Peter Fisk

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.

“Leading the Future” is about making sense of today’s rapidly changing world, but also understanding how to thrive 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.

“Business Recoded” was published earlier this 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.”

Here’s my keynote “Wave Riders: Leading the Future Megatrends” at the QSP Summit, Portugal.

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:

Q&A … ABOUT THE NEW BOOK … “BUSINESS RECODED”

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.

Keynote: “Marketing Recoded: What’s new, and not, in a world of relentless change?”

Download a summary of Peter’s Marketing Recoded keynote

“Every market is shaken up, with new challengers 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”

Keynote: “Friction-Free Marketing: The best brands are not about you” 

Download a summary of Peter’s Friction-Free Marketing keynote

“Consumer to consumer models are rapidly becoming the most effective marketing dynamics, social to superapps, collabs to  communities. Brands are about people, their passions and communities, not about business and its products and services”

• Q&A with Peter Fisk in advance of CAMP 2022
• New Marketing Agendas by Peter Fisk
• Business Recoded the new book from Peter Fisk

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.

Download a PDF summary of Peter Fisk’s Leading the Future Masterclass. 

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.

“Leading the Future” is about making sense of today’s rapidly changing world, but also understanding how to thrive 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.

“Business Recoded” was published earlier this 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.”

Here’s my keynote “Wave Riders: Leading the Future Megatrends” at the QSP Summit, Portugal.

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:

Q&A … ABOUT THE NEW BOOK … “BUSINESS RECODED”

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.

 

Savola Group’s mission is to have a positive impact on society, while generating profits and growth through strategic investment in the MENA (Middle East, North Africa) region. The group is composed of companies under two main entities (Savola Foods and Savola Retail), together with a specialized investment portfolio.

The business was founded in 1979 in the KSA as a small-scale company importing and refining vegetable oil for sale locally. Growth led in 1994 to the development of a sugar refinery in Jeddah, and geographical expansion into Egypt, Algeria, the Levant, Iran, Morocco, Sudan, and Kazakhstan. Prominent household brand names include Afia, Shams and Italiano. In 1998, the Savola entered the retail sector, acquiring the Panda grocery store chain, followed by minority investments in related companies including like Almarai, Herfy and Kinan.

Today, the group operates in over 50 countries, with a diverse range of business from edible oils, sugar, fresh dairy products, to supermarkets and restaurants serving fast foods.

Savola is committed to creating “value built on values”, with an organisation culture built around values of integrity, righteousness, fulfilment and persistence. In 2020, Savola was named one of the Top 20 Great Places to Work in KSA, ranked number 1 among non-financial businesses for corporate governance, and one of the Top 100 Companies in the Middle East by Forbes.

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:

Q&A … ABOUT THE NEW BOOK … “BUSINESS RECODED”

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.

• Download: Strategic Innovation Workshop
• Download: Strategic Innovation Workshop Toolkit
• Download: Strategic Innovation Additional Resources 

Al Ghurair Group is a diversified family-owned conglomerate based in the UAE.

The group’s origins trace back to the 1930s when Ahmad Al Ghurair and his son Saif were pearl divers in Dubai, going on to create the UAE’s first cement factory, flour mill, and sugar refinery.

There are three main lines of business – manufacturing, including petrochemicals, aluminium steel and packaging; real estate including shopping malls; and financial investments including a major stake in Mashreq Bank. The business also has an expanding global presence.

Looking to the future, the group seeks new growth opportunities with a diversifying portfolio, while adhering to its values of excellence, innovation and integrity. The group’s ambition is to triple net profits over the next 5 years, with 25% of profits coming from new activities.

Foresight and innovation will be key to unlocking assets and capabilities in new ways, guided by a purpose to enhance life. This will require new mindsets and perspectives, to link strategic horizons with ideation, to think differently about how to drive long-term, innovative growth.

 

Whilst creativity is about divergent thinking – opening up to explore new perspectives, make new connections, generate more ideas – innovation is about convergent thinking – evaluating the best ideas, focusing on making them practical and profitable, then making them happen effectively.

In my book “Creative Genius” we explore Leonardo da Vinci’s 8 principles, then apply them to today’s business world: being curious, exploring margins, reframing context, visualisation, resolving paradox, balancing art and science, making new connections and being alive.

I explored innovation with Sir Richard Branson, and the culture which he seeks to create across his Virgin companies, he reached for a pencil and paper and jotted down his equation of life … A+B+C+D (Always Be Connecting the Dots). Its not about creating newness, but making sense of what you have, maybe in fragments and different places, but can be shaped in new and interesting ways.

