Incredible technologies and geopolitical shifts, complex markets and stagnating growth, demanding customers and disruptive entrepreneurs, environmental crisis and social distrust, unexpected shocks and uncertain futures.

The challenge for every business, particularly those seeking to invest in the future, is about making sense of today’s rapidly changing world, and understanding how to prepare for, and succeed, in tomorrow’s world.

We explore how businesses can survive and thrive, and move forwards to create a better future. How to reimagine business, to reinvent markets, to reengage people. We consider what it means to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact.

The investment management world is itself on the cusp of huge disruption – millennials taking over control of wealth, a shift to alternative investment options, increased focus on ESG principles, and new business models, as well as the impact of digital tech. Incumbents are just beginning to leverage disruptive technologies, big data and AI, to embrace radically new business models and meeting the needs of a new investment market.

We also learn from the innovative strategies of incredible companies in finance and beyond – Alibaba and Amazon, Biontech and BlackRock, Narayana and Netflix, Patagonia and PingAn, Spotify and Supercell, and many more. We also take a look at what this means for insurance, and some of the most innovative companies in the field.

Agenda

We will explore three themes

Future Mindset … How do you see the future of Schroders?

  • Every market is shaken up, Epic to Ferrari, Starbucks to Shein, Biontech to Twelve
  • Asia and AI, GenZ and gene-editing, sustainability and super-apps, and S-curves
  • New attitudes and expectations, purpose and profit, on-demand and personal

Riding the Megatrends … What are best opportunities of change?

  • Megatrends, turning challenge into opportunity, accelerating the speed of change
  • Starting from the future back, working outside in, “invincible” today and tomorrow
  • New business models, Tesla and 23andMe, DBS and PingAn, Haier and Schneider

Transforming Futures … Why is now the time to change?

  • What’s your future potential? Growth mindset and “performer-transformer” leaders.
  • What do we really mean by transformation? IBM and Orsted, DSM and Fujifilm
  • 7 priorities for accelerating positive change, to drive the future of Schroders

Accelerating positive change

We live in a time of great promise but also great uncertainty.

Markets are more crowded, competition is intense, customer aspirations are constantly fuelled by new innovations and dreams. Technology disrupts every industry, from banking to construction, entertainment to healthcare. It drives new possibilities and solutions, but also speed and complexity, uncertainty and fear.

As digital and physical worlds fuse to augment how we live and work, AI and robotics enhance but also challenge our capabilities, whilst ubiquitous supercomputing, genetic editing and self-driving cars take us further.

Technologies with the power to help us leap forwards in unimaginable ways. To transform business, to solve our big problems, to drive radical innovation, to accelerate growth and achieve progress socially and environmentally too.

We are likely to see more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years.

  • Markets accelerate, 4 times faster than 20 years ago, based on the accelerating speed of innovation and diminishing lifecycles of products.
  • People are more capable, 825 times more connected than 20 years ago, with access to education, unlimited knowledge, tools to create anything.
  • Consumer attitudes change, 78% of young people choose brands that do good, they reject corporate jobs, and see the world with the lens of gamers.

However, change goes far beyond the technology.

Markets will transform, converge and evolve faster. From old town Ann Arbor to the rejuvenated Bilbao, today’s megacities like Chennai and the future Saudi tech city of Neom, economic power will continue to shift. China has risen to the top of the new global business order, whilst India and eventually Africa will follow.

Industrialisation challenges the natural equilibrium of our planet’s resources. Today’s climate crisis is the result of our progress, and our problem to solve. Globalisation challenges our old notions of nationhood and locality. Migration changes where we call home. Religious values compete with social values, economic priorities conflict with social priorities. Living standards improve but inequality grows.

Our current economic system is stretched to its limit. Global shocks, such as the global pandemic of 2020, exposes its fragility. We open our eyes to realise that we weren’t prepared for different futures, and that our drive for efficiency has left us unable to cope. Such crises will become more frequent, as change and disruption accelerate.

However, these shocks are more likely to accelerate change in business, rather than stifle it, to wake us up to the real impacts of our changing world – to the urgency of action, to the need to think and act more dramatically.

The old codes don’t work

Business is not fit for the future. Most organisations were designed for stable and predictable worlds, where the future evolves as planned, markets are definitive, and choices are clear.

The future isn’t like it used to be.

Dynamic markets are, by definition, turbulent. Whilst economic cycles have typically followed a pattern of peaks and troughs every 10-15 years, these will likely become more frequent.  Change is fast and exponential, uncertain and unpredictable, complex and ambiguous demanding new interpretation and imagination.

Yet too many business leaders hope that the strategies that made them successful in the past will continue to work in the future. They seek to keep stretching the old models in the hope that they will continue to see them through. Old business plans are tweaked each year, infrastructures are tested to breaking point, and people are asked to work harder.

In a way of dramatic, unpredictable change, this is not enough to survive, let alone thrive.

  • Growth is harder. Global GDP growth has declined by more than a third in the past decade. As the west stagnates, Asia grows, albeit more slowly.
  • Companies struggle, their average lifespan falling from 75 years in 1950 to 15 years today, 52% of the Fortune 500 in 2000 no longer exist in 2020.
  • Leaders are under pressure. 44% of today’s business leaders have held their position for at least 5 years, compared to 77% half a century ago.

Profit is no longer enough; people expect business to achieve more. Business cannot exist in isolation from the world around them, pursuing customers without care for the consequence. The old single-minded obsession with profits is too limiting. Business depends more than ever on its resources – people, communities, nature, partners – and will need to find a better way to embrace them.

Technology is no longer enough; innovation needs to be more human. Technology will automate and interpret reality, but it won’t empathise and imagine new futures. Ubiquitous technology-driven innovation quickly becomes commoditised, available from anywhere in the world, so we need to add value in new ways. The future is human, creative, and intuitive. People will matter more to business, not less.

Sustaining the environment is not enough. 200 years of industrialisation has stripped the planet of its ability to renew itself, and ultimately to sustain life. Business therefore needs to give back more than it takes. As inequality and distrust have grown in every society, traditional jobs are threatened by automation and stagnation, meaning that social issues will matter even more, both globally and locally.

The new DNA of business

As business leaders, our opportunity is to create a better business, one that is fit for the future, that can act in more innovative and responsible ways.

How can we harness the potential of this relentless and disruptive change, harness the talents of people and the possibilities of technology? How can business, with all its power and resources, be a platform for change, and a force for good?

We need to find new codes to succeed. We need to find new ways to work, to recognise business as a system that be virtuous, where less can be more, and growth can go beyond the old limits. This demands that we make new connections:

  • Profit + Purpose … to achieve more enlightened progress
  • Technology + Humanity … to achieve more human ingenuity
  • Innovation + Sustainability … to achieve more positive impact

We need to create a new framework for business, a better business – to reimagine why and redesign how we work, as well as reinvent what and refocus where we do business.

Imagine a future business that looks forwards not back, that rises up to shape the future on its own terms, making sense of change to find new possibilities, inspiring people with vision and optimism. Imagine a future that inspires progress, seeks new sources of growth, embraces networks and partners to go further, and enables people to achieve more.

Imagine too, a future business that creates new opportunity spaces, by connecting novel ideas and untapped needs, creatively responding to new customer agendas. Imagine a future business that disrupts the disruptors, where large companies have the vision and courage to reimagine themselves and compete as equals to fast and entrepreneurial start-ups.

Imagine a future business that embraces humanity, searches for better ideas, that fuse technology and people in more enlightened ways, to solve the big problems of society, and improve everyone’s lives. Imagine a future business that works collectively, self-organises to thrive without hierarchy, connects with partners in rich ecosystems, designs jobs around people, to do inspiring work.

Imagine also, a future business which is continually transforming, that thrives by learning better and faster, develops a rich portfolio of business ideas and innovations to sustain growth and progress. Imagine a future business that creates positive impact on the world, benefits all stakeholders with a circular model of value creation, that addresses negatives, and creates a net positive impact for society.

Creating a better business is an opportunity for every person who works inside or alongside it. It is not just a noble calling, to do something better for the world, but also a practical calling, a way to overcome the many limits of today, and attain future success for you and your business.You could call it the dawn of a new capitalism.

Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s workshop Leading in a Changing World. 

Incredible technologies and geopolitical shifts, complex markets and stagnating growth, demanding customers and disruptive entrepreneurs, environmental crisis and social distrust, unexpected shocks and uncertain futures.

The challenge for every business leader: making sense of today’s rapidly changing world, and understanding how to prepare for, and succeed, in tomorrow’s world.

