Peter Fisk explores the big themes from his new book Business Recoded, and what it means for marketing leaders.

Business needs a new code for success.

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.

“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.

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 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?

“A brilliant collection of practical guidelines intended to refresh and reinvent our mindsets, from a global thoughtful leader with vast experience in management development” Santiago Iniguez, President of IE University.

“Business Recoded is a great source of inspiration for leaders who want to position themselves for the future.” Alex Osterwalder, author of Business Model Generation and The Invincible Company.

Contents

Introduction

Business needs a new code for success

  • Why do we need to recode?
  • What are the new codes?
  • The new DNA of business
  • The new DNA of leadership
  • Have the courage to lead the future
  • Inspiration 1: Eliud Kipchoge
  • Inspiration 2: DeepMind
  • Inspiration 3: Tan Le
  • Inspiration 4: Satya Nadella
  • Inspiration 5: Mary Barra
  • Inspiration 6: Jack Ma
  • Inspiration 7: JK Rowling

Part 1: Aurora … Recode your future

How will you reinvent your business for a better future?

  • Code 1: Explore your future potential
  • Code 2: Have a future mindset
  • Code 3: Imagine a better business
  • Code 4: Find your inspiring purpose
  • Code 5: Create your future story
  • Code 6: Deliver more positive impact
  • Code 7: Be the radical optimist
  • Leader 1: Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe
  • Leader 2: Elon Musk, SpaceX
  • Leader 3: Patrick Brown, Impossible Foods
  • Leader 4: Larry Fink, BlackRock
  • Leader 5: Yves Chouinard, Patagonia

Part 2: Komorebi … Recode your growth

Where are the best opportunities to grow further and faster?

  • Code 8: Ride with the megatrends
  • Code 9: Find new sources of growth
  • Code 10: Embrace the Asian century
  • Code 11: Harness technology and humanity
  • Code 12: Start from the future back
  • Code 13: Accelerate through networks
  • Code 14: Build a growth portfolio 
  • Leader 6: Masayoshi Son, Softbank
  • Leader 7: Emily Weiss, Glossier
  • Leader 8: Wang Xing, Meituan Dianping
  • Leader 9: Danae Ringelmann, Indiegogo
  • Leader 10: Mukesh Ambani, Reliance

Part 3: Transcendent … Recode your market

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=part+3+business+recoded

How will you reshape your market to your advantage? 

  • Code 15: Explore the market matrix
  • Code 16: Disrupt the disruptors
  • Code 17: Capture the customer agenda
  • Code 18: Create new market spaces
  • Code 19: Build trust with authenticity
  • Code 20: Develop brands with purpose
  • Code 21: Enable people to achieve more
  • Leader 11: Bernard Arnault, LVMH
  • Leader 12: Maria Raga, Depop
  • Leader 13: Ali Parsa, Babylon Health
  • Leader 14: Hooi Ling Tan, Grab
  • Leader 15: Mikkel Bjergso, Mikkeller

Part 4: Ingenuity … Recode your innovation

What does it take to drive more radical innovation?

  • Code 22: Be ingenious
  • Code 23: Search for better ideas
  • Code 24: Embrace a designer mindset
  • Code 25: Create unusual connections
  • Code 26: Develop new business models
  • Code 27: Experiment with speed and agility
  • Code 28: Dream crazy
  • Leader 16: Rene Renzepi, Noma
  • Leader 17: James Watt, BrewDog
  • Leader 18: Jensen Huang, Nvidia
  • Leader 19: Devi Shetty, Narayana Health
  • Leader 20: Katrina Lake, Stitch Fix 

Part 5: Ubuntu … Recode your organisation

How can people achieve more together?

  • Code 29: Build a butterfly ecosystem
  • Code 30: Work as a living organisation
  • Code 31: Collaborate in fast projects
  • Code 32: Do human, inspiring work
  • Code 33: Align individuals and organisations
  • Code 34: Create energy and rhythm
  • Code 35: Be an extreme team 
  • Leader 21: Reed Hastings, Netflix
  • Leader 22: Zhang Ruimin, Haier
  • Leader 23: Cristina Junqueira, Nubank
  • Leader 24: Jos de Blok, Buurtzorg
  • Leader 25: Ari Weinzweig, Zingerman’s

Part 6: Syzygy … Recode your transformation

What does it take to transform your business effectively?

  • Code 36: Transform your business
  • Code 37: Exploit the core, explore the edge
  • Code 38: Start outside in, and inside out
  • Code 39: Engage people in change
  • Code 40: Build rocket ships to the future
  • Code 41: Create a circular ecosystem
  • Code 42: Have the strategic agility to never stop
  • Leader 26: Jeff Bezos, Amazon
  • Leader 27: Bob Iger, Disney
  • Leader 28: Jessica Tan, Ping An
  • Leader 29: Piyush Gupta, DBS
  • Leader 30: Javier Goyeneche, Ecoalf

Part 7: Awestruck … Recode your leadership

Do you have the courage to create a better future? 

  • Code 43: Step up to lead the future
  • Code 44: Have the courage to do more
  • Code 45: Develop your own leadership style
  • Code 46: Achieve your peak performance
  • Code 47: Stay resilient, stay strong
  • Code 48: Create a better legacy
  • Code 49: Be extraordinary
  • Leader 31: Jim Snabe, Maersk
  • Leader 32: Daniel Ek, Spotify
  • Leader 33: Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani
  • Leader 34: Zhang Xin, Soho China
  • Leader 35: Ilkka Paananen, Supercell

Business Recoded is about having the courage to create a better future. This can take many different forms.

The book starts with 7 short stories from very different people, in very different worlds, from business and beyond.  The stories are all about mindset, about the courage to do better, to achieve more, to break barriers, to be extraordinary.

Inspiration 1: Eliud Kipchoge

The humble Kenyan says that “no human is limited” and, despite his Olympic gold medals and world records, set himself a much more audacious goal.

“I don’t know where the limits are, but I would like to go there” said Eliud Kipchoge as dawn broke over the Danube river in Vienna.

Two hours later he stood in the middle of the tree lined Hauptallee, having just sprinted to the finish of the Ineos 1:59 Challenge, the first human to break two hours for the marathon. “That was the best moment of my life” he said, standing exhausted but still smiling at the finish line. The clock above him stopped at 1 hour 59 minutes and 40 seconds.

Having followed the Kenyan runner throughout his 20-year career, I watched his iconic record attempt in awe. Around him, some of the world’s greatest athletes, from Olympic 1500m Champion Matt Centrowitz to rising star Jacob Ingebrigtsen and the highly experienced Bernard Lagat, cheered and took selfies with the record breaker, pacemakers to the great man, happy to be part of history.

“Today we went to the Moon and came back to Earth” he said.

Back at home in Kenya, people were crowded round televisions, cheering for their runner. But Kipchoge lives a humble life, with the greatest clarity of purpose.

Every morning, just before 5am, in the small village of Kaptagat in western Kenya. He rolls out of bed, wipes the sleep from his eyes and gets ready to run. By the time the sun rises over the ochre red, dusty roads of the Rift Valley, he is well into his stride. Joined by dozens of ambitious young local runners, he strides past farmers heading for their fields, children waiting for their school buses.

This is just his first 20km, his first run of the day. Every day.

On returning to his training camp, it might be Kipchoge’s turn to make breakfast. Most likely it will be a simple bowl of ugali, a Kenyan staple made each day in a big pan from maize flour and water, plus whatever fruits are in season. Afterwards, he will probably hand-wash his running kit, ready for the afternoon session, and then take a nap. On other days, it might be his turn to head to the local farm for provisions, or to clean the communal toilets.

It is a frugal existence, particularly for a global champion, and self-made millionaire.

Yet for Kipchoge, the Olympic champion and world record holder, it is the only way of life that he has known. His wife and young children live in a much more spacious house in the town of Eldoret 40km away, but during his most important training periods, he prefers the simplicity of his spartan camp.

For 15 years, Kipchoge has been chasing a dream. I remember first seeing him run as a teenager, his bulging eyes fixed on the path ahead, always with a smile on his face. He showed early promise, beating world record holders Kenenisa Bekele and Hicham El Guerrouj to become the 1983 5000m world champion whilst only 18 years old. Over the next decade he won many medals but couldn’t call himself the best. As he reached his 30th birthday, he decided to move up to the marathon. To astonishing effect.

In the marathon, he became unbeatable.

In 2017, his sponsors Nike created a project to see if it would be possible to break 2 hours for the marathon. At the heart of their project was the Olympic champion, Kipchoge. They searched the world for the perfect location, choosing Monza’s Formula 1 motor racing circuit in Italy, the perfect conditions, the perfect pace set automatically by a Tesla car, and the perfect shoe. In the cool dark morning he set off, slipstreaming in behind a squadron of world-class pacemakers.

As his colleagues succumbed to the brutal and relentless pace, one man continued alone against the clock, although missing the historic barrier by 25 seconds. Kipchoge was unphased, delighted but determined to do better. He went back to Kenya and set about improving himself.

Listening to him, dressed in a dark suit and tie, as he addressed the Oxford Union later that year, it struck me that he is perhaps one of the most thoughtful, intelligent athletes you will ever meet. Constantly seeking to challenge himself as a way to progress. Always curious, always listening, wanting to read more and learn from others.

He is even a fan of motivational business books. In particular he regularly rereads Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People saying it taught him the importance of working hard, treating your profession as seriously as you can, and how to live alongside other people. He also likes John Maxwell’s 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth.

Why does he think he has become the best? Because of his mental toughness, he says. “Many of my peers train just as hard as I do. But success is more about having the right attitude”. Maybe unexpectedly for an African marathoner, he likes to quote Aristotle. “In any profession, you should think positively. That’s the driver of your mind. If your mind is really thinking positive, then you are on the right track. ‘Pleasure in what you’re doing puts perfection in your work.’”

Kipchoge is sometimes called the philosopher, sometimes even the Buddha. “No human is limited” says the rubber band that he wears around his wrist. “The mind is what drives a human being,” he says “If you have that belief – that you want to be successful – then you can talk to your mind. My mind is always free. My mind is flexible. I want to show the world that you can go beyond your thoughts, you can break more than you think you can break.”

What keeps him motivated, having achieved Olympic titles and world records? It was actually when he visited Iffley Road, the small Oxford running track where Roger Bannister had broken his 4 minutes for one mile, back in 1954, that Kipchoge became truly fixated by 2 hours, as a challenge and a legacy. He says “The world is full of challenges and we need to challenge ourselves. For me it is to run faster than anybody else in history.”

You might assume that once he found a winning formula, he would keep doing what he does. Not Kipchoge. A surprising supplement to his training schedule before Vienna was the introduction of aerobics and pilates. Seeing the highly tuned athletes working out to Pharrell Williams’ Happy soundtrack seemed almost surreal. “Constantly seek and embrace change” he says. “I know it is not really comfortable to adopt change but change in life of a human being or life of any profession is really important.”

He constantly asks himself what he could have done better, and what can he do in the future. He describes a tree planted near where he lives. “There is a sign next to it saying that the best time to plant a tree is 25 years ago. The second-best time is today.”

At the end of his 2-hour barrier-breaking run in Vienna, Kipchoge talked selflessly about how he hoped his moment would inspire others, not just to also beat the 2 hour barrier, but also for people to believe in the spirit of humanity, to rise above conflict and doubt. “We can make this world a beautiful world, a peaceful world, a running world”.

Inspiration 2: DeepMind

Whilst we marvel at extreme feats of human performance, we also know that technology has the potential to outperform humanity.

The ability to process huge amounts of data at incredible speeds, to learn through repetitive process, and to harness the strength and agility of robotics challenge many of the ways in which humans used to excel.