We spend much of our time collecting dots – seeking new insights, reading more books, generating more ideas – but too little time connecting dots. This requires confidence and creativity, to think bigger and laterally.

“The magic of connecting dots is that once you learn the techniques, the dots can change but you’ll still be good at connecting them.”

Indeed we live in an incredible world with so many great sources of ideas, insights and inspirations. I spend my exploring the world’s most innovative companies, the new markets which they shape, the business models which they develop, the new experiences they deliver to customers. There are so many ideas out there.

We have so many dots to connect …

• Connecting ideas with different ideas to create new and unusual concepts
• Connecting diverse people to combine talents, experience and perspectives
• Connecting customers with business to gain insight and engagement
• Connecting partners with business to gain capability and reach
• Connecting customer needs and wants, to solve bigger problems
• Connecting ideas from different places, across geographies and sectors
• Connecting products and services, into richer customer experiences
• Connecting markets in new ways, to operate different and better
• Connecting business with new business models to be more profitable
• Connecting media, channels and market networks to amplify the impact
• Connecting customers with customers to build richer communities

The real skill is to see the bigger picture, the bigger space in which you can make the new connections – and then to make new connections – interesting, unusual, distinctive, better. Even if at first you question how will it work, how will it make money, don’t be disheartened. By adding more connections you will soon find ways to implement and sell your uniqueness, often in ways you never imagined.

Innovation Recoded

Innovation in most companies is still mostly about products and services, whereas innovation has most impact when applied to business modelsand customer experiences. We therefore focus on business innovation, driven by your purpose and opportunity, and by thinking hard about what is the problem we are trying to solve, and the impact we want to make.

Innovation is therefore particularly about five important factors, looking across the whole business to open up, and then close down:

• Design thinking – embracing “insight” to understand the deeper motivations and aspirations of customers, through deep-dive immersion with individuals, connecting analytics with observation and intuition. Design thinking is about better defining the challenge – problem, opportunity – then being more human, creative and real in solving it.

• Making connections – fusing ideas to create richer “concepts”, but also learning from other places, from “parallel” markets where the same customers are already embracing change and new ideas, and then applying to your own market, as a pioneer. Connecting initial ideas into concepts makes them stronger and more distinctive.

• Creative disruption – how to be different, to challenge the conventions, break the rules, and redefine the markets in a different way – for example by technological simplification, or new customer behaviour. This creates rethinking – changing the who, why, what and how – and can potentially recalibrate the market.

• New business models – more dramatic and sustainable innovation usually involves changing the way the business works – in particular through new partnerships, and creating new revenue streams built around a strong value proposition at the core – this focuses on value propositions and business model design.

• Accelerating action – facilitating your best ideas to market better and faster, through challenge and support, bringing your best people together, adding external ideas to internal expertise, and disciplined process. This includes “lean thinking” techniques from minimal viable products, prototyping and then vortex market adoption.

10 types of innovation

After evaluating thousands of practical business innovations over recent years, researcher Jay Doblin found that  that most breakthroughs don’t necessarily stem from engineering inventions or rare discoveries. Instead, he categorised innovations within 10 distinct dimensions.

He then sought to understand which innovation create most value. First he looked at where most companies focus their innovation effort – not surprising, this focused on the offering (product, systems and  service). However far greater value was created through innovation in the business configuration (profit model and network), and to some extent, experience.

Here are examples of each type of innovation:

• Profit model: How you make money … the Financial Times pivoted from its traditional ad-driven media model to digital user subscriptions. Others: Gillette, Hilti.
• Network: Connections with others to create value … ARM, the world’s leading semiconductor business doesn’t make any thing, but licenses its designs to a network of partners to make with much great agility. Others: Target, Michael Graves
• Structure: Alignment of your talent and assets … Google’s 20% rule allows employees to work on side projects, that led to the creation of Gmail and Google News. Others: WL Gore, Zappos
• Process: Signature of superior methods for doing your work … McDonald’s franchises were encouraged to develop and launch their own food items, leading to wins like the Egg McMuffin. Others: Toyota, Zara

In the case of McDonald’s, the franchisee insight that led to the introduction of the Egg McMuffin spearheaded the company’s entire breakfast offering, which now accounts for 25% of revenues. Breakfast is also now the company’s most profitable segment.

• Product: Distinguishing features and functionality … Spotify created a seamless music streaming product that hugely outperformed competitors in terms of speed, responsiveness and user experience. Others: Dyson, Corning.
• Product system: Complementary products and services … Apple built an extensive ecosystem of products that work together, creating additional value for users. Others: Oscar Meyer, Mozilla.