We explore how businesses can survive and thrive, and move forwards to create a better future.

How to reimagine business, to reinvent markets, to reengage people. We consider what it means to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact.

We learn from the innovative strategies of incredible companies – Alibaba and Amazon, Biontech and BlackRock, Narayana and Netflix, Patagonia and PingAn, Spotify and Supercell, and many more. We also take a look at what this means for insurance, and some of the most innovative companies in the field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The super-apps!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s workshop 21st Century Leadership.

Culture encompasses language, traditions, art, music, religion, food, architecture, fashion language, music, attitudes. It is about the past and present, and a pathway to futures. It is different all over the world.

The word “culture” derives from a French term, which in turn derives from the Latin word “colere,” which means to tend to the earth and grow, or cultivation and nurture. Indeed culture shares its etymology with a number of other words related to actively fostering growth.

The term “western culture” has come to define the culture of European countries as well as those that have been heavily influenced by European immigration, such as the United States). It has its roots in the classical period of the Greco-Roman era (the fourth and fifth centuries BC) and the rise of Christianity in the 14th century.

Eastern culture generally refers to the societal norms of countries in Far East Asia and India. Like the West, it was heavily influenced by religion during its early development, but it was also heavily influenced by the growth and harvesting of rice. In general, there is less of a distinction between secular society and religious philosophy than in the West.

The term  “Middle Eastern culture” is another umbrella that encompasses a huge diversity of cultural practices, religious beliefs and daily habits. The region is the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and is home to dozens of languages, from Arabic to Hebrew to Turkish to Pashto.

While there is significant religious diversity in the Middle East, the predominant religion by numbers is Islam, which has played a large role in the cultural development of the region. Islam originated in what is today Saudi Arabia in the early seventh century. An influential moment for the culture and development of the Middle East came after the death of the religion’s founder, Muhammad, in 632.

No matter what a culture looks like, one thing is for certain: cultures change. “Culture appears to have become key in our interconnected world, which is made up of so many ethnically diverse societies, but also riddled by conflicts associated with religion, ethnicity, ethical beliefs, and, essentially, the elements which make up culture,” De Rossi said. “But culture is no longer fixed, if it ever was. It is essentially fluid and constantly in motion.”

This makes it difficult to define any culture in only one way. While change is inevitable, most people see value in respecting and preserving the past.  The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) seeks to identify cultural and natural heritage and to conserve and protect it. Monuments, buildings and sites are covered by the group’s protection, according to the international treaty, the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. This treaty was adopted by UNESCO in 1972.

Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s X-Marketing keynote.

“Every market is shaken up, with new challenges and disruptive innovation, new agendas for customers and business. Marketers are the sense makers, the business innovator and growth drivers. The pioneers of your future business.”

How do you see the future? Peter Fisk explores the post-pandemic world, the new opportunities emerging as every market is shaken up, and what it takes to reimagine the future and embrace the waves of change.

Peter takes you on a journey that rides the 5 seismic megatrends reshaping every market over the next 10 years, and what this means for business and its leaders in driving future strategies, innovation and growth.

He explores some of the world’s most innovative companies right now – from Tan Le’s Emotiv neurotech to Mikael Bjergso’s world-leading craft beer, Haier’s future vision for the home and DBS’s invisible bank, Jio’s super apps of India and Orsted’s green transformation.

And how to do it. Future back and outside in. With purpose, disruption and courage. Jump on your surfboard and get ready for an incredible ride!

Why marketing leaders need to be the future shapers, business innovators and growth drivers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here’s my manifesto for marketers:

Growth Drivers

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

Change Makers

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

Business Innovators

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

Value Creators

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

Of course this is a development challenge too. I spend much of my time working on leadership development, and particularly on the T-Shaped development of functional experts as they step to become business leaders. At that point, typically when they enter the C-suite, they shift from the vertical (the focused, functional expert who has all the answers), to the horizontal (the open-mind business leader who asks all the questions). This is is a tough transition for many leaders to make, and is more about awareness and confidence as about capability or skill, but when they can let go of their vertical past, they can thrive.

Interview Q&A

In advance, here is a quick Q&A to get you thinking …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at my new analysis of Latin American “Gamechanger” brands, shaking up markets right now. I will be launching this at CAMP 2022. How do they brands win? They play by a new set of rules. They change the game. They embrace tech, but in smart, human, creative ways.

© Peter Fisk 2022

  • Read my profiles of all 12 Latin American Gamechangers
  • Read the full story of NotCo, using AI to transform the future of food
  • Read the full story of Juan Valdez Cafe, making Colombian coffee better
  • Read the full story of Mercado Libre, the Argentinian retail revolutionaries

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

 Marketers need to be both strategic and operational.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 We are human. Real people. People trust people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Marketing from Peter Fisk

Download Peter Fisk’s keynote in Barcelona: Leading the Future. 

Incredible technologies and geopolitical shifts, complex markets and stagnating growth, demanding customers and disruptive entrepreneurs, environmental crisis and social distrust, unexpected shocks and uncertain futures.

The challenge for every business leader: making sense of today’s rapidly changing world, and understanding how to prepare for, and succeed, in tomorrow’s world.

We explore how businesses can survive and thrive, and move forwards to create a better future.

How to reimagine business, to reinvent markets, to reengage people. We consider what it means to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact.

We learn from the innovative strategies of incredible companies – Alibaba and Amazon, Biontech and BlackRock, Narayana and Netflix, Patagonia and PingAn, Spotify and Supercell, and many more. We also take a look at what this means for insurance, and some of the most innovative companies in the field

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

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

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

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

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

How to “recode” your future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now is the time to dare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should business leaders be focused on right now?

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

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

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

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

What is your big message, right now?

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

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

Creating a better world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The super-apps!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspired by Einstein and Picasso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I use a proprietary methodology, Innolab.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What interests you outside your professional work and why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Incredible technologies and geopolitical shifts, complex markets and stagnating growth, demanding customers and disruptive entrepreneurs, environmental crisis and social distrust, unexpected shocks and uncertain futures.

“Business Recoded” is about making sense of today’s rapidly changing world, and understanding how to prepare for, and succeed, in tomorrow’s world.

We explore how businesses can survive and thrive, and move forwards to create a better future.

How to reimagine business, to reinvent markets, to reengage people. We consider what it means to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact.

We learn from the innovative strategies of incredible companies – Alibaba and Amazon, Biontech and BlackRock, Narayana and Netflix, Patagonia and PingAn, Spotify and Supercell, and many more. We also take a look at what this means for insurance, and some of the most innovative companies in the field

Agenda

1: Worldchanging: How do you see the future?

We live in a time of incredible change. Dramatic, pervasive, and relentless. More change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years. Incredible technologies, expectant consumers, climate crisis, social distrust, and much more.

  • Every market is shaken up, how pandemic accelerated the future
  • Asia to AI, GenZ and gene-editing, sustainability and the super-apps
  • Who were the winners during two years of pandemic-driven revolution?

2: Megatrends: How to harness the change drivers?

How will you embrace the megatrends? Disruptive technologies, connected and intelligent; economic power shifts, 80% of the middle class in emerging markets; resource scarcity, where water is the biggest risk; demographic change, where markets are older, demanding and mobile; and rapid urbanisation, 33 of the 45 megacities in Asia.

  • What the 5 megatrends mean for me, turning challenge into opportunity
  • Starting from the future back, working from the outside in
  • Decoding the changing consumer types, and their new priorities

3: Reimagining Business: What are the new codes of business?

The old codes of business don’t work anymore. The most innovative companies – from Alibaba and Bytedance, to Coupang and Deepmind – succeed with new codes. So what are the new ideas to win in a fast and dynamic world of Asian renaissance, entrepreneurial supremacy, social conscience and smarter machines?

  • What can we learn the world’s most innovative companies right now
  • Exploring the radical innovations of companies like Orsted and PingAn
  • 7 priorities for business to be winners in 2022 and beyond

Watch this:

 

Introduction: Accelerating Change

We live in a time of great promise but also great uncertainty.

Markets are more crowded, competition is intense, customer aspirations are constantly fuelled by new innovations and dreams. Technology disrupts every industry, from banking to construction, entertainment to healthcare. It drives new possibilities and solutions, but also speed and complexity, uncertainty and fear.

As digital and physical worlds fuse to augment how we live and work, AI and robotics enhance but also challenge our capabilities, whilst ubiquitous supercomputing, genetic editing and self-driving cars take us further.