The game of chess has long served as a benchmark for AI researchers. John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence” in the early 1950s, once compared it to the way in which the fruit fly is used to understand genetics.

In 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer embarked upon a series of chess games against Garry Kasparov, the world champion. Deep Blue eventually beat Kasparov, marking the first time a machine had defeated a world champion.

Within a few years computing technology was consistently beating chess grandmasters.

However, AI developers knew that they needed greater challenges, searching for more complex games to test their increasingly sophisticated algorithms. They turned their attention to the ancient Chinese strategy game of Go, which is both deceptively simple to play, yet extraordinarily complex to master.

The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. It was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured aristocratic Chinese. Go has a larger board than chess, a 19×19 grid of lines containing 361 points, and therefore with many more alternatives to consider per move.

It took another decade of machine learning development until scientists were able to create a truly competitive AI-based Go player.

In 2014, a team at London-based DeepMind Technologies started working on a deep learning neural network called AlphaGo. Two years later a mysterious online Go player named “Master” appeared on the popular Asian game platform Tygem. The mysterious player dominated games against many world champions.

Eventually it was confirmed that the “master” was in fact created by DeepMind, since acquired by Google, and now a subsidiary of Alphabet.

The master was replaced by a grandmaster in 2017. AlphaZero, an enhanced version of the original system, embraced an even more sophisticated algorithm designed to learn as it progressed through games. The system simply plays against itself, over and over, and learns how to master whatever game it has been programmed to work with. Searching through 80,000 positions, a fraction of what other predictive software had used, it had perfected the game in 24 hours using an AI-type of intuition.

AlphaZero achieved two things: autonomy from humans, and superhuman ability. Scientist and futurist James Lovelock calls this “the novacene”, translated as “the new new” in Latin and Greek, where a new form of intelligent life emerges from a human-initiated AI-based machine into one which no longer requires human intervention.

He calls AlphaZero, and other such beings, cyborgs.

In his book “Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence”, Lovelock suggests that AI-based entities can think and act 10,000 times faster than humans (and to put that in perspective, that humans can think and act 10,000 times faster than plants). He then reflects that maybe AI-based life would be rather boring, considering that a flight to Australia using physical transport would currently take 3000 AI-based years.

The real point of a cyborg, a term first coined by Austria’s Manfred Clynes to describe an organism as self-sufficient as a human but made of engineered materials, is that it is able to improve and replicate itself.

Which quickly takes us to a future beyond what Hungarian John Van Neumann called “the singularity”, the point at which intelligent technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible. Both physicist Stephen Hawking and entrepreneur Elon Musk have warned of the profound implication of autonomous AI.

Of course, we already have many devices that learn and improve continually. Take Google Maps, for example, which constantly learns from all its users about realtime traffic situations, and the more users it has the better the information becomes. Or consider Google Nest, an intelligent thermostat which takes control of the temperature in our homes. For now, they are useful tools, to help us live better.

Inspiration 3: Tan Le

The Vietnamese boat refugee who found a new beginning in Australia, qualifying as a lawyer, then creating Emotiv, a world-leading neurotechnology company.

Tan Le was only 4 years old when she fled Vietnam with her mother and sister, crowded on board a fishing boat with 162 other people, in search of a better life. It was a difficult choice, leaving her father behind and heading out to the uncertain seas.

For 5 days they sailed, and then after losing power, drifted across the South China Sea. She remembers the long dark nights and rough seas, and everyone becoming desperate once food and water ran out.

Fortune came in the shape of a British oil tanker, which offered to rescue them. After 3 months in a refugee camp, the family were offered a flight to Australia. As the plane flew across the unknown country, she was struck by the huge emptiness of the land, and later reflected on it as symbolising the new opportunities which she could never have imagined. On landing, her mother told her to kiss the ground, as this was a special place.

At 8 years old, her mum says she was a dreamer, and particularly liked to pretend she had the power of telepathy, as inspired by a movie she had seen. In reality, she called herself a curious nerd, desperate to work hard and seize her opportunity. At the same time, she was very conscious about being different – her looks, her accent, her background.

Then, when she was 20, she won Young Australian of the Year for her work in helping other immigrants to settle locally, to learn the English language, and to find jobs. She was astonished that somebody like her could win such an award. It was the moment that really opened her mind.

She started to look beyond her mum’s dream of her becoming a doctor or lawyer. With a degree from Monash University she qualified as a lawyer, but quickly turned her attention to software engineering, exploring how brainwaves can control digital devices.

It was all about understanding the brain in context, and how it could be directed to do more productive work, to engage consumers more deeply with brands, to help people with disabilities. Her early work included the development of EEG (electroencephalography) headsets by which you can control a car, or drone, or game, with your mind.

“When the neurons in your brain interact, they emit electrical impulses, which we can then translate into patterns that become commands, by using machine learning” she explained in a recent interview with CNBC.

She founded Emotiv, a bio-informatics company. It was all about understanding the brain in context, and how it could be directed to do more productive work, to engage consumers more deeply with brands, to help people with disabilities.

Chosen to be part of the World Economic Forum’s Young Business Leaders in 2009, she sat at a dinner held in Buenos Aires with fellow participants. Opposite her sat a wheelchair-bound Brazilian called Rodrigo Hübner Mendes. He introduced himself as a Formula One racing car driver, who used a specially developed brain interface to control the vehicle.

Mendes explained how he would turn left by imagining eating tasty food, turn right by imagining he was riding a bike, and accelerate by imagining he had just scored a World Cup goal for Brazil. He explained how the technology for the car was developed by a small innovative company called Emotiv. She smiled, deeply moved by his story.

Today Emotiv is a world-leading in brain interface software, with technology that is cheaper than a gaming console, but has the ability to fundamentally disrupt and improve our lives. With offices around the world, Le spends much of her time in Hanoi, where her ground-breaking technology is being developed by young Vietnamese technologists.

Le reflects on her personal journey saying, “Like my mum, I took a leap of faith into the world of technology, and particularly into a completely new area for which I had no qualifications or experience.”

She freely admits that she doesn’t have all the answers, with “I try to make the right choices, but you never know exactly where you are going, or if doing your best” but is also an infectious optimism “The future is not hear yet. We have the chance to create it, to co-create it.”

As for Mendes, he recently found himself at a conference in Dubai listening to world champion F1 driver Lewis Hamilton. When it came to questions at the end, Mendes’ hand immediately sprung up. He challenged the world champion to a race, using brainwave-controlled cars. Hamilton, a lover of new technologies, accepted. The race awaits.

Inspiration 4: Satya Nadella

The Indian-born CEO says he doesn’t want to be cool, but to make other people cool, inspiring Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable business, again.

Technology’s impact on our lives is still in its infancy. From mobile phones to social networks that bring new connections and instant gratification, to the reinvention of every industry. This is where Microsoft sees its future.

After 15 years of Bill Gates’s visionary leadership in the emergent technological world, “putting a computer on every desk”, Microsoft declined under the heavy-handed control of Steve Ballmer. Until in 2014 when Satya Nadella took over, and in his words, “hit refresh”.

His first speech as CEO did not even mention the word “Windows”, the company’s proprietary operating system, and cash cow. Instead he said “the world is about cloud first, mobile first” setting out his new priorities for growth.

Within five years he had more than quadrupled the company’s value, and with a focus on how a new generation of technologies, most significantly AI, can enable other companies to transform themselves, with the help of Microsoft.

“We don’t want to be the cool company in the tech sector,” Nadella says, “We want to be the company that makes other people cool.” By which he means that his mission is to build Microsoft as the enabling force behind today’s business world. Whilst his predecessors burnt their fingers trying to create branded hardware, most notably acquiring Nokia’s mobile business, Nadella is happier to create the smart insides of other people’s solutions.

To be the partner, the enabler, to empower others to be great.

At Microsoft’s huge Redmond campus, just outside Seattle, there is a revolution in attitude and practice. Gone is the ego-driven, insular thinking of old. Boardroom strategies are replaced by hackathons where anyone can shine. Elitist developers are usurped by ideas that can come from anywhere. Collaboration with partners, even Apple and Amazon, is the new normal. And big human and ethical dilemmas are top of the company’s agenda, how to control intelligent machines, how to address global healthcare and inequality.

But this is not a cult of leadership, or a hierarchy of command. Nadella is a very modern leader, recognising that his role is not to be the expert, or the hero, or the decision-maker – but to be the facilitator, the connector, the enabler. Behind that behaviour is his belief in the idea of a “growth mindset. Nowhere will you find this approach to leadership more clear, applied and powerful than in today’s Microsoft.

“Growth mindset” is a simple but powerful concept that I use constantly in my work with business leaders. One of the biggest problems companies run into, and the successful ones even more so, is that they keep trying to perfect their existing world. Instead, it’s probably time to let go. As the world changes, ever more dramatically, leaders need to change too – looking forwards not back, experimenting with new ideas, rather than seek to optimise the old. Efficiency savings won’t create your future, but ideas and imagination just might. Move from diminishing returns to exponential opportunities.

“Don’t be a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all” Nadella loves to say. “In 2014, we cancelled our company meeting where our leaders would tell employees what was important, in favour of having a hackathon that lets our employees tell our leaders what’s important,” recalls Jeff Ramos, head of the Microsoft Garage, where employees with a bright idea can come and experiment, build, hack, and see if there ideas have potential.

I recently watched Nadella take to the stage at Microsoft Envision, a huge event where the company brings together many of the world’s leading CEOs to explore the future, there was a real energy in the room. From him – a great beaming smile, an uplifting speech, an entirely positive demeanour – but also from his team too. He believes in a new business world – one where teams beat hierarchy, where collaboration beats competition, where humanity is always superior to technology, and where dreams outperform numbers.

In November 2018, Microsoft became the world’s most valuable company again, after a gap of 16 years. 7 months later the business soared through the trillion dollar market cap mark. At the end of 2019, Nadella was named Financial Times’ Person of the Year, saying that “Microsoft was at risk of technological irrelevance but Nadella has presided over an era of stunning wealth creation.”

Inspiration 5: Mary Barra

She challenged the traditional culture of GM in dramatic style, rejecting complacency and embracing new tech, on a mission to reinvent her industry.

Car making is far from a luxury business, particularly in the decimated heartlands of the American car industry. The arrival of better, cheaper brands like Toyota from Japan, and more recently others from China and South Korea, fundamentally challenged local makers. Globalisation was killing the local industry.

Mary Barra grew up just outside Detroit, at a time when the city and car making was booming. Her father Ray Makela worked as a dye maker for 39 years at the Pontiac car factory, whilst Mary started working in the industry at the age of 18, checking fender panels and inspecting hoods to pay for her college education.

“My parents were both born and raised in the Depression. They instilled great values about integrity and the importance of hard work, and I’ve taken that with me to every job” she says.

When studying at the General Motors Institute, her tutor recalled how he taught her many aspects of car design, including how to make windscreen wipers work. He said she was always the leader, taking charge of mostly-male groups, balancing her strong technical knowledge with her easy-going communication skills.

She joined GM full time and worked through the ranks, becoming VP of Global Manufacturing in 2008, and then of Human Resources. In 2014, with the business increasingly struggling to survive, and uncertain about a future that looked electric and driverless, she became CEO.

Today she is a woman on a mission, to save GM and to reinvent her industry.

In her first year as leader, GM was forced to recall 30 million cars due to safety issues that resulted in 124 deaths. She was called before Senate to explain the problems, and brand reputation plummeted to an all-time low. The recalls, however, also demanded significant change in work practices. She introduced new policies for employees to report problems, and a new culture of openness and determination to fight back was born.

Over the next five years Barra pushed GM to transform itself, to embrace innovation and new ways of working, both operationally and strategically. In particular she wanted to seize the leadership in new technologies such as hybrid engines and automated driving.

