Peter Fisk

Nespresso might never have existed if we hadn’t set ourselves the challenge of making the ultimate espresso. In 1986 the first Nespresso capsule-based system was launched … “Gamechanging” innovation that answered this important business question: “How can we provide people premium coffee at the touch of a button?”

This intrapreneurial spirit thrives at Nespresso, where, in the words of Vincent Leroudier, Digital Customer Innovation Manager: “We’re in a competitive business climate. It’s not only about working with edgy startups – although we keep tabs on what’s happening – but about delivering fast innovation to solve immediate consumer needs.”

Nespresso has always led the market in coffee quality. But today’s consumers want more, and digital innovation is one way in which the brand can, in Leroudier’s words, “share the Nespresso experience, build stronger relationships with people, and lead – in terms of offering them new products and services, and innovative ways to access them”.

Chatbots and voice

This is why Nespresso is on a mission to use algorithm-rich technology to create a variety of ‘conversational marketing’ experiences, from asking a smart speaker to trace your coffee order to telling a barista-like chatbot that you’d like a no-foam, fat-free, extra-hot latte.

Launched in the US and Germany last year on Facebook Messenger, ‘Nespresso Assistant’ delivers everything from special offers and information on recycling, to cleaning your machine and suggesting new coffees to try.

Early results are promising – 70% of users report a positive experience – and by 2020 consumers around the world will be able to order their coffee via the app without leaving Facebook Messenger. Nespresso plans to scale the platform globally over the next two years.

“We think the bot will work because it’s easier than a website or proprietary app,” says Leroudier. “People want simplicity, and a messaging app is up-to-date 24/7, on mobile or desktop. Conversations follow you, from the office to the home, for example. And bots are more personal, interactive and entertaining.”

“What type of coffee would you like to try?” Nespresso Assistant might ask you, with a cheeky smile emoji, before answering your question on machine descaling using easy-to-follow GIFs. If the bot fails to deliver, and its artificial intelligence is improving all the time – there’s no coffee jolt here. A human being is just a click away.

Or just a simple voice request. Nespresso Voice Assistant is launching in France via a pilot with Google Home, and offers people similar services to the chatbot. From 2020, people will also be able to say: “OK Google, Ask Nespresso to reorder my coffee!” Your weekly coffee order just got a whole lot easier, and more fun.

Augmented reality

If Nespresso broke new ground in 1986 with a revolutionary new machine concept, then two years ago, the brand digitized it, creating an augmented reality (AR) app that allowed people to see what Nespresso’s new Essenza Mini would look like in their kitchens, then share the results with friends and family.

As a marketing tool it’s interactive, enjoyable and above all, useful. So much so that this year B2B sales teams began using the same technology. Want to see how a Nespresso coffee machine might sit in your hotel or restaurant? A salesperson can show you using a special app, then share the image with you, or print it out.

In future, augmented reality might enable you to overlay an image of your coffee machine on your smart phone with graphics showing you how to change its brew settings, descale it, even suggest new coffees to try. Forget hard-to-follow instructions – this makes the fiddly jobs fun, and the easier ‘jobs’ (drinking coffee) easier.

Whether we’re talking augmented reality apps, chatbots for Facebook Messenger or platforms like Google Home, Nespresso is meeting people on their own turf and adding value to their coffee drinking experience in ways that feel natural and easy.

The result? Happier customers who are a step closer to the Nespresso coffee they crave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMOtnamM1P4

Step back … Let’s take a look at Nespresso’s business model

Outcomes

Moving Forward

How do great businesses achieve long-lasting success? How can you build long-term value and healthy, enduring growth – to play the infinite game?

Do you know how to play the game you’re in?
 
In finite games, like football or chess, the players are known, the rules are fixed, and the endpoint is clear. The winners and losers are easily identified.

In infinite games, like business or politics or life itself, the players come and go, the rules are changeable, and there is no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers in an infinite game; there is only ahead and behind.

In his new book Simon Sinek applies game theory to understand the difference between finite and infinite games.

“I started to see that many of the struggles that organizations face exist simply because their leaders were playing with a finite mindset in an infinite game. These organizations tend to lag behind in innovation, discretionary effort, morale and ultimately performance.

The leaders who embrace an infinite mindset, in stark contrast, build stronger, more innovative, more inspiring organizations. Their people trust each other and their leaders. They have the resilience to thrive in an ever-changing world, while their competitors fall by the wayside. Ultimately, they are the ones who lead the rest of us into the future.

Any worthwhile undertaking starts with Why – the purpose, cause or belief that inspires us to do what we do and inspires others to join us. Good leaders know how to build Circles of Safety that promote trust and cooperation throughout their organizations. But that’s not enough to help us chart a course through the unpredictable, often chaotic landscape of today’s marketplace.

“I now believe that the ability to adopt an infinite mindset is a prerequisite for any leader who aspires to leave their organization in better shape than they found it.”

Your world changes, and so should you.

Yet so often we find comfort, security and laziness in staying the same. As human beings we have programmed ourselves to love stability, not change. To avoid testing situations, different and even challenging our norms. We steer clear of people who are not like us.

But the world keeps changing, and so should you.

Responding to the changes, facing the adversity and seizing the opportunity. As human beings we love newness, ideas and gadgets, entertainment and travel. Yet we embrace them in a way that doesn’t require us to change, to evolve to be different.

The alternative is to react.

Instead of meeting change with passive acceptance, and seek to accommodate it within our existing ways,  we should be active. If we find ourselves out of our depths, we should learn to swim. Or better find a higher ground. Instead of just responding we should go further, aim higher, do better.

So how do we thrive in a world of relentless change?

Life is less about what happens to you, much more about how you respond to it. As the changes we face grow bigger and come faster, more chaotic and confusing, how will you respond? Don’t passively watch in bewilderment. Do something about it. Better, different, further and faster.

Rise up to the opportunities of newness. Step up to believe in yourself and what you can do. Leap forwards to find a better place, to achieve more.

Now is your time to elevate.

Sometimes all we need is a new beginning.

So here’s a big “cheers” to thinking about positive change, as the year changes too.

Don’t forget the past, to build on what you’ve done so far.

But jump to the future, then plan your journey future back, with clarity of purpose and priorities.

Remember every achievement starts with a choice. And a first step.

Every new days brings new opportunities, and a step forwards towards that better future.