Technologies with the power to help us leap forwards in unimaginable ways. To transform business, to solve our big problems, to drive radical innovation, to accelerate growth and achieve progress socially and environmentally too.

We are likely to see more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years.

  • Markets accelerate, 4 times faster than 20 years ago, based on the accelerating speed of innovation and diminishing lifecycles of products.
  • People are more capable, 825 times more connected than 20 years ago, with access to education, unlimited knowledge, tools to create anything.
  • Consumer attitudes change, 78% of young people choose brands that do good, they reject corporate jobs, and see the world with the lens of gamers.

However, change goes far beyond the technology.

Markets will transform, converge and evolve faster. From old town Ann Arbor to the rejuvenated Bilbao, today’s megacities like Chennai and the future Saudi tech city of Neom, economic power will continue to shift. China has risen to the top of the new global business order, whilst India and eventually Africa will follow.

Industrialisation challenges the natural equilibrium of our planet’s resources. Today’s climate crisis is the result of our progress, and our problem to solve. Globalisation challenges our old notions of nationhood and locality. Migration changes where we call home. Religious values compete with social values, economic priorities conflict with social priorities. Living standards improve but inequality grows.

Our current economic system is stretched to its limit. Global shocks, such as the global pandemic of 2020, exposes its fragility. We open our eyes to realise that we weren’t prepared for different futures, and that our drive for efficiency has left us unable to cope. Such crises will become more frequent, as change and disruption accelerate.

However, these shocks are more likely to accelerate change in business, rather than stifle it, to wake us up to the real impacts of our changing world – to the urgency of action, to the need to think and act more dramatically.

The old codes don’t work

Business is not fit for the future. Most organisations were designed for stable and predictable worlds, where the future evolves as planned, markets are definitive, and choices are clear.

The future isn’t like it used to be.

Dynamic markets are, by definition, turbulent. Whilst economic cycles have typically followed a pattern of peaks and troughs every 10-15 years, these will likely become more frequent.  Change is fast and exponential, uncertain and unpredictable, complex and ambiguous demanding new interpretation and imagination.

Yet too many business leaders hope that the strategies that made them successful in the past will continue to work in the future. They seek to keep stretching the old models in the hope that they will continue to see them through. Old business plans are tweaked each year, infrastructures are tested to breaking point, and people are asked to work harder.

In a way of dramatic, unpredictable change, this is not enough to survive, let alone thrive.

  • Growth is harder. Global GDP growth has declined by more than a third in the past decade. As the west stagnates, Asia grows, albeit more slowly.
  • Companies struggle, their average lifespan falling from 75 years in 1950 to 15 years today, 52% of the Fortune 500 in 2000 no longer exist in 2020.
  • Leaders are under pressure. 44% of today’s business leaders have held their position for at least 5 years, compared to 77% half a century ago.

Profit is no longer enough; people expect business to achieve more. Business cannot exist in isolation from the world around them, pursuing customers without care for the consequence. The old single-minded obsession with profits is too limiting. Business depends more than ever on its resources – people, communities, nature, partners – and will need to find a better way to embrace them.

Technology is no longer enough; innovation needs to be more human. Technology will automate and interpret reality, but it won’t empathise and imagine new futures. Ubiquitous technology-driven innovation quickly becomes commoditised, available from anywhere in the world, so we need to add value in new ways. The future is human, creative, and intuitive. People will matter more to business, not less.

Sustaining the environment is not enough. 200 years of industrialisation has stripped the planet of its ability to renew itself, and ultimately to sustain life. Business therefore needs to give back more than it takes. As inequality and distrust have grown in every society, traditional jobs are threatened by automation and stagnation, meaning that social issues will matter even more, both globally and locally.

The new DNA of business

As business leaders, our opportunity is to create a better business, one that is fit for the future, that can act in more innovative and responsible ways.

How can we harness the potential of this relentless and disruptive change, harness the talents of people and the possibilities of technology? How can business, with all its power and resources, be a platform for change, and a force for good?

We need to find new codes to succeed. We need to find new ways to work, to recognise business as a system that be virtuous, where less can be more, and growth can go beyond the old limits. This demands that we make new connections:

  • Profit + Purpose … to achieve more enlightened progress
  • Technology + Humanity … to achieve more human ingenuity
  • Innovation + Sustainability … to achieve more positive impact

We need to create a new framework for business, a better business – to reimagine why and redesign how we work, as well as reinvent what and refocus where we do business.

Imagine a future business that looks forwards not back, that rises up to shape the future on its own terms, making sense of change to find new possibilities, inspiring people with vision and optimism. Imagine a future that inspires progress, seeks new sources of growth, embraces networks and partners to go further, and enables people to achieve more.

Imagine too, a future business that creates new opportunity spaces, by connecting novel ideas and untapped needs, creatively responding to new customer agendas. Imagine a future business that disrupts the disruptors, where large companies have the vision and courage to reimagine themselves and compete as equals to fast and entrepreneurial start-ups.

Imagine a future business that embraces humanity, searches for better ideas, that fuse technology and people in more enlightened ways, to solve the big problems of society, and improve everyone’s lives. Imagine a future business that works collectively, self-organises to thrive without hierarchy, connects with partners in rich ecosystems, designs jobs around people, to do inspiring work.

Imagine also, a future business which is continually transforming, that thrives by learning better and faster, develops a rich portfolio of business ideas and innovations to sustain growth and progress. Imagine a future business that creates positive impact on the world, benefits all stakeholders with a circular model of value creation, that addresses negatives, and creates a net positive impact for society.

Creating a better business is an opportunity for every person who works inside or alongside it. It is not just a noble calling, to do something better for the world, but also a practical calling, a way to overcome the many limits of today, and attain future success for you and your business.You could call it the dawn of a new capitalism.

More about Peter Fisk

Peter Fisk is a global thought leader – author, futurist, speaker – whose career was forged in a superconductivity lab, accelerated by managing supersonic brands, shaped by working with some of the world’s best companies in Europe, North America and Asia, evolved by leading a digital start-up, and formalised as CEO of the world’s largest marketing network.

He works with business leaders to reimagine their markets and strategies for a better future. He brings together the best in strategy and innovation, brand and customer thinking to drive smarter, sustainable growth.

Peter leads GeniusWorks, an innovative business accelerator, based in London, and is professor of leadership, strategy and innovation at IE Business School in Madrid, where he is responsible for executive programs. He also works independently and with other business schools. He was Thinkers50 Global Director, founded and hosts the annual European Business Forum, and publishes the monthly ”Fast Leader” magazine.

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

Peter’s first book “Marketing Genius” fused the brains of Einstein and Picasso to ask how would they do business today, and was translated into 35 languages. His next 8 books explore the renaissance creativity of Leonardo da Vinci, in “Creative Genius”, how to innovate with purpose for positive impact, in “People Planet Profit”, and learning from the world’s most innovative companies, in “Gamechangers”.

His new book “Business Recoded” challenges leaders to have the courage to create a better future, harnessing the opportunities of a post-pandemic world, through 7 shifts built on deep dives with 49 of the world’s most inspiring business leaders today. It is shortlisted for CMI Business Book of the Year 2021, and was reviewed by the Financial Times with “Wow. The book you have to read now”.

Find out more at peterfisk.com

Are you ready to lead the future?

The Global Advanced Management Program (Global AMP) is IE Business School’s flagship program for executives stepping up to lead the future of business.

It’s for leaders who are stepping up to become the next CEO, or maybe to join the C-suite, to run a business unit, or getting ready to do so. It’s for leaders who seek to be re-inspired, re-energised ready for an incredible future – to drive business-wide transformation, to reimagine their industry, to change the way their entire business and market works.

It’s for ambitious leaders, game changers, future makers.

If you can see yourself leading your business into the future … if you can start to imagine a business of the future, beyond that currently imagined by your leaders and peers. … then this is for you.

If you are intensely curious, positively dissatisfied, and highly ambitious … and have the courage to take on the next step, not just for you, but for your business too … then this is for you.

Our goal is to create the world’s best program for leaders like you … making sense of today’s incredible, complex and fast-changing world … and how you can have the brains and boldness to create, shape and deliver the future in your own vision.

Each year we take on a small group of 20-30 leaders and work together to help you transform your future. In the last two years, we have brought together some fantastic participants from all over the world, and many different sectors, ready to step up and shape their business, to lead their futures. They have gone on to thrive in their own worlds, and are still part of the Global AMP  community. You can join them.

Step up to lead the post-pandemic future

The Global AMP  is more relevant than ever, as the global Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted every market and business, demanding that leaders step up to think and act in new ways. As people around the world have shifted to digital technologies at home and work, we are likely to see an acceleration in new ways of working, new types of business, and new leaders.