Asked by CNN what it takes to transform a traditional business she said “It takes a lot! You need the right people, the right culture and the right strategy. To be truly great, your team must have diversity of thought and be willing to collaborate constructively.”

“Your company culture should empower and inspire people to relentlessly pursue the company’s vision, always with integrity.  A strong strategy is the roadmap to achieve your vision, but you need strategies for this year, as well as the next five, 10, and 20 years — and they all may need to work in tandem. Our vision at GM is a world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion, and everyone on the team knows we are committed to putting the customer at the centre of everything we do.”

“At GM we live and work by a set of seven behaviours, one of which we call Innovate Now. This means ‘I see things not how they are but how they should be.’ So, we empower our teams to innovate and create, while also understanding macro trends.”

In 2016 Barra splashed out over $1billion to invest in Cruise, a software business for driverless cars. She put it at the heart of her revolution. Her acquisition gave the old business an injection of new capabilities, but also new courage and creativity too.

“My definition of ‘innovative’ is providing value to the customer” she adds.

Her move was worth $20 billion of market value in investor confidence alone. Soon revenues started to grow back, employees and customers both believed in a new future. The Chevy Bolt, a car with no steering wheel, suddenly made autonomous dreams real, and the GM brands started to become desirable again.

Inspiration 6: Jack Ma

The Hangzhou teacher on $12 a month built Alibaba into a $400 billion global technology leader over 20 years, before retiring to become a teacher again.

Technology, of course, is not everything. Whilst machines might eclipse 30% of the human jobs of today, there will still be a need to achieve more than speed and efficiency. This demands that humans rise up to harness their more distinctive assets, to be creative and intuitive. To go beyond the technology.

Ma began studying English at a young age, spending time talking to English-speaking visitors at the Hangzhou international hotel near his home. He would then ride 70 miles on his bicycle to give tourists guided tours of the area to practice his English. Foreigners nicknamed him “Jack” because they found his Chinese name too difficult to pronounce.

In 1988 he became an English teacher earning just $12 a month, and describing it years later whilst speaking at the 2018 World Economic Forum, as “the best life I had”.

From teaching, he soon had ambitions to do more. He applied for 30 different jobs and got rejected by all. He wanted to be a policeman but was told he was too small. He tried his luck at KFC, the first one to arrive in China. Famously he retells the tale “24 people went for the job. 23 were accepted. I was the only guy who wasn’t.” He applied to Harvard Business School, but was rejected 10 times.

He persevered, seeing every step as a learning experience. In 1994, Ma heard about the Internet. One day, when searching online for the different beers of the world, he was surprised to find none from China. The world’s most consumed beer brand, Snow beer, is of course Chinese. So he and a friend launched a simple Chinese language website called China Pages. Within hours investors were on the phone, and within three years he was generating over 5,000,000 Chinese Yuan.

“My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.”

Interviewed at the World Economic Forum he said “I call Alibaba 1001 mistakes. We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn’t know how we’d make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us.”

Over the next two decades he built Alibaba into a $400 billion organisation. In 2017, to celebrate the internet giant’s 18th birthday, Ma appeared on stage dressed like Michael Jackson, turning the event into a “Thriller” performance. His passion for his company, and for his audience of employees, shone through.

Looking back he reflected “The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you’ve got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don’t give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.

And about himself, often quoted as a supporter of the “996” work mindset (working from 9am until 9pm, 6 days a week), he adds “I don’t think I’m a workaholic. Every weekend, I invite my colleagues and friends to my home to play cards. And people, my neighbours, are always surprised because I live on the second floor apartment, and there are usually 40 pairs of shoes in front of my gate. We have a lot of fun.”

On Alibaba’s 20th birthday, himself now 54 years old, and worth over $40 billion, he decided to retire saying “teachers always want their students to exceed them, so the responsible thing to do for me and the company to do is to let younger, more talented people take over in leadership roles so that they inherit our mission ‘to make it easy to do business anywhere’.”

“Having been trained as a teacher, I feel extremely proud of what I have achieved,” he wrote to his colleagues and shareholders” before adding “I still have lots of dreams to pursue. I want to return to education, which excites me with so much blessing because this is what I love to do. This is something I want to devote most of my time to when I retire.”

He spoke passionately about the challenges for the future of education in Davos saying: “A teacher should learn all the time; a teacher should share all the time. Education is a big challenge now – if we do not change the way we teach 30 years later we will be in trouble. We cannot teach our kids to compete with the machines who are smarter – we have to teach our kids something unique. In this way, 30 years later, kids will have a chance.”

Inspiration 7: JK Rowling

Harry Potter was the culmination of her own story from poverty and rebellion to fame and fortune. “It matters not what you are born, but what you grow to be.”

The power of our imagination, to drive creativity and innovation, to engage people with empathy, and to inspire their dreams, was the theme of Joanne Rowling’s speech to graduating students at Harvard University in 2008.

The bestselling author, better known as JK Rowling, told how she used her experiences of working as researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International to imagine the stories that became her much loved books.

She conceived the idea for her “Harry Potter” books while on a delayed train from Manchester to London in 1990, and started imagining a story of a young wizard who went to wizard school. Without anything to note down her ideas, she rapidly set out an entire plot in her head, then tried to write it down on arriving home.

The next 7 years were tough, with the death of her mother, birth of her first child, and divorce from her first husband. Having lost her job, because she sat dreaming about her plots, she decide to move to Porto where she briefly married a local TV journalist, before heading to Edinburgh to be with her sister.

In 1995 she sent her manuscript off to every publisher she could fund, but was rejected by all, being told that her story was too long, too elitist, and too complicated. Eventually the CEO’s daughter at Bloomsbury, a children’s imprint, read that story and couldn’t put it down. Her influence on her father resulted in a £4000 advance to Rowling. The only catch was that they felt her pen name needed more style, so she borrowed a middle initial from her grandmother, Kathleen.

“Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was published in 1997 to rave reviews. What really changed her life, was when the publishing firm Scholastic came in to buy the American rights to the book for a sensational $105,000. The book sold 80,000 copies in the first year, and hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Over the years since it has become the most financially successful novel in history with 400 million readers, and generating $10 billion of sales.

Her own story, a little like Jack Ma’s, was one of rags to riches, as she progressed from living on state benefits to being the world’s first billionaire author. She lost her billionaire status after giving away much of her earnings to charity, but remains one of the wealthiest people in the world.

She wrote her first book “Rabbit” when she was six years old, about a rabbit who lived in her village of Tutshill in Gloucestershire, who got sick and was cared for by a bumble bee called Miss Bee. She was convinced she could be a writer, even though she lacked confidence otherwise.

When Rowling was at school her parents didn’t want her to pursue her dream of being a writer because they worried it wouldn’t pay a mortgage. She ignored them, saying listen to your friends, family, and those who care about you, but remember it is your life. “If you have a gift, talent, dream, then pursue it. There’s no way anybody knows how it will turn out, but if you love it and you put all your energy into it, your chances of success are great.”

Her editor at Bloomsbury, the publisher who took a huge gamble on the unknown author, says that Rowling’s great strength is that she has “a microscopic and macroscopic view of the world” which enabled her to tell such imaginative tales in such engaging detail.

Passing exams, she said to the new Harvard graduates, does not determine your success. Whilst she admitted to having a knack for taking tests and passing exams, she also said that it was her failures that had taken her further. “It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously, you might as well not have lived at all– in which case, you fail by default.” Rather than seeking to avoid failure, we must be willing to accept that it is going to come and be ready to build our lives off it.

“To get through life without failing,” she said, “would not be a life worth living.”

“Imagination is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared” says Rowling, proclaiming that imagination is crucial for life. Without it, we ignore the one truly unique quality that differentiates us from all other species, effectively claiming that we are human.

Perhaps we should also remember the words of the Rowling’s great wizard Dumbledore, headmaster at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, who said “It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”

© Peter Fisk 2020.

Extracts from “Business Recoded” by Peter Fisk:

“Two characteristics that make Peter Fisk one of my favorites thought leaders in the strategy field are his ability to make complex matters simple and his positive views about the future, focusing, through real case studies, on the opportunities laid ahead, rather than the hurdles. His new book, Business Recoded, is definitely a must-read for leaders that want to succeed with their organizations in our fast-changing world”.  Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez,  author of “The Project Revolution” and “The Focused Organization”.

“It is not often that we have moments of magic in any business. What Peter has given us is more than just ideas and inspiration, but a whole way of thinking about how we could reinvent our future, and start making it happen tomorrow” Alberto Uncini-Manganelli, GM and SVP, Adidas.

© Peter Fisk 2020

“Business Recoded” by Peter Fisk is available now from Amazon and other retailers.

Peter Fisk explores the big themes from his new book Business Recoded, and what it means for marketing leaders.

Business needs a new code for success.

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.

“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.

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 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?

“A brilliant collection of practical guidelines intended to refresh and reinvent our mindsets, from a global thoughtful leader with vast experience in management development” Santiago Iniguez, President of IE University.

“Business Recoded is a great source of inspiration for leaders who want to position themselves for the future.” Alex Osterwalder, author of Business Model Generation and The Invincible Company.

Contents

Introduction

Business needs a new code for success

  • Why do we need to recode?
  • What are the new codes?
  • The new DNA of business
  • The new DNA of leadership
  • Have the courage to lead the future
  • Inspiration 1: Eliud Kipchoge
  • Inspiration 2: DeepMind
  • Inspiration 3: Tan Le
  • Inspiration 4: Satya Nadella
  • Inspiration 5: Mary Barra
  • Inspiration 6: Jack Ma
  • Inspiration 7: JK Rowling

Part 1: Aurora … Recode your future

How will you reinvent your business for a better future?

  • Code 1: Explore your future potential
  • Code 2: Have a future mindset
  • Code 3: Imagine a better business
  • Code 4: Find your inspiring purpose
  • Code 5: Create your future story
  • Code 6: Deliver more positive impact
  • Code 7: Be the radical optimist
  • Leader 1: Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe
  • Leader 2: Elon Musk, SpaceX
  • Leader 3: Patrick Brown, Impossible Foods
  • Leader 4: Larry Fink, BlackRock
  • Leader 5: Yves Chouinard, Patagonia

Part 2: Komorebi … Recode your growth

Where are the best opportunities to grow further and faster?

  • Code 8: Ride with the megatrends
  • Code 9: Find new sources of growth
  • Code 10: Embrace the Asian century
  • Code 11: Harness technology and humanity
  • Code 12: Start from the future back
  • Code 13: Accelerate through networks
  • Code 14: Build a growth portfolio 
  • Leader 6: Masayoshi Son, Softbank
  • Leader 7: Emily Weiss, Glossier
  • Leader 8: Wang Xing, Meituan Dianping
  • Leader 9: Danae Ringelmann, Indiegogo
  • Leader 10: Mukesh Ambani, Reliance

Part 3: Transcendent … Recode your market

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=part+3+business+recoded

How will you reshape your market to your advantage? 

  • Code 15: Explore the market matrix
  • Code 16: Disrupt the disruptors
  • Code 17: Capture the customer agenda
  • Code 18: Create new market spaces
  • Code 19: Build trust with authenticity
  • Code 20: Develop brands with purpose
  • Code 21: Enable people to achieve more
  • Leader 11: Bernard Arnault, LVMH
  • Leader 12: Maria Raga, Depop
  • Leader 13: Ali Parsa, Babylon Health
  • Leader 14: Hooi Ling Tan, Grab
  • Leader 15: Mikkel Bjergso, Mikkeller

Part 4: Ingenuity … Recode your innovation

What does it take to drive more radical innovation?