So here’s wishing you health, wealth and happiness throughout 2019.

Happy new year!

With the help of some of our friends on LinkedIn, here are some big ideas for 2019:

1. Move over, Millennials; it’s Gen Z’s time.

In 2019, Generation Z will outnumber Millennials, that generation you’ve loved to hate for the past decade. “Generation Z is now heading into the workforce in meaningful numbers and for the first time in modern history five generations will be working side-by-side,” says Michael Dell, CEO and chairman of Dell Technologies. Gen Z — which Pew Research Center defines as those born from 1997 onward — will be about one-third of the global population and one-fifth of its workers. What is this new generation’s work ethic? “My experience is that they lean in and lean hard,” says best-selling author Brené Brown. About half of her staff is Gen Z. “They are all very different people, but as a group I experience them as curious, hopeful, always learning, painfully attuned to the suffering in the world, and anxious to do something about it.”

2. The economy will slow down…

Economists are split on when exactly, but they know one thing for sure: a downturn is coming. “There is a confluence of deep-seated, structural headwinds that threaten to upend the global economy,” warns economist Dambisa Moyo, among them growing inequality, a workforce ill-adapted to rapid technological change, political instability and a massive debt burden on governments, corporations and individuals. “The U.S. has historically been the leader, and the U.S. is probably going to slow down this year,” adds CBS News business analyst Jill Schlesinger. China is already cooling. “World growth is much more likely to slow down in 2019, and it really looks like 2020 could be the year of a global recession,” she predicts.

3. And companies will prepare with pre-emptive layoffs.

Executives know the good times won’t last and many will reduce their workforce pre-emptively to preserve profits through a coming recession, warns Danielle DiMartino Booth, author of “Fed Up.” General Motors announced 14,000 strategic layoffs in November, after 2,250 had already taken buyouts. Meanwhile, Verizon will let go of 10,400 employees via voluntary severance, the company announced Monday. These won’t be the last. “I guarantee you right now, consultants across the country are convening and discussing with executive teams at many companies what they also can do to get in front of the next recession,” Booth says. “Companies are taking unusual steps because they know how very long in the tooth this expansion is and they know what’s to come.”

4. We are finally going to spend more time online than watching TV.

The lines will cross some time in 2019: Around the world, people will start spending more hours a day on the Internet than watching television. The glass-half-empty way to look at it is people are turning away from legacy media, says Viacom President and CEO Bob Bakish. The glass-half-full vision: “There is more content being consumed today than ever before in history,” he adds. For Viacom, that has meant expanding its intellectual property across many platforms or creating shows for third-party streaming sites. “We do work with folks that maybe didn’t exist 10 years ago, and started getting into the media business five years ago,” he says. “It’s a year of a mixed economy and a mixed ecosystem. And that’s the world of the future.”

5. Brexit will continue to consume the European political scene.

Prime Minister Theresa May is now touring European capitals to attempt to renegotiate her Brexit deal with the EU after she canceled a parliamentary vote, which should have taken place today. Brexit should have been the most predictable geopolitical event of 2019 – we’ve known for two years the clock runs out at the end of March. Instead, it continues to defy predictions. Negotiations will be uncertain to the very last minute, Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, warns. “May now needs to be thinking about plan B, since she’s lost so many [members of parliament],” he says. A revamped “Norway plus” deal is becoming the most likely outcome, but the tail risks of a no deal Brexit or a second referendum are also increasing, he adds. “It is really, really hard to come to terms to negotiate something this complicated with one of the most challenging supranational institutions in the world, the EU, and one of the most dysfunctional developed governments in the world today, the U.K.” Writing any more about Brexit at this point would just be handing the stick you’ll beat me with in a day or two.

6. Inclusive design will go mainstream.

A growing awareness among professionals and advances in artificial intelligence are transforming inclusive design, says Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “We used to call it assistive technologies and it used to be a checklist of things you did after the product was built,” he says. Now it’s “about taking this way upstream into the design process. What if we said upfront we want a design for people of different abilities to fully participate?” He points to the new Xbox adaptive controller, where even the packaging was designed to be accessible, or new AI that helps people with dyslexia read and comprehend written text.

7. AI will be in every industry and every job.

We asked 200 LinkedIn Top Voices about their Big Idea for 2019; one in four mentioned some application of AI, from parsing evidence in medical research to… helping surfers spot the best wave. Six of the 15 hot emerging jobs of the past year — which LinkedIn will unveil on Thursday — relate to AI, while AI skills are the fastest-growing on our platform, up 190% globally from 2015 to 2017. “While 2018 was the year of AI hype, it feels like we’re at an inflection point where these technologies are being incorporated into more of the tools we use everyday,” says Sharon O’Dea, co-founder of communications consultancy Lithos Partners. “It’s when technology trends start to become invisible that they really make a major impact.”

8. The next social movement? Occupy Silicon Valley.

“The ire progressives once felt toward the 1% on Wall Street is turning on Silicon Valley,” says Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “Where tech leaders were once hailed as the visionaries of a brave new world, viewed as a breed apart from financiers and other plutocrats, we’re now finding ourselves mired in debates over taxes, housing and affordability.” Not everyone will camp outside headquarters in Mountain View or Menlo Park, but users will vote with their feet, deleting accounts and refusing to play their part in those companies’ business models, warns customer experience expert Don Peppers. “More people than ever will install and use ad blockers, decline surveys and opt out of cookies as 2019 develops into a banner year for privacy protection apps, data blockers and other security services,” says Peppers.

9. Governments will seize the opportunity to regulate Big Tech.

Local and national authorities are surfing on that wave to impose new taxes and regulations on the industry; Kelman points to Seattle’s head tax and San Francisco’s Proposition C, inspiring other cities across the U.S. The British government plans to introduce a “digital tax” of 2% on tech companies’ British revenue, fighting back against U.S. tech giants that evade taxes by domiciling their profits in Ireland or the Netherlands. The European Union’s attempt at a similar tax just petered out, but India, South Korea, Mexico, Chile and others are all working on the same idea, putting pressure on the OECD to advance on its own promise of global taxation reform. European governments are also likely to turn to antitrust, predicts Emily Taylor, CEO of Oxford Information Labs. “We will rediscover competition law and regulation as a way of combating over-concentration of power and distortions in the market,” she says. It’s something the U.S. has shied away from, not wanting to stifle its own innovative companies, but Europe has fewer giants and freer hands. Smarter companies will help shape regulation rather than obstinately oppose it, says Booking.com CEO Gillian Tans. “This collaboration will be the deciding factor of which sharing economy companies will see success in the future,” she says. “Regulation will be something to lean into – not fear.”