The pandemic became a catalyst for innovation, not just to survive through crisis and uncertainty, but to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Indeed it is no surprise that 57% of companies are founded in a downturn, and most innovations are born out of crisis too. Now, more than ever is the time when business needs leaders with new mindsets, new skills, and who can combine advanced learning with simultaneous business transformation.

Liquid format

To make the Global AMP  even more accessible, practical, and applied to the changing needs of you and your business, we have enhanced the format. It will now take on a much more “liquid” learning structure, so that you can continue to work, and accelerate your leadership development, during these uncertain yet important times. The program will combine online and physical formats over a longer period, enabling you to learn more, apply more, and get more practical value from the experience.

Topical, practical content

The content is entirely updated, anticipating the changing needs of business and its people as we emerge from the recent Covid-19 crisis, and through the next decade – from the megatrends that drive global markets and intelligent technologies, to the convergence of markets and emergence of new business models, new ways of working and the challenges of leading for today, and tomorrow.

We look to the companies who are shaping the world right now – from Alibaba and Aerofarms, to Babylon and Bytedance. We will learn from many different sectors – from the rapidly changing world of healthcare and finance, fashion and retail, manufacturing and technology. How are they being shaped by AI and digital platforms, by 3D printing and ecosystems, emerging markets and new consumer agendas?

Transforming your business, transforming yourself

The program takes on a more dynamic learning style, helping your to explore how to transform yourself and your business, for a world of rapid and continuous change.

We’ve structured the four weeks into a practical yet exciting journey through the world of business –  starting from the future megatrends to today’s growth drivers, exploring a world of disruptive innovations and energising organisations. In the mornings we zig, we explore all the best new ideas business, what matters for business. In the afternoon we zag. We shift venue – to a more relaxed venue – to reflect on the personal leadership challenges. What does it mean for me, my business and our future?

Tranform! business simulation 

The ultimate challenge for any business leader is to put all the ideas, strategies, projects together as a transformational program for the organisation over time.

The business simulation takes the format of an interactive game, playing with other students around the world, physically and online, over three months. It will focus on one particular, dynamic industry and be relevant to what is happening right now in the real world.

If you were the CEO of a leading business in that industry, what would you do? Imagine you are in the world of mobility – Elon Musk has just launched a partnership with Volkswagen, China is massively subsidising rapid adoption, safety regulation is changing, factories can not cope with the growth in demand, media and employees need to be kept on side.

Gamechanger project

In addition to exploring the very latest business ideas and theories, the program is highly personalised in two ways – coaching and project work. The “gamechanger” project is your opportunity to develop your own blueprint for transforming the future of your business, or a new business of your own.

You work one to one with the Academic Director in exploring and defining a new vision which you can take back, share with your business colleagues, and implement over time. It is supported by a Gamechanger Toolkit, and works alongside all modules, applying the learning to your own business, and future potential.

Personal coaching

The one to one leadership coaching program helps you to make sense of your own strengths and style, and coaches work with you to develop this, to respond to the new needs, and to prepare to step up to business leadership. It starts with an in-depth diagnostic of your leadership attitudes and behaviours, and then your coach works with you over time, independent from the rest of the program, as this is specifically about you.

Detailed structure

Phases 1 and 3 will be online, built around a 2-4 hour session each Friday. During these sessions we will bring together the best ideas from around the business world, with expert faculty, and also take you on “deep dives” into what is happening right now in some of the world’s leading businesses.

Phases 2 and 4 will be residential, one week in Segovia, a world heritage site in Spain, and one week in the capital, Madrid. These weeks will also feature leading faculty brought together from around the world, and also enable more time for group networking and collaboration with colleagues who typically come from many different industries and every part of the world. Week 4 concludes with your graduation at IE Business School.

Delivered by some of the world’s top business leaders and thinkers

We bring together the world’s most inspiring and thoughtful faculty. This year it additionally includes

  • Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of Siemens and Maersk, author of Dreams and Details, one of the world’s top leaders.
  • Tendayi Viki, a psychologist-based innovator, author of Pirates in the Navy, and partner of Strategyzer
  • Christian Rangen, expert on business transformation, with both corporates and startups, especially in energy
  • Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez , GSK’s top project manager, and author of The Project Revolution
  • Terence Mauri, founder of the Hack Future Lab, former Saatchi and Saatchi planner and McKinsey advisor
  • Mark Fritz, expert in leading change, author of Lead and Influence, having worked on four continents for Kodak
  • Verónica Reyero, human anthropologist exploring a more human future, and founder of Anthropologia 2.0
  • Mikael Trolle, former national coach of Denmark’s Volleyball team, and coach to many business leaders

They add to the existing IE Business School team that includes

  • Peter Fisk, academic director of the Global AMP,  bestselling author of Gamechangers, and Business Recoded
  • Mark Esposito, technology futurist and AI pioneer, founder of Nexus FrontierTech, and works in UAE
  • Marcos Cajina, founder of Renewal, that focuses on the neuroscience of emotional engagement for leaders
  • Steven MacGregor, author of Chief Wellbeing Officer, founder of the Leadership Academy of Barcelona
  • Conchita Galdon, expert in sustainability strategy and practice, and leader of IE’s think tank in ESG
  • Ricardo Perez, technologist, researcher at MIT, focused on start-ups and emerging digital technologies
  • Jaime Vega, consumer researcher, specialist in understanding fast changing markets and new consumer agendas
  • Javier Bernad, helps leaders to present and perform better, from storytelling to keynotes, vision and action

Global participants

Importantly, the Global AMP brings together a great mix of participants from across sectors and around the world, enhancing your personal network, and learning experience for everyone.

Examples of recent participants include:

  • Finance, Head of Investment Banking, Portugal
  • Technology, Regional Marketing Leader, Egypt
  • Healthcare, Head of Clinical Development, Japan
  • Drinks, Supply Chain Director, Mexico
  • Airlines, Head of Network Development, UAE
  • Technology, Customer Service Director, Mexico
  • Energy, Corporate Strategy Director, Spain
  • Mining, Innovation Director, South Africa
  • Real Estate, Founder and CEO, Portugal
  • Sustainable Investment Fund, CEO, France
  • Healthcare, Senior Medical Advisor, USA
  • Technology, Entrepreneur, Saudi Arabia
  • Manufacturing, CEO and Chairman, Turkey
  • NGO, Founder and Director, Kenya

All participants then join the exclusive Global AMP alumni network, including regular networking and ongoing resources.

Idea Starters

Here are a few tasters of the expert faculty and their big ideas …

Jim Hagemann Snabe … one of the world’s top business leaders, on Dreams and Details:

Exploring the Future

Making sense of change, exploring megatrends and their implications for business, today and tomorrow, and making better choices for your future direction, are all essential to successful leadership. The rise of emerging markets, new technologies and next-generation audiences is accompanied by the increasing scarcity of resources, social fragmentation and climate change. The Fourth Industrial Revolution heralds a new era for business and society, from digitalization and automation to 3D printing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics.

  • Rocket ships: How will you lead the future, shape it in your own vision, and take your business on an uncertain journey towards a better tomorrow?
  • Exponential technologies: Harnessing the potential of new capabilities, from digital and big data to biotech and nanotech as well as AI and robotics.
  • Resource scarcity: Changing sources of energy, the peak of rare metals, high-tech components, patented technologies, talent and creativity.
  • Human impacts: Rethinking work, education and employment, aging and healthcare, urbanization and belonging, wealth and happiness.
  • Future shaping: Making sense of change and making better choices. Harnessing the value drivers and using scenario planning to shape the future you want.

Mark Esposito … the Canadian futurist explores the future as it unfolds:

 

Driving innovative growth

Markets are complex, competitive and dynamic. New markets emerge, and old markets decline, as new audiences, new aspirations and new possibilities drive new growth. Focusing on the best opportunities for growth becomes key to your future, and reimagining how your business can embrace them profitably. Digital markets have no limits, and allow even the smallest businesses to have a huge impact, while accelerating the convergence of sectors and businesses.– so what is your purpose, that will guide you through the future horizons of growth?

  • Growth markets: Exploring the changing the nature of markets. Creating new spaces based on new customers and solutions, driving your growth horizons.
  • Inspiring purpose: Finding your north star, why your business exists, and how putting purpose beyond profit, can transform your activities and success.
  • Customer futures: Understanding the changing aspirations and behaviours of customers, with deeper insight to understand and engage them better.
  • Platform markets: Harnessing the power of digital networks to create new market models that bring buyers and sellers together in new ways, creating new value.
  • Growth accelerators: Consumer data, digital network, and new business models enable you to accelerate every aspect of business, and your future growth.

