Over the past 30 years, the world has seen huge social improvements and technological progress. We have experienced unprecedented economic growth and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. We’re benefiting from a life-changing digital revolution that could help solve our most pressing social and environmental challenges. Yet despite these successes, our current model of development is deeply flawed.

Signs of its failure and imperfections in today’s markets are everywhere. Natural disasters triggered by climate change have doubled in frequency since the 1980s. Violence and armed conflict cost the world the equivalent of nine percent of GDP in 2014, while lost biodiversity and ecosystem damage cost an estimated three percent. We continue to invest in high-carbon infrastructure at a rate that could commit us to irreversible, immensely damaging climate change. Social inequality and youth unemployment is worsening in countries across the world, while on average women are still paid 25% less than men for comparable work.

Median real wages have been stagnant in developed economies since the 1980s, generating deep anxiety about the impact of automation on both service and manufacturing jobs and opposition to more globalisation. Real interest rates are historically low, even negative, in several major economies, while total debt remains uncomfortably high. Economic views lurch unpredictably between techno-optimism and political pessimism.

The resulting uncertainty makes it hard for business leaders to see the way ahead. Rather than commit to longer-term investments, many companies are treading water – sitting on cash, buying back shares, paying high dividends. The latest global report on trust in business from Edelman shows a double-digit decline in the credibility of CEOs in 80 percent of countries.

What else can business leaders do?

There is a positive alternative: setting business strategy and transforming markets in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals by exploring the impact on business of achieving these 17 objectives, known as the Global Goals, which UN member states agreed to, initially called Agenda 2030, in September 2015. Nations committed to focus their policies towards achieving the Global Goals.

Achieving the Global Goals would create a world that is comprehensively sustainable: socially fair; environmentally secure; economically prosperous; inclusive; and more predictable. They provide a viable model for long-term growth, as long as businesses move towards them together. The goals are designed to interact, so progress on them all will have much more impact than achieving only some. Of course, the results will not be heaven on earth; there will be many practical challenges. But the world would undoubtedly be on a better, more resilient path. We could be building an economy of abundance.

These are results that business leaders will surely support. However, they are less likely to feel responsible for delivering them: one survey shows that half the business community think this is government territory.

However business really needs the Global Goals: they offer a compelling growth strategy for individual businesses, for business generally and for the world economy. Second, the Global Goals really need business: unless private companies seize the market opportunities they open up and advance progress on the whole Global Goals package, the abundance they offer won’t materialise.

The challenge for every business leader is to embrace the Global Goals for Sustainable Development into its core growth strategies, value chain operations and policy positions. In 2017 the Business & Sustainable Development Commission brought together business leaders seeking to define the business case for action.

Achieving the Global Goals, they say, opens up $12 trillion of market opportunities in the four economic systems examined by the Commission. These are food and agriculture, cities, energy and materials, and health and well-being. They represent around 60 percent of the real economy and are critical to delivering the Global Goals. To capture these opportunities in full, businesses need to pursue social and environmental sustainability as avidly as they pursue market share and shareholder value. If a critical mass of companies joins us in doing this now, together we will become an unstoppable force. If they don’t, the costs and uncertainty of unsustainable development could swell until there is no viable world in which to do business.

The business logic for sustainable development is that core strategy gets much stronger as the world achieves the Global Goals.

Achieving the Global Goals in just four economic systems could open 60 market “hot spots” worth an estimated $12 trillion by 2030 in business savings and revenue.  The total economic prize from implementing the Global Goals could be 2-3 times bigger, assuming that the benefits are captured across the whole economy and accompanied by much higher labour and resource productivity. That’s a fair assumption. Consider that achieving the single goal of gender equality could contribute up to $28 trillion to global GDP by 2025, according to one estimate. The overall prize is enormous.

In 2019, 17 of the world’s leading companies came together as the The Business Avengers to better define the role that business can play and is playing in delivering the Global Goals throughout 2019 and 2020.

Each company represented one SDG in launching the campaign, whilst communicating internally and externally the importance of the SDGs overall, the opportunities that they represent, and the work that they are doing to help achieve them.

The campaign, supported by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, The B Team,the International Chamber of Commerce and the World Benchmarking Alliance will be dedicated to driving awareness, collaboration and action from the private sector towards achieving the Global Goals by 2030. The Business Avengers include ARM, Coca Cola, Diageo, Google, Mastercard, Nike, Mars, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce and Unilever.

They argue that the Global Goals cannot be achieved without businesses – through their core business, financial commitments, employee networks, consumer facing platforms and high-level influence they will play a pivotal role in accelerating progress. And that the goals are intrinsically linked to the future success and flourishing of organisations and businesses around the world.

A healthier, more peaceful, and more prosperous world matters to all of us. Every organisation and every person can play a role in achieving this future. The WBCSD linked with Futerra to create the Good Life Goals which are a set of personal lifestyle actions that people  can take to help support the SDGs.

Example of how CEMEX has embraced the SDGs

CEMEX, the global cement business based in Mexico City, developed a Responsible Business Strategy that seeks to understand stakeholder expectations by managing impact and creating value through three priorities:

  • Design and implement inclusive business models with social impact,
  • Implement sustainable community engagement plans to improve quality of life,
  • Design and co-create functional responsible business practices within our operation and with our value chain.

Fernando Gonzalez, the CEO articulated the company’s commitment to the 2030 agenda in 2015 saying “Our social initiatives aim to make cities and communities more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. By building strong, high-quality infrastructure, undertaking actions to combat climate change, and offering sustainable products and solutions, we contribute to the UN Global Compact’s Sustainable Development Goals and reinforce our commitment to building a better future.”

“We execute a global multi-stakeholder materiality assessment every 3-4 year, which we have taken into account to prioritize the 11 out of the 17 SDGs to which CEMEX contributes directly. SDGs 9 and 11, are particularly more related to our core business. Through the launch of various awareness activities and pilots, we aim to gather social intelligence that helps us inform our business decision-making and generate lasting impacts. The risk of inaction is simply too large, given that a growing number of investors and analysts agree that leading environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices can generate higher profitability and may be better long-term investments.

Executives were asked to take the “SDG challenge” and write a postcard to themselves stating what action they would take to be an “SDG mover”. These postcards will be sent back by the end of the year to remind them of the commitment they made to themselves to contribute to the SDG from their day to day responsibilities. CEMEX’s Integrated Report also guides readers on how the SDGs are embedded across various functions, and throughout this year we look to better understand what we measure in each geography in which we operate. The tracking of the SDG progress is supported by specific KPI’s.

Here is how CEMEX aligned itself to each SDG where relevant:

Are we making progress?

The 17 SDGs are defined in more detail through a framework of 169 SDG targets. Progress towards these targets is agreed to be tracked by 232 unique indicators. You can see a fabulous online tracker at Our World In Data, a resource created by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser and run by the University of Oxford.

What can business do now?

The Business Avengers have created a Business Guide to help business leaders understand the actions you can take to support the Global Goals. Answer the questions and you’ll be guided to the right resources for you. They also recommend these steps:

  • Step 1: Your Company … Assess the impact of your company against the seventeen SDGs, and identify related risks and opportunities across your entire value chain.
  • Step 2: Your Leaders… Hold a meeting of the board (or the executive management team) to set goals and targets specific to your company that align with sustainable development.
  • Step 3: Your Shareholders … Tell shareholders and other stakeholders the goals your company has set to contribute to the SDGs and progress made, also analysts and other influencers.
  • Step 4: Your Employees … Engage all your employees in advancing the Goals through their own work and distribute responsibilities across the entire organisation for achieving progress.
  • Step 5: Your Customers … Show your commitment by including SDG education and branding in your products, communication materials, and annual report.

Exploring more

Over the last 20 years, Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur have been dedicated to a single mission: how to help companies continuously reinvent themselves. They call themselves “the plumbers of business”.

Alex and Yves joined me at the recent European Business Forum in a highly entertaining and interactive innovation lab for 500 business leaders. They make an interesting duo. Alex is the performer, whilst Yves is the impresario – an evolution of their earlier days when Alex was the PhD student, and Yves his teacher at the University of Lausanne.

In preparing for the event, I had a number of Skype calls with Alex, in his Swiss mountain home. It looked more like a nuclear bunker, with plain concrete walls, and a small window showing the snowy mountains outside. In the centre was Alex at his desk, surrounded by 3 huge screens, with his headphones on. It looked like Strategyzer‘s mission control room.

On the walls were hundreds of yellow Post-It notes, plotting out the new book – lots of keywords, diagrams, arrows, connections – although the Skype camera kept falling to the floor where he was surrounded by weightlifting equipment. I wasn’t sure whether “invincible” was more an aspiration for business leaders reading the new book, or for himself.

They dedicate their work to designing better tools, using the power of information design, to create deceptively simple but incredibly useful templates for business to think, plan and execute. Most famously they created the Business Model Canvas.

Now they are going further – to consider not just business design, but transformation, and relentless transformation – with a fabulous new book, The Invincible Company.

Here’s a photo from Yves’ early notebook as they thought through how to visualise the challenges of these three areas:

The book combines their focus on business models with their new approach to innovation portfolios, which are key to the long-term success of any business. It becomes “invincible” because it builds a whole series of great ideas, innovations and business models that ensure its success today, and into the future. Alex and Yves believe there are three crucial areas that every business leader needs to consider in order to remain relevant and prosperous:

  • Companies have to develop truly ambidextrous organizational structures where the innovation arm is given equal power alongside the existing business.
  • This innovation team needs its very own culture, processes, skills, metrics, and incentives to explore potentially new business models and value propositions.
  • They need to better manage their portfolio of existing businesses and new opportunities – sustaining today, whilst cultivating tomorrow.