  • Code 22: Be ingenious
  • Code 23: Search for better ideas
  • Code 24: Embrace a designer mindset
  • Code 25: Create unusual connections
  • Code 26: Develop new business models
  • Code 27: Experiment with speed and agility
  • Code 28: Dream crazy
  • Leader 16: Rene Renzepi, Noma
  • Leader 17: James Watt, BrewDog
  • Leader 18: Jensen Huang, Nvidia
  • Leader 19: Devi Shetty, Narayana Health
  • Leader 20: Katrina Lake, Stitch Fix 

Part 5: Ubuntu … Recode your organisation

How can people achieve more together?

  • Code 29: Build a butterfly ecosystem
  • Code 30: Work as a living organisation
  • Code 31: Collaborate in fast projects
  • Code 32: Do human, inspiring work
  • Code 33: Align individuals and organisations
  • Code 34: Create energy and rhythm
  • Code 35: Be an extreme team 
  • Leader 21: Reed Hastings, Netflix
  • Leader 22: Zhang Ruimin, Haier
  • Leader 23: Cristina Junqueira, Nubank
  • Leader 24: Jos de Blok, Buurtzorg
  • Leader 25: Ari Weinzweig, Zingerman’s

Part 6: Syzygy … Recode your transformation

What does it take to transform your business effectively?

  • Code 36: Transform your business
  • Code 37: Exploit the core, explore the edge
  • Code 38: Start outside in, and inside out
  • Code 39: Engage people in change
  • Code 40: Build rocket ships to the future
  • Code 41: Create a circular ecosystem
  • Code 42: Have the strategic agility to never stop
  • Leader 26: Jeff Bezos, Amazon
  • Leader 27: Bob Iger, Disney
  • Leader 28: Jessica Tan, Ping An
  • Leader 29: Piyush Gupta, DBS
  • Leader 30: Javier Goyeneche, Ecoalf

Part 7: Awestruck … Recode your leadership

Do you have the courage to create a better future? 

  • Code 43: Step up to lead the future
  • Code 44: Have the courage to do more
  • Code 45: Develop your own leadership style
  • Code 46: Achieve your peak performance
  • Code 47: Stay resilient, stay strong
  • Code 48: Create a better legacy
  • Code 49: Be extraordinary
  • Leader 31: Jim Snabe, Maersk
  • Leader 32: Daniel Ek, Spotify
  • Leader 33: Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani
  • Leader 34: Zhang Xin, Soho China
  • Leader 35: Ilkka Paananen, Supercell

Business Recoded is about having the courage to create a better future. This can take many different forms.

The book starts with 7 short stories from very different people, in very different worlds, from business and beyond.  The stories are all about mindset, about the courage to do better, to achieve more, to break barriers, to be extraordinary.

Inspiration 1: Eliud Kipchoge

The humble Kenyan says that “no human is limited” and, despite his Olympic gold medals and world records, set himself a much more audacious goal.

“I don’t know where the limits are, but I would like to go there” said Eliud Kipchoge as dawn broke over the Danube river in Vienna.

Two hours later he stood in the middle of the tree lined Hauptallee, having just sprinted to the finish of the Ineos 1:59 Challenge, the first human to break two hours for the marathon. “That was the best moment of my life” he said, standing exhausted but still smiling at the finish line. The clock above him stopped at 1 hour 59 minutes and 40 seconds.

Having followed the Kenyan runner throughout his 20-year career, I watched his iconic record attempt in awe. Around him, some of the world’s greatest athletes, from Olympic 1500m Champion Matt Centrowitz to rising star Jacob Ingebrigtsen and the highly experienced Bernard Lagat, cheered and took selfies with the record breaker, pacemakers to the great man, happy to be part of history.

“Today we went to the Moon and came back to Earth” he said.

Back at home in Kenya, people were crowded round televisions, cheering for their runner. But Kipchoge lives a humble life, with the greatest clarity of purpose.

Every morning, just before 5am, in the small village of Kaptagat in western Kenya. He rolls out of bed, wipes the sleep from his eyes and gets ready to run. By the time the sun rises over the ochre red, dusty roads of the Rift Valley, he is well into his stride. Joined by dozens of ambitious young local runners, he strides past farmers heading for their fields, children waiting for their school buses.

This is just his first 20km, his first run of the day. Every day.

On returning to his training camp, it might be Kipchoge’s turn to make breakfast. Most likely it will be a simple bowl of ugali, a Kenyan staple made each day in a big pan from maize flour and water, plus whatever fruits are in season. Afterwards, he will probably hand-wash his running kit, ready for the afternoon session, and then take a nap. On other days, it might be his turn to head to the local farm for provisions, or to clean the communal toilets.

It is a frugal existence, particularly for a global champion, and self-made millionaire.

Yet for Kipchoge, the Olympic champion and world record holder, it is the only way of life that he has known. His wife and young children live in a much more spacious house in the town of Eldoret 40km away, but during his most important training periods, he prefers the simplicity of his spartan camp.

For 15 years, Kipchoge has been chasing a dream. I remember first seeing him run as a teenager, his bulging eyes fixed on the path ahead, always with a smile on his face. He showed early promise, beating world record holders Kenenisa Bekele and Hicham El Guerrouj to become the 1983 5000m world champion whilst only 18 years old. Over the next decade he won many medals but couldn’t call himself the best. As he reached his 30th birthday, he decided to move up to the marathon. To astonishing effect.

In the marathon, he became unbeatable.

In 2017, his sponsors Nike created a project to see if it would be possible to break 2 hours for the marathon. At the heart of their project was the Olympic champion, Kipchoge. They searched the world for the perfect location, choosing Monza’s Formula 1 motor racing circuit in Italy, the perfect conditions, the perfect pace set automatically by a Tesla car, and the perfect shoe. In the cool dark morning he set off, slipstreaming in behind a squadron of world-class pacemakers.

As his colleagues succumbed to the brutal and relentless pace, one man continued alone against the clock, although missing the historic barrier by 25 seconds. Kipchoge was unphased, delighted but determined to do better. He went back to Kenya and set about improving himself.

Listening to him, dressed in a dark suit and tie, as he addressed the Oxford Union later that year, it struck me that he is perhaps one of the most thoughtful, intelligent athletes you will ever meet. Constantly seeking to challenge himself as a way to progress. Always curious, always listening, wanting to read more and learn from others.

He is even a fan of motivational business books. In particular he regularly rereads Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People saying it taught him the importance of working hard, treating your profession as seriously as you can, and how to live alongside other people. He also likes John Maxwell’s 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth.

Why does he think he has become the best? Because of his mental toughness, he says. “Many of my peers train just as hard as I do. But success is more about having the right attitude”. Maybe unexpectedly for an African marathoner, he likes to quote Aristotle. “In any profession, you should think positively. That’s the driver of your mind. If your mind is really thinking positive, then you are on the right track. ‘Pleasure in what you’re doing puts perfection in your work.’”

Kipchoge is sometimes called the philosopher, sometimes even the Buddha. “No human is limited” says the rubber band that he wears around his wrist. “The mind is what drives a human being,” he says “If you have that belief – that you want to be successful – then you can talk to your mind. My mind is always free. My mind is flexible. I want to show the world that you can go beyond your thoughts, you can break more than you think you can break.”

What keeps him motivated, having achieved Olympic titles and world records? It was actually when he visited Iffley Road, the small Oxford running track where Roger Bannister had broken his 4 minutes for one mile, back in 1954, that Kipchoge became truly fixated by 2 hours, as a challenge and a legacy. He says “The world is full of challenges and we need to challenge ourselves. For me it is to run faster than anybody else in history.”

You might assume that once he found a winning formula, he would keep doing what he does. Not Kipchoge. A surprising supplement to his training schedule before Vienna was the introduction of aerobics and pilates. Seeing the highly tuned athletes working out to Pharrell Williams’ Happy soundtrack seemed almost surreal. “Constantly seek and embrace change” he says. “I know it is not really comfortable to adopt change but change in life of a human being or life of any profession is really important.”

He constantly asks himself what he could have done better, and what can he do in the future. He describes a tree planted near where he lives. “There is a sign next to it saying that the best time to plant a tree is 25 years ago. The second-best time is today.”

At the end of his 2-hour barrier-breaking run in Vienna, Kipchoge talked selflessly about how he hoped his moment would inspire others, not just to also beat the 2 hour barrier, but also for people to believe in the spirit of humanity, to rise above conflict and doubt. “We can make this world a beautiful world, a peaceful world, a running world”.

Inspiration 2: DeepMind

Whilst we marvel at extreme feats of human performance, we also know that technology has the potential to outperform humanity.

The ability to process huge amounts of data at incredible speeds, to learn through repetitive process, and to harness the strength and agility of robotics challenge many of the ways in which humans used to excel.

The game of chess has long served as a benchmark for AI researchers. John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence” in the early 1950s, once compared it to the way in which the fruit fly is used to understand genetics.

In 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer embarked upon a series of chess games against Garry Kasparov, the world champion. Deep Blue eventually beat Kasparov, marking the first time a machine had defeated a world champion.

Within a few years computing technology was consistently beating chess grandmasters.

However, AI developers knew that they needed greater challenges, searching for more complex games to test their increasingly sophisticated algorithms. They turned their attention to the ancient Chinese strategy game of Go, which is both deceptively simple to play, yet extraordinarily complex to master.

The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. It was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured aristocratic Chinese. Go has a larger board than chess, a 19×19 grid of lines containing 361 points, and therefore with many more alternatives to consider per move.

It took another decade of machine learning development until scientists were able to create a truly competitive AI-based Go player.

In 2014, a team at London-based DeepMind Technologies started working on a deep learning neural network called AlphaGo. Two years later a mysterious online Go player named “Master” appeared on the popular Asian game platform Tygem. The mysterious player dominated games against many world champions.

Eventually it was confirmed that the “master” was in fact created by DeepMind, since acquired by Google, and now a subsidiary of Alphabet.

The master was replaced by a grandmaster in 2017. AlphaZero, an enhanced version of the original system, embraced an even more sophisticated algorithm designed to learn as it progressed through games. The system simply plays against itself, over and over, and learns how to master whatever game it has been programmed to work with. Searching through 80,000 positions, a fraction of what other predictive software had used, it had perfected the game in 24 hours using an AI-type of intuition.

AlphaZero achieved two things: autonomy from humans, and superhuman ability. Scientist and futurist James Lovelock calls this “the novacene”, translated as “the new new” in Latin and Greek, where a new form of intelligent life emerges from a human-initiated AI-based machine into one which no longer requires human intervention.

He calls AlphaZero, and other such beings, cyborgs.

In his book “Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence”, Lovelock suggests that AI-based entities can think and act 10,000 times faster than humans (and to put that in perspective, that humans can think and act 10,000 times faster than plants). He then reflects that maybe AI-based life would be rather boring, considering that a flight to Australia using physical transport would currently take 3000 AI-based years.

The real point of a cyborg, a term first coined by Austria’s Manfred Clynes to describe an organism as self-sufficient as a human but made of engineered materials, is that it is able to improve and replicate itself.

Which quickly takes us to a future beyond what Hungarian John Van Neumann called “the singularity”, the point at which intelligent technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible. Both physicist Stephen Hawking and entrepreneur Elon Musk have warned of the profound implication of autonomous AI.

Of course, we already have many devices that learn and improve continually. Take Google Maps, for example, which constantly learns from all its users about realtime traffic situations, and the more users it has the better the information becomes. Or consider Google Nest, an intelligent thermostat which takes control of the temperature in our homes. For now, they are useful tools, to help us live better.

Inspiration 3: Tan Le

The Vietnamese boat refugee who found a new beginning in Australia, qualifying as a lawyer, then creating Emotiv, a world-leading neurotechnology company.

