Events Archive - Page 23 of 53

We live in the most incredible time. More change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years. Technologies with the power to help us leap forwards in unimaginable ways. To transform business, to drive radical innovation. to accelerate growth and achieve progress in the broader world too.

Artificial intelligence and robotics will come together with new mindsets and business models to disrupt everything from entertainment to education, healthcare and travel. For businesses, large and small, it creates a new playing field, with many new possibilities. For people, young and old, it brings new challenges and opportunities. For leaders, it demands new perspectives, new values, and radical new thinking.

“Leading Change” is about having the courage to achieve more. It is about stepping up to see further ahead, to explore more radical ideas, to discover new talents, to seize bigger opportunities, to have more influence, and to positively amplify your impact.

It’s about daring to be more.

Going beyond the ordinary to achieve extra ordinary results. It requires new thinking, and new approaches. It demands change. It probably requires that you are the change. Leading yourself and your business to a new place, to win in today and tomorrow’s world.

“Leading Change” is about rising up to lead the future of your business … There are 7 elevations, 7 ways for leaders to raise their game, that we will explore:

Winning… to rise above the pursuit of progress through incrementalism, to develop a future mindset, a forwards orientation, redefining success and how to achieve it.
Sensing… to rise above the chaos of change to see the drivers of tomorrow, making sense of complexity and uncertainty, finding the best new opportunities.
Framing… to rise above the limitations of business as a profit machine, to capture a higher purpose, guided by the desire, strategies and choices, to make life better.
Creating … to rise above the obsession for technologies, whilst harnessing their intelligence and capabilities, to innovate more radically for people and society.
Delivering … to rise above the limitations of big and small, incumbent or start-up, transforming organisations, fusing brands and networks with speed and agility.
Teaming … to rise above what we each contribute separately, to harness the power of diversity and collaboration, people and platforms, achieving more together.
Leading … to rise up to be the leader of the future business, with courage to embrace change and progress, inspire and enable others, finding your own magic.

Consider some of the challenges of our changing world:

In the last 25 years, China’s share of global manufacturing output has grown from 2% to 25%. Over that time China’s GDP has grown thirty-fold.
In the last two decades, 9.6% of the earth’s total wilderness areas has been lost, equalling an estimated 3.3 million square km.
51% of job activities can be automated, only 5% of jobs entirely replaceable by machines. However more new occupations will emerge than those lost.
New digital technologies can enable a 20% reduction in global carbon emissions by 2030, equivalent to eliminating more than China and India’s CO₂
Car sharing could reduce the number of cars needed by 90% by 2035, resulting in only 17% as many cars as there are today.
CEO pay has risen 1,000% over the last 40 years, howeveraverage worker pay has increased by just 11%, essentially stagnating taking into account inflation
72% of people feel that companies have become more dishonest. 93% of CEOs believe it’s important to engender trust that their company “will do the right thing”.

How will you rise up to do better?

Idea 1. More change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years.

How will you shape the future of your business? From the steam engine to the telephone, automobiles and aeroplanes, space travel and digital revolution, the world has moved forwards rapidly since the industrial revolution. Today’s revolution, driven by aspects such of robotics and AI, will be just as dramatic, but much faster. The next decade’s accelerating change, proliferation of technologies, rapid speed of adaption, and the exponential impacts that result, will dwarf the scale of previous progress. How will we rethink and reinvent our worlds?

Idea 2. Infinite potential, significant choices

How will you seize the opportunities of incredible change? Markets rise and fall, collide and evolve. Power shifts economically and politically, culturally and collectively. Young, intriguing start-ups grab the attention, whilst the older incumbent companies struggle to respond and adapt. Technology, most significantly, disrupts the rules of play, and the possibilities by which we can win. The challenge and opportunities are immense, but where to focus is not obvious. You have more choices than ever before, in terms of who, where, what and how. Global or local? China or India? Online or physical? Human or machines? Make or partner? The choices of course, are not binary or separate, but a huge spectrum of options. How will you make the smarter choices, the right choices for your future?

Idea 3. The paradox of “forwards versus backwards”

Are you doing what you’ve always done? Everybody struggles with this tension, spending too much time looking backwards, and not enough looking forwards. We pour over last year’s performance, learning from previous customers, talking about what we currently know, and rewarded for our past successes. We believe in the formula that got us to where we are, commercially and personally, afraid to let go of it. Yet the past is no longer a guide to the future. The future isn’t like it used to be, a continuation of today. It’s volatile, complex and ambiguous. Too many companies spend most of their time playing the old game, optimising their existing models, and trying to stretch the model which made them successful in the past. Are you looking forwards or backwards?

Idea 4. Pivot to the future

Start with a future mindset. New strategies, acquiring a few start-ups, and driving a program of innovation are not enough. They are typically framed in the context of the old world, the existing business, and an outdated mindset. Top-down business planning, stage-gate product development, and functional operations just don’t work in this new volatile and vibrant context. The old business thrived on stability and predictability, efficiency and repetition. What matters most is the mindset, the attitude to want to change, to be open to new ideas, to have a passion for the future, and to shape it in your own vision. A “growth mindset” is about exploring what’s next, whilst a “fixed mindset” seeks perfection, to optimise the status quo. Best of all, is a “future mindset” which embraces experimentation and growth, to see and shape the future to your advantage.

Idea 5. Build your future-proof business

Start-ups have all the advantages, don’t they? Corporate executives sit in their offices looking out with envy at the speed and agility of small companies, with their ability to start afresh with legacy infrastructures, to grab the new investment and focus on stretching and single-minded dreams, to inspire customers with their funky newness and new business models, and to easily for partnerships. Whilst “speedboats” have many advantages, the “supertankers” have their own strengths. Their challenge is to reimagine how they use their assets in new and powerful ways. Established audiences and diverse portfolios, established supply and distribution networks, experienced people and trusted reputations. The question is how to reimagine the business, to harness what exists and embrace the new. Start-ups and corporates both have advantages, it’s how they use them that matters. The future-proofed business combines the best of both speedboats and supertankers. Size is not the important thing. Transformation is not a one-off. Innovation and transformation are relentless in today’s world. Knowing what you will do next, and next, and next, matters. The future-proof organisation has a built-in appetite to keep reinventing itself.

Idea 6. Harness the power of ideas and networks

What makes a business successful? It’s certainly not about being the biggest company. Anybody can make lots of products, and sell them, usually at a discount. Equally, any company can have a great market share, if they just redefine the boundaries, or don’t care about profitability. So how did WhatsApp create $19 billion in 3 years with 17 people? Or Uber $66 billion in 6 years? Or Alibaba $470 billion in 13 years? They harnessed the power of addictive ideas – concepts, brands and experiences that spread rapidly across their target audiences. They harness the power of networks, in the form of platforms and ecosystems, affiliates and licensees, social media and online communities. The impact is exponential, in that it rapidly multiplies in reach and richness.