Apple has a reputation for innovation, but the product ecosystem highlighted above is an underappreciated piece of the company’s strategy. By putting thought into the ecosystem of products—and ensuring they work together flawlessly—additional utility is created, while also making it harder for customers to switch away from Apple products.

• Service: Support and enhancements that surround your offerings … Amazon Prime comes with free and fast delivery, which can have products to your home within 2 hours in some urban areas. Others: Singapore Airlines, Timpsons.
• Channel: How your offerings are delivered to customers and users … Nespresso locks in customers with its Nespresso Club as well as through ongoing sales of  its own single use coffee pods. Others: Birchbox, Nike.
• Brand: Representation of your offerings and business … Patagonia’s brand activism and links to environmental causes gives it a unique position in the outdoor apparel market. Others: Intel, Virgin.
• Customer engagement: Distinctive interactions you foster … Mercedes launched an augmented reality owner’s manual that replaces its traditional guides, personalised with driver and car data. Others: Blizzard, Disney.

In the early days of the internet, online shipping was precarious at best—but Amazon’s introduction of Amazon Prime and free and fast shipping for all members has transformed its online retail. Executing on such a promise was no small task, but today there are 150 million users of Prime worldwide, receiving their deliveries within two hours in urban areas.

The most innovative companies typically innovate in multiple dimensions at the same time.

Nike, is probably a product performance company at its core, producing leading sportswear and equipment for decades. Back in 1985 they innovated by signing then rookie basketball star Michael Jordan to endorse the Nike brand, a trend that continues today.

In 1990, Niketown was launched – a channel innovation, retail as theatre. The flagship stores cost millions, and were clearly never going to produce a return on investment by selling goods in store. Instead the initiative was funded by the advertising budget; the stores could do more to build brand innovation than any ad campaign.

In recent times Nike has launched Nike+, an innovative product system which is integrated into the sportswear range, and allows runners and athletes to track their movements. It also integrated with Apple products in a network innovation. These steps alone touch on half of the ten types, and as a result Nike is consistently one of the leading brand names in the world.

Below, the historic market performance graph shows how companies with more types of innovation further outperform the market.

Peter Fisk on innovation

Peter Fisk helps you to innovate, further and faster. This can be either through fast and focused facilitation using the “Innolab” methodology that brings expert support to help you make the best ideas happen faster, through to the broader challenges of developing a creative culture, and innovation strategy – from capability diagnostics to portfolio management.

Examples of recent clients include

• American Express: Innovation mindset and breakthrough projects, developing a shared process and culture for innovation.
• Aster Atelier: Reimagining the fashion business for one of the largest private label manufactures on the high street, how to be better and go direct.
• Coty: rethinking business models for a very different future of beauty – consumer change, market disruption, finding new growth.
• Canon: FutureBook, creating the future of printing and publishing, positioning Canon as the thought leader of its customers world.
• Erste Bank: How banks can innovate for innovators, by recognising the roles of finance and advice at each point in the start up, and scale up, journey for small businesses.
• GSK: Rethinking healthcare around patients and doctors, from an old model of product-centric selling to a new future of patient-centric wellbeing.
• Vodafone: Creating a global strategy for sustainable innovation, by focusing on what the brand can uniquely enable, through its subscriber network, rather than just do itself.

Here is the 4D innovation process which Peter uses as a starting point for implementing effective innovation capabilities and processes within organisations:

Explore more about innovation

• Book: “Creative Genius: The Business Leaders Innovation Handbook”
• Book: “People Planet Profit: How to Drive Sustainable Growth“
• Article: Never Stop Reinventing
• Article: Innovate like Leonardo Da Vinci
• Article: Finding your Magic
• Article: Innovative Business models
• Workshop: “Business Innovation Lab: insight to innovation to implementation”
• Workshop: “Creative Disruption: reinventing your business and market”

How will you become a Gamechanger?

The Global AMP is all about transformational growth, of you as a leader, and how you can drive transformation in your business.

It’s not just about leading your current business, sustaining the strategies that others have created. As markets change, your business needs to change. You as the future leader, need to take your business to the next place. To change the game.

That means thinking beyond your current strategy, and your ways of competing and operating – beyond what your current leaders think, as priorities and possibilities. You need to challenge the conventions, the assumptions, and the limits.

Why does the Gamechanger Project matter?

This is your opportunity to develop a new blueprint for the future of your business – or even a new business of your own – and how you will make it happen. And it’s real. Not an exercise, or fantasy. Your future business starts here.

The gamechanger project is one of the most valuable parts of the Global AMP. Both in terms of learning, and ensuring you and your future business get a significant return on your time and financial investment. The project runs throughout the duration of the program – helping you to apply all the best ideas and tools as you progress – and presenting your blueprint on graduation day.