10. Automation will disproportionately impact women’s jobs.

“New technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing the way work gets done all over the world. The automation trend is especially challenging for women because they tend to be employed in more routine tasks than men across all sectors and occupations, making them more prone to automation. New IMF research estimates that 26 million women’s jobs in 30 countries are at high risk of being displaced by technology in the next 20 years. This means 180 million women’s jobs globally!

We don’t have much time to act, so 2019 is the year to make important inroads in tackling this challenge. How? We must help women get the skills they need to succeed. Education and training will be key — including greater emphasis on lifelong learning and STEM. Think, in particular, of coding programs like Girls Who Code in the U.S. or developing tax deductions for training as they do in the Netherlands. We also need to close gender gaps in leadership positions across all sectors, while doing more to help men and women combine work and family life. Finally, we need to do a better job at bridging the digital divide and ensure women have equal access to finance, bank accounts and connectivity. 2019 is the year we should take a leap forward in leveling the playing field between men and women.”

11. Health care providers will cover your groceries.

A lot more than what happens in a doctor’s office affects health outcomes. “If you’re sitting at home with no job, it’s going to impact your health, whether that’s the mental stress, whether that starts to create high blood pressure, early signs of hypertension,” explains Kaiser Permanente chairman and CEO Bernard Tyson. Same if you can’t afford balanced meals or if violence in your community stops you going out and exercising. That’s pushing health care companies to step out of their lane and start new programs. Geisinger, a health care system covering the poorest counties in Pennsylvania, started a “fresh food pharmacy”, providing patients with groceries, nutrition information and cooking classes, says its president and CEO, Dr. Jaewon Ryu. “Whether commercial insurers start paying for those programs or not, I think it depends on how innovative and receptive they are to the growing body of evidence,” he adds.

12. #MeToo will enter Phase Two…

More than a year after #MeToo exploded onto the public scene, and 13 years after Tarana Burke first launched the movement, the stream of executives undone by their own bad behavior flows unabated. After sweeping the media and entertainment industries, it will spread to mid-level leaders and less visible industries, predicts Ross Martin, CEO of marketing firm Blackbird. “You won’t know all of their names, but you’ll certainly know the brands that they lead or work for,” Martin says. Deloitte just admitted to firing 20 UK partners, and KPMG seven, in the last four years over sexual harassment complaints.

13. But some disgraced executives will make a comeback.

The spin doctors have learned to plan for it and manage what Martin calls “the sorry cycle.” “We’re compressing the time and space between success, failure and then redemption,” he explains. “Apology content has become a major component of any marketing strategy.” It’s ok to find that cynical; he does too.

14. The battle against extreme poverty will heat up.

Over the last 25 years, more than a billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty, and the global poverty rate is at its lowest level in recorded history. However, that trend may not continue into 2019 due to increasing poverty concentrations in areas like Sub-Saharan Africa, says Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “We can’t always change the circumstances a child is born into, but we can invest in that child’s potential to thrive in spite of them by investing in their health and education,” says Gates. “Economists call health and education ‘human capital,’ because they’re proven to be the twin engines of economic growth.” Especially important, she argues, is investing in the health and education of women and girls. “Healthy, economically-empowered women are some of development’s best allies,” says Gates. “If the number of people trapped in poverty continues to decline, these women will be a big reason why.”

15. A U.S.-China cold war will first be fought on the technology front.

Despite current tensions, the U.S. and Chinese economy are too interlinked for a trade war to truly escalate in the short term, says Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer. A cold war is more likely in five or 10 years, he adds, when an economic downturn and sustained animosity have undone those ties. But for 2019, the fight is on the technology front: “There you do have a cold war. There you have the Chinese with their AI model, the Americans with our AI model. The Chinese with their internet, the Americans with our internet,” he says. He echoes former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who warned in September that our online world risked a “bifurcation” into Chinese-led and U.S.-led internets. “They’re not playing nice at all,” Bremmer adds. “I do think that longer term we’re heading for big trouble between the Americans and the Chinese.”

16. What will matter at work is your humanity.

When robots take all our jobs, what do humans have left? Precisely that — our humanity. Creativity and so-called soft skills are becoming all the more important to your career because that’s what can’t be automated. In fact, LinkedIn data shows the fastest-growing skills gaps — the difference between what employers seek and what workers bring to the table — are related to soft skills: oral communication tops the list, followed by people management, time management or leadership. Employers who want to make the most of their human employees make sure to look after them as whole people, not just task performers, says Susan Cain, author of “Quiet” and CEO of Quiet Revolution. “I’m increasingly seeing employers having a goal of facilitating the entire life of an employee,” Cain says. “I don’t mean it in a Big Brother type of way, but being an aid in the entire life of an employee as opposed to just the part that shows up to make wages.”

17. The combustion engine will get smarter before it goes away.

Going green doesn’t have to be reserved for the wealthy who can afford to switch to an electric car, says Bertrand Piccard, chairman and pilot of Solar Impulse, who flew a solar plane around the planet. For middle class people struggling to fill up the tank — we were speaking at the start of the Yellow Vest protests in France — there are solutions. He points to an anti-smog device installed on the engine for a few hundred bucks that reduces fuel consumption by 20% and particles by 80%. Built-in AI in your car can help you drive greener and cut another 20% off the bill. “Today, half the energy we use is wasted because we have inefficient systems,” Piccard says. “There will be more carbon taxes because we can’t afford to keep wasting fossil fuels. But we can put systems in place to be less wasteful, to consume less, and in the end we’ll save money.”

18. Uber and Lyft will lead a wave of IPOs.

Ride-hailing companies Lyft and Uber just filed papers on the same day to go public in early 2019. This could be a banner year for tech IPOs, with total proceeds forecast north of $100 billion. “According to the Chinese calendar, 2019 rings in the Year of the Pig…and boy is that apt for the IPO market!” says CBS News’s Jill Schlesinger. “Uber, Lyft, Palantir, Slack, Airbnb all could take the plunge in 2019. With the tech sector taking a bit of a hit recently, the C-suite execs and their bankers are trying to carefully weigh the old Wall Street mantra: ‘Bulls and bears make money; pigs get slaughtered!’” Despite a shaky market, they may still pull the trigger this year to avoid running into a downturn and an election cycle in 2020.