Idea 7. Be the radical optimist

Be curious and optimistic. Believe in a better world. What will it take to create the future of your business? If you don’t somebody will need to. Will your legacy be that you managed to postpone the demise of a sinking ship for a little longer, trying to survive in unchartered waters? Or will you be the navigator of incredible new voyages, with a fit for purpose boat, seizing the opportunities of new lands? Innovation today is less about products and services, more about markets and businesses. Transformation is probably a better word, because it demands holistic change. It also becomes relentless, not a short intervention, to get you to a new steady state, but a dynamic business for dynamic markets. Most of all, it starts with, and depends upon, you. Your mindset. Your transformation. Your leadership.

Idea 8. New technologies enhance our human and business potential

Is AI your rocket fuel to the future?Digital platforms like Alibaba and Airbnb bring millions of buyers and sellers together, big data analytics enable precision and predictive experiences like Netflix, 3D printing deletes factories and distributors from value chains, blockchain localises connections and decisions, robotics augments your capabilities, and perhaps most powerfully, AI can reinvent the very essence of what you do. Collectively they accelerate and converge, disrupt and transform every business function, across ever industry. Industry 4.0 is a revolution that challenges the existence of millions of businesses and jobs, Amazon can seem like the enemy of most retailers, Snapchat can feel like the insane distraction of our kids. Yet these technologies also create the possibilities to learn and live in new ways, for even the most traditional business, a local craftsman or a remote trader, to do more, better and cheaper, and go further and faster.

Idea 9. This is the Asian century. Time to follow the new Silk Road

Will you be the Marco Polo of China’s new Belt and Road? 5 billion people, two thirds of the world’s megacities, one third of the global economy, two-thirds of global economic growth, thirty of the Fortune 100, six of the ten largest banks, eight of the ten largest armies, five nuclear powers, massive technological innovation, the newest crop of top-ranked universities. Asia is also the world’s most ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse region of the planet, eluding any remotely meaningful generalization beyond the geographic label itself. Even for Asians, Asia is dizzying to navigate.

Idea 10. Customers have new agendas, markets have new structures

What are the new drivers of value? Markets have super-segmented, driven by their individual needs, expectations and the ability of technology to engage each person uniquely. As trust in brands declines, they demand more value and greater transparency, and they turn to friends and peers for recommendation. They work on their terms not yours, requiring you to connect with their worlds – fusing public and private, digital and physical, personal and professional – changing contexts for purchase and the nature of value. Collectively as communities and society, their priorities have changed, beyond fairness and environment, demanding more, and rewarding those who deliver.

Idea 11. The paradox of “order versus chaos”

How do you make sense of all this complexity?Our inclination is to seek clarity, to put this new world into boxes, that make choices and targeting easy. But the world no longer lives in a convenient order, and any attempt to order it would miss the dynamic richness, and the new marketspaces. Day fuses with night, home with work, education with entertainment, rich with poor, male with female. There are no straight lines, instead we have brilliant ambiguities. The apparent chaos is the new order. Take customer insight for example, where the old method of seeking average insights about what we already know, is replaced by anthropological discovery, or “design thinking” to explore people in their changing lives. Sometimes it is about reducing chaos and complexity, to find focus and simplicity. Yet newness is often found in the complexity, outside of the old boxes.

Idea 12. Making sense of complexity demands a new worldview

What is your better worldview? When I asked Jim Snabe, chairman of Siemens and Maersk, how he makes sense of his business world, he paused. His first reaction was the obvious, to understand his specific industries, his customer and competitors, today. But then he reflected on the inadequacy of that current view. If what comes next will be different, then he needs to look differently for it, he said. Seeing the bigger picture, is one way to change our viewpoint, but it’s probably still not enough. We still put ourselves at the centre, and then explore the obvious adjacencies. Instead it’s about looking ahead, seeing the emerging patterns of change, the parallels and possibilities, how to react to them, to seize the best new opportunities first. Put simply it’s about being farsighted.

Idea 13. Start from the future, then work backwards

How do you find the best new opportunities?You start from the end point, and then work backwards. As a scientist I have always valued the power of hypothesis. As Einstein wandered through the Swiss mountains, he hypothesised a connection between energy and matter. It was then through experimentation that he proved the association and simplified it to a mathematical formula. Similarly, in dynamic markets, we should start with a hypothesis. This is a creative process. It is about asking profound questions, exploring alternative futures, looking beyond the boundaries of today. Ideas come from everywhere, from other industries or geographies, and from the margins where deviant behaviours and newness emerge. Developing a vision of what the future market will be like enables us to work backwards, and look at how it could evolve, and how we could be most influential in that, turning it to our advantage. This is more intuitive than analytical, requiring leaders to engage deeply in seeing and choosing the future they want.

Idea 14. Sensemaking becomes your competitive advantage.

The best surfers live for the biggest waves. Similarly, the best leaders thrive on radical change. Change that starts in the market and is positively embraced by the business. In the same way the surfers are constantly searching for that next big wave, scanning the global coastlines, travelling hours to get there, so business leaders should be watching the future. “Sensemaking” if you like, becomes the way to outthink, and ultimately outperform, the others in your current or future market, the way to attract customers who have a hunger for newness, and the way to make the right choices when complexity can seem overwhelming. It requires a holistic mind, one that can interpret likely cause and effect, that can use hypothesis and analogy. It requires a leadership team who have diversity of vision yet engage in a collective view of the future. There is no right or wrong, only possibility and choice. Perhaps most usefully, it requires a leader who can ask the right questions.

Do you have the belief of Eliud Kipchoge, to harness technologies like that of AlphaGo, that can transform businesses like Satya Nadella, with the beauty of Zhang Xin, letting go of the past like Mary Barra, creating the legacy of Jack Ma, and realising dreams like JK Rowling? And do it your way?

It’s about daring to be more.

“Leading Change” is about rising up to lead the future of your business … There are 7 elevations, 7 ways for leaders to raise their game, that we will explore:

Winning… to rise above the pursuit of progress through incrementalism, to develop a future mindset, a forwards orientation, redefining success and how to achieve it.
Sensing… to rise above the chaos of change to see the drivers of tomorrow, making sense of complexity and uncertainty, finding the best new opportunities.
Framing… to rise above the limitations of business as a profit machine, to capture a higher purpose, guided by the desire, strategies and choices, to make life better.
Creating … to rise above the obsession for technologies, whilst harnessing their intelligence and capabilities, to innovate more radically for people and society.
Delivering … to rise above the limitations of big and small, incumbent or start-up, transforming organisations, fusing brands and networks with speed and agility.
Teaming … to rise above what we each contribute separately, to harness the power of diversity and collaboration, people and platforms, achieving more together.
Leading … to rise up to be the leader of the future business, with courage to embrace change and progress, inspire and enable others, finding your own magic.

