once nothing more than the stuff of comic books and TV shows, we truly have the technology to become modern superheroes

Today’s AI is more formally known as narrow (or weak) AI, meaning that it is designed to perform a narrow task, like playing chess or searching online. We see this embedded in our everyday lives, from anti-lock brakes in cars to fraud protection of payments, email spam filters and autocomplete forms. Future AI, however, seeks to take a more integrated form, known as general (or strong) AI, with the ability to do any task, and far more autonomy.

In healthcare, for example, AI can already interpret scans, sequence genomes, and synthesise new drugs within minutes, whilst also powering virtual nurses and robotics surgeons.

However, AI brings many ethical questions, risks associated with inbuilt biases, and has inconsistent regulation. Gender, race and ethnic biases can wrongly negatively influence the criminal justice system; fake news and misinformation can spread rapidly through bots and social media it threatens privacy and security; and it could displace many humans from jobs.

AI is the new rocket fuel for business innovation and growth. Here are some more examples:

• American Express processes $1 trillion in transactions and has 110 million cards in operation, relying on AI-based algorithms to help detect fraud in near real time, therefore saving millions in losses. Its data analytics also enables apps to engage cardholders with personalised offers, and merchants to manage performance.
• Burberry uses AI to combat counterfeit products and improve sales and customer relationships. Its loyalty programs go beyond rewards using that data to personalise the shopping experience online, and to augment the physical store experience using intelligent devices, from smartphones and biometric sensors.
• Darktrace Enterprise Immune System slows attacks on computing systems by emulating the way humans fend off viruses. An AI-enabled platform embeds in a network, learns what be­­haviours are normal, and flags anomalies, automatically slowing or stopping compromised networks and devices.
• Lemonade is reinventing insurance to be instant, easy, and transparent. It offers home insurance powered by AI and behavioural economics. By replacing brokers with bots and machine learning, Lemonade promises zero paperwork and instant policies and claims. As a B-Corp, it also has a Give Back scheme to non-profits.
• Microsoft has put AI at the core of its service. Cortana is a virtual assistant, chatbots run Skype and answer queries, Office includes intelligent features such as weather, traffic and personal schedule intelligence, and business customers can use the Microsoft AI Platform to create their own intelligent tools.
• Netflix’s incredible growth is largely due to its AI-driven personalisation, bringing together the viewing histories, searches and ratings of viewers to offer recommendations to you and others like you. It then uses this intelligence to develop new preference-matched content, such as House of Cards.
• Rare Carat is disrupting the diamond market. Its platform uses blockchain technology to track provenance and verify certification, massively improving authenticity and ethics of diamond sourcing, and then AI-based analytics to compare the price of diamonds, connecting buyers with appropriate retailers.

“Everything invented in the past 150 years will be reinvented using AI within the next 15 years,” says Randy Dean of Launchpad AI, and maybe not surprisingly PwC estimates that it could add $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

© Peter Fisk 2020

Extract from Business Recoded by Peter Fisk

Image: Unsplash