As Global AMP academic director, I’m here to help you. You can also talk to people in your own business – maybe find a sponsor (your CEO?) or develop a project team – even during these early stages. We will have group sessions, and one-to-one sessions, including during each of the XDots at the end of each module.  And you can contact me at any time for advice.

What are some examples of Gamechanger Projects?

Over the last few years, Global AMP participants have each developed their projects, and then taken them back to their businesses for implementation, and to shape their own futures. Here are just a few examples:

• In USA, Eloine is founder of a PR agency supporting African business. She had a passion to do much more for African companies, creating a venture fund and start-up incubator, connecting Africa with the world.
• In Portugal, Ricardo is CEO of a real estate business. He wanted to do more for clients, shifting from selling homes, to being a lifestyle hub for local communities, delivered with partners, driving new growth.
• In South Africa, Carel is MD of business banking. He wanted to improve the speed of offering business loans 10 times. He transformed the process, cutting through old red tape, and lunched a new service.
• In Turkey, Ahu was CEO of her family’s traditional car parts business. While sustaining the old business, she created a new ventures business to drive transformation, launching an electric charging business.
• In Mexico, Carlos was COO of a leading alcoholic drinks business. He wanted to explore how to tap into the fast growth craft beer market, and so created a new business model to support independent brewers.
• In Dubai, Sophie was founder of a woman’s forum and investment fund. She wanted to shift online to reach more people, creating a platform ranking companies on diversity metrics, and driving improvement.
• In Latin America, Carolina is CFO of an energy business. She explored how to use a key asset – the optic fibre distribution network – in new ways, shifting to also become a communications business.

Sometimes, people even find that the project takes them in new directions, and they start a new venture, either within or beyond their existing business, to make their dream come true.

How can I use the Gamechanger Toolkit?

You are smart and experienced, so you don’t need to just follow a process. But to help you, I have developed a toolkit with a wide range of templates and frameworks to help you think, and apply the Global AMP content.

• Gamechanger Toolkit … a collection of templates to help you think and develop, over the 6 months of your project

Use the tools gradually during the program – we will focus on specific ones, in specific sessions – but also you can jump around and explore ideas, go back and redo the early tools again later, and embrace others too.

I have brought together over 200 resources – inspiring articles, trend reports, case studies, toolkits and more – which you can explore for inspiration as you wish.

• Future Recoded … useful resources about futures, trends, scenarios, purpose, and change
• Growth Recoded … useful resources about strategy, markets, brands, customers, sustainability
• Innovation Recoded  … useful resources about innovation, creativity, design, business models
• Work Recoded… useful resources about people, organisations, teams, agility, transformation
• Leadership Recoded … useful resources about leadership, courage, and high performance

I have also profiled over 100 business leaders, and 100 most inspiring companies, largely through one to one interviews and published in my various books. You can dip into them here:

• 100 Leaders … from Anne Wojcicki to Bernard Arnault, Cristina Junqueira to Zhang Yimin, and many more.
• 100 Companies … from %Arabica to 1Atelier, 77 Diamonds to A Boring Life, Aerofarms to Alibaba, and more.

Additionally there’s a wide range of useful resources – personally, I chose to search for new insight and ideas in Business Insider, CB Insights, Fast Company, Inc Magazine, McKinsey Insights, Strategy & Business, and many others.

Getting started in Spring 2022

As we have a short pause in the Global AMP, now is a great time to get started thinking about your projects. We have three extra sessions to inspire your thinking, and to learn from other companies and entrepreneurs.

Here are the next dates:

In preparation for an interactive session, I would like you to do some prework – it’s simple – to watch three videos of inspiring business entrepreneurs and corporate leaders, and be ready to talk about them in our online session.

I want you to be curious and interested – in them as people, and in their ideas – so you might also want to check out their businesses more directly, and what they are doing right now.

What can you learn from each of them?

#1 Tan Le, founder of Emotiv …  is merging the human brain with technology and blurring the line between science fiction and reality. But before changing other people’s lives, she had to change her own.

#3 Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe co-founder & CEO …  on the benefits of DNA testing, and the future of medicine. Recently she partnered with Richard Branson’s Virgin Investments to take the genetics business public.

How will you become a Gamechanger?

The Global AMP is all about transformational growth, of you as a leader, and how you can drive transformation in your business.

It’s not just about leading your current business, sustaining the strategies that others have created. As markets change, your business needs to change. You as the future leader, need to take your business to the next place. To change the game.

That means thinking beyond your current strategy, and your ways of competing and operating – beyond what your current leaders think, as priorities and possibilities. You need to challenge the conventions, the assumptions, and the limits.