Consider some of the challenges of our changing world:

In the last 25 years, China’s share of global manufacturing output has grown from 2% to 25%. Over that time China’s GDP has grown thirty-fold.
In the last two decades, 9.6% of the earth’s total wilderness areas has been lost, equalling an estimated 3.3 million square km.
51% of job activities can be automated, only 5% of jobs entirely replaceable by machines. However more new occupations will emerge than those lost.
New digital technologies can enable a 20% reduction in global carbon emissions by 2030, equivalent to eliminating more than China and India’s CO₂
Car sharing could reduce the number of cars needed by 90% by 2035, resulting in only 17% as many cars as there are today.
CEO pay has risen 1,000% over the last 40 years, howeveraverage worker pay has increased by just 11%, essentially stagnating taking into account inflation
72% of people feel that companies have become more dishonest. 93% of CEOs believe it’s important to engender trust that their company “will do the right thing”.

How will you rise up to do better?

Idea 1. More change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years.

Idea 2. Infinite potential, significant choices

Idea 3. The paradox of “forwards versus backwards”

Idea 4. Pivot to the future

Idea 5. Build your future-proof business

Idea 6. Harness the power of ideas and networks

Idea 7. Be the radical optimist

Idea 8. New technologies enhance our human and business potential

Idea 9. This is the Asian century. Time to follow the new Silk Road

Idea 10. Customers have new agendas, markets have new structures

Idea 11. The paradox of “order versus chaos”

Idea 12. Making sense of complexity demands a new worldview

Idea 13. Start from the future, then work backwards

Idea 14. Sensemaking becomes your competitive advantage.

Download Peter Fisk’s Helsinki keynote here (limited time only): The Quantum Store

Change is dramatic, pervasive and relentless. The challenges are numerous. The opportunities are greater.

Incredible technologies and geopolitical shifts, complex markets and stagnating growth, demanding customers and disruptive entrepreneurs, environmental crisis and social distrust, unexpected shocks and uncertain futures. The old codes that got us here don’t work anymore. Moving forwards needs a new mindset.

The future isn’t like it used to be

Market are fast and dynamic, more change in next 10 years than last 250
Leading in complex and uncertain markets, every business is a digital business
Covid-19 accelerated change, from Felix to Lifvs, Meituan and Starship
Tobi Lutke had a dream for Shopify, to engage people in what they love
How Instagram and Fortnite, Glossier and Nike are redefining retail

The quantum store, e-commerce and more

Shopping is consumer-driven, tech-enabled, but human and emotional
Defining the “quantum” store, and how Nike transformed its retail experience
E-commerce and more … personal, fast, easy, dynamic, virtual … and the 3Ss
Smart … Stitch Fix’s data … Jio’s superapps … Coupang’s speedy delivery
Sociable … Pinduoduo’s games … Zalando’s brands … Glossier’s community
Sustainable … Bookshop’s locality … Ecovative’s packaging … Depop’s cool

How can you shape a better future?

Now is the time to dare, to accelerate your future – more foresight and vision
Start with a bigger purpose, think from the future back, faster and easier
Work from the outside in, reframing context, language and experiences
Don’t look for what’s next, but what happens after what happens next
Lead with curiosity, creativity and courage – bold, brave and brilliant!

This is a session for business leaders who seek to progress in today’s rapidly changing world, and to create the organisations that will thrive in tomorrow’s world.

It explores how to lead a better future, to reimagine your business, to reinvent markets, to energise your people. It describes how to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact.

It dives deep into the minds of some of today’s most inspiring business leaders – people like Anne Wojcicki and Jeff Bezos, Emily Weiss and Devi Shetty, Daniel Ek and Tan Le, Mary Barra and Masayoshi Son, Satya Nadella and Zhang Ruimin – and practical retail examples.

Explore the FutureStore … case studies on the future of retail

Do you have the courage to create a better future, for you and your business?

Q&A with Peter Fisk

You’re the keynote speaker at an event that aims to inspire the main influencers / opinion leaders on e-commerce, along with online vendors. What can the audience expect from your keynote? Will you concentrate on exploring the themes from your latest book?

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.

If so, how would you say that the courage to create a successful and innovative company in the future applies specifically to e-commerce? What does “a better future” mean in this context? What previous research experience or insight do you have about e-commerce? How has the market changed along the years and where is it heading?

Firstly, we are at the point now where every company is a digital business, and similarly within retail, every retailer is an e-commerce business.

We can talk about all the new tools and tactics in e-commerce – from video streaming influencers to augmented reality, hybrid channels and subscription models, rapid research and streamlining returns, site loading speeds to new payment options, brand showcases and consumer personalisation, speedy delivery and sustainability.

But 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 and research? And what does the disruption mean to e-commerce?

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.

The event will include announcing and discussing the results of a major e-commerce survey and awarding the year’s best e-commerce sites. What would you say that makes the best online vendors stand out from the competition? Any personal favourites to share?

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.

All in all, what should be the main takeaway from your keynote?

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.

It’s about daring to be more.

“Leading Change” is about rising up to lead the future of your business … There are 7 elevations, 7 ways for leaders to raise their game, that we will explore:

Winning… to rise above the pursuit of progress through incrementalism, to develop a future mindset, a forwards orientation, redefining success and how to achieve it.
Sensing… to rise above the chaos of change to see the drivers of tomorrow, making sense of complexity and uncertainty, finding the best new opportunities.
Framing… to rise above the limitations of business as a profit machine, to capture a higher purpose, guided by the desire, strategies and choices, to make life better.
Creating … to rise above the obsession for technologies, whilst harnessing their intelligence and capabilities, to innovate more radically for people and society.
Delivering … to rise above the limitations of big and small, incumbent or start-up, transforming organisations, fusing brands and networks with speed and agility.
Teaming … to rise above what we each contribute separately, to harness the power of diversity and collaboration, people and platforms, achieving more together.
Leading … to rise up to be the leader of the future business, with courage to embrace change and progress, inspire and enable others, finding your own magic.

Consider some of the challenges of our changing world:

In the last 25 years, China’s share of global manufacturing output has grown from 2% to 25%. Over that time China’s GDP has grown thirty-fold.
In the last two decades, 9.6% of the earth’s total wilderness areas has been lost, equalling an estimated 3.3 million square km.
51% of job activities can be automated, only 5% of jobs entirely replaceable by machines. However more new occupations will emerge than those lost.
New digital technologies can enable a 20% reduction in global carbon emissions by 2030, equivalent to eliminating more than China and India’s CO₂
Car sharing could reduce the number of cars needed by 90% by 2035, resulting in only 17% as many cars as there are today.
CEO pay has risen 1,000% over the last 40 years, howeveraverage worker pay has increased by just 11%, essentially stagnating taking into account inflation
72% of people feel that companies have become more dishonest. 93% of CEOs believe it’s important to engender trust that their company “will do the right thing”.