Companies need a new and integrated approach to managing a dynamic portfolio of established and emerging businesses –  to protect established business models from disruption as long as possible, while simultaneously cultivating the business models of tomorrow.

Exploit the current business: Every portfolio starts with a look at managing and improving the businesses you already have. Here you assess two areas:

  1. Profitability: How much profit does the existing business models generate?
  2. Disruption risk: How protected is your business model, and how likely is it to be disrupted? Models at risk may be established businesses, increasingly prone to disruption by new technology, new markets, or regulatory changes.

Explore: the future business: As you manage the present, you also look towards the future for new areas of growth. Here you assess two different areas:

  1. Expected profitability: How big can an idea for a new business become? What’s the potential? How big is the size of the new market, revenue potential, pricing, etc. Here it is equally important to judge how robust a business model is, eg in terms of recurring revenues, long term growth, scalability, and protection from competition.
  2. Innovation risk: Here you evaluate how much you de-risked a good looking business initiative. New ideas may be unproven, and risky to invest in. The more confidence you have that an initiative will work, based on tests and the resulting evidence, the more you might choose to invest time and resources into it.

Amazon is a good example of a company that intentionally manages a diverse portfolio of existing and promising new business models. The company continues to produce growth with its existing businesses (e-commerce, AWS, logistics), whilst also developing a portfolio of potential future growth engines that may become big profit generators one day (Alexa, Echo, Dash Button, Prime Air, Amazon Fresh, etc).

Investors who seek long-term sustained growth, should be demanding an “invincible” organization built on a portfolio of short and long-term innovative business models Such companies can better allocate capital and resources better at each stage of development. It also demands a continuous flow of new ideas and innovation to sustain your business in a turbulent and uncertain future.

You can download the sneak preview here, and order the book here.

 

Innovation drives the world forwards at incredible pace.

Augmented reality that brings joy into the daily lives of more than 163 million people. Drones deliver vital medicines across the remotest parts of Africa. Brands develop creative business models to reduce society’s addiction to new clothing and single-use plastic. Platforms allow the most obscure talented fiction writers and video producers to become recognised.

Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies” ranking is based on companies with great ideas, that can change the world, that disrupt industries, and inspire society. It is less about the innovation statistics (BCG produce a deeply analytical ranking each year, based on R&D spend and business performance, hardly a measure of creativity or quality of strategic innovation).

I love the Fast Company annual ranking for it stories – amazing organisations doing incredible work – and for its drill downs into different sectors, and parts of the world. The top 50 list is a little American obsessed, but look further into the regional list for great innovators. It truly is an inspiring source of inspiration, insight and ideas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88RVU08_3SY

World’s most innovative companies

Here’s this year’s ranking:

The top 50 ranking is here

Europe’s most innovative companies

  • #1 Siemens … For paving an electric highway: an Authobahn that charges hybrid electric trucks.  It broke new ground this year in the sustainable transportations pace by opening the first “e-highway” that allows electric trucks to be charged as they drive. This technology, if widely adopted could simultaneously help solve some of the pain-points associated with electric vehicles—and have a massive positive effect on climate change
  • #2 Sprout World … for designing a pencil that can be planted in the ground so a tree can grow from its used body. It packs a lot of innovation into a small, everyday object, demonstrating that everyone can make a positive difference. Surreal, yet brilliant.
  • #3 Elvie … for fashioning a silent, discreet breast pump that women can use throughout the day. The UK company’s smart, wearable breast pump received FDA approval 2019 and expanded to the U.S. The design allows new mothers to pump through the day, discreetly, silently, and hands-free. It’s a great example of how “femtech” is being created to address the specific needs of women.

China’s most innovative companies 2020

  • #1 Luckin Coffee … For brewing the tech-centric chain restaurant of the future. It launched its chain of coffee shops in October 2017, and since then it’s grown remarkably fast, so fast that Luckin surpassed the number of Starbucks outlets in China by the end of 2019, with more than 4,500 outlets. The chain’s distinctive, digital model allows it to learn where its customers are and proliferate its small, pickup-only coffee counters as close to them as possible. Luckin’s focus on data ripples through the rest of its business, informing its decision-making on everything from its staffing to its supply chain. It launched tea and juice last year to offer more choices to its more than 30 million customers, and it introduced a new “partnership model,” which is a new spin on franchising that will allow the company to expand even more rapidly—and globally—while still controlling the data and selling experience. Luckin’s model started to kick in over the course of 2019, with store growth (more than 200%) being outpaced by returning customers (397.5%), and that impressive stat is being lapped by the number of products they buy (470.1%) and the revenue they’re generating (557.6%). “We effectively started as an online model, spending a year setting up the entire operation before opening our first store, so 100% of the transactions give us data,” says Reinout Schakel, Luckin’s CFO and chief strategy officer. “Traditional retailers might have 20, 30, 40%, so you’re always going to have to rely on people making decisions. That’s going to be a big competitive advantage for Luckin.”
  • #2 Meituan Dianping … For proving the transactional super-app can be profitable by boosting its food-delivery membership program and increasing its ad revenue. The Chinese super-app, which connects more than 400 million customers to such services as food delivery and hotel booking, did what skeptics did not think possible: Show a profit. To achieve this milestone, the company goosed its transaction volume in food delivery with its membership program, with members on average ordering three times more frequently than other Meituan users. In addition, the company increased its efficiencies across its delivery network, improving its gross margins by the end of June last year (its last financial report) to almost 23%, up from 15.8% a year earlier. With its large user base and almost 6 million active merchants, Meituan benefited from offering advertising services for those businesses to try to reach hundreds of millions of customers as well.
  • #3 Alibaba … For powering China’s digital transformation with its “business operating system”. The Chinese e-commerce giant continues to push its technological prowess deeper into the real world. Its aggregation of its digital services for branding, channel management, customer service, finance, logistics, marketing, product development, sales, and more seeks to accelerate the digitization of businesses large and small across China. Flagship customers include Nestlé and Starbucks as well as Universal Parks & Resorts, which intends to use Alibaba’s range of services to serve customers from booking their trip to its Universal Beijing Resort (set to open in 2021) to speeding their entry into the park to running everything on Alibaba’s cloud-computing platform.

Why is Snap the world’s most innovative company?

From the company’s remarkable turnaround to its creation and popularisation of augmented reality, CEO Evan Spiegel talked to Fast Company about how he changed and how he built a structure for innovation.

Spiegel has also pulled off a remarkable comeback from 2018, when Snap itself was said to be ailing. Snapchat lost 5 million daily users over the course of that year. Between its March 2017 IPO and the final weeks of 2018, 17 executives departed. Facebook’s unabashed adoption of Snap’s features—executives have acknowledged the similarity between Instagram Stories and Snapchat Stories, for example, but stated that Stories is a format that it had built upon and not proprietary technology—was taking a toll. An app redesign flopped. Heading into Christmas, Snap’s stock dipped as low as $4.82, 84% off its onetime high of $29.44. Forbesargued, “Why Snapchat’s Trainwreck Stock Will Never Have a Facebook Rebound,” while business pundit Scott Galloway declared the company “roadkill” and predicted that Snap would get acquired before 2020, probably by Amazon.

Unknown to most observers, though, Spiegel had been aware of the issues plaguing the company and had put critical fixes in motion. He worked on his leadership skills and altered Snap’s executive team and management structure to make it more effective at executing on innovations. Snap recoded its Android app so it could run better on the 85% of phones in the world that aren’t the iPhone, and simplified its tools for ad buying, helping it boost revenue year over year by 65% and add 31 million daily users to the platform in 2019. As investors caught on, Snap’s stock price rose almost 250% last year. Although the company is still losing money, Snapchat is poised for international growth. “I’m now rooting for Snap,” Galloway wrote in January after admitting he’d been wrong. “Snap is on the verge of writing its own ‘Cinderella story,’ ” wrote MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson last summer.

Snap is now ushering in the next wave of computing. While tech giants hope to make augmented reality mainstream within a decade, Snap has already made the software commonplace. On average, more than 75% of Snapchat’s 218 million daily users play with its AR “lenses” every day. That’s more than 163 million people putting silly digital effects like biker beards and puppy ears on their faces. Last year, the company expanded its AR purview even further, turning its attention to augmenting the world around users rather than just their faces, with lenses that can transform buildings into giant pizzas and products into shoppable pages.

Snap has also constructed a formidable premium content business on its Discover platform, which functions like a mini, mobile-optimized Netflix, with five-minute-long shows that users can subscribe to and binge on. There are now more than 450 channels of content worldwide, and in the fourth quarter of 2019, more than 50 shows had a monthly audience of over 10 million people. The first season of one of its teen-oriented scripted shows, Endless Summer, produced by the company behind The Real World and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, racked up 28 million viewers.

“I don’t have to feel trapped by the way everyone else [operates],” says Spiegel. He could build Snap to function in the way that worked best for what he wanted to accomplish. “We can try new things.”

 

Adidas, Google and the FIFA online game have teamed up to create a smart football boot. The technology known as “Adidas GMR”, tracks how people play in real life, allowing them to complete challenges or hit milestones. When they do, they will be rewarded with improvements within FIFA Mobile, allowing them to unlock in-game rewards or improve the performance of their team within FIFA Mobile Ultimate Team.