Tendayi Viki … the psychologist innovator creates the invincible company:

Transforming business faster

Disruption is everywhere, whether it’s a start-up challenging established giants, new technologies replacing inefficient processes, simplicity outperforming complexity or customers challenging businesses to do better. The impact can be dramatic. Reputations can be made and destroyed in a matter of days, while veteran companies are wiped off the map. How can you turn the tables and become the disrupter by developing insights, ideas, innovative strategies and business models that can be delivered quickly and efficiently?

  • Faster innovation: Transforming ideas into new solutions, strategies into action, embracing disruptive change, to reimagine your future business.
  • Creative designs: Harnessing the power of creativity, fused with deep insight, to design better solutions – products and services, experiences and business.
  • Sustainable innovation: Innovating to solve the biggest social and environmental challenges, in a way that is good for the world, and more profitable too.
  • Business Models: Rethinking how organisations work to deliver innovative propositions, leveraging assets and partners to create new ways of working.
  • Invincible companies: Bringing together your innovation portfolio as a source of relentless progress and profitable growth for your business.

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez  … the world’s top project manager on leading transformation:

Leaders as performers and transformers

Organisations thrive on an inspiring purpose, aligned business model, innovation inside and outside, driving change and high performance. They constantly drive change and transformation, working through projects to create seize new opportunities. People are energised by a positive culture, harnessing the best talents of man and machine, with the agility to continually adapt and respond to changing markets, develop new capabilities and partnerships, and reach new heights. How can you transform, mobilise and energise your organization with a strategy to deliver the best performance today, and create an even better future?

  • Winning strategies: Defining the right direction and priorities, guided by an inspiring purpose, and harnessing the drivers of value.
  • Driving change: Making better, more strategic decisions every day, turning strategy into implementation, while using the right metrics and rewards, to drive transformation and performance.
  • Fast and agile: Shaping organisations and processes to be agile and efficient, leveraging strengths and addressing weaknesses both internally and externally.
  • Energising people: Mobilising employees to think and deliver strategy innovatively and profitably, unlocking the power of teams and humanity in a positive culture.
  • Sustaining impact: Ensuring that the organisation has the capacity to renew and adapt to deliver shared value in the short and long term.

Verónica Reyero … the modern anthropologist, exploring better human futures:

Creating a better future

The best leaders amplify the potential of their teams and their business. By developing an effective leadership style, they can inspire, engage, connect and support to drive long-term direction and meet short-term goals. Leaders of the future will drive change in a way that unlocks talent and performance, constantly reinventing organisations. How will you lead yourself, your team and your business towards a better future, one that combines purpose with passion, profit and progress? This module is interspersed across the whole program, in order to connect with the many different business topics.

  • Great leaders: Business are obsessed with leadership, but how do leaders really add value, engage people effectively and deliver better results?
  • Authentic organizations: From corporate to personal reputations, how do you build trust and authenticity inside and outside the business?
  • Talent beacons: How to attract, engage and retain the best people in an ideas-driven world – to nurture, motivate, and inspire them to create the future.
  • High performance: Improving your personal and business wellbeing to drive high performance, physically and mentally, agile and resilient, with a winning mindset.
  • Leadership style: Why should you be the leader? What do you have that will take your company further? And why will anyone want to be led by you?

Chris Rangen … Leading transformation:

Terence Mauri … being a courageous leader:

Steven MacGregor … well-being habits for leaders to start every day:

Download the new Global AMP Brochure

Download Peter Fisk’s workshop “Rocket Ships: Creating a Better Future“. 

Incredible technologies and geopolitical shifts, complex markets and stagnating growth, demanding customers and disruptive entrepreneurs, environmental crisis and social distrust, unexpected shocks and uncertain futures.

“Business Recoded” is about making sense of today’s rapidly changing world, and understanding how to prepare for, and succeed, in tomorrow’s world.

We explore how businesses can survive and thrive, and move forwards to create a better future.

How to reimagine business, to reinvent markets, to reengage people. We consider what it means to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact.

We learn from the innovative strategies of incredible companies – Alibaba and Amazon, Biontech and BlackRock, Narayana and Netflix, Patagonia and PingAn, Spotify and Supercell, and many more. We also take a look at what this means for insurance, and some of the most innovative companies in the field

Agenda

Future Mindset: How do you see the future?

We live in a time of incredible change. Dramatic, pervasive, and relentless. More change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years. Incredible technologies, expectant consumers, climate crisis, social distrust, and much more.

  • Every market is shaken up, how pandemic accelerated the future
  • Asia to AI, GenZ and gene-editing, sustainability and the super-apps
  • Who were the winners during two years of pandemic-driven revolution?

Future Markets: How to harness the change drivers?

How will you embrace the megatrends? Disruptive technologies, connected and intelligent; economic power shifts, 80% of the middle class in emerging markets; resource scarcity, where water is the biggest risk; demographic change, where markets are older, demanding and mobile; and rapid urbanisation, 33 of the 45 megacities in Asia.

  • What the 5 megatrends mean for me, turning challenge into opportunity
  • Starting from the future back, working from the outside in
  • Decoding the changing consumer types, and their new priorities

Future Business: What are the new codes of business?

The old codes of business don’t work anymore. The most innovative companies – from Alibaba and Bytedance, to Coupang and Deepmind – succeed with new codes. So what are the new ideas to win in a fast and dynamic world of Asian renaissance, entrepreneurial supremacy, social conscience and smarter machines?

  • What can we learn the world’s most innovative companies right now
  • Exploring the radical innovations of companies like Orsted and PingAn
  • 7 priorities for business to be winners in 2022 and beyond

Introduction: Accelerating Change

We live in a time of great promise but also great uncertainty.

Markets are more crowded, competition is intense, customer aspirations are constantly fuelled by new innovations and dreams. Technology disrupts every industry, from banking to construction, entertainment to healthcare. It drives new possibilities and solutions, but also speed and complexity, uncertainty and fear.

As digital and physical worlds fuse to augment how we live and work, AI and robotics enhance but also challenge our capabilities, whilst ubiquitous supercomputing, genetic editing and self-driving cars take us further.

Technologies with the power to help us leap forwards in unimaginable ways. To transform business, to solve our big problems, to drive radical innovation, to accelerate growth and achieve progress socially and environmentally too.

We are likely to see more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years.

  • Markets accelerate, 4 times faster than 20 years ago, based on the accelerating speed of innovation and diminishing lifecycles of products.
  • People are more capable, 825 times more connected than 20 years ago, with access to education, unlimited knowledge, tools to create anything.
  • Consumer attitudes change, 78% of young people choose brands that do good, they reject corporate jobs, and see the world with the lens of gamers.

However, change goes far beyond the technology.

Markets will transform, converge and evolve faster. From old town Ann Arbor to the rejuvenated Bilbao, today’s megacities like Chennai and the future Saudi tech city of Neom, economic power will continue to shift. China has risen to the top of the new global business order, whilst India and eventually Africa will follow.

Industrialisation challenges the natural equilibrium of our planet’s resources. Today’s climate crisis is the result of our progress, and our problem to solve. Globalisation challenges our old notions of nationhood and locality. Migration changes where we call home. Religious values compete with social values, economic priorities conflict with social priorities. Living standards improve but inequality grows.

Our current economic system is stretched to its limit. Global shocks, such as the global pandemic of 2020, exposes its fragility. We open our eyes to realise that we weren’t prepared for different futures, and that our drive for efficiency has left us unable to cope. Such crises will become more frequent, as change and disruption accelerate.

However, these shocks are more likely to accelerate change in business, rather than stifle it, to wake us up to the real impacts of our changing world – to the urgency of action, to the need to think and act more dramatically.

The old codes don’t work

Business is not fit for the future. Most organisations were designed for stable and predictable worlds, where the future evolves as planned, markets are definitive, and choices are clear.

The future isn’t like it used to be.

Dynamic markets are, by definition, turbulent. Whilst economic cycles have typically followed a pattern of peaks and troughs every 10-15 years, these will likely become more frequent.  Change is fast and exponential, uncertain and unpredictable, complex and ambiguous demanding new interpretation and imagination.

Yet too many business leaders hope that the strategies that made them successful in the past will continue to work in the future. They seek to keep stretching the old models in the hope that they will continue to see them through. Old business plans are tweaked each year, infrastructures are tested to breaking point, and people are asked to work harder.