19. Companies will speed up diversifying their workforce — or will be made to.

Nearly five years after they started publishing diversity reports, few companies have actually made material progress in hiring and retaining a more diverse workforce. That’s because besides being more open about their shortcomings, they’ve mostly kept recruiting the same old way, says Jopwell CEO Porter Braswell. Now’s the time employers humble themselves and ask for help, he says: “They’ll be recruiting with a different mindset, not looking to check every item off a list.” That’s driven by two factors: short term, the labor market is tight and talent at a premium. Long term, “by 2040, the majority of people in the U.S. will be people of color,” Braswell reminds us. Companies that don’t change will become irrelevant to workers and customers. And they may not even have the option: in the U.K., after the success of mandatory gender pay gap disclosures that started in 2018, the government is considering forcing companies to reveal their ethnic pay gap as well — and their action plan to close it.

20. A “me first” world will be harder to steer.

Some of the institutions that since WWII have held the world together — the UN, NATO, G20 and more — are weakening, notes Stan McChrystal, CEO of the McChrystal Group and former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. What comes after is uncertain, he warns, because when you pull the key stone from the arch, things may fall apart that you did not expect. “Our challenge is we’re in a ‘me first’ world now, and I mean ‘me first’ by nations, but also ‘me first’ by leaders, ‘me first’ by companies,” he explains. Leaders need to make decisions from a broader perspective and consider interdependencies, McChrystal says. If you go into a negotiation expecting to win everything and leave the other side weakened, he warns, “in many cases, what’s happened is the very ecosystem we both depend upon is gone.”

21. The office will empty out.

“With cities filling up and housing prices rising, employers will have to pay more for employees to afford an urban life. Some businesses will open an office in a smaller town; more will embrace employees’ working from home. The whole point of an office weakened years ago with the disastrous open floor-plan, a warren of people wearing headphones and messaging their brains out, together in name only. More recently, the movement to give working parents more flexibility has made managers hesitant to grade on attendance. And now, Slack, Github, Jira and other tools for virtual teams are being co-opted by workers of all stripes.

“A gradual process will, in 2019, reach a tipping point: The office will empty out. Working from home will change the most basic rhythm of industrial life. People will have more time to work, and also to play. What we’ll lose is the water cooler, which alongside the altar and the school entrance, was a place for us to connect with new people. Offices are also one of the last spots in an increasingly secular society for all of us to get a sense of community and purpose. I’ll be sorry to see them so diminished.”

22. You’ll have better access to your medical data.

Apple’s move to make medical records available on the iPhone is likely to be the first domino in a move to democratize access to, and control of, patients’ health data. People who live in countries where health care is decentralized know that if they change doctors, their medical records typically don’t follow them. And the entities that do have access to health care data, such as hospitals and insurance companies, typically don’t share it, more for competitive reasons than patient-centric ones. But a behemoth like Apple could change the stakes. “I’d like us to get to the point where data is not seen as intellectual property,” said Dr. Doug Fridsma, president and CEO of the American Medical Informatics Association. “If we don’t have the ability to share data, you’re going to stifle innovation.” It’s notable, he adds, that Apple — a company that does everything on its own terms, from operating systems to headphone jacks — is using the international FHIR standards for its Health app.

23. The high street will band together.

The story is repeating itself in every country: From the famed big box stores of America to the high street chains of the U.K., physical retailers buckle as they face deep-pocketed online disruptors. “Things have never been more competitive,” says entrepreneur Naomi Simson, CEO of the Big Red Group in Australia, where Amazon launched with fanfare just a year ago. But smaller players are starting to band together to stand up to the giants, she says. “It might be through buying groups, marketplaces, associations, movements such as ‘buy local’… There will also be M&A,” she predicts. “The difference now is mindset. Business owners used to think the shop next door was competition. Now they know that there is safety in numbers.”

24. Financial options will catch up to the modern worker.

“If we want to provide the opportunity for people in the future to live financially healthy lives, the industry will need to rethink financial services that were designed for individuals that work a single job for his or her lifetime,” says Dan Schulman, CEO of PayPal. “Emerging technologies as well as socio-demographic changes are going to cause a shift in financial service needs and demands.” We can already see this trickle starting in the industry. The new “UltraFICO” credit score will be rolling out early next year. “It will take into account your banking behavior: Are you able to pay all of your bills? Are you making sure that you don’t go negative in that account?” Jill Schlesinger of CBS News explains. By changing the way loan providers think about credit, it opens a door for a younger generation shying away from credit cards and debt.

25. CEOs will work hard to become more inclusive leaders — or leave.

The new generation of workers expects a different kind of leadership and has now reached the critical mass where their opinion is corporate law. “We were primarily led by ‘my way or the highway’ type leaders and that does not work with this environment,” says Carla Harris, vice chairman and managing director at Morgan Stanley. “I think you’re going to see more leaders looking for leadership development or leadership guidance on how to be more collaborative, how to spur innovation, how to teach people how to fail and how to innovate. I think you’re going to see far more money spent on speakers and resources around that.” Not immediately, but over time executives who don’t make that effort and pivot will be pushed out, she warns.

Sapiens was an obscure Hebrew-language history of humanity, translated into English in 2014, and then sold more than a million copies when Mark Zuckerberg included it in his 2015 reading list. Ridley Scott now wants to turn it into a TV series, whilst Barack Obama said it gave him perspective on “the core things that have allowed us to build this extraordinary civilization that we take for granted”. Most dramatically, its sales spiked when it was mentioned on reality TV show Love Island.

Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century has become even more successful. Covering everything from war to meditation, fake news to climate change, it seeks to make sense of where humanity has reached, and where it might be going. Life in 15th-century China was pretty slow, but now the pace of change feels unstoppable. Religion can be bad, but has its uses. Nationalism can be bad, but has its uses. Factory farming is very, very bad. Liberalism is good, but under threat. Hunter-gathering is a more exciting lifestyle choice than farming, or working in a factory. Technological advances bring big ethical dilemmas.