The technology brings together insoles made for Adidas football boots with Google’s Jacquard technology, which allows smart fabric to be sewn into otherwise normal pieces of clothing. It has already been integrated into backpacks and denim jackets, for instance, allowing wearers to swipe on a sleeve and change the song that is playing on their phone.

The new tie-up with Adidas puts the tag inside of an insole so that it can be placed into any type of footwear. Once it is in, players will be given challenges to complete in the real world. One of the first, for instance, tells players to take 40 powerful shots from within the penalty box to complete the “Master Finisher” achievement, and the power of their shots will be ranked on leaderboards within the game.

The companies say the tag uses machine learning to understand how players are moving around in the real world, while playing on the pitch. It will be able to measure the kicks they take, the power of shots, the distance they run and the speed they do it, the companies claim. The shoes are available to buy through Adidas now for £29.95. They also require the Fifa Mobile app, which is available on Android or iOS.

More things happening this month in the world of business and brands:

  • Dazed unveils the “beauty counter of the future” at Selfridges, merging digital beauty and IRL experiences. Via Dazed.
  • The psychology behind ASMR’s appeal is rooted in formative memories of being cared for, suggests i-D.
  • Fenty Beauty opened a TikTok house as “a platform for the next generation of creators,” announces Glamour.
  • H&M plans to share its production chain with rivals as part of a new program to help mid- and large-sized brands expand, reports the Financial Times.
  • Fans of the Netflix show Sex Education will be able to rent the main character’s house, reveals Teen Vogue.
  • CNN explores how North Korean millennials are using beauty to express political freedom.
  • Hyundai’s Prophecy car concept takes design inspiration from nature and is meant to “build an emotional connection between humans and cars,” writes Dezeen.
  • TikTok has announced plans to open a “transparency center” in Los Angeles, California under heightened scrutiny from US lawmakers and officials, reports the Wall Street Journal.
  • Fashion house Balenciaga is turning political instability and eco-anxiety into artistic inspiration, “channelling the ongoing turmoil into creative output” in a new SS20 campaign video that mimics an evening news broadcast, writes Dazed.
  • Doctors and lawyers are taking to TikTok to give advice and clear up misconceptions in their fields, reveals BBC.
  • A new jewellery store in New York City was designed to be a “sensory retail experience,” informed by darkness, materiality, scent and sound, says Dezeen.
  • Could micro-credentials replace traditional degrees? BBC explores.
  • Sephora is rolling out new standards for its CBD products, making it the first national retailer to do so. Via Glossy.
  • Australia is leaning into voluntourism with a new visa that lets tourists extend their stay to help with bushfire recovery efforts, reveals Travel + Leisure.
  • Big Tech brands continue their play for healthcare. Amazon has launched a new digital health care service for employees, reports The Seattle Times, while Apple has partnered with Johnson & Johnson to see if Apple Watch can reduce the risk of stroke, announces CNN.
  • Durex reveals a new “sex-positive” brand manifesto in an effort to tackle stigmas around sex, explains Marketing Week.
  • Delta has announced that it will go fully carbon neutral in March 2020, reveals CNBC.
  • Adidas is using WhatsApp as a direct marketing channel, describes Digiday.
  • Amazon opened its first cashierless grocery store, evolving the Amazon Go retail concept, announces Business Insider.
  • Kickstarter has become the first tech company to unionise, reports The New York Times.
  • Time investigates how AI is being used to help patients find the best antidepressant treatment.
  • Forgo is a new mix-it-yourself waterless beauty brand that cuts down on carbon emissions and plastic waste. Via Dezeen.
  • France has introduced a raft of environmental policies under the new French Office of Biodiversity, including a protected nature reserve surrounding Mont Blanc to cute down on overtourism, announces BBC.
  • Artist Ai Weiwei has created self-assembled ‘democratic’ artwork to make high art more attainable, says Dazed.
  • The Verge explores how creators are using video games to make climate change education more engaging.
  • British pop rock band The 1975 has committed to only performing at music festivals with gender-balanced lineups. Via The Guardian.
  • Theory’s new clothing labelling system prioritizes conscious design by communicating sustainability and ethics alongside material composition, announces Fast Company.
  • Teens are using TikTok “as an important springboard for discussion” to critique mental health services, describes i-D.
  • High-end wellness drink Dirty Lemon drink is partnering with Walmart as the latest example of how the wellness is being democratized, reports CNN.
  • Unilever will stop marketing ice cream to kids for obesity concerns, reveals CNBC.
  • Artist James Casebere imagines post-climate change dwellings, projecting “a quiet optimism in the face of catastrophe.” Via Wallpaper.
  • The Guardian explores the gender bias in sustainability.
  • The New York City government is stepping in to address discrimination in luxury fashion, overseeing sensitivity training for Prada, reports The New York Times.
  • Automaker Ford wants to make the roads safer for cyclists with its new “emoji jacket” that displays bikers’ emotions to drivers. Via Designboom.
  • The North Face is sending its designers back to school to teach them how to “improve the longevity of the garments they make,” writes Fast Company.
  • CNN is launching a culinary documentary series starring Stanley Tucci, announces Deadline.
  • Designer Tanya Taylor is forgoing New York Fashion Week this year, instead releasing five short star-studded films and a digital lookbook. Via Nylon.
  • Glossy unpacks the migration of oral-care brands to the beauty aisle.
  • A newly proposed Dutch neighbourhood is designed around car-free urban living, where there will be “one shared car for every households,” describes Fast Company.
  • Vegan fashion in the UK will have new government-mandated regulations to standardise products marketing themselves as animal-free, reveals The Guardian.
  • Dyson has patented a new wearable air purifier with built-in headphones, announces Engadget.

A “better” business

  • Has purpose beyond profit … believes that profit is not its purpose, but the outcome of an effective business that seeks to achieve a better purpose for society.
  • Acts for broader society … acts beyond self interest, demonstrating respect for people and building relationships that benefit business and society
  • Enables good … becomes a platform for change, and force for good, to deliver clear benefits to society as well as delivering long term sustainable performance.

The Blueprint Trust is an independent charity seeking a better business. It defines a blueprint for better business.

Here is how Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, described it in July 2018: “Blueprint for Better Business challenges companies to be a force for good and contribute to a better society. Such a system is fundamentally about delivering a basic social contract comprised of relative equality of outcomes; equality of opportunity; and fairness across generations. Blueprint’s Five Principles provide guidance for businesses and reflect the foundations needed for responsible business: honesty and fairness; good citizenship; responsible employment; guardians for future generations; and a purposeful business that delivers long-term sustainable performance.

The ‘Five Principles of a Purpose Driven Business’ is a picture of what a company that is guided and inspired by a purpose that serves society might look like. It sets out where an organisation seeks to get to rather than where it is, and not intended to be exhaustive.

The ‘Framework to Guide Decision Making’ outlines the behaviours needed to sustain purpose. It also provides the link to the underlying provenance of  Blueprint, which is one of its distinguishing features. The provenance is derived from a strong foundation of learning from society, including social and behavioural sciences, faith and philosophy.

Similarly Richard Branson has been the driving force behind “The B Team”

Beck in 2013, when launching the initiative in Davos, he said “I’m excited about debating the need to develop deep reforms that can have a lasting positive impact on the world. From climate change to shortages in natural resources, bio-diversity loss to economic inequality and corruption, we are taking on 10 big Challenges. The way we work is changing forever and the sooner businesses recognise this, the better. The B Team members are starting at home by committing to advance these 10 Challenges within their own companies.”

Key people on the B Team include Paul Polman and Jochen Zeitz (Kering), Emmanuel Faber (Danone) and Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Muhammad Yunus to Hamdi Ulakaya (Chobani).

The B Team set out to address 10 big challenges:

  • Drive full transparency
  • Foster collaboration
  • Restore nature
  • Scale true accounting
  • Create thriving communities
  • Reinvent market incentives
  • Ensure dignity and fairness
  • Redefine reward systems
  • Value diversity
  • Lead for the long run

“We believe that for a better tomorrow for our communities, our companies and our planet, we need bold leadership now.

Our current economic model is broken. But it did not break itself. And it will not repair itself. We, as private sector and civil society leaders, envision the way forward as a better way of doing business. That’s why we’re working to shift the culture of accountability in business to include not only numbers and performance, but people and planet.

We acknowledge that while we are part of the problem, we have the responsibility—and the power—to lead on the solution. We will create new norms of corporate leadership that go beyond commitment and toward fundamental transformation today, for a better tomorrow.”

“This shared value has brought together a close community of peers where difficult decisions can be embraced, and timely, large-scale change can be achieved. We are driven by a clear strategy and dedicate our collective influence to encourage others—and ourselves—to take personal risks to do what is right. We at The B Team choose to take the more difficult yet more rewarding path.”

  • Purpose and principles:  Leading with purpose means examining why it is you do what you do—and that isn’t to make a profit. Purpose sets forth intentions that will make a tangible difference in the world. But purpose alone is not enough. It might be a starting point, but leaders need a strong set of principles to bring their purpose to life. And at this crucial turning point for leadership, we believe there are three principles leaders must holistically and boldly embrace: sustainability, equality and accountability.
  • Humility: Leaders operating with humility have an honest understanding of their strengths and limitations. They are not seeking to be the hero of their company, but rather a part of a community. A humble leader actively and continually admits to their imperfections while seeking to learn and grow.
  • Courage: Courageous leaders are willing to take a personal risk for what is right and use their voice when it matters most. They choose to take the often difficult yet more rewarding path. They acknowledge that the global economic model is broken, but it did not break itself and they have a responsibility to repair it.