In a way of dramatic, unpredictable change, this is not enough to survive, let alone thrive.

  • Growth is harder. Global GDP growth has declined by more than a third in the past decade. As the west stagnates, Asia grows, albeit more slowly.
  • Companies struggle, their average lifespan falling from 75 years in 1950 to 15 years today, 52% of the Fortune 500 in 2000 no longer exist in 2020.
  • Leaders are under pressure. 44% of today’s business leaders have held their position for at least 5 years, compared to 77% half a century ago.

Profit is no longer enough; people expect business to achieve more. Business cannot exist in isolation from the world around them, pursuing customers without care for the consequence. The old single-minded obsession with profits is too limiting. Business depends more than ever on its resources – people, communities, nature, partners – and will need to find a better way to embrace them.

Technology is no longer enough; innovation needs to be more human. Technology will automate and interpret reality, but it won’t empathise and imagine new futures. Ubiquitous technology-driven innovation quickly becomes commoditised, available from anywhere in the world, so we need to add value in new ways. The future is human, creative, and intuitive. People will matter more to business, not less.

Sustaining the environment is not enough. 200 years of industrialisation has stripped the planet of its ability to renew itself, and ultimately to sustain life. Business therefore needs to give back more than it takes. As inequality and distrust have grown in every society, traditional jobs are threatened by automation and stagnation, meaning that social issues will matter even more, both globally and locally.

The new DNA of business

As business leaders, our opportunity is to create a better business, one that is fit for the future, that can act in more innovative and responsible ways.

How can we harness the potential of this relentless and disruptive change, harness the talents of people and the possibilities of technology? How can business, with all its power and resources, be a platform for change, and a force for good?

We need to find new codes to succeed. We need to find new ways to work, to recognise business as a system that be virtuous, where less can be more, and growth can go beyond the old limits. This demands that we make new connections:

  • Profit + Purpose … to achieve more enlightened progress
  • Technology + Humanity … to achieve more human ingenuity
  • Innovation + Sustainability … to achieve more positive impact

We need to create a new framework for business, a better business – to reimagine why and redesign how we work, as well as reinvent what and refocus where we do business.

Imagine a future business that looks forwards not back, that rises up to shape the future on its own terms, making sense of change to find new possibilities, inspiring people with vision and optimism. Imagine a future that inspires progress, seeks new sources of growth, embraces networks and partners to go further, and enables people to achieve more.

Imagine too, a future business that creates new opportunity spaces, by connecting novel ideas and untapped needs, creatively responding to new customer agendas. Imagine a future business that disrupts the disruptors, where large companies have the vision and courage to reimagine themselves and compete as equals to fast and entrepreneurial start-ups.

Imagine a future business that embraces humanity, searches for better ideas, that fuse technology and people in more enlightened ways, to solve the big problems of society, and improve everyone’s lives. Imagine a future business that works collectively, self-organises to thrive without hierarchy, connects with partners in rich ecosystems, designs jobs around people, to do inspiring work.

Imagine also, a future business which is continually transforming, that thrives by learning better and faster, develops a rich portfolio of business ideas and innovations to sustain growth and progress. Imagine a future business that creates positive impact on the world, benefits all stakeholders with a circular model of value creation, that addresses negatives, and creates a net positive impact for society.

Creating a better business is an opportunity for every person who works inside or alongside it. It is not just a noble calling, to do something better for the world, but also a practical calling, a way to overcome the many limits of today, and attain future success for you and your business.You could call it the dawn of a new capitalism.

Are you ready to lead the future?

The Global Advanced Management Program (Global AMP) is IE Business School’s flagship program for executives stepping up to lead the future of business.

It’s for leaders who are stepping up to become the next CEO, or maybe to join the C-suite, to run a business unit, or getting ready to do so. It’s for leaders who seek to be re-inspired, re-energised ready for an incredible future – to drive business-wide transformation, to reimagine their industry, to change the way their entire business and market works.

It’s for ambitious leaders, game changers, future makers.

If you can see yourself leading your business into the future … if you can start to imagine a business of the future, beyond that currently imagined by your leaders and peers. … then this is for you.

If you are intensely curious, positively dissatisfied, and highly ambitious … and have the courage to take on the next step, not just for you, but for your business too … then this is for you.

Our goal is to create the world’s best program for leaders like you … making sense of today’s incredible, complex and fast-changing world … and how you can have the brains and boldness to create, shape and deliver the future in your own vision.

Each year we take on a small group of 20-30 leaders and work together to help you transform your future. In the last two years, we have brought together some fantastic participants from all over the world, and many different sectors, ready to step up and shape their business, to lead their futures. They have gone on to thrive in their own worlds, and are still part of the Global AMP  community. You can join them.

Step up to lead the post-pandemic future

The Global AMP  is more relevant than ever, as the global Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted every market and business, demanding that leaders step up to think and act in new ways. As people around the world have shifted to digital technologies at home and work, we are likely to see an acceleration in new ways of working, new types of business, and new leaders.

The pandemic became a catalyst for innovation, not just to survive through crisis and uncertainty, but to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Indeed it is no surprise that 57% of companies are founded in a downturn, and most innovations are born out of crisis too. Now, more than ever is the time when business needs leaders with new mindsets, new skills, and who can combine advanced learning with simultaneous business transformation.

Liquid format

To make the Global AMP  even more accessible, practical, and applied to the changing needs of you and your business, we have enhanced the format. It will now take on a much more “liquid” learning structure, so that you can continue to work, and accelerate your leadership development, during these uncertain yet important times. The program will combine online and physical formats over a longer period, enabling you to learn more, apply more, and get more practical value from the experience.

Topical, practical content

The content is entirely updated, anticipating the changing needs of business and its people as we emerge from the recent Covid-19 crisis, and through the next decade – from the megatrends that drive global markets and intelligent technologies, to the convergence of markets and emergence of new business models, new ways of working and the challenges of leading for today, and tomorrow.

We look to the companies who are shaping the world right now – from Alibaba and Aerofarms, to Babylon and Bytedance. We will learn from many different sectors – from the rapidly changing world of healthcare and finance, fashion and retail, manufacturing and technology. How are they being shaped by AI and digital platforms, by 3D printing and ecosystems, emerging markets and new consumer agendas?

Transforming your business, transforming yourself

The program takes on a more dynamic learning style, helping your to explore how to transform yourself and your business, for a world of rapid and continuous change.

We’ve structured the four weeks into a practical yet exciting journey through the world of business –  starting from the future megatrends to today’s growth drivers, exploring a world of disruptive innovations and energising organisations. In the mornings we zig, we explore all the best new ideas business, what matters for business. In the afternoon we zag. We shift venue – to a more relaxed venue – to reflect on the personal leadership challenges. What does it mean for me, my business and our future?

Tranform! business simulation 

The ultimate challenge for any business leader is to put all the ideas, strategies, projects together as a transformational program for the organisation over time.

The business simulation takes the format of an interactive game, playing with other students around the world, physically and online, over three months. It will focus on one particular, dynamic industry and be relevant to what is happening right now in the real world.

If you were the CEO of a leading business in that industry, what would you do? Imagine you are in the world of mobility – Elon Musk has just launched a partnership with Volkswagen, China is massively subsidising rapid adoption, safety regulation is changing, factories can not cope with the growth in demand, media and employees need to be kept on side.

Gamechanger project

In addition to exploring the very latest business ideas and theories, the program is highly personalised in two ways – coaching and project work. The “gamechanger” project is your opportunity to develop your own blueprint for transforming the future of your business, or a new business of your own.

You work one to one with the Academic Director in exploring and defining a new vision which you can take back, share with your business colleagues, and implement over time. It is supported by a Gamechanger Toolkit, and works alongside all modules, applying the learning to your own business, and future potential.

Personal coaching

The one to one leadership coaching program helps you to make sense of your own strengths and style, and coaches work with you to develop this, to respond to the new needs, and to prepare to step up to business leadership. It starts with an in-depth diagnostic of your leadership attitudes and behaviours, and then your coach works with you over time, independent from the rest of the program, as this is specifically about you.

Detailed structure

Phases 1 and 3 will be online, built around a 2-4 hour session each Friday. During these sessions we will bring together the best ideas from around the business world, with expert faculty, and also take you on “deep dives” into what is happening right now in some of the world’s leading businesses.

Phases 2 and 4 will be residential, one week in Segovia, a world heritage site in Spain, and one week in the capital, Madrid. These weeks will also feature leading faculty brought together from around the world, and also enable more time for group networking and collaboration with colleagues who typically come from many different industries and every part of the world. Week 4 concludes with your graduation at IE Business School.