Harari’s big question is “How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed, and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?” He contends that collective myths, such as money and laws, have allowed us to build huge, complicated societies far beyond what our biological limitations might suggest is possible. But in the secular west, religion is fading from public life. And in our globalised world, the idea of a coherent nation-state is threatened. What do we have left to believe in?

He uses evolutionary psychology as self-help: the world is a scary, fast-changing place, so it’s no surprise our savannah-trained ape brains struggle to navigate through it. We simply haven’t evolved to cope with automated checkouts and emailing after 7pm. “Why do we fear terrorism more than sugar?” Harari asks at one point. (Answer: terrorism is not delicious on porridge.) “Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.” (he is nostalgic for the era of berry collection.) “Homo Sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.” Microsoft “is an intricate legal fiction”.

Occasionally, Harari writes a paragraph that is genuinely mind-expanding. In the chapter on religion he says “Japan was the first power to develop and use precision-guided missiles.” Cue a hundred military historians dropping their marmalade. Say what? “We know these missiles as the kamikaze.” The willingness of Japanese pilots to die made their military hardware more effective, and “was the product of the death-defying spirit of sacrifice cultivated by State Shintō”. Humans are endlessly creative, goes the lesson, and sometimes we solve problems by changing the question rather than answering it. Beat that, AI.

Harari groups his 21 lessons, or essays, into five parts:

Part 1: The Technological Challenge

The first part of Harari’s book consists of four chapters, covering the topics of disillusionment, work, liberty, and equality.

The gist of it is stated in the subtitle of the main chapter:

Humankind is losing faith in the liberal story that dominated global politics in recent decades, exactly when the merger of biotech and infotech confronts us with the biggest challenges humankind has ever encountered.

The first four lessons are:

#1. The end of history has been postponed
#2. When you grow up, you might not have a job
#3. Big Data is watching you
#4. Those who own the data own the future

Harari is interested here into how and to what extent computer technology is disrupting almost every single sphere of our existence.

His main point is that up to recently, we used computers and robots to automatize some mechanical processes. And that was not bad at all. However, we’re at a stage when automating cognitive processes is not anymore just a possibility, but also an inevitable part of the future.

Modern neuroscience has all but confirmed what we’ve feared for quite some time – namely, that even our brains maybe just machines. Exceptionally complex, but machines nevertheless. And if that is the case, not much time will pass before we build a God-Brain, a supercomputer which will know much more than us.

In that world, human intuition will have no value whatsoever, and all important decisions will be made by AI.

Don’t believe us? Just remember that back in the 1990s, nobody believed that computers will ever beat a human at chess. Nowadays, no chess player is capable of beating a computer. In fact, now computers are teaching humans to play chess.

So, prepare for a world ruled by AI.

Part 2: The Political Challenge

The second part of Harari’s book deals with the political climate of the 21^st century, exploring the nature of present-day communities, civilizations, nationalism, religion, and immigration.

Once again, the main lesson is chilling:

The merger of infotech and biotech threatens the core modern values of liberty and equality. Any solution to the technological challenge has to involve global cooperation. But nationalism, religion and culture divide humankind into hostile camps and make it very difficult to cooperate on a global level.

The next 5 lessons are

#5. Humans have bodies
#6. There is just one civilization in the world
#7. Global problems need global answers
#8. God now serves the nation
#9. Some cultures might be better than others

To understand Harari’s analyses and opinions from this very important section of the book, you must first go back to Samuel Huntington and his “clash of civilizations” thesis, according to which, humankind “has always been divided into diverse civilizations whose members view the world in irreconcilable ways.”

In other words, the Western liberals and the Eastern Muslims are as different from each other as wolves and bears. “These incompatible world views make conflicts between civilizations inevitable… and only the fittest have survived to tell the tale.”

The very existence of such cross-cultural creations such as the European Union is evidence enough that this thesis is misleading. However, the current state of affairs unravels the dualistic existence of the modern world.

On one side, the great issues of this century – such as, for example, climate change and nuclear weapons – require a global community; on the other, immigration and nationalism form the basis of the defense mechanism of those threatened by globalization.

Part 3: Despair and Hope

The five essays which comprise the third part of Harari’s book try to answer some of the questions posited in the first two parts of 21 Lessons for the 21^stCentury.

Aptly titled, the “Despair and Hope” chapter treats – in five essays – subjects such as terrorism, war, humility, god, and secularism, and ultimately boils down to this:

Though the challenges are unprecedented, and though the disagreements are intense, humankind can rise to the occasion if we keep our fears under control and be a bit more humble about our views.

#10. Don’t panic
#11. Never underestimate human stupidity
#12. You are not the center of the world
#13. Don’t take the name of God in vain
#14. Acknowledge your shadow

As far as Harari is concerned, the best way a human being can keep its fears under control and be a bit more humble about his or her views is secularism, something which “can provide us with all the values we need.”

Unlike dogmatic stories – political or religious – secularism presupposes doubt and critical mindset, as well as a coherent set of values, such as equality, compassion, freedom, truth, courage, and responsibility. It also allows us to make these kinds of analyses.

During the past 17 years – meaning: since the 9/11 attacks – no more than 50 people are killed by terrorists in the European Union on a yearly basis. During that same period, 80,000 Europeans have died in traffic accidents.

So why are we talking so much about terrorism? Simply put, because we’re stupid and we’re playing the game terrorists want us to play. They are proverbially nothing more than flies on the bulls in a china shop. Unable to cause much damage themselves, they merely create a buzz so that the bulls cause it in their stead.

Part 4: Truth

If you ask us, this fourth part may be the most important one of the whole book, encompassing four enlightening essays on ignorance, justice, post-truth and science fiction.

The main lesson:

If you feel overwhelmed and confused by the global predicament, you are on the right track. Global processes have become too complicated for any single person to understand. How then can you know the truth about the world, and avoid falling victim to propaganda and misinformation?

The four lessons here are:

#15. You know less than you think
#16. Our sense of justice might be out of date
#17. Some fake news lasts forever
#18. The future is not what you see in the movies

Harari’s starting point is one he has already analyzed in detail in Sapiens. Namely, that much of what we do and have accomplished is the result of our capacity to believe in fictions.

Comparing religion to what Donald Trump named “fake news,” Harari notes sarcastically that, “when a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it fake news in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath).”