Why does the Gamechanger Project matter?

This is your opportunity to develop a new blueprint for the future of your business – or even a new business of your own – and how you will make it happen. And it’s real. Not an exercise, or fantasy. Your future business starts here.

The gamechanger project is one of the most valuable parts of the Global AMP. Both in terms of learning, and ensuring you and your future business get a significant return on your time and financial investment. The project runs throughout the duration of the program – helping you to apply all the best ideas and tools as you progress – and presenting your blueprint on graduation day.

As Global AMP academic director, I’m here to help you. You can also talk to people in your own business – maybe find a sponsor (your CEO?) or develop a project team – even during these early stages. We will have group sessions, and one-to-one sessions, including during each of the XDots at the end of each module.  And you can contact me at any time for advice.

What are some examples of Gamechanger Projects?

Over the last few years, Global AMP participants have each developed their projects, and then taken them back to their businesses for implementation, and to shape their own futures. Here are just a few examples:

• In USA, Eloine is founder of a PR agency supporting African business. She had a passion to do much more for African companies, creating a venture fund and start-up incubator, connecting Africa with the world.
• In Portugal, Ricardo is CEO of a real estate business. He wanted to do more for clients, shifting from selling homes, to being a lifestyle hub for local communities, delivered with partners, driving new growth.
• In South Africa, Carel is MD of business banking. He wanted to improve the speed of offering business loans 10 times. He transformed the process, cutting through old red tape, and lunched a new service.
• In Turkey, Ahu was CEO of her family’s traditional car parts business. While sustaining the old business, she created a new ventures business to drive transformation, launching an electric charging business.
• In Mexico, Carlos was COO of a leading alcoholic drinks business. He wanted to explore how to tap into the fast growth craft beer market, and so created a new business model to support independent brewers.
• In Dubai, Sophie was founder of a woman’s forum and investment fund. She wanted to shift online to reach more people, creating a platform ranking companies on diversity metrics, and driving improvement.
• In Latin America, Carolina is CFO of an energy business. She explored how to use a key asset – the optic fibre distribution network – in new ways, shifting to also become a communications business.

Sometimes, people even find that the project takes them in new directions, and they start a new venture, either within or beyond their existing business, to make their dream come true.

How can I use the Gamechanger Toolkit?

You are smart and experienced, so you don’t need to just follow a process. But to help you, I have developed a toolkit with a wide range of templates and frameworks to help you think, and apply the Global AMP content.

• Gamechanger Toolkit … a collection of templates to help you think and develop, over the 6 months of your project

Use the tools gradually during the program – we will focus on specific ones, in specific sessions – but also you can jump around and explore ideas, go back and redo the early tools again later, and embrace others too.

I have brought together over 200 resources – inspiring articles, trend reports, case studies, toolkits and more – which you can explore for inspiration as you wish.

• Future Recoded … useful resources about futures, trends, scenarios, purpose, and change
• Growth Recoded … useful resources about strategy, markets, brands, customers, sustainability
• Innovation Recoded  … useful resources about innovation, creativity, design, business models
• Work Recoded… useful resources about people, organisations, teams, agility, transformation
• Leadership Recoded … useful resources about leadership, courage, and high performance

I have also profiled over 100 business leaders, and 100 most inspiring companies, largely through one to one interviews and published in my various books. You can dip into them here:

• 100 Leaders … from Anne Wojcicki to Bernard Arnault, Cristina Junqueira to Zhang Yimin, and many more.
• 100 Companies … from %Arabica to 1Atelier, 77 Diamonds to A Boring Life, Aerofarms to Alibaba, and more.

Additionally there’s a wide range of useful resources – personally, I chose to search for new insight and ideas in Business Insider, CB Insights, Fast Company, Inc Magazine, McKinsey Insights, Strategy & Business, and many others.

Getting started in Spring 2022

As we have a short pause in the Global AMP, now is a great time to get started thinking about your projects. We have three extra sessions to inspire your thinking, and to learn from other companies and entrepreneurs.

Here are the next dates:

In preparation for an interactive session, I would like you to do some prework – it’s simple – to watch three videos of inspiring business entrepreneurs and corporate leaders, and be ready to talk about them in our online session.

I want you to be curious and interested – in them as people, and in their ideas – so you might also want to check out their businesses more directly, and what they are doing right now.

What can you learn from each of them?

#1 Tan Le, founder of Emotiv …  is merging the human brain with technology and blurring the line between science fiction and reality. But before changing other people’s lives, she had to change her own.

#3 Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe co-founder & CEO …  on the benefits of DNA testing, and the future of medicine. Recently she partnered with Richard Branson’s Virgin Investments to take the genetics business public.