 

In 2015 The B Team launched the 100% Human at Work initiative and network as they believed it was “time for businesses to stop looking at people as resources and to start seeing them as human beings”. The B Team have built the People Innovation Network, to bring companies together to share and learn from one another about how to help their employees thrive at work.

In 2016, as part of their work for The B Team Sir Richard Branson and Benioff launched a movement of entrepreneurs and business leaders building their companies with people and planet alongside profit as part of their DNA from the outset, called “Born B'”.

 

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t everyone favourite philosopher, but the drop-out student who spent his Harvard years playing around with FaceMash as a way to find a girl, was recently back at Harvard talking about finding a more inspiring purpose. And he made a lot of sense:

“Today I want to talk about purpose. But I’m not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose. We’re millennials. We’ll try to do that instinctively. Instead, I’m here to tell you finding your purpose isn’t enough. The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.

One of my favorite stories is when John F. Kennedy visited the NASA space center, he saw a janitor carrying a broom and he walked over and asked what he was doing. The janitor responded: “Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.”

Purpose is that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are needed, that we have something better ahead to work for. Purpose is what creates true happiness.”

Roy Spence, a little known guy, who was the creator of much of Southwest Airline’s journey to become one of the legends of customer service, describes purpose simply:

“Purpose is a definitive statement about the difference you are trying to make in the world.”

Of course Simon Sinek, and his “Start with Why” circle, is perhaps the best known descriptor of purpose and why it matters. Here’s his logic:

“All the great and inspiring leaders and organizations in the world, whether it’s Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers — they all think, act, and communicate the exact same way and it’s the complete opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it. It’s probably the world’s simplest idea and I call it the Golden Circle. Why? How? What?

This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others are not. Let me define the terms very quickly.

Every single person and organization in the planet knows what they do 100%. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiating proposition or proprietary process or USP. But very very few people and organizations know why they do what they do. And by why I don’t mean to make a profit — that’s a result. It’s always a result. By why I mean, what’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why does your organization exist?”

From Purpose to Concept to Strategy … from WHY to HOW to WHAT

The real question most people then struggle with is, is how to turn an inspiring but fairly intangible purpose statement into something which is a meaningful strategy for the business. The key is to turn the aspiration into something practical, her called a strategic concept, before going on to define the practical actions, prioritised and delivered.

Step 1: Define your inspiring purpose … the WHY

The framework starts with purpose. For example, Starbucks’ purpose is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit”. 

As the core of purpose are three questions we need to answer:

  1. Who do we serve?
  2. What do we do for them?
  3. How does this enable them to achieve more, or be more?

Step 2: Interpret this as a strategic concept … the HOW

What is the big idea which will enable your business to deliver this purpose in a distinctive, better way? What is the strategic concept that will enable your inspiring intent to become real?

A concept is the core activity that sits about your day-to-day operations and allows you to deliver the purpose. In creative or brand agency parlance, this would be called the creative concept – the big idea.

For example, at the core of Starbucks are two things: coffee and human connection. Starbucks this concept more simply as the third place.

Step 3: Develop your purpose-driven strategy … the WHAT

A great example of this is the transformation agenda Starbucks created in 2008 to turn the company around. The agenda stated seven big moves:

  1. Be the undisputed coffee authority
  2. Engage and inspire their partners
  3. Ignite the emotional attachment with their customers
  4. Expand their global presence-while making each store the heart of the local neighborhood
  5. Be a leader in ethical sourcing and environmental impact
  6. Create innovative growth platforms worthy of their coffee
  7. Deliver a sustainable economic model

Indeed as demonstrated by Starbucks, a good way to articulate strategy is to come up a list of bold moves that will enable you to move dramatically and distinctively towards achieving your purpose.

Another great reference for strategy is Elon Musk’s Master Plan for Tesla. (Part two of their master plan is here.)

Tesla starts with an inspiring purpose, “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy” (not just to make cool cars, or even to become a global leader in electric cars – that is just part of its internal mission, on the way to a more inspiring purpose).

  1. Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive
  2. Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price
  3. Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car

The Master Plan provides a clear road map (a series of steps) on what needs to be done.

What about mission, vision and goals?

Good question. Does the purpose sit above these statements or replace them?

MVGs are about the business itself – its what it seeks to achieve for itself – whereas purpose is what a business does for the world. Mission is what the business does itself, vision is a description of the future state when success is achieved, and goals are the specific things to achieve on the way. MVGs are insular, self-serving. Purpose is about engaging with the world, to make it better in some way (which might be in a positive way, contributing to society, which could be anything from fighting climate change, to spreading happiness).

Purpose by contrast is about business engaging with the outside world.

It defines what a company contributes to the world, why it exists, and how the world would be a lesser place without it. It is emotionally engaging to the audience – ideally to all stakeholders, employees and investors, as well as consumers – because it is what the business does for them, how it makes their lives better. Because it is more engaging, they pay more for it – be it in terms of price or loyalty, hard work and productivity, capital investment and support.

Profit follows purpose – but it’s the purpose not profit that is the WHY – and a surplus profit can be divided in a fair and forwards-looking way – used both to reward stakeholders for their roles in achieving it, but also invested in doing better, achieving more purpose.

We all need “more female” attributes to seize the opportunities of today’s rapidly changing business world.

Making sense of relentless change and complexity requires us to rise above the data points and short-term priorities, to see a bigger picture – to make sense of a new emerging world. That requires intuition more than logic (intuition is more forwards looking, whilst logic tends to look back).

To add value beyond machines and AI, we need to unlock our humanity, our creativity. That requires us to be more empathetic, to make new connections. Ideas, design, relationships are most valued in today’s business world.

And to solve the big problems of our world, we need to be more thoughtful – to find more responsible, caring and creative, intuitive and inspiring solutions.

You could say “the future is female”

It’s not just about getting to a level playing field in diversity and inclusion, which matters … but even more, its about taking those attributes, those qualities, which are typically “more female” and to embrace them … both for men and women.

We could go into a biological and neurological discussion at this point, but I think the point is clear. Women therefore can have an advantage, whilst for men it might require some unlearning.

The future is not like the future used to be. Being a leader of the future, is not achieved by following the traits of the past success. It’s time to look forwards, together, with a positive mindset, to embrace the opportunities of an incredible new world.

So here are 10 incredible female business leaders, stepping up to disrupt and reinvent our world and our lives:

Kathy Hannun, Cofounder and CEO of Dandelion

Kathy Hannun was at Google X when she became obsessed with geothermal energy for home heating and cooling. It drastically cuts the eco footprint compared with diesel or propane-powered furnaces — but a system typically cost $80,000 or more to install in a private house. Hannun cofounded Dandelion in 2017 to bring down the expense. Already, the company’s innovative equipment means that homeowners can either pay $18,500 up front and recoup the costs over about five years or put no money down and pay $135 a month, less than most diesel heating bills. So far Dandelion has raised $23.5 million and is growing 20 percent month over month; its waitlist is in the thousands. “My goal is to make this the mainstream option,” says Hannun. “And advance the way society heats and cools indoor spaces.”

Cristina Junqueira, Cofounder and VP of Nubank

Cristina Junqueira was working at a traditional bank in Brazil, and in 2013 she scored the largest bonus of her career. She quit immediately. Junqueira realized she wanted to change people’s lives, not just make money. Within months, she helped launch Nubank, a Brazilian fintech company that aims to make banking accessible to everyone via tools like low-interest credit cards, high-interest savings accounts, and an app-based credit system. In the early days, it was all hands on deck for Nubank’s tiny team. “You would call our customer service line and it would ring on my cellphone,” Junqueira says. But today, she’s having the impact she hoped for: Her company is valued at $10 billion, recently announced plans to move into Mexico and Argentina, and is exploring new products like personal loans, investment products, and accounts for small and medium-­size businesses.

Payal Kadakia, Founder and executive chairman of ClassPass

Back in 2010, Payal Kadakia gave herself two weeks to come up with a viable business idea — time enough, she thought, to know whether she was cut out to be an entrepreneur. It worked. That experiment evolved into ClassPass, the subscription-based service that now helps users in 2,500-plus cities in more than 20 countries discover and book exercise classes. This year, Kadakia expanded into corporate wellness with a service that gives employees access to classes with 22,000 studio partners; clients include Google, Facebook, and Morgan Stanley. But the company, which has raised $255 million, is approaching the milestone of 100 million class reservations, a figure that keeps the founder motivated. “Our ultimate success metric is when someone goes to class,” Kadakia says.

Andrea and Robin McBride, Founders of McBride Sisters Wine 

Sometimes a founding story is so good, you just want to bottle it. And these sisters did. Andrea McBride was 12 and living with her foster mom in New Zealand when the phone rang. “Hey, Andrea; it’s your dad,” a man said. He told her he had terminal stomach cancer and she had a big sister named Robin (left) on the opposite side of the world. Andrea set out to find her. It took a few years, but she did. Andrea was 16 and Robin was 25 when the two first met, in New York’s LaGuardia airport. “When I got off the plane,” says Robin, who’d been brought up by her mom in California, “she was standing at the end of the jetway. I thought I was seeing my own reflection.” In 2005, the sisters ended up in California concocting a plan to squeeze into the very male, very white, very old-school wine industry. First they became importers, then distributors, and in 2009 they produced their first vintage. Many followed, including a Black Girl Magic collection, from New Zealand and California. Today the McBride Sisters Wine Collection sells 80,000 cases a year, landing it in the top 3 percent of wineries by size. But the sisters want to see more women there. On March 8, International Women’s Day, they debuted She Can — a New Zealand sauvignon blanc and a California rosé in cans — along with a fund to advance the careers of women in the wine industry. “It’s better than when we started,” says Robin. Andrea finishes the sentence: “But there’s still a lot more work to be done.”