The point is simple: it is difficult nowadays to distinguish between facts and fiction, because every single aspect of our existence is so intricate and complex that not many people are able to understand it. Embracing our ignorance is the only road towards salvation. Because you’re helping nobody if you are talking about the war in Ukraine or climate change even though you are not that interested into politics and don’t know a single thing about meteorology.

Part 5: Resilience

The fifth part of Harari’s book is the shortest one, comprising only three essays on education, meaning, and meditation.

And instead of a lesson, it is framed by a very thought-provoking question:

How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed, and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?

The final 3 lessons:

#19. Change is the only constant
#20. Life is not a story
#21. Just observe

What lies beneath them is an exploration of Harari’s personal understanding of how should one act in this age of bewilderment.

“Having criticized so many stories, religions and ideologies,” he writes, “it is only fair that I put myself in the firing line too, and explain how somebody so skeptical can still manage to wake up cheerful in the morning.”

Completely aware of the fact that what works for him might not work for everybody, Harari shares his love of meditation and advocates it as an antidote to the chaotic world of today. In his eyes, there are no more over-arching stories to guide us through our day, but there have always been – and always will be – feelings that define our experience. And they stream through us. And it’s about time that we get to know them.

Our systems of education should mirror this thirst for self-discovery and teach us to critically analyze the world instead of merely teaching us to memorize facts and trivial data. The man of the future is the Skeptic, an always curious Socrates aware of his ignorance and ready to get to the bottom of it.

Key Lessons?

1.      The World Is Changing Faster Than Ever, and We’re Failing to Acknowledge This
2.      The Age of Bewilderment: Do We Have a Story?
3.      The 22^nd Lesson: Be a Socrates

Change

The book tries to make sense of many political, social, and technological changes humankind faces at the moment. In the opinion of Harari, many of these changes are as inevitable as death and taxes, and yet very few people acknowledge that they are happening.

For example, automation all but guarantees a very recent future in which many people will be left without jobs, and, for some reason, neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton discussed this problem during the 2016 presidential campaign.

What they chose to talk about most was, say, terrorism, even though, essentially, this is basically unimportant topic and is, in fact, what terrorists want to achieve.

They are much more marginal than hundreds of groups of people, and yet, fighting against terrorism is the focus of American – nay, world – foreign policy ever since September 11.

In the meantime, Facebook has gathered data of just about everybody on the planet, automated cars are on the verge of eliminating the need of human drivers altogether, and religion has stopped being an important part of the lives of most Europeans.

So why are we still talking about free will, open jobs, and God?

Story

As stated above, the subtitle of the fifth part of Harari’s book posits a very important question: “How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed, and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?” As Harari explained all too well in Sapiens, our species exists precisely because of these stories, fiction being “among the most effective tools in humanity’s toolkit.”

Everything – from money to religion to laws – is, in its essence, a big lie; but since these lies come with a story, and we are storytelling chimpanzees by our very nature, we’ve chosen to believe them. And we’ve made a good choice, since this has helped us create communities and civilization itself.

However, at present, we have a fairly serious problem: a large number of people are uninterested in believing these stories. Considering the fact that some of them – be that fascism or communism, nationalism or almost every single religion – have wreaked havoc on the world for millennia, this, according to Harari, may not be such a bad thing after all. “So,” he notes something Jordan Peterson would probably sign as well, “if you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life, and about your own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is.”

“The answer is not a story,” he adds.

Socrates

So, what is it? Of course, Harari’s book doesn’t include a 22^nd lesson; however, inspired by the Guardian review quoted at the very beginning of our summary, we felt compelled to add it, meshing a few of Harari’s insights into one very actionable advice.

And we feel that it’s good if we start explaining Harari’s point by quoting this passage from the 18^thchapter of the book:

Unlike the creators of The Matrix and The Truman Show, Huxley doubted the possibility of escape, because he questioned whether there was anybody to make the escape.
Since your brain and your ‘self’ are part of the matrix, to escape the matrix you must escape your self. That, however, is a possibility worth exploring. Escaping the narrow definition of self might well become a necessary survival skill in the twenty-first century.

In other words, we are our brains and it is impossible for us to escape them. So, in order to not be brainwashed, doubt everything! Admit your ignorance before yourself and be skeptical. Listen to each and every story – coming from many different people – and try to find cracks as often as you can. Understand your mind before the algorithms of tomorrow start making your mind up for you.

Contemplate, reflect, ruminate, muse, meditate.

Be a Socrates.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century is for the 21-year-old recent graduate, who’s just starting her life as an adult in this century, the 53-year-old father, who feels lost amid all this new technology, and anyone who’s worried about our future. One reviewer said “I’d rather read one book like this each year than consume any news.”

Tracksmith, the Boston-based retro running clothing brand with a devoted following, recently launched its Hare A.C. running club.

Membership is priced at $128 annually and includes not just a free racing vest, early access to major launches, and exclusive lines, but also in-person perks, like invites to pop-up events around the country, that will likely further build a sense of community around the brand.

“We heard feedback that people who have been fans of the brand for a long time were looking for ways to engage with us more and go even deeper with Tracksmith,” said Matt Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Tracksmith.

Of course you could just drop into the brand’s new Track House at 25 Newbury Street in Boston:

Nike revamped its membership program, too. As an active runner, I have long worn Nike. With the app on my Apple Watch, the concept of getting discounts to the online store, to uniquely reward myself for a great workout certainly appeals.

Exclusive editions of shoes and clothing is an additional benefit to members, as is the free postage and returns from the store.

Nike chose to go down the free route (this could change, pending on the success of other sports brands’ programs). The membership now includes partnerships with Classpass and Headspace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoG19QjKu70

Lululemon, the yoga wear brand, also tested a loyalty program in Canada last year: For $128 Canadian Dollars ($96.55 in U.S. dollars) annually, devotees received, among other things, a pair of leggings or shorts, as well as free classes and free shipping.

The pilot program was so successful, the brand announced on a sales call, that it plans to expand it to Lululemon’s other markets, likely with a fee increase.

Rapha, the cycling brand, with stores around the world dubbed Cycle Clubs has long set the trend in sports branded communities. Simon Mottram’s famously opened his first store for cycling enthusiasts in London’s Covent Garden.