How will you become a Gamechanger?

The Global AMP is all about transformational growth, of you as a leader, and how you can drive transformation in your business.

It’s not just about leading your current business, sustaining the strategies that others have created. As markets change, your business needs to change. You as the future leader, need to take your business to the next place. To change the game.

That means thinking beyond your current strategy, and your ways of competing and operating – beyond what your current leaders think, as priorities and possibilities. You need to challenge the conventions, the assumptions, and the limits.

Why does the Gamechanger Project matter?

This is your opportunity to develop a new blueprint for the future of your business – or even a new business of your own – and how you will make it happen. And it’s real. Not an exercise, or fantasy. Your future business starts here.

The gamechanger project is one of the most valuable parts of the Global AMP. Both in terms of learning, and ensuring you and your future business get a significant return on your time and financial investment. The project runs throughout the duration of the program – helping you to apply all the best ideas and tools as you progress – and presenting your blueprint on graduation day.

As Global AMP academic director, I’m here to help you. You can also talk to people in your own business – maybe find a sponsor (your CEO?) or develop a project team – even during these early stages. We will have group sessions, and one-to-one sessions, including during each of the XDots at the end of each module.  And you can contact me at any time for advice.

What are some examples of Gamechanger Projects?

Over the last few years, Global AMP participants have each developed their projects, and then taken them back to their businesses for implementation, and to shape their own futures. Here are just a few examples:

• In USA, Eloine is founder of a PR agency supporting African business. She had a passion to do much more for African companies, creating a venture fund and start-up incubator, connecting Africa with the world.
• In Portugal, Ricardo is CEO of a real estate business. He wanted to do more for clients, shifting from selling homes, to being a lifestyle hub for local communities, delivered with partners, driving new growth.
• In South Africa, Carel is MD of business banking. He wanted to improve the speed of offering business loans 10 times. He transformed the process, cutting through old red tape, and lunched a new service.
• In Turkey, Ahu was CEO of her family’s traditional car parts business. While sustaining the old business, she created a new ventures business to drive transformation, launching an electric charging business.
• In Mexico, Carlos was COO of a leading alcoholic drinks business. He wanted to explore how to tap into the fast growth craft beer market, and so created a new business model to support independent brewers.
• In Dubai, Sophie was founder of a woman’s forum and investment fund. She wanted to shift online to reach more people, creating a platform ranking companies on diversity metrics, and driving improvement.
• In Latin America, Carolina is CFO of an energy business. She explored how to use a key asset – the optic fibre distribution network – in new ways, shifting to also become a communications business.

Sometimes, people even find that the project takes them in new directions, and they start a new venture, either within or beyond their existing business, to make their dream come true.

How can I use the Gamechanger Toolkit?

You are smart and experienced, so you don’t need to just follow a process. But to help you, I have developed a toolkit with a wide range of templates and frameworks to help you think, and apply the Global AMP content.

• Gamechanger Toolkit … a collection of templates to help you think and develop, over the 6 months of your project

Use the tools gradually during the program – we will focus on specific ones, in specific sessions – but also you can jump around and explore ideas, go back and redo the early tools again later, and embrace others too.

I have brought together over 200 resources – inspiring articles, trend reports, case studies, toolkits and more – which you can explore for inspiration as you wish.

• Future Recoded … useful resources about futures, trends, scenarios, purpose, and change
• Growth Recoded … useful resources about strategy, markets, brands, customers, sustainability
• Innovation Recoded  … useful resources about innovation, creativity, design, business models
• Work Recoded… useful resources about people, organisations, teams, agility, transformation
• Leadership Recoded … useful resources about leadership, courage, and high performance

I have also profiled over 100 business leaders, and 100 most inspiring companies, largely through one to one interviews and published in my various books. You can dip into them here:

• 100 Leaders … from Anne Wojcicki to Bernard Arnault, Cristina Junqueira to Zhang Yimin, and many more.
• 100 Companies … from %Arabica to 1Atelier, 77 Diamonds to A Boring Life, Aerofarms to Alibaba, and more.

Additionally there’s a wide range of useful resources – personally, I chose to search for new insight and ideas in Business Insider, CB Insights, Fast Company, Inc Magazine, McKinsey Insights, Strategy & Business, and many others.

Getting started in Spring 2022

As we have a short pause in the Global AMP, now is a great time to get started thinking about your projects. We have three extra sessions to inspire your thinking, and to learn from other companies and entrepreneurs.

Here are the next dates:

In preparation for an interactive session, I would like you to do some prework – it’s simple – to watch three videos of inspiring business entrepreneurs and corporate leaders, and be ready to talk about them in our online session.