Mariam Naficy, Founder and CEO of Minted

Minted, which transformed over 11 years from selling stationery to being a massive marketplace for indie artists, inked a big deal this summer: Samsung and Method will now license work from Minted’s community, giving newfound exposure to independent designers. “We’re a source for companies that understand the value of one-of-a-kind design but may not have the scale or merchandising bandwidth to develop it internally,” says founder and CEO Mariam Naficy. And Minted doesn’t just have scale; it has crowd buy-in. Back when the company focused solely on greeting cards and wedding invitations, Naficy devised a crowdsourcing model for up-voting the art potential shoppers liked best. Fast-forward to today, and that means big brands can tap into a decade of data on design that inspires both fandom and sales—Naficy even says that by now, Minted can predict which designs will ultimately become best-sellers.

Neha Narkhede, Cofounder and chief product officer of Confluent

Next time you swipe a credit card or call a Lyft, thank Neha Narkhede, who is building what she calls a “central nervous system” for companies’ data. It started while she was working as an engineer at LinkedIn, where she helped create Apache Kafka, an open-source software system that processes the deluge of data flowing through the platform — clicks, messages, and news-feed updates — and makes it available to users in real time. “We said, ‘This is not just a LinkedIn problem; this is part of a broader trend that’s happening in the world where businesses are going to become more digital,’ ” Narkhede says. So she and two colleagues left to start Confluent, a software system that turbocharges Apache Kafka’s capabilities for startups, financial institutions, and Fortune 500 companies. Confluent enables its customers to process trillions of event streams every day, integrating data across apps and platforms and making all that information available centrally to analyze in real time. The service has quickly become an integral tool for businesses looking to leverage their digital footprint, and it shows in Confluent’s growth: The company recently raised $125 million in Series D funding, catapulting it to unicorn status with a $2.5 billion valuation. Next year, Confluent will focus on international business while increasing its 800-person workforce. “The market is as big as what the relational database market will be,” Narkhede says. “That’s on the order of tens of billions of dollars—that’s what we’re looking at in terms of total market potential.”

Melanie Perkins, Cofounder and CEO of Canva 

Canva, the Australia-based graphic design platform, was created in 2013 to help anyone, anywhere — with any level of design knowledge — create and publish beautiful, professional materials. Six years later, CEO Melanie Perkins and her cofounders have made strides. Canva has raised more than $140 million, is valued at $2.5 billion, and has 15 million active monthly users around the globe. “We’re now in 100 languages, and a goal for the year ahead is to bring access to every single market,” Perkins says. “We’ve done less than 1 percent of what we think is possible — we’ve got .56 percent of the world’s population on the platform, but we want to empower the entire world.”

Kendra Scott, Founder and CEO of Kendra Scott

As she designed her first jewelry collection out of her home in 2002, Kendra Scott never dreamed it would become a $1 billion brand. But today, her eponymous company has a unicorn valuation, 100 stores, and shows no signs of slowing down — though Scott’s main focus is about more than baubles. Of the Austin-based brand’s 2,000 employees, more than 90 percent are women, many of whom are mothers. Nursing rooms are commonplace at HQ and distribution centers, Kendra Scott Kids provides a children’s playroom, and once a year Camp Kendra invites in employees’ kids for a day of activities, in which office employees become camp counselors. “If we can support our staff, these women, at this very special time in their lives, we’ll have an employee who is incredibly loyal to our brand,” says Scott. “We believe in their future.” In September, that support expanded beyond the walls of Scott’s company, when she announced the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Program in partnership with the University of Texas. The programming will feature speaker series and courses on everything from building a business to advocating for equal pay and will be available to University of Texas students. “We want women to be able to access this information,” Scott says.

Reshma Shetty, Cofounder of Ginkgo Bioworks

A biological engineer who can synthesize bacteria to smell like bananas, Reshma Shetty never intended to be an entrepreneur. But as a graduate student at MIT, she became passionate about designing biology-based products the way an architect designs a house. To make her vision a reality, in 2008 she cofounded Ginkgo Bioworks. Eleven years later, Shetty and her 250-person team are known for cutting-­edge biotech and valued at $1.4 billion. Ginkgo’s work has spanned various industries, from healthcare to agriculture, with products like synthetic probiotics that reduce gastrointestinal problems in soldiers and (in progress with Synlogic) medicines that program the body’s cells to treat complex diseases. Earlier this year, Ginkgo spun out a separate company called Motif Ingredients to engineer sustainable alternative proteins that taste like the real thing. “Although we’re going after these radically different markets,” says Shetty, “the common thread is biology.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeqQz15QehE

Alli Webb, Founder of  Drybar

Drybar founder Alli Webb has a new company, Squeeze, that aims to do for massages what she did for blowouts: Make the experience easy and affordable. The chain launched in March; customers book appointments via an app and can select from a menu of treatments and preferences, from pressure type to areas to avoid. But unlike Drybar (which has 130 locations and 4,000 employees), Squeeze will scale as a franchise, and Webb’s team is creating a two-year blueprint for its future partners, detailing how to greet customers and market locally. “We love the idea of enabling other people to become entrepreneurs themselves,” Webb says.

What are the successful traits?

Fortune Magazine recently asked a range of female leaders about the personality trait they credit for helping launching them into their leadership positions of today:

Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President, and CEO, IBM  … “Be curious. A constant thirst to learn has served me well my entire career, especially in the tech industry. We’ve always hired for curiosity at IBM. We receive 7,000 job applications a day, and our managers and HR teams are geared to look for people who are curious and committed to constantly advancing what they know.”

Gail Boudreaux, President and CEO, Anthem … “My strong focus on leadership has been a large part of my success to date. I believe the ability to build and inspire teams is critical and that individuals and organizations can accomplish extraordinary results when they leverage the power of their collective strength working together.”

Julie Sweet, CEO, Accenture … “Openness: starting with my decision to learn Chinese and live in Taiwan and China in 1987 and 1988, before it was commonplace. I have often pursued paths that were not well-trodden. It has helped me become a continuous learner and to understand that it is often from unexpected sources and places that you learn the most.”

Judith McKenna, President and CEO, Walmart International  … “It must be somewhere between curiosity and always focusing on people. Both are really important, and I really believe that if we always keep our associates, our people, at the heart of everything we do, and build out strong teams, then we’ll continue to make our business successful.”

Amy Hood, EVP and CFO, Microsoft … “I’m pretty gritty. I can work through most things and come out on the other side feeling like I’ve learned a good lesson and I’ll get better.”

Leanne Caret, President and CEO, Defense, Space & Security, and EVP, Boeing … “I love being authentic and letting people see the real me. That hopefully creates an environment where we are all in it together.”

Jennifer Taubert, EVP, Worldwide Chairman, Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson … “I think two qualities have been critical in my career: optimism and perseverance. Optimism because I believe in stretching and redefining the boundaries of what’s possible. Perseverance because, with determination, you can overcome any obstacle to do the right thing for patients. ”

Michele Buck, President and CEO, Hershey  … “Being a great listener has long been one of my hallmark leadership qualities. I find immense value in seeking diverse perspectives when I’m making an important business decision. I want to hear from people who are deep in the organization, closest to the work, as well as those outside the decision domain who may see things a bit differently. As a leader, it’s important to set direction and impart your knowledge to others; but, you have to balance that with listening to the expertise and point of views of those around you. Intentional listening, and the learning associated with that, has undoubtedly been key to my success. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is to weigh the perspectives of those around me with my north star. Then, I listen to my gut, which to me isn’t just natural instinct, it’s been built through years of experience, successes, failures, and everything in between.”

Mary Dillon, CEO, Ulta Beauty … “Curiosity and empathy. I told my children as they were growing up to always ask other people about themselves, to be curious to learn about others and to respect their journey. At Ulta Beauty, this is the way we do business. We have a deep curiosity about our guests and their needs, and we treat associates with the respect they deserve. We believe these values are helping us win customer loyalty.”

Marillyn Hewson, Chairman, President, and CEO, Lockheed Martin … “A focus on effective communication—and it all starts with the ability to really listen. Listening to your customers leads to a customer-focused vision. And listening to those you lead creates a climate of understanding and trust. By focusing on consistent and effective communication, leaders can also more quickly identify those times when it is critical to step forward and reach out directly to customers, shareholders, or employees. Simply put, effective communication is the engine for effective leadership and effective decision making at every level.”

Download a summary of my keynote: The Future is Female

Peter Fisk’s new book Business Recoded is out in September 2020.

SpaceX is fixed on building a new civilisation on Mars, but it is also seeking to improve life on Earth, especially for anyone struggling to get a phone or wifi signal. Earlier this year it started building a constellation of 300 mini satellites in orbit and plans to launch another 1,300 very soon. OneWeb, another space company based in London, will also launch 650 satellites this year. The networks seek to create a global communications network that will reach everyone everywhere.