Yes they could buy his ultra-premium cycle gear, and soon after access a range of services such as cycle repairs to route planning,  but most important was the coffee shop. Here people could chat, watch the current events on big screens, and plan their next rides.

Soon it became a meeting point to start or end rides, and the club started to journey across the world too. Now in over 50 global cities, Rapha Cycle Clubs are the mecca of “middle aged men in Lycra” everywhere.

The physical locations mattered, it was a place people could meet, could start and end their rides, and of course buy Rapha products too. But online resources sustained the community everyday, with movies to inspire you, chat forums to connect you, and tools to measure you.

“A global community needs to keep in touch. Rapha’s digital platforms have been created to ensure you’re always in the loop with rides, events, news and club chatter both within your own chapter and those in other countries.”

Nearly two decades ago, military planners coined an acronym to capture the nature of an increasingly unpredictable and dynamic world. They called it VUCA—an environment of nonstop volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

The world today embodies VUCA more so than any era we’ve recently experienced.

Why do so many of us—individually and collectively—fail to imagine, let alone anticipate, the massive and disruptive changes that are unfolding? Driven by fast moving technologies and globalization, the pace of change is accelerating, our brains are struggling to keep up, and surprise, discomfort, and unrest are the result.

This is no anomaly. VUCA isn’t going away. Change promises to speed up, not slow down. To thrive in a world where “change is the only constant,” leaders need to replace old thinking with a new framework.

One simple way is to think of it more as an opportunity than a challenge

• V from volatility to vibrant … consider the multitude of incredible opportunities
• U from uncertainty to unreal … the ways in which physical is enhanced by digital
• C from complex to crazy … the speed at which ideas are implemented and spread
• A form ambiguous to astounding … the impact even the smallest entity can make

William Gibson famously once said, “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” As leaders, how do we embrace the elements of the future that are here, and the ones that are just around the corner?

In times of increasing change and complexity, it can be difficult to envision bold new futures with any certainty. Our go-to strategies for thinking about the future typically start with the elements that are known, such as projecting out historic results to future performance, analyzing existing competitors, or focusing on executing near-term results.

What’s missing are systematic approaches to understanding and taking advantage of the unknown. This is why leaders need to embrace skills, practices and behaviors of futurists.

Every leader needs to be a futurist today.

Futurists don’t have secret powers to predict the future. They don’t have a Magic 8 Ball or special basket of fortune-cookie predictions. Rather, futurists discipline themselves to question the status quo. They regularly scan external trends, adjacent industries and underlying forces. They consider diverse perspectives. And they boldly tell stories about the future before all of the data is available to back it up.

This does not mean simply extrapolating today’s pace of change into the future. It means imagining new possibilities boldly and optimistically—and understanding they are quite likely to arise sooner than expected. Leaders will have to get equally comfortable with what can be known and with exploring what is unknown.

This is not how many leaders currently operate.

Today, leaders typically manage risk with a variety of analytic processes and frameworks that identify and quantify known variables. In most organizations, the future is primarily projected through numerical forecasts and spreadsheets, reinforcing a perspective that the world is an extension of what we know today, and that we can plug in some numeric formula to calculate quantifiable predictions.

The problem, however, is these forecasts rely on understanding current variables and existing trends. We see future events as a new version of past events, presuming the pace of change will move in a straight line. In reality, the line curves upward, and new variables—unforeseen technologies, for example—always enter the equation.

The result? Forecasts fall short. At best, we’re shocked, at worst disrupted.

As futurists, leaders need to get comfortable asking open-ended questions about unspoken assumptions to see new possibilities. They need to be curious about the future and blend imaginative practices of strategic foresight, futures backcasting, science fiction design and scenario planning into traditional business planning.

Nike’s Dream Crazy campaign could be the best of the decade, let alone the last year. Their decision to use Colin Kaepernick was one of the boldest made in marketing in a long, long time and the brand was rewarded accordingly. The black and white close up of his face was shared around the world, and made news headlines in almost every country.

The streets of Beijing and Shanghai are littered with yellow Ofo bikes, lying abandoned in varying states of disrepair, chains broken, wheels buckled and paint fading. A reflection of the quick rise and sharp fall of the billion-dollar Chinese bike-sharing platform.

Not long ago, Ofo, led by its 24 year old founder Dei Wei, was racing into overseas markets and raising billions from backers including Alibaba and Didi Chuxing. Even the pavements near my suburban London home featured a cluster of the bikes.

“It now appears bike sharing is the stupidest business, but the smartest brains of China all tried to get in,” Wu Shenghua, founder of another bankrupted bike-sharing company 3Vbike, said. “It really now seems ridiculous.”

Ofo’s plight is a warning for China’s tech investors, who have plowed tens of billions of dollars into loss-making businesses such as bike sharing and food delivery.

Ofo was a phenomenon. Its dockless bicycles, which could be picked up by scanning a QR code and left anywhere, grew from Beijing campuses to become an icon of young, urban cool. The firm garnered a valuation of $2 billion.

Its bikes – and those of main rival Mobike – could be found on almost every city street corner, often in staggering numbers. Ofo’s advertisements featured major Chinese popstars and showed trendy youngsters pedaling around the hippest areas of town.

Dozens of smaller rivals emerged in China over the last two years, only to go out of business, leaving Ofo, fellow Alibaba-backed Hellobike, and Tencent’s Mobike, as the major players.

But costly battles for market share have meant Ofo and its rivals have struggled to turn popularity into profit. Ofo’s very survival is now at risk as debts to suppliers have come due and user demands for deposits have mounted.

“It’s a very tricky business, all the profits are eaten away by competition. It’s something that really needs to be part of a bigger business,” said Maxwell Zhou, founder of tech startup metaapp.cn and a former employee of Mobike in China.

“It’s very similar to email in that way. It has a lot of benefits for society, but none of the email providers were able to create a barrier to entry, so anybody could host emails, and eventually nobody could make any money.”

At its peak, Ofo had bike fleets in more than 20 countries, from France to Australia and the United States. Company insiders, however, said it tried to grow too fast, and found itself facing a wide array of hurdles, from traffic regulations to vandalism, as well as spiraling costs.

In China, once-loyal users have turned on Ofo, lining up at its offices in Beijing to demand the return of deposits paid up-front to use the service. Over 12 million people have so far requested repayment online.