I want you to be curious and interested – in them as people, and in their ideas – so you might also want to check out their businesses more directly, and what they are doing right now.

What can you learn from each of them?

#1 Tan Le, founder of Emotiv …  is merging the human brain with technology and blurring the line between science fiction and reality. But before changing other people’s lives, she had to change her own.

Read more about Tan Le: Connecting you, your brain, and the world

#3 Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe co-founder & CEO …  on the benefits of DNA testing, and the future of medicine. Recently she partnered with Richard Branson’s Virgin Investments to take the genetics business public.

Read more about Anne Wojcicki: Decoding and recoding the future of healthcare

Keanu Reeves described his 1999 movie “The Matrix” as a wake-up call to the speed of our changing world. Two decades later we can see many of the movie’s themes in our everyday lives – the primacy of the individual, disregard for the old system, anti-corporate backlash, the blur of fake and reality.

Today’s markets are a matrix of possibilities, where we could say that almost nothing has changed in those last 20 years, or everything has. The lens by which you see your market shapes everything else about what you do, your strategy and innovation, and how you work, your organisation and people. Time for leaders to wake up.

Customers don’t live in sectors or segments

We used to think of markets as defined spaces – industry sectors – with clear boundaries and categorisation, industry standards and predictable competition. And then markets started to blur and fragment.

Amazon disrupts fashion, Alphabet disrupts travel, Apple disrupts healthcare, Tesla disrupts energy, Alibaba disrupts finance, Snap disrupts movies.

Sectors like telecoms and technology, communication and media, data and information, entertainment and gaming, converge into each other. Or pharmaceuticals and healthcare, wellness and food, fashion and sport, become a boundaryless continuum.

You can define your business any way you want. What kind of company are you? What market are you in? Anyone can frame their market “space” in this new market matrix.

The blur of boundaries has evolved in multi-dimensions

• The blur of digital and physical: Fortnite’s online games become a physical stadium event, Nike’s flagship stores are navigated and enhanced by smartphones, L’Oréal’s magic mirror customises your cosmetics and delivers to your home.
• The blur of products and services: Harley Davidson’s holidays embrace bike hire plus flights and hotels, Adobe’s software is delivered “as a service”, Disneyland experiences can be planned and continued online at home.
• The blur of categories and sectors: Grab is a delivery company with a data and finance core, CVS is a pharmacy that reframed as a health and wellness store, athleisure wear is sporting apparel made stylish for everyday fashion.
• The blur of industry and functional roles: IBM was the computer manufacturer who became trusted advisor, Amazon is a retailer but also a leading brand of own-label products and services, Casper the mattress sold direct to consumers.
• The blur of business and consumer: Glossier is a cosmetics brand but equally a community of people who share and co-create, Avon is a brand of consumer sellers, Rapha calls its stores Cycle Clubs, meeting places as well as retail stores.

Taking advantage of non-linear value chains, and brands that have evolved beyond descriptors of products, manufacturers can think like retailers, creating direct to consumer (DTC) channels, with more trust and style than a commoditising intermediary. Think of Apple or Allbirds, Dollar Shave Club or Warby Parker.

Equally retailers like Carrefour and Target realised that private label products don’t have to be inferior to the products of consumer brands like Heinz and P&G. Indeed, many are made by the same manufacturers. Retailers have many advantages, with more opportunities to engage consumers more intimately, to add adjacent services such as advice, and understand consumers personally. Target could be a stronger brand than P&G.

 Multi-dimensional markets

 What are the major challenges for the markets of today, new business models, sustainable impacts, and rapidly changing aspirations of stakeholders?