How will you rise up to do better?

Idea 1. More change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years.

Idea 2. Infinite potential, significant choices

Idea 3. The paradox of “forwards versus backwards”

Idea 4. Pivot to the future

Idea 5. Build your future-proof business

Idea 6. Harness the power of ideas and networks

Idea 7. Be the radical optimist

Idea 8. New technologies enhance our human and business potential

Idea 9. This is the Asian century. Time to follow the new Silk Road

Idea 10. Customers have new agendas, markets have new structures

Idea 11. The paradox of “order versus chaos”

Idea 12. Making sense of complexity demands a new worldview

Idea 13. Start from the future, then work backwards

Idea 14. Sensemaking becomes your competitive advantage.

More programs from IE Business School Global AMP’s director Peter Fisk.

Masterclass 1: LEADING CHANGE by Peter Fisk

Download a summary

Making sense of today’s world, the challenge and opportunity of relentless change
The future isn’t like it used to be, so we can’t keep doing what we used to do
100 companies changing the world right now. What can you learn from them?
Start with a future mindset, jump ahead, look forwards not backwards
Going beyond limits, how will you be the change, how will you achieve more?

Masterclass 2: THE FUTURE BUSINESS by Peter Fisk

Download a summary

How is the 21st Century Business different from the 20th Century Business?
East and West, Tech and Human, Profit and Purpose, Start-up and Corporate
Paradoxes provide new opportunities … to reinvent how we work, how we win
Learning from Asia’s high growth markets, and doing business differently
Defining the DNA of the future business, and what it takes to be a great leader

Masterclass 3: DARE TO BE MORE by Peter Fisk

Download a summary

Aurora … Create the future, like Masayoshi Son and Emily Weiss
Komorebi … Seize the best opportunities, like Anne Wojcicki and Wang Xing
Transcendence … Find more purpose, like Larry Fink and Yves Chouinard
Ingenuity … Innovate with humanity, like Devi Shetty and David Kelley
Syzygy … Transform your business, like Bernard Arnault and Jeff Bezos
Ubuntu … Achieve more together like Piyush Gupta and Zhang Ruimin
Awestruck … Be a better leader, like Pablo Isla and Tadashi Yanai

CMOs should make the best CEOs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here’s my manifesto for marketers:

Growth Drivers

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

Change Makers

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

Business Innovators

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

Value Creators

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

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

Peter Fisk Q&A with Adlatina Media

When you came to Buenos Aires in 2019 and gave a lecture at the CMO Latam Summit, your big theme at that time was gamechanging. How much has the game changed since then?

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.

In your latest book “Business Recoded” you assert that business must be recoded. Do you think that the work of chief marketer officers should also be recoded?

Yes absolutely. 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 an “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!

Your new book “Business Recoded” is devoted to three major issues: inspiring leadership, strategic innovation and positive impact. How do these issues translate to the day-to-day life of a chief marketing officer?

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.

Therefore CMOs 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 are the challenges posed by digital transformation, how are the most innovative companies tackling it, and what, in your opinion, is the new role of the CMO in this context?

The biggest challenge of “digital innovation” 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 minds of CMOs 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 will your main message be to the chief marketing officers attending the CMO Clinic?

Now is the time to reimagine your business. It’s time for CMOs to step up, to make sense of a changing world, to reinvent markets, and to recode business.

We will see more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years. Change hugely accelerated by Covid-19. So as we get back to business, there is no going back to the old ways, we need to create the new ways of business.

Crisis has been a huge challenge, but now it can be a huge opportunity. We need CMOs with the courage to think different, to explore the future, and start to harness the power of the brands and business to create a better future.

Inspiring marketing leaders

So who are some of the world’s more enlightened marketers, the CMOs who are customer champions but also business innovators and growth drivers? Here are some examples:

Stephanie Buscemi, Salesforce

Salesforce’s CMO talks about the strategic challenge of building value in organisations, about brand purpose and promise. That purpose was is interesting. It gets thrown around with abandon, usually result in some mash-up of keywords which are neither understood or inspiring. Instead need real purpose, how the business will contribute towards a better world (in whatever way, not only around social-type issues), and then translating this into brands with real purpose, and made relevant for each person.

Chris Capossela, Microsoft

Microsoft’s CMO is “taking big swings: in the quest for success and discovering how failure is “the great instigator for growth.” What impresses me about working with Microsoft, one of my own biggest clients, is how they have real conscience, imagination and entrepreneurship. Their purpose is to enable customers to do more, not just sell products. This is where sales and marketing focus their effort (“your potential, our passion”) in tangible ways. They also truly embrace entrepreneurship – from design and lean thinking, to pizza teams and hackathons, debates on ethics and customers in their boardroom.

Carolyn Everson, Facebook

Facebook’s vice president of global marketing solutions leads the company’s relationships with top marketers and agencies. What’s interesting here is that Facebook is probably more of a media company than those associated with its agencies. In some ways its roles are therefore reversed compared to the norm. But the real power of a tech platform like Facebook, and Instagram and WhatsApp too, lies in its data, its networks, and power as platforms. Look, for example, at the rise of Instagram Shops, the development for social interaction, to a dynamic, realtime, platform for commerce.

Julia Goldin, Lego

Lego’s CMO discusses how tech presents massive opportunity for innovation and Lego’s approach to digital transformation. Lego is a great example of digital transformation because it is classically not a tech company, and still has a heart in physical play. The ability to recognise the brand asset as far more than a product umbrella, enables it to develop in terms of new markets – from clothing to crafting, movies and theme parks – not as adjacencies but as one story. Brands anchored around ideas (led godt, meaning creative play) rather than products or categories, can achieve so much more.

Marc Pritchard, P&G

P&G’s Chief Brand Officer explores a future of technology that is allowing brands to find new ways to reach the consumer. Pritchard recognises that with a portfolio like P&G’s he has the power and reach to do so much more in the world. His focus on sustainability, driving the entire organisation to transform its practices, but equally enabling customers to apply their own impact too, is worth copying. He achieves this as an organisational leader. People look to him for strategic direction, for business priorities, and for innovation. He also backs this up, by showing it matters, and the impact it makes. The focus is on profitable growth not just revenue or share (anyone can create share without profit), and linking it to DCFs and economic value creation. Ultimately he is the guy investors look to, and in the analyst reports, to understand the organisation’s future potential.