Tan Le was only 4 years old when she fled Vietnam with her mother and sister, crowded on board a fishing boat with 162 other people, in search of a better life. It was a difficult choice, leaving her father behind and heading out to the uncertain seas.

For 5 days they sailed, and then after losing power, drifted across the South China Sea. She remembers the long dark nights and rough seas, and everyone becoming desperate once food and water ran out.

Fortune came in the shape of a British oil tanker, which offered to rescue them. After 3 months in a refugee camp, the family were offered a flight to Australia. As the plane flew across the unknown country, she was struck by the huge emptiness of the land, and later reflected on it as symbolising the new opportunities which she could never have imagined. On landing, her mother told her to kiss the ground, as this was a special place.

At 8 years old, her mum says she was a dreamer, and particularly liked to pretend she had the power of telepathy, as inspired by a movie she had seen. In reality, she called herself a curious nerd, desperate to work hard and seize her opportunity. At the same time, she was very conscious about being different – her looks, her accent, her background.

Then, when she was 20, she won Young Australian of the Year for her work in helping other immigrants to settle locally, to learn the English language, and to find jobs. She was astonished that somebody like her could win such an award. It was the moment that really opened her mind.

She started to look beyond her mum’s dream of her becoming a doctor or lawyer. With a degree from Monash University she qualified as a lawyer, but quickly turned her attention to software engineering, exploring how brainwaves can control digital devices.

It was all about understanding the brain in context, and how it could be directed to do more productive work, to engage consumers more deeply with brands, to help people with disabilities. Her early work included the development of EEG (electroencephalography) headsets by which you can control a car, or drone, or game, with your mind.

“When the neurons in your brain interact, they emit electrical impulses, which we can then translate into patterns that become commands, by using machine learning” she explained in a recent interview with CNBC.

She founded Emotiv, a bio-informatics company. It was all about understanding the brain in context, and how it could be directed to do more productive work, to engage consumers more deeply with brands, to help people with disabilities.

Chosen to be part of the World Economic Forum’s Young Business Leaders in 2009, she sat at a dinner held in Buenos Aires with fellow participants. Opposite her sat a wheelchair-bound Brazilian called Rodrigo Hübner Mendes. He introduced himself as a Formula One racing car driver, who used a specially developed brain interface to control the vehicle.

Mendes explained how he would turn left by imagining eating tasty food, turn right by imagining he was riding a bike, and accelerate by imagining he had just scored a World Cup goal for Brazil. He explained how the technology for the car was developed by a small innovative company called Emotiv. She smiled, deeply moved by his story.

Today Emotiv is a world-leading in brain interface software, with technology that is cheaper than a gaming console, but has the ability to fundamentally disrupt and improve our lives. With offices around the world, Le spends much of her time in Hanoi, where her ground-breaking technology is being developed by young Vietnamese technologists.

Le reflects on her personal journey saying, “Like my mum, I took a leap of faith into the world of technology, and particularly into a completely new area for which I had no qualifications or experience.”

She freely admits that she doesn’t have all the answers, with “I try to make the right choices, but you never know exactly where you are going, or if doing your best” but is also an infectious optimism “The future is not hear yet. We have the chance to create it, to co-create it.”

As for Mendes, he recently found himself at a conference in Dubai listening to world champion F1 driver Lewis Hamilton. When it came to questions at the end, Mendes’ hand immediately sprung up. He challenged the world champion to a race, using brainwave-controlled cars. Hamilton, a lover of new technologies, accepted. The race awaits.

Inspiration 4: Satya Nadella

The Indian-born CEO says he doesn’t want to be cool, but to make other people cool, inspiring Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable business, again.

Technology’s impact on our lives is still in its infancy. From mobile phones to social networks that bring new connections and instant gratification, to the reinvention of every industry. This is where Microsoft sees its future.

After 15 years of Bill Gates’s visionary leadership in the emergent technological world, “putting a computer on every desk”, Microsoft declined under the heavy-handed control of Steve Ballmer. Until in 2014 when Satya Nadella took over, and in his words, “hit refresh”.

His first speech as CEO did not even mention the word “Windows”, the company’s proprietary operating system, and cash cow. Instead he said “the world is about cloud first, mobile first” setting out his new priorities for growth.

Within five years he had more than quadrupled the company’s value, and with a focus on how a new generation of technologies, most significantly AI, can enable other companies to transform themselves, with the help of Microsoft.

“We don’t want to be the cool company in the tech sector,” Nadella says, “We want to be the company that makes other people cool.” By which he means that his mission is to build Microsoft as the enabling force behind today’s business world. Whilst his predecessors burnt their fingers trying to create branded hardware, most notably acquiring Nokia’s mobile business, Nadella is happier to create the smart insides of other people’s solutions.

To be the partner, the enabler, to empower others to be great.

At Microsoft’s huge Redmond campus, just outside Seattle, there is a revolution in attitude and practice. Gone is the ego-driven, insular thinking of old. Boardroom strategies are replaced by hackathons where anyone can shine. Elitist developers are usurped by ideas that can come from anywhere. Collaboration with partners, even Apple and Amazon, is the new normal. And big human and ethical dilemmas are top of the company’s agenda, how to control intelligent machines, how to address global healthcare and inequality.

But this is not a cult of leadership, or a hierarchy of command. Nadella is a very modern leader, recognising that his role is not to be the expert, or the hero, or the decision-maker – but to be the facilitator, the connector, the enabler. Behind that behaviour is his belief in the idea of a “growth mindset. Nowhere will you find this approach to leadership more clear, applied and powerful than in today’s Microsoft.

“Growth mindset” is a simple but powerful concept that I use constantly in my work with business leaders. One of the biggest problems companies run into, and the successful ones even more so, is that they keep trying to perfect their existing world. Instead, it’s probably time to let go. As the world changes, ever more dramatically, leaders need to change too – looking forwards not back, experimenting with new ideas, rather than seek to optimise the old. Efficiency savings won’t create your future, but ideas and imagination just might. Move from diminishing returns to exponential opportunities.

“Don’t be a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all” Nadella loves to say. “In 2014, we cancelled our company meeting where our leaders would tell employees what was important, in favour of having a hackathon that lets our employees tell our leaders what’s important,” recalls Jeff Ramos, head of the Microsoft Garage, where employees with a bright idea can come and experiment, build, hack, and see if there ideas have potential.

I recently watched Nadella take to the stage at Microsoft Envision, a huge event where the company brings together many of the world’s leading CEOs to explore the future, there was a real energy in the room. From him – a great beaming smile, an uplifting speech, an entirely positive demeanour – but also from his team too. He believes in a new business world – one where teams beat hierarchy, where collaboration beats competition, where humanity is always superior to technology, and where dreams outperform numbers.

In November 2018, Microsoft became the world’s most valuable company again, after a gap of 16 years. 7 months later the business soared through the trillion dollar market cap mark. At the end of 2019, Nadella was named Financial Times’ Person of the Year, saying that “Microsoft was at risk of technological irrelevance but Nadella has presided over an era of stunning wealth creation.”

Inspiration 5: Mary Barra

She challenged the traditional culture of GM in dramatic style, rejecting complacency and embracing new tech, on a mission to reinvent her industry.

Car making is far from a luxury business, particularly in the decimated heartlands of the American car industry. The arrival of better, cheaper brands like Toyota from Japan, and more recently others from China and South Korea, fundamentally challenged local makers. Globalisation was killing the local industry.

Mary Barra grew up just outside Detroit, at a time when the city and car making was booming. Her father Ray Makela worked as a dye maker for 39 years at the Pontiac car factory, whilst Mary started working in the industry at the age of 18, checking fender panels and inspecting hoods to pay for her college education.

“My parents were both born and raised in the Depression. They instilled great values about integrity and the importance of hard work, and I’ve taken that with me to every job” she says.

When studying at the General Motors Institute, her tutor recalled how he taught her many aspects of car design, including how to make windscreen wipers work. He said she was always the leader, taking charge of mostly-male groups, balancing her strong technical knowledge with her easy-going communication skills.

She joined GM full time and worked through the ranks, becoming VP of Global Manufacturing in 2008, and then of Human Resources. In 2014, with the business increasingly struggling to survive, and uncertain about a future that looked electric and driverless, she became CEO.

Today she is a woman on a mission, to save GM and to reinvent her industry.

In her first year as leader, GM was forced to recall 30 million cars due to safety issues that resulted in 124 deaths. She was called before Senate to explain the problems, and brand reputation plummeted to an all-time low. The recalls, however, also demanded significant change in work practices. She introduced new policies for employees to report problems, and a new culture of openness and determination to fight back was born.

Over the next five years Barra pushed GM to transform itself, to embrace innovation and new ways of working, both operationally and strategically. In particular she wanted to seize the leadership in new technologies such as hybrid engines and automated driving.

Asked by CNN what it takes to transform a traditional business she said “It takes a lot! You need the right people, the right culture and the right strategy. To be truly great, your team must have diversity of thought and be willing to collaborate constructively.”

“Your company culture should empower and inspire people to relentlessly pursue the company’s vision, always with integrity.  A strong strategy is the roadmap to achieve your vision, but you need strategies for this year, as well as the next five, 10, and 20 years — and they all may need to work in tandem. Our vision at GM is a world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion, and everyone on the team knows we are committed to putting the customer at the centre of everything we do.”

“At GM we live and work by a set of seven behaviours, one of which we call Innovate Now. This means ‘I see things not how they are but how they should be.’ So, we empower our teams to innovate and create, while also understanding macro trends.”

In 2016 Barra splashed out over $1billion to invest in Cruise, a software business for driverless cars. She put it at the heart of her revolution. Her acquisition gave the old business an injection of new capabilities, but also new courage and creativity too.

“My definition of ‘innovative’ is providing value to the customer” she adds.

Her move was worth $20 billion of market value in investor confidence alone. Soon revenues started to grow back, employees and customers both believed in a new future. The Chevy Bolt, a car with no steering wheel, suddenly made autonomous dreams real, and the GM brands started to become desirable again.

Inspiration 6: Jack Ma

The Hangzhou teacher on $12 a month built Alibaba into a $400 billion global technology leader over 20 years, before retiring to become a teacher again.

Technology, of course, is not everything. Whilst machines might eclipse 30% of the human jobs of today, there will still be a need to achieve more than speed and efficiency. This demands that humans rise up to harness their more distinctive assets, to be creative and intuitive. To go beyond the technology.

Ma began studying English at a young age, spending time talking to English-speaking visitors at the Hangzhou international hotel near his home. He would then ride 70 miles on his bicycle to give tourists guided tours of the area to practice his English. Foreigners nicknamed him “Jack” because they found his Chinese name too difficult to pronounce.

In 1988 he became an English teacher earning just $12 a month, and describing it years later whilst speaking at the 2018 World Economic Forum, as “the best life I had”.

From teaching, he soon had ambitions to do more. He applied for 30 different jobs and got rejected by all. He wanted to be a policeman but was told he was too small. He tried his luck at KFC, the first one to arrive in China. Famously he retells the tale “24 people went for the job. 23 were accepted. I was the only guy who wasn’t.” He applied to Harvard Business School, but was rejected 10 times.

He persevered, seeing every step as a learning experience. In 1994, Ma heard about the Internet. One day, when searching online for the different beers of the world, he was surprised to find none from China. The world’s most consumed beer brand, Snow beer, is of course Chinese. So he and a friend launched a simple Chinese language website called China Pages. Within hours investors were on the phone, and within three years he was generating over 5,000,000 Chinese Yuan.

“My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.”

Interviewed at the World Economic Forum he said “I call Alibaba 1001 mistakes. We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn’t know how we’d make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us.”