We are all familiar with the increasingly disruptive growth of AI. However a miniaturised form of AI will enable devices to run complex computations on their own with no need to relay data to and from a centralised cloud. With Apple’s newest iOS update, for example, Siri’s language recognition function operates directly on the iPhone. The changes mean faster responses, less privacy vulnerability, and less energy consumption.

Climate change is on almost everyone’s agenda, now due to the impacts of  extreme weather. More robust satellite data and increased computing power allow scientists to run more advanced weather simulations than ever before. This helps them figure out what kinds of risks to prepare for, such as how severe heat waves will get and how extensive a flood will be. It also allows scientists to more precisely measure how much climate change increased the chances of a weather event.

With the help of MIT’s technology forecasting team, here are 7 breakthroughs that are likely to change our lives over the next few years:

Anti-ageing drugs

A number of different diseases, including cancer, heart disease, and dementia, could potentially be treated by slowing ageing. The first wave of a new class of anti-aging drugs have begun human testing. These drugs won’t let you live longer but aim to treat specific ailments by slowing or reversing a fundamental process of ageing.

The drugs are called senolytics—they work by removing certain cells that accumulate as we age. Known as “senescent” cells, they can create low-level inflammation that suppresses normal mechanisms of cellular repair and creates a toxic environment for neighboring cells.

In June, San Francisco–based Unity Biotechnology reported initial results in patients with mild to severe osteoarthritis of the knee. Results from a larger clinical trial are expected in the second half of 2020. The company is also developing similar drugs to treat age-related diseases of the eyes and lungs, among other conditions.  Senolytics are now in human tests, along with a number of other promising approaches  targeting the biological processes that lie at the root of aging and various diseases.

A company called Alkahest injects patients with components found in young people’s blood and says it hopes to halt cognitive and functional decline in patients suffering from mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. The company also has drugs for Parkinson’s and dementia in human testing.  And in December, researchers at Drexel University College of Medicine even tried to see if a cream including the immune-suppressing drug rapamycin could slow aging   in human skin. The tests reflect researchers’ expanding efforts to learn if the many diseases associated with getting older—such as heart diseases, arthritis, cancer, and dementia—can be hacked to delay their onset.

Climate analytics

Ten days after Tropical Storm Imelda began flooding neighbourhoods across the Houston area last September, a rapid-response research team announced that climate change almost certainly played a role. The group, World Weather Attribution, had compared high-resolution computer simulations of worlds where climate change did and didn’t occur. In the former, the world we live in, the severe storm was as much as 2.6 times more likely—and up to 28% more intense.

Earlier this decade, scientists were reluctant to link any specific event to climate change. But many more extreme-weather attribution studies have been done in the last few years, and rapidly improving tools and techniques have made them more reliable and convincing.  This has been made possible by a combination of advances. For one, the lengthening record of detailed satellite data is helping us understand natural systems. Also, increased computing power means scientists can create higher-resolution simulations and conduct many more virtual experiments.

These and other improvements have allowed scientists to state with increasing statistical certainty that yes, global warming is often fueling more dangerous weather events.  By disentangling the role of climate change from other factors, the studies are telling us what kinds of risks we need to prepare for, including how much flooding to expect and how severe heat waves will get as global warming becomes worse. If we choose to listen, they can help us understand how to rebuild our cities and infrastructure for a climate-changed world.

Digital money

As the use of physical cash declines, so does the freedom to transact without an intermediary. Meanwhile, digital currency technology could be used to splinter the global financial system.

Last June Facebook unveiled a “global digital currency” called Libra. The idea triggered a backlash and Libra may never launch, at least not in the way it was originally envisioned. But it’s still made a difference: just days after Facebook’s announcement, an official from the People’s Bank of China implied that it would speed the development of its own digital currency in response. Now China is poised to become the first major economy to issue a digital version of its money, which it intends as a replacement for physical cash.

China’s leaders apparently see Libra, meant to be backed by a reserve that will be mostly US dollars, as a threat: it could reinforce America’s disproportionate power over the global financial system, which stems from the dollar’s role as the world’s de facto reserve currency. Some suspect China intends to promote its digital renminbi internationally. Now Facebook’s Libra pitch has become geopolitical. In October, CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised Congress that Libra “will extend America’s financial leadership as well as our democratic values and oversight around the world.” The digital money wars have begun.

Personalised drugs

Genetic medicine tailored to a single patient means hope for people whose ailments were previously uncurable.

Here’s a definition of a hopeless case: a child with a fatal disease so exceedingly rare that not only is there no treatment, there’s not even anyone in a lab coat studying it. “Too rare to care,” goes the saying. That’s about to change, thanks to new classes of drugs that can be tailored to a person’s genes. If an extremely rare disease is caused by a specific DNA mistake—as several thousand are—there’s now at least a fighting chance for a genetic fix.

One such case is that of Mila Makovec, a little girl suffering from a devastating illness caused by a unique genetic mutation, who got a drug manufactured just for her. Her case made the New England Journal of Medicine in October, after doctors moved from a readout of her genetic error to a treatment in just a year. They called the drug milasen, after her. The treatment hasn’t cured Mila. But it seems to have stabilized her condition: it has reduced her seizures, and she has begun to stand and walk with assistance.  Mila’s treatment was possible because creating a gene medicine has never been faster or had a better chance of working. The new medicines might take the form of gene replacement, gene editing, or antisense (the type Mila received), a sort of molecular eraser, which erases or fixes erroneous genetic messages. What the treatments have in common is that they can be programmed, in digital fashion and with digital speed, to correct or compensate for inherited diseases, letter for DNA letter.

How many stories like Mila’s are there? So far, just a handful. But more are on the way. Where researchers would have once seen obstacles and said “I’m sorry,” they now see solutions in DNA and think maybe they can help. The real challenge for “n-of-1” treatments (a reference to the number of people who get the drug) is that they defy just about every accepted notion of how pharmaceuticals should be developed, tested, and sold. Who will pay for these drugs when they help one person, but still take large teams to design and manufacture?

Space internet 

Satellites that can beam a broadband connection to internet terminals. As long as these terminals have a clear view of the sky, they can deliver internet to any nearby devices. SpaceX alone wants to send more than 4.5 times more satellites into orbit this decade than humans have ever launched since Sputnik. These mega-constellations are feasible because we have learned how to build smaller satellites and launch them more cheaply. During the space shuttle era, launching a satellite into space cost roughly $24,800 per pound. A small communications satellite that weighed four tons cost nearly $200 million to fly up.

Today a SpaceX Starlink satellite weighs about 500 pounds (227 kilograms). Reusable architecture and cheaper manufacturing mean we can strap dozens of them onto rockets to greatly lower the cost; a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch today costs about $1,240 per pound. The first 120 Starlink satellites went up last year, and the company planned to launch batches of 60 every two weeks starting in January 2020. OneWeb will launch over 30 satellites later this year. We could soon see thousands of satellites working in tandem to supply internet access for even the poorest and most remote populations on the planet.

But that’s only if things work out. Some researchers are livid because they fear these objects will disrupt astronomy research. Worse is the prospect of a collision that could cascade into a catastrophe of millions of pieces of space debris, making satellite services and future space exploration next to impossible. Starlink’s near-miss with an ESA weather satellite in September was a jolting reminder that the world is woefully unprepared to manage this much orbital traffic. What happens with these mega-constellations this decade will define the future of orbital space.

Tiny AI

AI has a problem: in the quest to build more powerful algorithms, researchers are using ever greater amounts of data and computing power, and relying on centralized cloud services. This not only generates alarming amounts of carbon emissions but also limits the speed and privacy of AI applications.

But a countertrend of tiny AI is changing that. Tech giants and academic researchers are working on new algorithms to shrink existing deep-learning models without losing their capabilities. Meanwhile, an emerging generation of specialized AI chips promises to pack more computational power into tighter physical spaces, and train and run AI on far less energy.

These advances are just starting to become available to consumers. Last May, Google announced that it can now run Google Assistant on users’ phones without sending requests to a remote server. As of iOS 13, Apple runs Siri’s speech recognition capabilities and its QuickType keyboard locally on the iPhone. IBM and Amazon now also offer developer platforms for making and deploying tiny AI.

All this could bring about many benefits. Existing services like voice assistants, autocorrect, and digital cameras will get better and faster without having to ping the cloud every time they need access to a deep-learning model. Tiny AI will also make new applications possible, like mobile-based medical-image analysis or self-driving cars with faster reaction times. Finally, localized AI is better for privacy, since your data no longer needs to leave your device to improve a service or a feature.

But as the benefits of AI become distributed, so will all its challenges. It could become harder to combat surveillance systems or deepfake videos, for example, and discriminatory algorithms could also proliferate. Researchers, engineers, and policymakers need to work together now to develop technical and policy checks on these potential harms.

Quantum computing

Quantum computers store and process data in a way completely differently from the ones we’re all used to. In theory, they could tackle certain classes of problems that even the most powerful classical supercomputer imaginable would take millennia to solve, like breaking today’s cryptographic codes or simulating the precise behavior of molecules to help discover new drugs and materials.

There have been working quantum computers for several years, but it’s only under certain conditions that they outperform classical ones, and in October Google claimed the first such demonstration of “quantum supremacy.” A computer with 53 qubits—the basic unit of quantum computation—did a calculation in a little over three minutes that, by Google’s reckoning, would have taken the world’s biggest supercomputer 10,000 years, or 1.5 billion times as long. IBM challenged Google’s claim, saying the speedup would be a thousandfold at best; even so, it was a milestone, and each additional qubit will make the computer twice as fast.