Phil Schiller, Apple

Apple’s outgoing SVP talks about the company’s role in empowering developers to create the future of technology. Schiller is stepping down after being the right hand man in a $2 trillion journey of growth. What is remarkable about Apple’s incredible performance of the last 10 years, is that it has grown to almost 10x the size of Steve Jobs’ era without a real focus on radical product innovation (yes they are great, but from a product perspective its been evolution than revolution). It’s more about how they evolved, particularly as an ecosystem – think App Store, or iTunes – and as a portfolio. Some innovations under Schiller, enabled by his phenomenal brand halo, include the AirPods, with a business model creating the equivalent of a $250 billion business. Indeed as a brand, Apple has continued to shine, reaching across the world, and to all of our lives.

More than anything, marketing and marketers, have the potential to be so much more. The next 10 years will see more change than the last 250 years. Right now, as we slowly emerge from pandemic, every market is being shaken up, the rules rewritten, a new generation of brands emerging.

Now is the time to seize the seismic changes in consumer behaviour and aspiration, economic shifts and technological revolution. Now is the time to be the future shapers, business innovators and growth drivers. To be the energising, mobilising, progressive leaders of business. To be the change makers.

Change is dramatic, pervasive and relentless. The challenges are numerous. The opportunities are greater.

The old codes that got us here don’t work anymore. Moving forwards needs a new mindset.

“Business Recoded” is for business leaders who seek to progress in today’s rapidly changing world, and to create the organisations that will thrive in tomorrow’s world.

The book explores how to lead a better future, to reimagine your business, to reinvent markets, to energise your people. It describes how to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact.

And learns from the innovative strategies of incredible companies – Alibaba and Amazon, Babylon and BlackRock, Meituan Dianping and Microsoft, Narayana Health and Netflix, Patagonia and PingAn, Spotify and Supercell, and many more.

The book is built on 7 seismic shifts driving a more enlightened future of business, unlocking 49 codes that collectively define a new DNA for organisations and their leadership.

It’s about you – realising your future potential – by developing your own codes for more enlightened progress, personal and business success.

Do you have the courage to create a better future, for you and your business?

Change is dramatic, pervasive and relentless. The challenges are numerous. The opportunities are greater.

The old codes that got us here don’t work anymore. Moving forwards needs a new mindset.

“Business Recoded” is for business leaders who seek to progress in today’s rapidly changing world, and to create the organisations that will thrive in tomorrow’s world.

The book is built on 7 seismic shifts driving a more enlightened future of business, unlocking 49 codes that collectively define a new DNA for organisations and their leadership.

It’s about you – realising your future potential – by developing your own codes for more enlightened progress, personal and business success.

Do you have the courage to create a better future, for you and your business?

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

It’s time for leaders to step up, to create a better future

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

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

New ideas for leaders to accelerate business recovery

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

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_5Vxufidg&feature=emb_logo

With a more liquid learning style, more accessible and convenient

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

The content is entirely updated, anticipating the changing needs of business and its people as we emerge from crisis, and through the next decade – from the megatrends that drive global markets and intelligent technologies, to the convergence of markets and emergence of new business models, new ways of working and the challenges of leading for today, and tomorrow. The program takes on a more dynamic learning style, helping your to explore how to transform yourself and your business, for a world of rapid and continuous change.

Delivered by top business leaders, thinkers and experts

I will be joined by some of the world’s most inspiring and thoughtful faculty. This year it includes

Jim Snabe, chairman of Siemens and Maersk, former CEO of SAP, one of the world’s top leaders
Tendayi Viki, a psychologist-based innovator, partner of Strategyzer
Antonio Rodriguez Nieto, the world’s top project manager, and senior leader in GSK
Christian Rangen, energy expert and expert in business transformation
Terence Mauri, leading thinker on 3D leadership, bold and brave
Verónica Reyero, anthropologist of a more human future.

They add to the existing IE team that includes

Mark Esposito, leading futurist and AI pioneer
Terence Tse, expert on the future of finance and healthcare
Juan Carlos Pastor, leading on authentic leadership; media expert
Lola Martinez, media expert, on storytelling and presenting
Marcos Cajina, on the neuroscience of emotional engagement
Steven MacGregor, on executive fitness, and many more

In addition to exploring the very latest business ideas and theories, the program is highly personalised in two ways – a personal leadership coaching program helps you to make sense of your own strengths and style, and coaches work with you to develop this, to respond to the new needs, and to prepare to step up to business leadership – and a personal “Gamechanger” project in which we work with you over the entire duration of the program to help you develop your own blueprint for transforming the future of your business, or industry.

Starting in April 2021

Modules 1 and 3 will be online, built around a 4 hour session each Friday for 10 weeks. During these sessions we will bring together the best ideas from around the business world, with expert faculty, and also take you on “deep dives” into what is happening right now in some of the world’s leading businesses.

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

Module 1 (Online, half-day Fridays): April-May 2021
Module 2 (Residential- Segovia Campus): June-July 2021
Module 3 (Online, half-day Fridays): Sep-Oct 2021
Module 4 (Residential- Madrid Campus): Oct-Nov 2021

We are really excited by this new format, and also by all the enhanced content for the program. There never has been a more urgent or important time for leaders to step up, to make sense of a changing world, and prepare to create a better future.

Download a summary of the masterclass and program launch

Find out more about the Global AMP at IE Business School

The program has been designed specifically to prepare current and future leaders, and their businesses, for the challenges which they face now and in the coming years. Focusing on leadership in a world of disruptive change, the Global AMP will help you understand the underlying trends driving the future which are already shaking up your industry, explore the threats and opportunities these bring, and respond accordingly.

Divided into 5 core academic modules, each designed and orchestrated by expert faculty, the program will lead you through the challenge of understanding mega-trends such as technological change, our role in a world where AI and robotics make many traditional jobs irrelevant, scarce physical resources and changing demographics.

How will you shape the new markets formed by these trends to the advantage of your business? Where will you focus, and how will you compete? How will you engage with the future customers – Asian, millennial, female – and those in markets that do not even exist today? What are your new business models to drive speed, agility and profitable growth?

Be the disrupter, not the disrupted.

The program focuses on devising new solutions, delivered by the right organisations and strategies, to succeed in such a brave new world. Energising and aligning the business to the strategic needs of the future will require that it becomes faster and more agile and we will learn how to use areas such as finance and operations, partnerships and networks, as levers for growth.

Most significantly, we will help you develop yourself as a leader of this dynamic world – to build a leadership platform, and exploit it skilfully to implement change that builds organisations that are themselves a source of competitive strength.