Over the next two decades he built Alibaba into a $400 billion organisation. In 2017, to celebrate the internet giant’s 18th birthday, Ma appeared on stage dressed like Michael Jackson, turning the event into a “Thriller” performance. His passion for his company, and for his audience of employees, shone through.

Looking back he reflected “The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you’ve got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don’t give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.

And about himself, often quoted as a supporter of the “996” work mindset (working from 9am until 9pm, 6 days a week), he adds “I don’t think I’m a workaholic. Every weekend, I invite my colleagues and friends to my home to play cards. And people, my neighbours, are always surprised because I live on the second floor apartment, and there are usually 40 pairs of shoes in front of my gate. We have a lot of fun.”

On Alibaba’s 20th birthday, himself now 54 years old, and worth over $40 billion, he decided to retire saying “teachers always want their students to exceed them, so the responsible thing to do for me and the company to do is to let younger, more talented people take over in leadership roles so that they inherit our mission ‘to make it easy to do business anywhere’.”

“Having been trained as a teacher, I feel extremely proud of what I have achieved,” he wrote to his colleagues and shareholders” before adding “I still have lots of dreams to pursue. I want to return to education, which excites me with so much blessing because this is what I love to do. This is something I want to devote most of my time to when I retire.”

He spoke passionately about the challenges for the future of education in Davos saying: “A teacher should learn all the time; a teacher should share all the time. Education is a big challenge now – if we do not change the way we teach 30 years later we will be in trouble. We cannot teach our kids to compete with the machines who are smarter – we have to teach our kids something unique. In this way, 30 years later, kids will have a chance.”

Inspiration 7: JK Rowling

Harry Potter was the culmination of her own story from poverty and rebellion to fame and fortune. “It matters not what you are born, but what you grow to be.”

The power of our imagination, to drive creativity and innovation, to engage people with empathy, and to inspire their dreams, was the theme of Joanne Rowling’s speech to graduating students at Harvard University in 2008.

The bestselling author, better known as JK Rowling, told how she used her experiences of working as researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International to imagine the stories that became her much loved books.

She conceived the idea for her “Harry Potter” books while on a delayed train from Manchester to London in 1990, and started imagining a story of a young wizard who went to wizard school. Without anything to note down her ideas, she rapidly set out an entire plot in her head, then tried to write it down on arriving home.

The next 7 years were tough, with the death of her mother, birth of her first child, and divorce from her first husband. Having lost her job, because she sat dreaming about her plots, she decide to move to Porto where she briefly married a local TV journalist, before heading to Edinburgh to be with her sister.

In 1995 she sent her manuscript off to every publisher she could fund, but was rejected by all, being told that her story was too long, too elitist, and too complicated. Eventually the CEO’s daughter at Bloomsbury, a children’s imprint, read that story and couldn’t put it down. Her influence on her father resulted in a £4000 advance to Rowling. The only catch was that they felt her pen name needed more style, so she borrowed a middle initial from her grandmother, Kathleen.

“Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was published in 1997 to rave reviews. What really changed her life, was when the publishing firm Scholastic came in to buy the American rights to the book for a sensational $105,000. The book sold 80,000 copies in the first year, and hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Over the years since it has become the most financially successful novel in history with 400 million readers, and generating $10 billion of sales.

Her own story, a little like Jack Ma’s, was one of rags to riches, as she progressed from living on state benefits to being the world’s first billionaire author. She lost her billionaire status after giving away much of her earnings to charity, but remains one of the wealthiest people in the world.

She wrote her first book “Rabbit” when she was six years old, about a rabbit who lived in her village of Tutshill in Gloucestershire, who got sick and was cared for by a bumble bee called Miss Bee. She was convinced she could be a writer, even though she lacked confidence otherwise.

When Rowling was at school her parents didn’t want her to pursue her dream of being a writer because they worried it wouldn’t pay a mortgage. She ignored them, saying listen to your friends, family, and those who care about you, but remember it is your life. “If you have a gift, talent, dream, then pursue it. There’s no way anybody knows how it will turn out, but if you love it and you put all your energy into it, your chances of success are great.”

Her editor at Bloomsbury, the publisher who took a huge gamble on the unknown author, says that Rowling’s great strength is that she has “a microscopic and macroscopic view of the world” which enabled her to tell such imaginative tales in such engaging detail.

Passing exams, she said to the new Harvard graduates, does not determine your success. Whilst she admitted to having a knack for taking tests and passing exams, she also said that it was her failures that had taken her further. “It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously, you might as well not have lived at all– in which case, you fail by default.” Rather than seeking to avoid failure, we must be willing to accept that it is going to come and be ready to build our lives off it.

“To get through life without failing,” she said, “would not be a life worth living.”

“Imagination is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared” says Rowling, proclaiming that imagination is crucial for life. Without it, we ignore the one truly unique quality that differentiates us from all other species, effectively claiming that we are human.

Perhaps we should also remember the words of the Rowling’s great wizard Dumbledore, headmaster at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, who said “It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”

© Peter Fisk 2020.

Extracts from “Business Recoded” by Peter Fisk:

“Two characteristics that make Peter Fisk one of my favorites thought leaders in the strategy field are his ability to make complex matters simple and his positive views about the future, focusing, through real case studies, on the opportunities laid ahead, rather than the hurdles. His new book, Business Recoded, is definitely a must-read for leaders that want to succeed with their organizations in our fast-changing world”.  Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez,  author of “The Project Revolution” and “The Focused Organization”.

“It is not often that we have moments of magic in any business. What Peter has given us is more than just ideas and inspiration, but a whole way of thinking about how we could reinvent our future, and start making it happen tomorrow” Alberto Uncini-Manganelli, GM and SVP, Adidas.

© Peter Fisk 2020

“Business Recoded” by Peter Fisk is available now from Amazon and other retailers.

Circklo was created to bring a solution for start-up founders that do not want to change their vision to adapt to the mindsets or impositions of investors.

In our Business Configurator Academy, it is the founders who choose their investors and not the other way round. Our Academy is solely dedicated to the mavericks, misfits, innovators, and ceiling breakers of the 21st century technology and science: it is a safe space for those start-up and SMEs founders who know they have more than just potential, they have the mindset to succeed.

The Configurator programme is highly personalised and practical, and it is not for the faint-hearted: it is not a race to the finish line, it is a marathon. While we cater for many businesses and industries, we are only open to very few: those who are fearless, who are not afraid to change the status quo, who push the boundaries of what is possible and acceptable, and those who understand that science and technology are the foundation of progress and business success.

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

Circklo’s Configurator Academy is a fixed term, mentorship-driven programme dedicated to start ups aiming to succeed in sustainable digital innovation.

We are looking to accelerate start ups for profit and impact in the areas of:

  • Sustainable Food and Beverage companies;
  • Sustainable Fashion companies;
  • Recycling and reuse of resources (i.e. plastic, metals etc.);
  • Non-financial metrics calculators and track and trace platforms;
  • Financial technology (Fintech).

We work intensively with individual teams for 12 weeks, ensuring we help them create a refined business plan. Each 12-week cycle culminates in a Dragons’ Guild Day, when the teams which have attended the programme will be presenting their business plan to a carefully selected, invite-only audience of investors and industry experts, the ultimate goal being that of seeking investment funding for their business idea, and/or a way to validate their idea with a real case scenario.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZYxmVC29hI

 

 

Circklo was created to bring a solution for start-up founders that do not want to change their vision to adapt to the mindsets or impositions of investors.

In our Business Configurator Academy, it is the founders who choose their investors and not the other way round. Our Academy is solely dedicated to the mavericks, misfits, innovators, and ceiling breakers of the 21st century technology and science: it is a safe space for those start-up and SMEs founders who know they have more than just potential, they have the mindset to succeed.

The Configurator programme is highly personalised and practical, and it is not for the faint-hearted: it is not a race to the finish line, it is a marathon. While we cater for many businesses and industries, we are only open to very few: those who are fearless, who are not afraid to change the status quo, who push the boundaries of what is possible and acceptable, and those who understand that science and technology are the foundation of progress and business success.

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

Circklo’s Configurator Academy is a fixed term, mentorship-driven programme dedicated to start ups aiming to succeed in sustainable digital innovation.

We are looking to accelerate start ups for profit and impact in the areas of:

  • Sustainable Food and Beverage companies;
  • Sustainable Fashion companies;
  • Recycling and reuse of resources (i.e. plastic, metals etc.);
  • Non-financial metrics calculators and track and trace platforms;
  • Financial technology (Fintech).

We work intensively with individual teams for 12 weeks, ensuring we help them create a refined business plan. Each 12-week cycle culminates in a Dragons’ Guild Day, when the teams which have attended the programme will be presenting their business plan to a carefully selected, invite-only audience of investors and industry experts, the ultimate goal being that of seeking investment funding for their business idea, and/or a way to validate their idea with a real case scenario.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZYxmVC29hI

Homes are our personal cocoons, our places to relax and recover from the challenges of a fast and challenging world, to connect with family, to eat and sleep, to be ourselves.

Yet the Covid-19 pandemic has also made homes our windows on the world, a place for work, for learning, for entertainment, for exercise. When lockdown first struck we enhanced our hardware, now we are reimagining homes for good.

In this program we explore the challenge for leaders in developing the future of real estate, learning from the rapidly changing industry including smart cities and virtual living, and embracing the trends and ideas from other sectors, and consumers themselves.

Session 1: Leading with Vision, 11 January 2021 (90 minutes) with Peter Fisk

  • Leadership in a complex, uncertain and rapidly changing world
  • Harnessing the megatrends, and seizing the opportunities of change
    • Insight 1: How Microsoft’s Satya Nadella “hit refresh” with a growth mindset
    • Tool 1: Growth Mindset
  • Exploring the drivers of real estate, smart cities to sustainable communities
    • Insight 2: How Amsterdam is reimagining its city as a sustainable “doughnut”
    • Tool 2: Future Radar
  • Defining your strategic purpose, in a relevant way for customers and society
    • Insight 3: How Cemex found more purpose as “builders of communities”
    • Tool 3: Inspiring Purpose
  • Capturing the strategic vision as a purposeful, distinctive and inspiring story
    • Insight 4: How Elon Musk’s bigger vision aligns and inspires stakeholders
    • Tool 4: Strategic Storytelling
  • Leading transformational change that delivers real impact
    • Insight 5: How Orsted became the world’s most sustainable company
    • Tool 5: Transformation Roadmap
  • What will you do?

Session 2: Leading through Innovation, 18 January 2021 (90 minutes) with Peter Fisk

  • Leadership that drives curiosity and courage, creativity and collaboration
  • Innovating from the future back, turning strategies into practical actions
    • Insight 6: How Orascom reimagined homes and towns in Egypt
    • Tool 6: Future Roadmap
  • Innovation is about problem solving, lean experiments and rapid development
    • Insight 7: How Airbnb sustains fast and disruptive innovation
    • Tool 7: Innovation Accelerator
  • Innovation beyond products and services, developing new business models
    • Insight 8: How Haier’s Zhang Ruimin reimagined innovative business models
    • Tool 8: New Business Models
  • Managing a strategic portfolio of innovations to deliver with agility and impact
    • Insight 9: How Fujifilm sustains innovation from beauty to healthcare
    • Tool 9: Innovation Portfolio
  • What does this mean for leaders, how do leaders need to lead differently?
    • Insight 10: How Jim Snabe is transforming leadership
    • Tool 10: The New Leadership DNA
  • What will you do?

Changing how we live

More generally we see global “megatrends” changing where and how we live:

  • shift towards urbanisation, in search of better lifestyles and services, although balanced by a desire to escape dense populations.
  • changing demographics, as populations live longer, care and support matters more, as do trends in singles and people marrying much later.
  • sustainability has become a priority, environmentally in using less and cleaner energy, and socially in supporting local communities and others.