However, Google’s demo was strictly a proof of concept—the equivalent of doing random sums on a calculator and showing that the answers are right. The goal now is to build machines with enough qubits to solve useful problems. This is a formidable challenge: the more qubits you have, the harder it is to maintain their delicate quantum state. Google’s engineers believe the approach they’re using can get them to somewhere between 100 and 1,000 qubits, which may be enough to do something useful—but nobody is quite sure what.

And beyond that? Machines that can crack today’s cryptography will require millions of qubits; it will probably take decades to get there. But one that can model molecules should be easier to build.

 

“Leading with Purpose in an Age Defined by It” is a great new report from Quartz Insights, and says that nearly 75% of surveyed business leaders agree that purpose is as important as financial performance.

It is rapidly becoming the core driver – idea, philosophy, intent – of many businesses … the reason why people come to work, the reason why customers choose the brand, the reason why investors want to be part of the business.

Not so long ago, we had that vague, subsidiary concept of CSR. A kind of bolt on, a children’s playground to relieve our guilt, an addendum to the annual report. More recently we’ve seen a wave of purpose-washing. Nice statements, which were essentially the same as previous mission statements, claiming that the business has found itself.

But now purpose really matters.

Last year the Business Roundtable took a step closer, when they announced last year that all stakeholders mattered, not just shareholders. But it still felt like they were hedging their bets. Then in January Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment house, said that he would only continue investing in businesses if they could demonstrate purpose “beyond” profit. And the World Economic Forum added to all of that by declaring the end of shareholder value, and the primacy of purpose, and society.

I think Fink gets it best. The pursuit of shareholder value was never, actually the devil’s work. What it really meant, certainly in a long-term context, was that a business could create more economic value over time if it invested in all its stakeholders, to maximise their engagement and effectiveness. The net value created at the end was a measure of this collective effectiveness – a bigger cake, where everybody could have a bigger slice. Purpose is similar, although the final measure is not in economic value terms, but in the achievement of a bigger goal – that which is defined by the purpose, which might be to bring more joy to the world (Coca Cola), or to save our planet (Patagonia).

Genuine purpose should come from a company’s heart and soul: its people. It’s about your why – why you exist, why the world is better with you than not, why you come to work … It’s your distinctive passion. And it requires a shared passion, aligning organisation and individuals. For company leaders, this means engaging with employees on every level about the things that matter most to them, and using those values as the North Star that guides every decision you make—no matter the size.

Putting purpose into action

The study also shows that 80% of business leaders agree that they have a moral obligation to engage on a social issue when it impacts their employees. For instance, Patagonia has many business decisions over the years (from stopping selling its most profitable item in its early days, metal pegs which mountaineers hammered into rocks, to helping customers to keep and mend their existing clothes, rather than buying new ones).

Practically this means acting with boldness, bravery, and conviction. Whether you’re a small business owner or the executive of a large company, here are four steps you can take to help your organisation chart its purpose and pivot into action.

  • Define yourself: Look to the strengths of your current mission statement as a starting point. Be courageous, and be specific. The most resonant purpose strategies are broad enough to inspire, but concrete enough to be impactful. For example, since the company was founded in 1947, Dr. Bronner’s Soaps has been committed to progressive business practices. It gives 10% of its revenue to charities, shares its profits with workers, and tells the story of its values right on its products’ iconic, 3,000-word labels. And as global wealth inequality continues to grow, leaders at Dr. Bronner’s have pledged never to make more than five times what the company’s lowest-paid employees earn.
  • Engage and listen to your stakeholders: Communication starts with employees who want to feel part of something bigger. But employees are just the beginning. Discussions about a company’s purpose and values should also incorporate its customers, shareholders, like-minded advocacy groups, and community members. Inditex, the Spanish parent company of fashion brands like Zara and Massimo Dutti, listened to consumer and stakeholder perspectives on the wastefulness of fast fashion. In response, the company announced that beginning with Zara in 2025, all its collections will soon be made from sustainable fabrics. In other words, stakeholders identified a concern, and the company changed the way it does business—and inspired other companies to do the same.
  • Align your story and your actions: Make your communication meaningful. A full 81% of those surveyed say a fragmented message is as ineffective as no message at all. Choose a simple, focused, and repeatable point, and make sure you live it out. At WE, we use communications to move people to positive action around the world. We do the same with one another, by supporting employees’ personal philanthropic goals as well as their professional development. Every staff member gets extra paid time off for volunteering, and through the Global Pro Bono program, employees get the opportunity to spend four weeks supporting nonprofits and social enterprises around the world.
  • Activate and build a movement: Connecting with the outside world is where the rubber meets the road. In fact, the strongest purpose moments don’t emerge in isolation. Instead, they’re part of expansive social movements dedicated to changing the way the world works for everyone. For example, Mastercard is now making it possible for customers to use their chosen names—that is, names that reflect their true identity—on credit cards. It’s a practical shift that matters particularly to people in the LGBTQIA+ community. It also reflects a much larger commitment to inclusion and acceptance, in both the company and the broader community outside it.

The Quartz report shows that now, more than ever, the public expects brands to take a stand, and back up its values with meaningful action. It also shows that purpose can be a brand’s lifesaver, bolstering customer loyalty through good times and bad. Finally, and most important: it shows that brand purpose is a group commitment. It doesn’t swoop down from leadership or shareholders. It rises organically, and it lifts us all, to do better.

5 inspiring books on purpose

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World, by Yancey Strickler

Businesses have sought to maximize profits for so long that it’s hard to imagine another reason for companies to exist. But Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler makes the cogent argument that we can, and must, reprioritize if we want a stronger civil society than the one we have now—marked by crumbling infrastructure, the dominance of chain stores, and the rise of offshore tax havens. Strickler isn’t opposed to money, or even wealth. If businesses were optimized for the community or sustainability, he writes, “the rich would still be rich, just not as rich,” while the average worker and average citizen would be on more solid footing.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind, by Raghuram Rajan

Shortlisted for the 2019 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, The Third Pillar provides a detailed accounting of the imbalances in capitalistic societies. The FT calls it “a new departure into grand social history, which in its breadth often echoes big-picture theorists such as Barrington Moore and Francis Fukuyama and their attempts to tease apart the long-term tensions between capitalism and democracy.”

Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind: Leadership Lessons From Three Decades of Social Entrepreneurship by Alex Counts

By his early 30s, Grameen Foundation CEO Alex Counts had fulfilled his dream of becoming an accomplished nonprofit leader—and was, as he tells it, “unhealthy and unhappy to the core.” What he has learned about life and work in the two decades since is the subject of his gamely titled book, written for “a new generation of leaders dedicated to social change and environmental justice,” including those who are already jaded and those who are blissfully unaware of how easy it is, in the nonprofit world especially, to get that way.

The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good, by James O’Toole

Is there hope for the virtuous corporation? Today, thanks to the leadership of Paul Polman, Unilever is closely associated with the conscious capitalism movement. But so was the company’s namesake, William Lever, the British soap magnate who was deeply concerned with his workers’ welfare at home (though considerably less so on his plantations in Africa). Lever eventually lost control of the business, and his more enlightened practices didn’t survive the transition—not an uncommon fate for founders of virtuous companies, as James O’Toole, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, explains with vivid examples of historical and contemporary capitalists who tried to give back not through philanthropy but through their business practices.

The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age by Bina Venkataraman

“Whenever I tried to convince business executives that they should prepare for droughts and heat waves, I armed myself with reliable projections of the future,” writes Bina Venkataraman, a former climate-change advisor to the Obama White House. “But corporate leaders … struggled to see themselves and their companies in the forecast scenarios.” It’s not just public companies that are driven by shortsightedness, though. Our inattention to long-term interests is a universal affliction, affecting our health, our relationships, and our environment. Venkataraman offers clear, engaging explanations of why we keep letting ourselves go off-track, and how even short-term incentives can be better designed to align with our long-term priorities.

Disney stands out as one of the few corporations to have managed to transform themselves, not just to survive but to thrive, in today’s world of digital disruption and incredible change. Usually we turn to start-ups to learn how to embrace digital platforms and the new zeitgeist, but Disney is a shining example of how large and established organisations can do it too.

Bob Iger could easily have let the childlike dreams of his Magic Kingdom hide the need for significant change in his Disney empire.  As a teenager he dreamt of becoming a news reader, or if not a weather presenter, for a local TV station. Instead he developed a love of production, initially with ABC in gameshows and soaps, then joined Disney in 1996, becoming COO 4 years later.

Stepping up to the CEO job in 2005, replacing Michael Eisner might have seemed daunting. But the old Disney had lost its way, many of the most talented people had gone, and Disney was becoming a dinosaur of the digital age. In fact Iger was a key factor in Eisner’s demise, creating a “Save Disney” campaign.

As CEO he acquired Pixar Animation Studios, Marvel Studios’ superhero factory, the “Star Wars” franchise of Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox (for $71bn in 2019). Over the past 15 years, he has overseen 11 of the top 20 box office hits of all time, including “X-Men” and “Black Panther”. Disney’s parks are eight of the busiest 10 theme parks in the world.

In late 2019 he launched the Disney+ streaming platform, attracting 28 million subscribers in 3 months, with the help of his latest character Baby Yoda. This was particularly significant as it signalled Disney’s desire to retain a direct relationship with consumers, rather than becoming a content producer for other distributors.