Alongside these academic modules, the program also includes practical application, with each participant developing a Gamechanger Project from they will create a blueprint for the future of their industry, a plan for how their business can reinvent itself, and define their own role in leading their company or division towards this future successfully.

Finally, the Leadership Development Plan helps each participant, along with an individual advisor, focus on their own specific strengths and weaknesses and actions that they can take to become an effective leader, and to sustain high personal and business performance.

World Changing: Making sense of change, exploring megatrends and their medium and longer-term implications, and choosing your future direction. The rise of emerging markets, new technologies and next generation audiences, is matched by the increasing scarcity of resources, social fragmentation and climate impact. The “fourth industrial revolution” heralds a new era for business and society, from digitalisation and automation, to 3D printing and machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics. Philosophically, we will also look back to the age of genius, and the lessons for the future.

Power shifts: Economic, political and economic power shifts across continents, generations and businesses.
Technology futures: Harnessing the potential of new capabilities, from digital and big data, biotech and nanotech, to AI and robotics.
Resource scarcity: Changing sources of energy, the peak of rare metals, talent and creativity, high-tech components and patented technologies.
Human impacts: Rethinking work, education and employment, ageing and healthcare, urbanization and belonging, wealth and happiness.
Future shaping: Making sense of change, and making better choices. Harnessing value drivers and scenario planning to shape the future that you want.

Market Shaping: Competitive landscapes have become increasingly complex, competition can now appear from seemingly unrelated industries, new markets emerge and old ones disappear. Digital markets have no boundaries, allowing the smallest business to have huge impact, and accelerating the convergence of sectors and businesses. In this context, the market-shaping module will guide you in engaging with future customers, shaping markets to your advantage and ultimately developing a market map that can help focus your business to win in future markets.

Market spaces: How well do you really know your market? Framing markets and how they work, value drivers and emerging practices, challenges and opportunities.
Future markets: Finding and creating new market spaces, based on new customers, new geographies and new solutions.
Customer thinking: Understanding new and existing customers based on aspirations and behaviours, finding new insights and ideas, new needs and niches.
Engaging propositions: Rethinking value, how it created and captured, and then delivered in terms of engagement and experiences.
Markets as movements: Rethinking how to build brands and loyalty where customers trust each other, and seek personalisation, collaboration and community

Disruptive Innovation: Disruption comes from all angles – entrepreneurial start-ups challenging established giants, new technologies replacing inefficient processes, simplicity outperforming complexity, and customers challenging businesses to do better. The impact can be dramatic, reputations can be made and destroyed in days, whilst long admired companies are wiped off the map. The aim of this module is to learn how to turn the tables and become the disrupter by quickly developing insights and ideas, driving innovative strategies and business models, that can be delivered in fast and efficient ways.

Market Disruption: Transforming value equations by rethinking the way markets work, the sources of advantage, pain points and profit pools.
Design thinking: Gaining deeper insights into what really drives customers, to find the real problem, and solutions that are more relevant and valuable.
Fast Innovation: Turning ideas into impact faster through fast and lean innovation, from incremental to breakthough, managing portfolios to create the future
Business models: Rethinking how organisations work to deliver innovative propositions, from licensing to subscription, low cost to luxury.
Accelerating impact: Harnessing the power of multipliers, the network effect of social media to business ecosystems, spreading innovation faster, accelerating growth.

Energizing Organizations: Business thrives on an inspiring purpose, an alignment for action, and priorities and incentives that engage people to high performance. Organisations also need the agility to continually adapt and respond to changing markets, to develop new capabilities and partnerships, and reach new markets. The objective of this module is to help you energize your organization, develop a strategy, along with the metrics to constantly measure its implementation, and align financial and operational resources to deliver results effectively.

Winning strategy: Defining the right direction and priorities, guided by an inspiring purpose, and harnessing the drivers of value.
Smarter choices: Making better decisions, strategically and every day, matched by the right metrics and rewards that ensure performance.
Aligning organisations: Shaping organisations and processes to be agile and efficient, leveraging strengths and addressing weakness, inside and outside.
Energising people: Mobilising your employees to think and deliver the strategy in innovative and profitable ways, harnessing the power of teams and humanity.
Sustaining impact: Ensuring that the organization has the ongoing renewal and adaptability to deliver share value, short term and into the future.

Amplified Leadership: The best leaders amplify the impact of their people and their business. Developing a leadership that is relevant to them and their people, they inspire and engage, connect and support the business to deliver against long-term directions and short-term priorities. Leaders of the future, will need to be adept at leading and managing change in a way that unlocks talent and performance. The outcome of this module will be to a help participants lead themselves, their teams and their business. For this reason, the module works through all the other modules to connect ideas and future action.

Leadership matters: Business is obsessed with leadership, but how do leaders really add value, engage people effectively, and deliver better results?
Knowledge economy: Organisational hierarchies are a legacy of old economies. In today’s ideas-based organisations, leaders add value in different ways.
Authentic organisations: From corporate to personal reputations, how do you build trust and authenticity inside and outside the business?
Talent beacons: In an ideas-driven world, the best companies have the best people. So how do you ensure that you attract, motivate and retain the best talent?
Why should anyone be led by you? Fundamentally, why should you be the leader of the business. What do you have, and what will you give, to be successful?

Leaders are, of course, much more than functional managers. They see a bigger picture, work across the organization, and connect activities for more impact. The 5 Global AMP modules, rather than addressed in isolation will be carefully knitted together throughout the duration of the program, to demonstrate the opportunities and implications of every decision and action across the business.

Gamechanger Projects: Participants will work on an individual, evaluated project throughout the program. This “Gamechanger Project” is designed to draw on all of the materials covered in each module and will be applied directly to the challenges and opportunities of the participants’ business. It will deliver five specific outcomes, in the form of maps, that will be of value to you and to your company. Together they form a blueprint for the future.

Future Map: Developing a vision of the future of your industry. Define how you will shape it to your business’ advantage, to seize the best opportunities for growth.
Market Map: Shaping your markets, how you work, and your customer propositions to engage current and future customers.
Innovation Map: Reinventing your business model to deliver the future propositions in practical, efficient and profitable ways.
Organisation Map: Aligning your direction and strategy, your processes and people, metrics and performance to deliver results.
Impact Map: Defining your role in leading your company or division towards a bright, inspiring and successful future.

Progress on the project will be checked in peer to peer presentations and participants will have access to tutors to guide their work. This will be underpinned by the Leadership Development Plan which supports the individual in how they will develop themselves to deliver this effectively.

Download a summary of the masterclass and program launch

Find out more about the Global AMP at IE Business School

Which are the world’s most innovative organisations, and what exactly makes them innovative?

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, change goes far beyond the technology.