• Automotive: Facing its most profound change in 100 years, with autonomous vehicles, electrification and other fuels, new models of ownership and connected ecosystems. Add to this, AI and smart road infrastructure, connectivity and entertainment. Issues like safety will still matter, Volvo for example, is installing new sensors to detect poor driving, intoxication or excess speed, and take action.
• Beauty: Personalisation and environmentally friendly products are key to the future of skin and colour products, with new science creating sophisticated functionality. Influencers like Michelle Phan rather than advertising shapes attitudes, whilst the subscription models of Birchbox and direct to consumer models of Beauty Pie have transformed the traditional purchase experience from instore to bathroom.
• Energy: Decarbonisation, decentralisation and digitalisation are the key challenges for every power generator or distributor. As oil and gas, mining and fracking, give way to solar and wind, there is also a shift to city and home management, from local generation to automated control. Lanzatech turning waste into clean energy, Fluence a huge battery business from Siemens, and Watty are typical disruptors.
• Fashion: New materials, new business models and new technologies are transforming fashion. From Agua Bendita’s beautiful bikinis made out of scraps to Bolt Thread’s synthetic spider silk, Unspun’s custom-made jeans using a 20 second Fit3D bodyscan to ThredUP’s resale platform, environmental impact has become the biggest issues in an industry which is one of the biggest polluters.
• Finance: Digital entrants and emerging technologies are transforming banking, from DBS transforming to become “invisible” inside other services, to Atom and Number26 seeking speed and simplicity. Lemonade has embraced AI to transform the business model of insurance, while AXA explores new applications of blockchain, and cryptocurrencies evolve.
• Food and drink: Wellness and sustainability have topped the agendas of major businesses like Danone, Nestle and Unilever, whilst animal and dairy-based categories have been challenged by plant-based alternatives such as Impossible and Beyond Meat. New channels and business models have been driven by a huge rise in snacking and on-the-go markets, plus home delivery and meal kits.
• Healthcare: From positive health to personalised pharma, people are seeking to engage with healthcare in new ways. Combine 23andMe genetic profiling with PatientsLikeMe’s peer to peer advice, Babylon’s AI-enabled diagnostics and wearable health trackers, Minute Clinic’s simple consultations and Zipline’s drone deliveries, Organova’s 3D printed organs, gene editing and personalised medicines.
• Media: Playing games to streaming television, virtual reality and instant messaging, have transformed how we immerse ourselves in content. New business models, in particular subscription, enable access across platforms, as we now shift to content that is even more user-generated and interactive. Platforms like Twitch and Spotify will become more important in curating content and building community.
• Retail: In a sector dominated by Amazon, innovators like Shopify have helped direct brands to sell and deliver faster. Glossier has shown the power of community and pop-up stores, whilst Etsy has allowed artisans to reach the world, Alibaba embraces gamification to engage consumers more deeply, whilst intelligent delivery businesses like Meituan Dianping know consumers most personally.
• Technology: AI and cloud will embed tech ever further into our lives, enabling more intelligent and individual choices and behaviours. In telecoms the shift to 5G will enable realtime engagement like never before, video-based content will accelerate with particular application to education and work, whilst our primary user interfaces will continue to shift to voice, eye tracking, and ultimately the brain.
• Travel: AI will drive transportation to become automated, intelligent and efficient, health and environmental issues will continue to challenge airlines, hospitality and vacations. The shift to cleaner fuels and responsible tourism will be accelerated through innovations like those of Selina’s nomadic places to live, Lilium’s electric flying cars, and Ctrip in the huge Asian travel market.

What business are you really in?

 Within the next decade, automotive companies will no longer sell cars, instead facilitating mobility on-demand, ride sharing and logistics services. They could also converge with other service providers such as scooters and trains, planes and hotels, energy and telecoms. Within the next decade we will subscribe to smart homes, which will manage our utilities, organise our shopping, stream our entertainment.

Who will provide these services? Tesla has long defined itself as an energy company, rather than an auto manufacturer. With “accelerate to renewable energy” as its defined purpose, it has a diversified business in batteries, energy systems and transportation. Indeed, it combines sales of cars with Powerwall charging systems, and even its solar roof tiles, creating an all-in-one subscription model that transforms value perceptions.

And there will be completely new markets too. Here are just a few examples of areas that are expected to be worth at least $100 billion by 2025: autonomous vehicles, IOT software and sensors, tissue engineering, smart grid technology and renewable energy.

 The best way to “frame” your market space is around customers, and what you enable them to do. Like we defined purpose, define your market around why you exist, rather than just what you do, or how you do it. The “why” framing gives you a much richer space to play in, a broad range of market opportunities which by definition are desired, and more valuable to your customers.

Framing your market space is also a source of competitive advantage. By framing it differently from your competitors, you define your business and the value you offer in a more inspiring way. A new frame sets you alongside different alternatives, with different value perceptions and market models.

Consider other stakeholders too. Ask your employees, would they prefer to work in a telecom or tech company, a drug or wellness company? Similarly form alternatively framed markets will be seen with different risks and rewards, directly affecting your market value.

Discussion starters:

• It’s easy to say think customer, but much harder to make it work. Most companies are still product-driven rather than customer-driven.
• Customers are not average, customers are not products, customers are not really interested in banking. Yet we still define banking around what matters to us.
• Every market is shaken up, accelerated by pandemic – NextEra beats Exxon, Nio beats BMW, Kweichou Moutai beats Coca Cola, Visa beats every bank.
• So what makes a great customer experience – fair advice, simple products, efficient response – yes, but it’s not what we do, it’s what customers do in their lives.
• Think about Nike – “We are not a sportswear company, we are a sports company” – what does that mean? How could it apply to your business?