While these megatrends may not happen overnight, they are the big shifts in our wider world, that will ultimately transform the ways in which we live.

Covid-19 has accelerated many of these trends, as we rush to reprioritise what matters in our lives, and also cope with the effects on our economies, work and health. It has driven:

  • changing work, enforced working from home will evolve into more virtual organisations, more gig working, and more fused home-work styles.
  • changing towns, the huge shift to online shopping and entertainment and education, will have lasting impact on the role and feel of towns, malls, schools and shops.
  • changing communities, our interests are shared less by people who live in physical proximity, but by those who connect socially online, for sport and much more.

So what is the future of homes, towns and cities?

Smart cities

The rush to “smart cities” has been driven by technological possibility – the ability to create clean energy-powered, intelligent service-providing new urban settlements.

A smart city, according to Forbes “is one that leverages technology to increase efficiencies and improve the quality of services and life for its residents. Smart city initiatives can cover anything from power distribution, transport systems, street lights, and even rubbish collection. The idea is to use data and technology to make everyday life easier and better for the people who live and work in the city, while maximizing the use of resources.”

From Masdar to Neom we imagined huge new technological metropolises.

 

More and more of us are living in cities – the UN predicts that 68 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050. And this means our cities are facing growing environmental, societal, and economic challenges. By making cities smarter, we can overcome some of these challenges and make cities better places to live. One report by McKinsey Global Institute found smart city technology can improve key quality of life indicators – such as the daily commute, health issues, or crime incidents – by 10 to 30 percent.

Examples of ways in which cities have embraced technology to be “smarter” include:

  • Transport: Public transport routes can be adjusted in real-time according to demand, and intelligent traffic light systems can be used to improve congestion. In the Chinese city of Hangzhou, an AI-based smart “City Brain” has helped to reduce traffic jams by 15 percent.
  • Resources: Telefonica has been investing heavily in smart city technology in its home country, Spain. In one example, sensors are attached to refuse containers to report, in real-time, how full they are – which means refuse collectors don’t have to waste time traveling to bins that are only half-full.
  • Energy: As well as investing in clean energy sources, smart cities also use technology to help closely monitor real-time energy use and reduce energy consumption. For example, in Amsterdam, homes are being provided with smart energy meters that are designed to incentivize reduced energy consumption.
  • Safety: Wi-Fi connectivity, IoT technologies, and CCTV cameras all help to improve resident safety and boost incident response times. In New Orleans, for example, real-time video data from Bourbon Street is analyzed in order to better track and allocate resources on the ground, and improve public safety.
  • Community:  The Smart Citizen Kit can be placed in locations like balconies and windowsills to gather data on the local environment, including air pollution and noise. The data is streamed to an online platform, effectively creating a crowdsourced map of data from all over the world.

IMD’s Smart City Index 2020 again ranks Singapore as the world’s smartest city. 5 European cities – Helsinki, Zurich, Oslo, Copenhagen and Amsterdam – make the top 10, largely due a combination of digital connectivity and sustainable development, delivering both social and economic benefits to citizens and other stakeholders (business, investment, tourism, government, services).

Three specific reasons why Singapore is the world’s smartest city, according to IMD, are

  • Healthier citizens make healthier cities … How a city’s leaders shape the future of healthcare will ultimately determine how the prosperity of the city itself and of its citizens. In Singapore, a key example of this is the development of Healthcity Novena – a masterplan for community-focused health in which infrastructure such as pedestrian walkways, underground car parks and outdoor green spaces exist to complement and ameliorate the citizen-patient experience.
  • A house with a heart is a home …  Singapore’s Housing Development Board (HDB) offers all citizens access to free public housing. Furthermore, the country’s leaders have created public housing that is more than just an apartment space; it also stretches into larger community areas that integrate liveability, sustainability and growth. More than 80% of the country’s population lives in public housing, which means the provision and administration of housing is pivotal to the identity and character of a diverse city like Singapore.
  • Mobility is a shared community experience … Transportation determines much of the quality of life for residents in a smart city. In late October, the city’s Land Transit Authority (LTA) expanded a pilot area for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to cover the whole of western Singapore. The LTA is building a system of transport infrastructure in which daily commutes can integrate active mobility modes like walking and cycling with public transportation services like mass rapid transit (MRT) and buses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NzZy36L2v4

Indeed, smart cities offer tech firms a “$2.46 trillion opportunity” according to Frost and Sullivan, who specifically focus on the technological implications of better urban living:

  • Smart cities’ spending on technology in the next six years is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22.7%, reaching $327 billion by 2025 from $96 billion in 2019. Technologies like artificial intelligence and big data will be in high demand to combat the pandemic, with growing opportunities for crowd analytics, open data dashboards, and online city services.
  • There will be more than 26 smart cities by 2025, with 16 in North America and Europe.
  • More than 70% of global smart city spending by 2030 will be from the United States, Western Europe, and China. Smart cities in the US and Europe will continue spending on 5G and autonomous and robotic technologies. Almost all smart cities in the US and Europe have already invested in open-data initiatives during the pandemic. In addition, China has renewed investments in 5G, smart grids, AI, data centers, and other smart city-related areas through the “new infrastructure initiative” introduced in 2018.
  • Growing demand for crowd management and monitoring in smart cities will lead the crowd analytics market to grow by 20%-25% by 2030. It had market revenues of $748.6 million in 2020. Crowd analytics can be used to access collective real-time data. It can help ensure proper public healthcare services, traffic movement, and security and surveillance services across the smart city.
  • Investments in smart initiatives are expected to rise over the next two years. Smart cities have already invested in contact tracing wearables and apps, open data platforms, autonomous drones, and crowd analytics to fight the pandemic. Post-pandemic, investment in smart projects like smart grids, intelligent traffic management, autonomous vehicles, smart lighting, e-governance services and data-enabled public safety and security will gain traction.

Beyond smart cities

However there is much more for cities to be “smart” about. Cities like Amsterdam seek to embrace “doughnut economics” guided by ecological and sustainable living (as first described by Kate Raworth). Amsterdam’s new City DoughnutStrategy has been galvanised by the pandemic, and the need for communities to be more.

And cities aren’t necessarily the answer. I worked recently with Orascom in Egypt who are building new communities for people to escape the mass spawn of cities like Cairo. They describe their developments as “places to live, love and laugh”. El Gouna is one example of a more village-like development on the banks of the Red Sea, planned for a more human, natural, positive lifestyle.

Indeed there are many trade-offs in considering future environments, regardless of how smart they might be:

  • Organised cityscapes v natural villagescapes
  • Affluent havens v affordable homes
  • Economic development v human wellbeing
  • Inspiring architecture v functional efficiency
  • Personal privacy v collaborative community

Architecture is an interesting one. While we have vanity projects like the Burj Khalifa, it has also acted to create an icon and central point for Dubai’s development. Equally Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim was symbolic in inspiring a reimagining of Spain’s old declined port of Bilbao. The same can work at local levels, and for homes.

Better homes

Indeed when we get to the point of homes, what happens inside, is just as important as what happens outside.

Aritco and Springwise worked together to suggest 18 innovations that we can expect to see in our homes in 2021 and beyond. The 36 page research paper Future of the Home offers a view of how our lives at home might be shifting in light of the pandemic. Examples of innovations include

  • Air purification system disguised as a piece of art
  • Windows that become solar cells when heated
  • Home radiator that uses infrared radiation to save energy
  • A bladeless ceiling fan that kills microorganisms
  • Smart circadian lightbulbs that provide personalised body clock lighting

Ultimately we create new ecosystems, whether living in dense urbanisations or more remote villages. The need to work, shop, learn, socialise, exercise, travel, and much more depends on a rich ecosystems of many different partners. These can be designed around a core idea or not, integrated or evolve more organically.

Brands will seek to influence the evolving nature of the home – brands like Amazon, (not just for shopping but everything to manage and control your home, from energy to entertainment and security), or Haier, the Chinese home appliances company who seeks to become a leader in services (give the fridge away free, then manage shopping, nutrition, cooking). Technologies will be key to accelerating this commercially-inspired change – not only home shopping and virtual working, but 3D printers will transform supply chains, IOT sensors will predict and optimise our needs, and much more.

The role of governments, local authorities, private organisations, and citizens together, also becomes key in shaping the future lifespaces which we seek. These bodies can often have conflicting goals, but can also come together with a more enlightened purpose. We need to see where and how we live with much more circular impact, on the social and economic prosperity of nations, and of society at large.

 

Homes are our personal cocoons, our places to relax and recover from the challenges of a fast and challenging world, to connect with family, to eat and sleep, to be ourselves.

Yet the Covid-19 pandemic has also made homes our windows on the world, a place for work, for learning, for entertainment, for exercise. When lockdown first struck we enhanced our hardware, now we are reimagining homes for good.

In this program we explore the challenge for leaders in developing the future of real estate, learning from the rapidly changing industry including smart cities and virtual living, and embracing the trends and ideas from other sectors, and consumers themselves.

https://www2.slideshare.net/geniusworks/shifting-mindsets-leading-with-vision

Session 1: Leading with Vision, 11 January 2021 (90 minutes) with Peter Fisk

  • Leadership in a complex, uncertain and rapidly changing world
  • Harnessing the megatrends, and seizing the opportunities of change
    • Insight 1: How Microsoft’s Satya Nadella “hit refresh” with a growth mindset
    • Tool 1: Growth Mindset
  • Exploring the drivers of real estate, smart cities to sustainable communities
    • Insight 2: How Amsterdam is reimagining its city as a sustainable “doughnut”
    • Tool 2: Future Radar
  • Defining your strategic purpose, in a relevant way for customers and society
    • Insight 3: How Cemex found more purpose as “builders of communities”
    • Tool 3: Inspiring Purpose
  • Capturing the strategic vision as a purposeful, distinctive and inspiring story
    • Insight 4: How Elon Musk’s bigger vision aligns and inspires stakeholders
    • Tool 4: Strategic Storytelling
  • Leading transformational change that delivers real impact
    • Insight 5: How Orsted became the world’s most sustainable company
    • Tool 5: Transformation Roadmap
  • What will you do?

Session 2: Leading through Innovation, 18 January 2021 (90 minutes) with Peter Fisk

  • Leadership that drives curiosity and courage, creativity and collaboration
  • Innovating from the future back, turning strategies into practical actions
    • Insight 6: How Orascom reimagined homes and towns in Egypt
    • Tool 6: Future Roadmap
  • Innovation is about problem solving, lean experiments and rapid development
    • Insight 7: How Airbnb sustains fast and disruptive innovation
    • Tool 7: Innovation Accelerator
  • Innovation beyond products and services, developing new business models
    • Insight 8: How Haier’s Zhang Ruimin reimagined innovative business models
    • Tool 8: New Business Models
  • Managing a strategic portfolio of innovations to deliver with agility and impact
    • Insight 9: How Fujifilm sustains innovation from beauty to healthcare
    • Tool 9: Innovation Portfolio
  • What does this mean for leaders, how do leaders need to lead differently?
    • Insight 10: How Jim Snabe is transforming leadership
    • Tool 10: The New Leadership DNA
  • What will you do?

Changing how we live

More generally we see global “megatrends” changing where and how we live:

  • shift towards urbanisation, in search of better lifestyles and services, although balanced by a desire to escape dense populations.
  • changing demographics, as populations live longer, care and support matters more, as do trends in singles and people marrying much later.
  • sustainability has become a priority, environmentally in using less and cleaner energy, and socially in supporting local communities and others.

While these megatrends may not happen overnight, they are the big shifts in our wider world, that will ultimately transform the ways in which we live.