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

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

Agenda

Part 1: Innovation in Business

Entrepreneurs and Gamechangers: Who are the world’s most innovative companies?
Inspired by Apple and Bytedance, Cemex and DBS, Google and Lucky Iron Fish, Netflix and Tesla
What do we think they do? (Discussion)
Case 1: Microsoft … the purpose, mindset and collaboration to reinvent the trillion-dollar business
Case 2: Haier … using the power of Rendanheyi to reimagine the future of home appliances
Case 3: Amazon … creating a relentless drive for better, and how every day is day one
What can we learn from each of these companies?

Part 2: Innovation in Government

Governments and Services: Who are the world’s most innovative governments?
Inspired by Dutch Doughnut, Belgian Badges, Canadian Carrots, Korean Encore, UAE Futures
How different is public versus private sector innovation?
Case 4: Singapore … the innovative approach to deliver a Smart Nation
Case 5: Estonia … creating a digital nation of integrated services and citizens beyond borders
Case 6: UAE … from the Ministry of Possibilities to Area2071, Museum of the Future to Possibilities 2025
What can we learn from each of these companies?

Part 3: The Innovation Driven Organisation

Having the courage to create a better future: How do leaders create innovative organisations?
Inspired by Tan Le and Devi Shetty, Elon Musk and Pat Brown, Ilkka Paananen and Jessica Tan
Creating a “smorgasbord” of innovation practices
Innovation Culture: Purpose Centric, Growth Mindset, Extreme Teams, Open Systems, Gamechanger Ambitions
Innovation Process: Future Back, Outside In, Integrated Innovation, Agile Strategies, Impact Portfolio
Which would work in your organisation and how?
What are the essentials, the differentiators, and the accelerators?

Download Peter Fisk’s keynote here … Work Recoded: Back to the office, or a new world of work?

Covid-19 has prompted a rapid shift away from office working to home working.

Now, as companies look beyond the pandemic, many are deciding whether to bring employees back to offices or allow them to stay at home. But it’s not just about where to work.

A year of working from home, juggling childcare when schools were closed, avoiding the stress of commutes, and the cost of inner city real estate, has prompted many businesses to look again at the traditional working week, and some to fundamentally reimagine how they work.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg predicted 50% of his people could be working remotely within 5-10 years, but added “people living outside major cities may be asked to take a pay cut”.
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey made headlines when he announced his employees “can now work from home forever” … and then added “if they are doing work suitable to do at home”.
Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, however, said the lack of division between private life and work life meant “it sometimes feels like you are sleeping at work”.

The pandemic has highlighted many advantages to working from home, the time and expense saved commuting, the efficiency of remote meetings, particularly when connecting with people who are located far away, the new online work tools like Miro, the ability to be more flexible in your personal time, including spending more time with the children.

The disruption, and experiment, has allowed companies and individuals to explore working in new ways – and to live in new ways – so, perhaps it also a time to reimagine how we work.

Brynn Harrington, who is Facebook’s vice president of People Growth, says some workers have been “really thriving” at home and will be keen to continue doing so. “For example, parents who are closer to their children and are happy to cut their commute time and optimise their work day, they’re thrilled to work from home,” she said.

But home working is not great for everyone. “We also have people juggling care giving responsibilities, we have people living in small apartments with roommates, those people desperately want to get back into offices, and we’re working really hard to do that, as soon as it’s safe to open our offices.”

Starting with the bigger changes

However we should also see these challenges, and choices, in the context of a bigger picture. “The future of work” was already a huge question before Covid ever hit. Digitally-enabled transformation of every market and organisation demands that business thinks, adds value and works in new ways. Fast and connected, automated or augmented, collaborative ecosystems and empowered teams, gig workers and multi careers, more flexible, more hybrid, more human.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Work agenda, updated annually, creates a strong vision of a rapidly changing world of work, most significantly driven by the fourth industrial revolution, the challenge of technology, but also the imperative for human ingenuity. My new book Business Recoded builds on this, connecting it with other ideas such as Laloux’s reimagined organisations, Haier’s “rendanheyi” devolved structure, and Google Aristotle’s safe and extreme teaming:

Future-proofed organisations – simple, flat and agile structures – connecting people and partners
Align new technologies and skills – augmenting and enabling people to add more beyond process and machine
Work portfolios – everyone is a project worker, internally or gig-working, lifelong learning and evolving
Doing meaningful work – more purposeful, more responsible, more valued outcomes, particularly for GenZ
Human-centric leadership – organisations as platforms to enable people to achieve their potential

The pandemic’s disruption has accelerated this shift. Without choice, we all found ourselves experimenting with new environments, new tools, new ways of working. Some of it we loved, some of it we didn’t. But it gave us a glimpse of what’s possible, and some of it will inevitably stick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ-3JrWLwwU

Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends report for 2021 focuses on the shrift from surviving to thriving, both in the sense of surviving the pandemic and thriving as we emerge, but also a more general complacency in business, to choose stability over change. It highlights 5 big trends:

Designing work for wellbeing (and the end of the work/life balance or separation)
Unleashing human potential (beyond skills, enabling new mindsets and freedoms)
Building superteams (power of teams, and using tech to augment the humanity)
Adaptive strategies (embracing uncertainty, to make better decisions, with agility)
Rearchitecting organisations (enterprise-wide mindset, more fluid, connected and human)

One of the most insightful analysis of what is happening comes from Microsoft, and while they clearly have a Teams-centred tech view of of the digital workspace, they are also an organisation of 166,000 people across the world. Over the last two years I have seen at first hand how they are rapidly embracing a new work style, physical and virtual, not just where, but why and how their people approach work.

Microsoft’s Hybrid Work report has key messages including “leaders are out of touch … productivity masks exhaustion … GenZ most at risk … authenticity drives well-being … innovation in danger … talent is everywhere”.

The Next Great Disruption is Hybrid Work by Microsoft
McKinsey’s The Future of Work after Covid-19
Resetting the future of work agenda by World Economic Forum
Workbook for work strategies for post-Covid recovery by Deloitte
Reimagining the office and worklife after Covid by McKinsey
In Australia the post-pandemic office is already here, says WSJ
Human Capital Trends 2021 report by Deloitte
What Is Your Organization’s Long-Term Remote Work Strategy? in HBR
Employee attitudes to remote working from McKinsey

Creating the hybrid post-pandemic workspace

Different organisations are responding differently – partly because they have different types of tasks and cultures – but qually depending on how enlightened they are, or at least their leaders. NTT’s workplace intelligence report found that 31% of companies are implementing additional creative thinking spaces, while 30% will provide more meeting places and 27% will reduce individual desk space.