On 25 February, after 15 years, Iger decided to step down, and hands over to Bob Chapek who becomes Disney’s 7th CEO in 100 years. Disney’s market value has grown 5 times under Iger’s leadership, from $48bn to $257bn. He leaves an incredible legacy of digital transformation and profitable growth, making Disney the most innovative company in entertainment again.

Here are three things we can learn from Iger’s leadership:

1. Empower people to deliver specific goals

In his memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime, published in 2019, Iger explained his strategy for revitalising Disney. Specifically he wanted to “increase the amount of high-quality branded content we created; embrace advanced technologically, both in our ability to create more compelling products and to deliver those products to consumers; and to grow globally.” Those goals were specific enough to be quantified, but flexible enough to empower creativity and agility.

2. Add practical value to strategy implementation 

Iger spent much of his CEO time on ensuring strategy moved to execution. He took 40 trips to Shanghai during the planning of the $6 billion Disneyland Shanghai, and spent many hours personally engaging content producers when he acquired Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm. He had a ruthless focus on execution and implementation. He was a dreams and details leader who was not afraid to be bold in execution as well as aspirations.

3. Engage people in the excitement of change

Iger’s leadership style has been called a “cult of nice.” He engages with people both inside and out without any ego, with a specific desire to ensure that customers and staff were treated fairly and with respect. He promoted a culture of curiosity and optimism, particularly to new employees who joined Disney through acquisitions, and encouraged them to embrace the excitement of change, rather than worry about it.

“With the successful launch of Disney’s direct-to-consumer businesses and the integration of 21st Century Fox well under way, I believe this is the optimal time to transition to a new CEO,” Iger said on announcing his departure.  Few leaders are able to leave at the top of their game. “We all want to believe that we’re irreplaceable,” Iger wrote in his 2019 book. “The trick is to be self-aware enough that you don’t cling to the notion that you are the only person who can do this job.”

Time Magazine chose Bob Iger as their Businessperson of the Year 2019. Here is an extract from their profile:

“Not since somebody figured out that you could attach two black plastic disks to a skull cap and make everyone look like Mickey Mouse has a pair of ears sent such a buzz through a media executive. The new set were green, wing-shaped and attached to a baby space alien. The instant Disney CEO Bob Iger saw them, his heart leapt.

“As soon as those ears popped up from under the blanket, and the eyes, I knew,” says Iger, recalling when he first saw footage of Disney’s newest bankable piece of intellectual property, known to the world as Baby Yoda. He likens the feeling to when he was running ABC’s prime-time TV division and 16-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio showed up on Growing Pains. The next moves were obvious: start production on little green dolls and theme-park rides and lunch boxes, then throw open the vaults and clear space for more cash.

But Iger is the kind of guy who, if given the marshmallow test, would not only decline to eat the marshmallow, but persuade everyone else to sell him theirs and corner the market on S’mores. So he made a different call: no Baby Yoda merch yet. The cuddly alien was the heart of the new Star Wars–themed series The Mandalorian. That show was the anchor of Disney’s new streaming service Disney+, and Iger would not spoil the first episode’s big reveal.

As history will show, the auricles delivered. Disney+ signed up 10 million people by the day after its Nov. 12 launch. It is not yet a threat to the big tech companies that dominate the stream: Netflix has 158.3 million subscribers, Amazon Prime has 101 million, and Google’s YouTube has about 2 billion users a month. But if streaming is the future of entertainment, Disney—the ultimate legacy player—now has a credible vessel in which to get there.

Iger’s tenure as the leader of the world’s most lucrative dream factory has been one long CEO highlight reel. But 2019 was an apex year, when many of his carefully incubated eggs hatched. Creativity is a messy affair, technology is an expensive, glitchy one, and business plans, like military campaigns, rarely survive the first battle. Yet in 2019, Iger managed to blend all three into one epic, deal-packed 12 months. And in a year when the tide has shifted against Big Business, Big Media and Big Tech, Iger has transformed his enormous media company into a gargantuan media and tech business while ensuring that the Walt Disney Co.’s products remain widely beloved. As other corporate chiefs face steepening criticism, the worst thing he’s accused of is being a promising presidential candidate. He has rebuffed the idea. Why bother? In the post-information age, mythmakers carry more weight than lawmakers. In many ways, Iger is the Western culture’s Secretary of Stories, with the power to choose what narratives are given the most resources.

“I think the Disney+ launch has been amazing,” says Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was on the company’s board from 2010 to 2018. “It’s a big risk, but Bob’s really good at understanding the landscape further out as well as executing a strategy. It’s rare to be able to do both.”

“This has been probably one of the most productive years we’ve had as a company in the 15 years that I’ve been in this job,” says Iger, 68, who lives in L.A., but is in his native New York to host an East Coast board meeting. “This time last year, we had not closed the deal for Fox,” he says, referring to the $71 billion acquisition of most of Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment assets. “We had not opened up two Star Wars Lands, we had not launched Disney+. We had not closed the deal for control of Hulu.” Iger was also not yet a best-selling author. His seven-figure earnings from his memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime, are going toward journalism scholarships.

Iger managed all those moving parts while still making moving pictures. Even before Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker arrives, Walt Disney Studios has already released six of the eight most lucrative movies of 2019, and broken the $10 billion global box office barrier. Avengers: Endgame is now the highest-grossing movie of all time, selling $2.8 billion worth of tickets globally since it was released in April. Investors are thrilled; the stock is up 34% this year.

The entertainment business isn’t just about money, though. When Disney generates a successful franchise, the characters and myths it creates occupy the culture to a degree that they can amplify or dampen people’s understanding of who they are and what they stand for. Movies like Black Panther and Frozen take up so much of the national attention span that the communities and identities those films portray become less other, more central.

Of course, not everyone celebrates Iger’s choices. Many bemoan Disney’s blanding effect on the culture—including director Martin Scorsese, who in November wrote in an excoriating New York Timesop-ed that movies from Disney’s Marvel studio lacked “revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger.” He claimed that the focus on franchises—a key Iger strategy—was contributing to a situation that “was brutal and inhospitable to art.”

Iger, famous for his Mandalorian-like imperturbability, calls Scorsese’s comments “nasty” and “not fair to the people who are making the movies,” but brushes them off. “If Marty Scorsese wants to be in the business of taking artistic risk, all power to him,” he says. “It doesn’t mean that what we’re doing isn’t art.” In true Hollywood fashion, Iger says his people and Marty’s people are arranging a get-together.

Whenever he’s accused of taking no risks, Iger points to Black Panther,which he considers one of his top five career achievements. “I expected Bob’s [advice] to be more conservative, but it was actually the opposite,” says Panther director Ryan Coogler. “He wanted us to be more aggressive and ambitious.” Iger encouraged him to build out the theme of transgenerational trauma as it relates to race. “He wasn’t afraid from a cultural standpoint or a business standpoint.”

Nearly every story about Iger’s tenure at Disney contains a variant of the sentence This is his biggest gamble yet. In 2006, he made a $7.4 billion deal to buy Pixar from a guy who hated Disney. Then he bought Marvel, a company built on the mercurial fantasies of adolescent males, then Lucasfilm, when the Star Wars stories seemed burned out. And this March, he persuaded the mulish Murdoch to sell him nearly all his marshmallows too.

Disney+, however, makes those other bets look penny-ante. Iger had slowly and somewhat stealthily bought BAMTech, the company Major League Baseball used to stream games, which provided the technological back end. But he knew the only way to bring people to a new streaming service is with shows they can’t miss. “There was a meeting. In the Disney boardroom,” says Iger, whose way of telling stories is as consistent and methodical as his schedule. Heads of the company’s creative shops were told to come with pitches for the new service. “I said, ‘We’re not creating another separate studio. You will all be the suppliers. No. 1 priority.’”

Of all the suggestions he heard that day, it soon emerged that only The Mandalorian would make it in time. It—and by extension Baby Yoda—would have to carry the whole launch. Iger was right to keep that black-eyed sweet pea a secret, because the culture wasn’t going to wait until gift season. The Internet was swiftly flooded with Baby Yoda–bilia, including knitted hats, baby items, love songs, DIY Christmas ornaments and, of course, memes. So many memes. Iger sent friends his favorite, a mash-up of cosmological narratives featuring the Pope holding Baby Yoda like a communion wafer.

In some circles, Iger is considered only marginally less alien than the creature he greenlighted. He has worked for the same company for 45 years, through 20 jobs and 14 bosses, outlasting scores of rivals, apparently without making any major enemies. “You will never hear, ‘Bob Iger, he’s such a son of a bitch,’” Gayle King—not even on his payroll!—said last year. When he finally got a shot at the top spot, however, there were doubts; the interview process was so long and humiliating he ended up at the doctor’s office with an anxiety attack. The $65.6 million he earned last year seems to have eased but not erased the memory.

Of course, Iger may have bet wrong. Disney has already spent $3 billion on the service and plans to spend billions more on a venture that may never turn a cent. The Star Wars and Avengers narratives are reaching their outer atmospheres. Hong Kong Disneyland is almost empty amid the ongoing protests. And he has still not named a successor.

But for now, for just this moment, Iger is unassailable. He’s transformed his company from a stuffy media doyen into a sexy cultural force. He can glide to retirement in 2021 on the fumes of that triumph. Except it’s not his style. When asked which IP he would buy if in some fantasy world he could: Harry Potter, Gandalf or James Bond, Iger smiles. “We’re not looking to buy anything right now,” he says. “But I’ve always been a huge James Bond fan.”