Delivered by some of the world’s top business leaders and thinkers

We bring together the world’s most inspiring and thoughtful faculty. This year it additionally includes

  • Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of Siemens and Maersk, author of Dreams and Details, one of the world’s top leaders.
  • Tendayi Viki, a psychologist-based innovator, author of Pirates in the Navy, and partner of Strategyzer
  • Christian Rangen, expert on business transformation, with both corporates and startups, especially in energy
  • Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez , GSK’s top project manager, and author of The Project Revolution
  • Terence Mauri, founder of the Hack Future Lab, former Saatchi and Saatchi planner and McKinsey advisor
  • Mark Fritz, expert in leading change, author of Lead and Influence, having worked on four continents for Kodak
  • Verónica Reyero, human anthropologist exploring a more human future, and founder of Anthropologia 2.0
  • Mikael Trolle, former national coach of Denmark’s Volleyball team, and coach to many business leaders

They add to the existing IE Business School team that includes

  • Peter Fisk, academic director of the Global AMP,  bestselling author of Gamechangers, and Business Recoded
  • Mark Esposito, technology futurist and AI pioneer, founder of Nexus FrontierTech, and works in UAE
  • Marcos Cajina, founder of Renewal, that focuses on the neuroscience of emotional engagement for leaders
  • Steven MacGregor, author of Chief Wellbeing Officer, founder of the Leadership Academy of Barcelona
  • Conchita Galdon, expert in sustainability strategy and practice, and leader of IE’s think tank in ESG
  • Ricardo Perez, technologist, researcher at MIT, focused on start-ups and emerging digital technologies
  • Jaime Vega, consumer researcher, specialist in understanding fast changing markets and new consumer agendas
  • Javier Bernad, helps leaders to present and perform better, from storytelling to keynotes, vision and action

Global participants

Importantly, the Global AMP brings together a great mix of participants from across sectors and around the world, enhancing your personal network, and learning experience for everyone.

Examples of recent participants include:

  • Finance, Head of Investment Banking, Portugal
  • Technology, Regional Marketing Leader, Egypt
  • Healthcare, Head of Clinical Development, Japan
  • Drinks, Supply Chain Director, Mexico
  • Airlines, Head of Network Development, UAE
  • Technology, Customer Service Director, Mexico
  • Energy, Corporate Strategy Director, Spain
  • Mining, Innovation Director, South Africa
  • Real Estate, Founder and CEO, Portugal
  • Sustainable Investment Fund, CEO, France
  • Healthcare, Senior Medical Advisor, USA
  • Technology, Entrepreneur, Saudi Arabia
  • Manufacturing, CEO and Chairman, Turkey
  • NGO, Founder and Director, Kenya

All participants then join the exclusive Global AMP alumni network, including regular networking and ongoing resources.

Idea Starters

Here are a few tasters of the expert faculty and their big ideas …

Jim Hagemann Snabe … one of the world’s top business leaders, on Dreams and Details:

Exploring the Future

Making sense of change, exploring megatrends and their implications for business, today and tomorrow, and making better choices for your future direction, are all essential to successful leadership. The rise of emerging markets, new technologies and next-generation audiences is accompanied by the increasing scarcity of resources, social fragmentation and climate change. The Fourth Industrial Revolution heralds a new era for business and society, from digitalization and automation to 3D printing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics.

  • Rocket ships: How will you lead the future, shape it in your own vision, and take your business on an uncertain journey towards a better tomorrow?
  • Exponential technologies: Harnessing the potential of new capabilities, from digital and big data to biotech and nanotech as well as AI and robotics.
  • Resource scarcity: Changing sources of energy, the peak of rare metals, high-tech components, patented technologies, talent and creativity.
  • Human impacts: Rethinking work, education and employment, aging and healthcare, urbanization and belonging, wealth and happiness.
  • Future shaping: Making sense of change and making better choices. Harnessing the value drivers and using scenario planning to shape the future you want.

Mark Esposito … the Canadian futurist explores the future as it unfolds:

 

Driving innovative growth

Markets are complex, competitive and dynamic. New markets emerge, and old markets decline, as new audiences, new aspirations and new possibilities drive new growth. Focusing on the best opportunities for growth becomes key to your future, and reimagining how your business can embrace them profitably. Digital markets have no limits, and allow even the smallest businesses to have a huge impact, while accelerating the convergence of sectors and businesses.– so what is your purpose, that will guide you through the future horizons of growth?

  • Growth markets: Exploring the changing the nature of markets. Creating new spaces based on new customers and solutions, driving your growth horizons.
  • Inspiring purpose: Finding your north star, why your business exists, and how putting purpose beyond profit, can transform your activities and success.
  • Customer futures: Understanding the changing aspirations and behaviours of customers, with deeper insight to understand and engage them better.
  • Platform markets: Harnessing the power of digital networks to create new market models that bring buyers and sellers together in new ways, creating new value.
  • Growth accelerators: Consumer data, digital network, and new business models enable you to accelerate every aspect of business, and your future growth.

Tendayi Viki … the psychologist innovator creates the invincible company:

Transforming business faster

Disruption is everywhere, whether it’s a start-up challenging established giants, new technologies replacing inefficient processes, simplicity outperforming complexity or customers challenging businesses to do better. The impact can be dramatic. Reputations can be made and destroyed in a matter of days, while veteran companies are wiped off the map. How can you turn the tables and become the disrupter by developing insights, ideas, innovative strategies and business models that can be delivered quickly and efficiently?

  • Faster innovation: Transforming ideas into new solutions, strategies into action, embracing disruptive change, to reimagine your future business.
  • Creative designs: Harnessing the power of creativity, fused with deep insight, to design better solutions – products and services, experiences and business.
  • Sustainable innovation: Innovating to solve the biggest social and environmental challenges, in a way that is good for the world, and more profitable too.
  • Business Models: Rethinking how organisations work to deliver innovative propositions, leveraging assets and partners to create new ways of working.
  • Invincible companies: Bringing together your innovation portfolio as a source of relentless progress and profitable growth for your business.

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez  … the world’s top project manager on leading transformation:

Leaders as performers and transformers

Organisations thrive on an inspiring purpose, aligned business model, innovation inside and outside, driving change and high performance. They constantly drive change and transformation, working through projects to create seize new opportunities. People are energised by a positive culture, harnessing the best talents of man and machine, with the agility to continually adapt and respond to changing markets, develop new capabilities and partnerships, and reach new heights. How can you transform, mobilise and energise your organization with a strategy to deliver the best performance today, and create an even better future?

  • Winning strategies: Defining the right direction and priorities, guided by an inspiring purpose, and harnessing the drivers of value.
  • Driving change: Making better, more strategic decisions every day, turning strategy into implementation, while using the right metrics and rewards, to drive transformation and performance.
  • Fast and agile: Shaping organisations and processes to be agile and efficient, leveraging strengths and addressing weaknesses both internally and externally.
  • Energising people: Mobilising employees to think and deliver strategy innovatively and profitably, unlocking the power of teams and humanity in a positive culture.
  • Sustaining impact: Ensuring that the organisation has the capacity to renew and adapt to deliver shared value in the short and long term.

Verónica Reyero … the modern anthropologist, exploring better human futures:

Creating a better future

The best leaders amplify the potential of their teams and their business. By developing an effective leadership style, they can inspire, engage, connect and support to drive long-term direction and meet short-term goals. Leaders of the future will drive change in a way that unlocks talent and performance, constantly reinventing organisations. How will you lead yourself, your team and your business towards a better future, one that combines purpose with passion, profit and progress? This module is interspersed across the whole program, in order to connect with the many different business topics.

  • Great leaders: Business are obsessed with leadership, but how do leaders really add value, engage people effectively and deliver better results?
  • Authentic organizations: From corporate to personal reputations, how do you build trust and authenticity inside and outside the business?
  • Talent beacons: How to attract, engage and retain the best people in an ideas-driven world – to nurture, motivate, and inspire them to create the future.
  • High performance: Improving your personal and business wellbeing to drive high performance, physically and mentally, agile and resilient, with a winning mindset.
  • Leadership style: Why should you be the leader? What do you have that will take your company further? And why will anyone want to be led by you?

Chris Rangen … Leading transformation:

Terence Mauri … being a courageous leader:

Steven MacGregor … well-being habits for leaders to start every day:

Download the new Global AMP Brochure

Incredible technologies and geopolitical shifts, complex markets and stagnating growth, demanding customers and disruptive entrepreneurs, environmental crisis and social distrust, unexpected shocks and uncertain futures.