Turning the office into a digitally enabled, collaboration-first environment will be critical to enabling a hybrid workforce. As companies seek to create a safe, collaborative, and efficient space for their employees, we have observed a few common practices:

Smart meeting rooms: spaces that enable employees to easily collaborate with their remote colleagues, often include video-conferencing capabilities, smart whiteboards (eg Miro), mobile-friendly office management applications, and virtual collaboration hardware such as 360-degree cameras.
Portable work kit: network technology will need to evolve to support employees constantly on the move between the home and office and third spaces (clients, coffee shops, virtual hubs), meaning a new focus on what tools are needed to support a mobile, connected and productive workforce.
Touchdown space: beyond hot desk, a shared space to plug in and work, eg second monitors widely accessible in those desk spaces can enable employees to move to and from the office while maintaining equal levels of productivity, to work open plan on large tables to encourage informal collaboration and socialising.
Activity zones: huddle rooms for one-on-one meetings, phone booths for calls, larger conference spaces and separate, project enclaves to build virtual teams, movable desks and even walls, to create more activity-based spaces while balancing the need for privacy.
Cowork spaces: rethinking real estate, some companies are choosing to invest in smaller co-working spaces that are closer to employees, local Regus hubs etc. Done strategically, this setup can generate sizable cost reductions while fostering a strong sense of community and providing employees with the option to work in different settings.

As companies begin to formulate and test hybrid operating models, continued investment and careful strategic planning are necessary to maintain effectiveness and resilience.

So what are companies actually doing so far?

Microsoft with 160,000 employees is fully embracing a hybrid working future, giving employees personal choice in where, when and how to work. However Satya Nadella said physical workspaces still matter, even for the most tech-enabled business: “We believe in the value of bringing people together in the workplace. Having facilities around the globe enriches our culture with new ideas, fresh perspectives and unique local viewpoints that help us continue learning from each other. From innovation labs to briefing centers, being near our customers and having more touchpoints helps us better understand customer and partner needs, adding value to the great work we’re doing together.”

Facebook is planning to start its return to in-person work in May, after over a year of working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Bloomberg. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced remote work plans near the start of the pandemic that promised around half of his employees could work remotely in the next five to 10 years, but until then, in-person work, at least in a limited capacity, is in the company’s immediate future.

Uber is hoping to get back to in-person work even sooner. The ride-sharing company announced that it’ll reopen its Mission Bay, San Francisco headquarters on March 29th, with a limited 20 percent capacity, according to Reuters. Uber plans to follow similar COVID-19 restrictions as Facebook, requiring face coverings, regular cleanings, and asking employees with sick family members to stay home. Prior to this reopening plan, Uber was letting its office employees work from home until mid-September 2021.

Twitter took a big step and made working from home indefinitely an option for all employees at the start of the pandemic. The company doesn’t have a set date for when it will reopen its offices, however, but “it will be gradual, office-by-office, and at a 20 percent capacity to start,” a Twitter spokesperson tells The Verge.

Google’s plans are less certain, and the company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge, but in 2020, it said employees would be able to work from home until September 2021 and that it would explore requiring employees only to work three days a week in-person.

Spotify starts by describing the principles for working, and then how they plan to change:

Work isn’t something you come to the office for, it’s something you do
Effectiveness can’t be measured by the number of hours people spend in an office – instead, giving people the freedom to choose where they work will boost effectiveness
Giving our people more flexibility will support better work-life balance and help tap into new talent pools while keeping our existing band members
Operating as a distributed organisation will produce better and more efficient ways of working through more intentional use of communication and collaboration practices, processes and tools.

Spotify defines its new hybrid work model:

My Work Mode – employees will be able to work full time from home, from the office, or a combination of the two. The exact mix of home and office work mode is a decision each employee and their manager make together.
Location choices – more flexibility when it comes to what country and city each employee works from (with some limitations to address time zone difficulties, and regional entity laws in the initial rollout of this program). Here, our employees have the same “My Work Mode” flexibility, and if someone chooses a location that is not near a Spotify office, we will support them with a co-working space membership if they want to work from an office.

IBM was a pioneer in the work-from-home revolution before it largely abandoned the policy in 2017, but the company is pivoting again with a new system of remote working, with 80% of the workforce working at least three days a week in the office. “I would imagine that we will get rid of tens of millions,” CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg, referring to square feet of office space. “Are we going to go toward zero, absolutely not. Will we have over half of what we had, most likely.”

IBM employees took it upon themselves to define good ways of working remotely during the pandemic. They created a “work-from-home pledge” that specified company norms such as how to communicate and treat each other while working remotely. This grassroots initiative was ultimately supported by Krishna, which provided a strong signal to the rest of the organization about accepted remote-work norms.

However “When people are remote, I worry about what their career trajectory is going to be,” says Krishna. “If they want to become a people manager, if they want to get increasing responsibilities, or if they want to build a culture within their teams, how are we going to do that remotely?” he asked.

Goldman Sachs’ chief executive made clear he saw working from home during the pandemic as an “aberration” saying young employees at the investment bank needed direct contact and mentorship that you could only get in the office.

PwC say employees will be able to work from home a couple of days a week and start as early or late as you like. This summer you can knock off early on Fridays too. Following the pandemic the accountancy giant is offering its staff much more control over their working pattern. PwC chairman Kevin Ellis said he hoped this would make flexible working “the norm rather than the exception”. “We want our people to feel trusted and empowered,” Mr Ellis said. PwC call their approach “The Deal“, built on two-way flexibility, to meet the needs of clients and employees and the company, and to achieve climate goals. It includes:

an ‘Empowered day’ – which gives our workforce more freedom to decide the most effective working pattern on any given day – for example, an earlier start and finish time
flexibility to continue working from home as part of blended working, with an expectation that people will spend an average of 40-60% of their time co-located with colleagues, either in offices or at client sites
a reduced working day on a Friday, with the assumption the majority of our people will finish at lunchtime having condensed their working week

Siemens, the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe, announced that its employees may work from wherever they want for two or three days a week. Siemens has around 385,000 employees in more than 200 countries. The work-anywhere— several days a week—decision was due to a global staff survey, in which employees desired greater flexibility in their approach to work. Roland Busch, the deputy CEO and labor director of Siemens, wrote in a tweet, “#Covid19 gives us a chance to reshape our world and reimagine work. To empower @Siemens employees to perform their best, our #newnormal working model will offer 2-3 days mobile working.” The press release highlights

Mobile working two to three days a week as worldwide standard
Managing Board approves new model for working independently of fixed locations
Model based on transformation of leadership and corporate culture
Siemens among first large companies to adjust working models permanently

Amazon issued a statement to employees saying: “Our plan is to return to an office-centric culture as our baseline. We believe it enables us to invent, collaborate, and learn together most effectively.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the new work-from-home age, then. Part of the hesitancy is that although many employees want more flexibility, it’s still not at all clear what kind of model works for the companies.