Covid-19 has accelerated many of these trends, as we rush to reprioritise what matters in our lives, and also cope with the effects on our economies, work and health. It has driven:

  • changing work, enforced working from home will evolve into more virtual organisations, more gig working, and more fused home-work styles.
  • changing towns, the huge shift to online shopping and entertainment and education, will have lasting impact on the role and feel of towns, malls, schools and shops.
  • changing communities, our interests are shared less by people who live in physical proximity, but by those who connect socially online, for sport and much more.

So what is the future of homes, towns and cities?

Smart cities

The rush to “smart cities” has been driven by technological possibility – the ability to create clean energy-powered, intelligent service-providing new urban settlements.

A smart city, according to Forbes “is one that leverages technology to increase efficiencies and improve the quality of services and life for its residents. Smart city initiatives can cover anything from power distribution, transport systems, street lights, and even rubbish collection. The idea is to use data and technology to make everyday life easier and better for the people who live and work in the city, while maximizing the use of resources.”

From Masdar to Neom we imagined huge new technological metropolises.

 

More and more of us are living in cities – the UN predicts that 68 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050. And this means our cities are facing growing environmental, societal, and economic challenges. By making cities smarter, we can overcome some of these challenges and make cities better places to live. One report by McKinsey Global Institute found smart city technology can improve key quality of life indicators – such as the daily commute, health issues, or crime incidents – by 10 to 30 percent.

Examples of ways in which cities have embraced technology to be “smarter” include:

  • Transport: Public transport routes can be adjusted in real-time according to demand, and intelligent traffic light systems can be used to improve congestion. In the Chinese city of Hangzhou, an AI-based smart “City Brain” has helped to reduce traffic jams by 15 percent.
  • Resources: Telefonica has been investing heavily in smart city technology in its home country, Spain. In one example, sensors are attached to refuse containers to report, in real-time, how full they are – which means refuse collectors don’t have to waste time traveling to bins that are only half-full.
  • Energy: As well as investing in clean energy sources, smart cities also use technology to help closely monitor real-time energy use and reduce energy consumption. For example, in Amsterdam, homes are being provided with smart energy meters that are designed to incentivize reduced energy consumption.
  • Safety: Wi-Fi connectivity, IoT technologies, and CCTV cameras all help to improve resident safety and boost incident response times. In New Orleans, for example, real-time video data from Bourbon Street is analyzed in order to better track and allocate resources on the ground, and improve public safety.
  • Community:  The Smart Citizen Kit can be placed in locations like balconies and windowsills to gather data on the local environment, including air pollution and noise. The data is streamed to an online platform, effectively creating a crowdsourced map of data from all over the world.

IMD’s Smart City Index 2020 again ranks Singapore as the world’s smartest city. 5 European cities – Helsinki, Zurich, Oslo, Copenhagen and Amsterdam – make the top 10, largely due a combination of digital connectivity and sustainable development, delivering both social and economic benefits to citizens and other stakeholders (business, investment, tourism, government, services).

Three specific reasons why Singapore is the world’s smartest city, according to IMD, are

  • Healthier citizens make healthier cities … How a city’s leaders shape the future of healthcare will ultimately determine how the prosperity of the city itself and of its citizens. In Singapore, a key example of this is the development of Healthcity Novena – a masterplan for community-focused health in which infrastructure such as pedestrian walkways, underground car parks and outdoor green spaces exist to complement and ameliorate the citizen-patient experience.
  • A house with a heart is a home …  Singapore’s Housing Development Board (HDB) offers all citizens access to free public housing. Furthermore, the country’s leaders have created public housing that is more than just an apartment space; it also stretches into larger community areas that integrate liveability, sustainability and growth. More than 80% of the country’s population lives in public housing, which means the provision and administration of housing is pivotal to the identity and character of a diverse city like Singapore.
  • Mobility is a shared community experience … Transportation determines much of the quality of life for residents in a smart city. In late October, the city’s Land Transit Authority (LTA) expanded a pilot area for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to cover the whole of western Singapore. The LTA is building a system of transport infrastructure in which daily commutes can integrate active mobility modes like walking and cycling with public transportation services like mass rapid transit (MRT) and buses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NzZy36L2v4

Indeed, smart cities offer tech firms a “$2.46 trillion opportunity” according to Frost and Sullivan, who specifically focus on the technological implications of better urban living:

  • Smart cities’ spending on technology in the next six years is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22.7%, reaching $327 billion by 2025 from $96 billion in 2019. Technologies like artificial intelligence and big data will be in high demand to combat the pandemic, with growing opportunities for crowd analytics, open data dashboards, and online city services.
  • There will be more than 26 smart cities by 2025, with 16 in North America and Europe.
  • More than 70% of global smart city spending by 2030 will be from the United States, Western Europe, and China. Smart cities in the US and Europe will continue spending on 5G and autonomous and robotic technologies. Almost all smart cities in the US and Europe have already invested in open-data initiatives during the pandemic. In addition, China has renewed investments in 5G, smart grids, AI, data centers, and other smart city-related areas through the “new infrastructure initiative” introduced in 2018.
  • Growing demand for crowd management and monitoring in smart cities will lead the crowd analytics market to grow by 20%-25% by 2030. It had market revenues of $748.6 million in 2020. Crowd analytics can be used to access collective real-time data. It can help ensure proper public healthcare services, traffic movement, and security and surveillance services across the smart city.
  • Investments in smart initiatives are expected to rise over the next two years. Smart cities have already invested in contact tracing wearables and apps, open data platforms, autonomous drones, and crowd analytics to fight the pandemic. Post-pandemic, investment in smart projects like smart grids, intelligent traffic management, autonomous vehicles, smart lighting, e-governance services and data-enabled public safety and security will gain traction.

Beyond smart cities

However there is much more for cities to be “smart” about. Cities like Amsterdam seek to embrace “doughnut economics” guided by ecological and sustainable living (as first described by Kate Raworth). Amsterdam’s new City DoughnutStrategy has been galvanised by the pandemic, and the need for communities to be more.

And cities aren’t necessarily the answer. I worked recently with Orascom in Egypt who are building new communities for people to escape the mass spawn of cities like Cairo. They describe their developments as “places to live, love and laugh”. El Gouna is one example of a more village-like development on the banks of the Red Sea, planned for a more human, natural, positive lifestyle.

Indeed there are many trade-offs in considering future environments, regardless of how smart they might be:

  • Organised cityscapes v natural villagescapes
  • Affluent havens v affordable homes
  • Economic development v human wellbeing
  • Inspiring architecture v functional efficiency
  • Personal privacy v collaborative community

Architecture is an interesting one. While we have vanity projects like the Burj Khalifa, it has also acted to create an icon and central point for Dubai’s development. Equally Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim was symbolic in inspiring a reimagining of Spain’s old declined port of Bilbao. The same can work at local levels, and for homes.

Better homes

Indeed when we get to the point of homes, what happens inside, is just as important as what happens outside.

Aritco and Springwise worked together to suggest 18 innovations that we can expect to see in our homes in 2021 and beyond. The 36 page research paper Future of the Home offers a view of how our lives at home might be shifting in light of the pandemic. Examples of innovations include

  • Air purification system disguised as a piece of art
  • Windows that become solar cells when heated
  • Home radiator that uses infrared radiation to save energy
  • A bladeless ceiling fan that kills microorganisms
  • Smart circadian lightbulbs that provide personalised body clock lighting

Ultimately we create new ecosystems, whether living in dense urbanisations or more remote villages. The need to work, shop, learn, socialise, exercise, travel, and much more depends on a rich ecosystems of many different partners. These can be designed around a core idea or not, integrated or evolve more organically.

Brands will seek to influence the evolving nature of the home – brands like Amazon, (not just for shopping but everything to manage and control your home, from energy to entertainment and security), or Haier, the Chinese home appliances company who seeks to become a leader in services (give the fridge away free, then manage shopping, nutrition, cooking). Technologies will be key to accelerating this commercially-inspired change – not only home shopping and virtual working, but 3D printers will transform supply chains, IOT sensors will predict and optimise our needs, and much more.

The role of governments, local authorities, private organisations, and citizens together, also becomes key in shaping the future lifespaces which we seek. These bodies can often have conflicting goals, but can also come together with a more enlightened purpose. We need to see where and how we live with much more circular impact, on the social and economic prosperity of nations, and of society at large.

 

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, 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
  • Joost Minaar, half of Corporate Rebels, all about making work more fun
  • Bernard Marr, the world’s leading expert on big data, and more
  • 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 September 2020, or January 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. Week 4 concludes with your graduation at IE Business School.

There are two alternative start dates – September 2020 or January 2021 (for the online module 1), and both groups will then merge together in March 2021 (for the residential module 2, and all subsequent modules). This gives you the option of starting at a more gradual pace this year, or waiting until the new year, when we all hope to return to less unusual times).

Module 1 (Online, half-day Fridays): Sep 25th – Dec 19th, 2020
Module 2 (Residential- Segovia Campus): Mar 22th – 26th, 2021
Module 3 (Online, half-day Fridays): Apr 9th- Jun 19th, 2021
Module 4 (Residential- Madrid Campus): Jun 28th -Jul 3rd, 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

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, 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
  • Joost Minaar, half of Corporate Rebels, all about making work more fun
  • Bernard Marr, the world’s leading expert on big data, and more
  • 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 September 2020, or January 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. Week 4 concludes with your graduation at IE Business School.

There are two alternative start dates – September 2020 or January 2021 (for the online module 1), and both groups will then merge together in March 2021 (for the residential module 2, and all subsequent modules). This gives you the option of starting at a more gradual pace this year, or waiting until the new year, when we all hope to return to less unusual times).

Module 1 (Online, half-day Fridays): Sep 25th – Dec 19th, 2020
Module 2 (Residential- Segovia Campus): Mar 22th – 26th, 2021
Module 3 (Online, half-day Fridays): Apr 9th- Jun 19th, 2021
Module 4 (Residential- Madrid Campus): Jun 28th -Jul 3rd, 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

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, 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
  • Joost Minaar, half of Corporate Rebels, all about making work more fun
  • Bernard Marr, the world’s leading expert on big data, and more
  • 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 September 2020, or January 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. Week 4 concludes with your graduation at IE Business School.

There are two alternative start dates – September 2020 or January 2021 (for the online module 1), and both groups will then merge together in March 2021 (for the residential module 2, and all subsequent modules). This gives you the option of starting at a more gradual pace this year, or waiting until the new year, when we all hope to return to less unusual times).

Module 1 (Online, half-day Fridays): Sep 25th – Dec 19th, 2020
Module 2 (Residential- Segovia Campus): Mar 22th – 26th, 2021
Module 3 (Online, half-day Fridays): Apr 9th- Jun 19th, 2021
Module 4 (Residential- Madrid Campus): Jun 28th -Jul 3rd, 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

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, 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
  • Joost Minaar, half of Corporate Rebels, all about making work more fun
  • Bernard Marr, the world’s leading expert on big data, and more
  • 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 September 2020, or January 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. Week 4 concludes with your graduation at IE Business School.

There are two alternative start dates – September 2020 or January 2021 (for the online module 1), and both groups will then merge together in March 2021 (for the residential module 2, and all subsequent modules). This gives you the option of starting at a more gradual pace this year, or waiting until the new year, when we all hope to return to less unusual times).

Module 1 (Online, half-day Fridays): Sep 25th – Dec 19th, 2020
Module 2 (Residential- Segovia Campus): Mar 22th – 26th, 2021
Module 3 (Online, half-day Fridays): Apr 9th- Jun 19th, 2021
Module 4 (Residential- Madrid Campus): Jun 28th -Jul 3rd, 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