In a letter to employees last week, Dai Wei said the company was struggling to resolve a cash shortage, in part because of user refunds as well as payments to suppliers. He said the firm was battling on amid “pain and hopelessness” …

“Due to failures in making correct judgements towards external changes from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, ofo has shouldered immense cash flow pressure. We need to process refunds for users, pay back the suppliers’ debts while maintaining the company’s daily operations. Every penny is spent cautiously.”

“In the past six months, cash flow and media pressure have rendered us powerless and discouraged, especially after failing to get funding. I’ve thought about using all the operating capital to pay back the deposits and debts from the suppliers. I’ve even thought about dissolving the company and filing for bankruptcy, so that we wouldn’t have to feel pressured anymore.”

He ended the letter with seemingly encouraging remarks. “I hope that every ofo employee can agree to and firmly believe that we will carry on with courage and will not be dodging our responsibilities. We will be responsible for every penny we owe, and for every user who has once supported us!”

Michael Johnson is one day younger than me.

Johnson was the world’s greatest 200/400m runner. His performance were out of this world. For a number of years, he really was at a different level to the rest of humanity.

His best moments came in 1996 at the Atlanta Olympics. He walked on track, in front of his home crowd in golden Nike spikes. Talk about confidence. He walked back out of the stadium with two gold medals in the 200m and 400m, the former in a sensational world record.

At the 2000 Games in Sydney, he defended his 400m title becoming – at 33 years 12 days – the oldest champion of any track event shorter than 5,000m. He won many more golds at World Championships and in 4x400m relays too.

After hanging up the golden spikes “Superman” was faced with a distinctly ordinary world. He turned his hand to sports commentary, becoming a permanent fixture on the BBC at every major athletics event.

His on screen “execution”, as he loves to call it, was superb. Unlike most other ex-athletes he was crisp and disciplined, thoughtful and provocative.

12 years ago he launched his own business Michael Johnson Performance, a bespoke training institute he set up in the Texan city of McKinney. Over the course of the last decade this facility, and the philosophy and approach behind it, has been utilised by elite sporting clients who range from Premier League sides such as Manchester United to NFL American Football teams such as Dallas Stars, from Formula 1 teams to National Olympic Federations.

The MJP brand has become a global one, and is about to launch on another significant expansion. The USP is Johnson himself, and his self-confessedly obsessional attention to detail – an obsession that he required to maintain a ten-year career that saw him win a first global gold at the 1991 World Championships and a last one at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Johnson has shaped the MJP offering through his own experience, assisted by carefully assembled groups of experts in the fields of Performance, Sports Medicine, Nutrition and Mental Skills, and also with the support of the company who sponsored him during his glory years, Nike.

At the heart of the operation is NextGen, an athletic development programme that is, according to the MJP site, “centered around the personalized training philosophy of Olympic gold medallist, Michael Johnson.

“With progressive methods, we take athletes with raw talent and develop their fundamentals to help them excel across all sports in which they compete.

“Our programs are based on years of research and scientific exploration. By utilizing our partnership with Nike, we take the latest technology and innovations in training to draw out the potential of every athlete. MJP’s NextGen Program takes athletes to the next level.”

It all sounds fine. But the proof of its effectiveness, unimpeachably, is the list of current clients.

The MJP centre numbers among its regulars the local National Hockey Leaguers Dallas Stars and players from the NFL American Football side Dallas Cowboys.

Johnson was personally engaged two years ago to work on the speed and strength of players in the Arsenal FC youth ranks.

“Over the years,” Johnson adds, “we have also worked with Manchester United, the Football Association, and numerous Olympic committees including Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, China, Romania, Azerbaijan, Cayman Islands, and Japan.

“We’ve worked with athletes from all 32 teams in the NFL.

“We worked with sports as varied as Williams F1 team and Professional Bull riders….

“We have some ongoing clients who we’ve worked with for years and some clients who come in for a Two-day Advanced Athlete Assessment only. One interesting development is the expansion of our services – we have recently launched our MJP Coach Education Certification in China where we are certifying coaches and trainers on the MJP training methodology with two courses each month.

“We will launch worldwide in 2018.”

So what was Johnson hoping for when he started MJP, and how has the reality measured up?

“The vision for MJP was to assemble a group of experts in all areas of sport performance to assist and support athletes whether individual or as part of a team, to reach their full potential,” he says.

“Our mission is to help every athlete reach their full potential regardless of sport, gender, ability level, or limitation. We help sports people to be the best athlete they can be from ages nine through to professionals at the highest level, in all sports, including able-bodied and athletes with a disability.”

Asked if he believes MJP is offering something that rival organisations cannot match, Johnson responds:

“We don’t really compare ourselves to others. What we do is somewhat unique simply because we are not a sport specific organisation. We are sport agnostic and we focus on athleticism and performance, developing athleticism properly for youth athletes, and improving athletic performance specific to the sport of the athlete at the elite level.

“In our 10 years, we have worked with athletes from over 30 different countries and over 25 different sports. This wealth of experience gives our organisation a unique ability to develop solutions to the challenges faced by sports organisations and athletes in developing and improving athleticism and sport performance.

“I think many people don’t understand how MJP performance services work. We are not just a facility where people come to train and we don’t have just one solution, which is simply training with us.”

The list of MJP services includes tailored training programmes, visiting athletic performance consulting services, physical therapy and injury rehabilitation, bespoke training camps, coach education and input from Nike sport scientists.

“We have brought together experts from all areas of developing and improving athleticism,” Johnson says. “And with all of those experts cooperating together with the athlete in the centre of it all, we are uniquely positioned to help the athlete reach their full potential. This is exactly what I attribute my career longevity and consistency to, and was the reason behind starting Michael Johnson Performance.

In September last year the invisible Michael Johnson, the tough talking, supreme performing athlete, who called himself Superman, had a stroke.

He realised he was human. After a number of weeks in hospital, and the in recovery it took him 15 minutes to walk 200m, the distance he once ran in 19.32 seconds.

“I was achieving tiny incremental improvements and it gave me hope,” Johnson told the BBC.

“I told my wife I was confident of making a full recovery and not only will I do that, I will do it faster than anybody else has done before.

“I knew then the recovery was going to be down to hard work, focus and commitment to the process. That is something I am very familiar with.

“Almost three months on now from the stroke and I am pretty much back to normal and back to work.”