“Business Recoded” is about making sense of today’s rapidly changing world, and understanding how to prepare for, and succeed, in tomorrow’s world.

We explore how businesses can survive and thrive, and move forwards to create a better future.

How to reimagine business, to reinvent markets, to reengage people. We consider what it means to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact.

We learn from the innovative strategies of incredible companies – Alibaba and Amazon, Biontech and BlackRock, Narayana and Netflix, Patagonia and PingAn, Spotify and Supercell, and many more. We also take a look at what this means for insurance, and some of the most innovative companies in the field

Agenda

Session 1: Megatrends and Metaverses 

Making sense of a fast-changing world

We live in a time of incredible change. Dramatic, pervasive, and relentless. More change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years. Incredible technologies, expectant consumers, climate crisis, social distrust, and much more. How will you embrace the megatrends? Disruptive technologies, connected and intelligent; economic power shifts, 80% of the middle class in emerging markets; resource scarcity, where water is the biggest risk; demographic change, where markets are older, demanding and mobile; and rapid urbanisation, 33 of the 45 megacities in Asia.

  • Every market is shaken up, how pandemic accelerated the future
  • Asia to AI, GenZ and gene-editing, sustainability and the super-apps
  • What the 6 megatrends mean for me, turning challenge into opportunity
  • Customers around the world, and the new agendas and behaviours
  • Who were the winners in fast-changing markets?

Session 2: Leading the Transformation 

Creating a better future for your business

The old codes of business don’t work anymore. The most innovative companies – from Amazon and Bytedance, to Coupang and Deepmind – succeed with new codes. So what are the new ideas to win in a fast and dynamic world of Asian renaissance, entrepreneurial supremacy, social conscience and smarter machines? What can you learn from Jio’s revolution from petrochemicals to phones, and DBS’s transformation of banking? How can you be inspired by courageous leaders like 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki, Haier’s Zhang Ruimin and Citigroup’s Jane Fraser?

  • What can we learn the world’s most innovative companies right now
  • Finding purpose, driving moonshots, and starting from the future back
  • Exploring the radical innovations of companies like Orsted to PingAn
  • Growth mindset, business models and business transformation
  • Having the courage to lead a better future

Introduction: Accelerating Change

We live in a time of great promise but also great uncertainty.

Markets are more crowded, competition is intense, customer aspirations are constantly fuelled by new innovations and dreams. Technology disrupts every industry, from banking to construction, entertainment to healthcare. It drives new possibilities and solutions, but also speed and complexity, uncertainty and fear.

As digital and physical worlds fuse to augment how we live and work, AI and robotics enhance but also challenge our capabilities, whilst ubiquitous supercomputing, genetic editing and self-driving cars take us further.

Technologies with the power to help us leap forwards in unimaginable ways. To transform business, to solve our big problems, to drive radical innovation, to accelerate growth and achieve progress socially and environmentally too.

We are likely to see more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years.

  • Markets accelerate, 4 times faster than 20 years ago, based on the accelerating speed of innovation and diminishing lifecycles of products.
  • People are more capable, 825 times more connected than 20 years ago, with access to education, unlimited knowledge, tools to create anything.
  • Consumer attitudes change, 78% of young people choose brands that do good, they reject corporate jobs, and see the world with the lens of gamers.

However, change goes far beyond the technology.

Markets will transform, converge and evolve faster. From old town Ann Arbor to the rejuvenated Bilbao, today’s megacities like Chennai and the future Saudi tech city of Neom, economic power will continue to shift. China has risen to the top of the new global business order, whilst India and eventually Africa will follow.

Industrialisation challenges the natural equilibrium of our planet’s resources. Today’s climate crisis is the result of our progress, and our problem to solve. Globalisation challenges our old notions of nationhood and locality. Migration changes where we call home. Religious values compete with social values, economic priorities conflict with social priorities. Living standards improve but inequality grows.

Our current economic system is stretched to its limit. Global shocks, such as the global pandemic of 2020, exposes its fragility. We open our eyes to realise that we weren’t prepared for different futures, and that our drive for efficiency has left us unable to cope. Such crises will become more frequent, as change and disruption accelerate.

However, these shocks are more likely to accelerate change in business, rather than stifle it, to wake us up to the real impacts of our changing world – to the urgency of action, to the need to think and act more dramatically.

The old codes don’t work

Business is not fit for the future. Most organisations were designed for stable and predictable worlds, where the future evolves as planned, markets are definitive, and choices are clear.

The future isn’t like it used to be.

Dynamic markets are, by definition, turbulent. Whilst economic cycles have typically followed a pattern of peaks and troughs every 10-15 years, these will likely become more frequent.  Change is fast and exponential, uncertain and unpredictable, complex and ambiguous demanding new interpretation and imagination.

Yet too many business leaders hope that the strategies that made them successful in the past will continue to work in the future. They seek to keep stretching the old models in the hope that they will continue to see them through. Old business plans are tweaked each year, infrastructures are tested to breaking point, and people are asked to work harder.

In a way of dramatic, unpredictable change, this is not enough to survive, let alone thrive.

  • Growth is harder. Global GDP growth has declined by more than a third in the past decade. As the west stagnates, Asia grows, albeit more slowly.
  • Companies struggle, their average lifespan falling from 75 years in 1950 to 15 years today, 52% of the Fortune 500 in 2000 no longer exist in 2020.
  • Leaders are under pressure. 44% of today’s business leaders have held their position for at least 5 years, compared to 77% half a century ago.

Profit is no longer enough; people expect business to achieve more. Business cannot exist in isolation from the world around them, pursuing customers without care for the consequence. The old single-minded obsession with profits is too limiting. Business depends more than ever on its resources – people, communities, nature, partners – and will need to find a better way to embrace them.

Technology is no longer enough; innovation needs to be more human. Technology will automate and interpret reality, but it won’t empathise and imagine new futures. Ubiquitous technology-driven innovation quickly becomes commoditised, available from anywhere in the world, so we need to add value in new ways. The future is human, creative, and intuitive. People will matter more to business, not less.

Sustaining the environment is not enough. 200 years of industrialisation has stripped the planet of its ability to renew itself, and ultimately to sustain life. Business therefore needs to give back more than it takes. As inequality and distrust have grown in every society, traditional jobs are threatened by automation and stagnation, meaning that social issues will matter even more, both globally and locally.

The new DNA of business

As business leaders, our opportunity is to create a better business, one that is fit for the future, that can act in more innovative and responsible ways.

How can we harness the potential of this relentless and disruptive change, harness the talents of people and the possibilities of technology? How can business, with all its power and resources, be a platform for change, and a force for good?

We need to find new codes to succeed. We need to find new ways to work, to recognise business as a system that be virtuous, where less can be more, and growth can go beyond the old limits. This demands that we make new connections:

  • Profit + Purpose … to achieve more enlightened progress
  • Technology + Humanity … to achieve more human ingenuity
  • Innovation + Sustainability … to achieve more positive impact

We need to create a new framework for business, a better business – to reimagine why and redesign how we work, as well as reinvent what and refocus where we do business.

Imagine a future business that looks forwards not back, that rises up to shape the future on its own terms, making sense of change to find new possibilities, inspiring people with vision and optimism. Imagine a future that inspires progress, seeks new sources of growth, embraces networks and partners to go further, and enables people to achieve more.

Imagine too, a future business that creates new opportunity spaces, by connecting novel ideas and untapped needs, creatively responding to new customer agendas. Imagine a future business that disrupts the disruptors, where large companies have the vision and courage to reimagine themselves and compete as equals to fast and entrepreneurial start-ups.

Imagine a future business that embraces humanity, searches for better ideas, that fuse technology and people in more enlightened ways, to solve the big problems of society, and improve everyone’s lives. Imagine a future business that works collectively, self-organises to thrive without hierarchy, connects with partners in rich ecosystems, designs jobs around people, to do inspiring work.

Imagine also, a future business which is continually transforming, that thrives by learning better and faster, develops a rich portfolio of business ideas and innovations to sustain growth and progress. Imagine a future business that creates positive impact on the world, benefits all stakeholders with a circular model of value creation, that addresses negatives, and creates a net positive impact for society.

Creating a better business is an opportunity for every person who works inside or alongside it. It is not just a noble calling, to do something better for the world, but also a practical calling, a way to overcome the many limits of today, and attain future success for you and your business.You could call it the dawn of a new capitalism.