The most innovative businesses see the world differently.

They don’t just seek to imitate the success of others, to compete in the markets of today, to frame themselves by their relative differences to competitors. Instead they play their own game.

I call them “gamechangers”, and here in Dubai, I will be previewing the World Expo 2020, and taking inspirations from companies all around the world who are shaking up markets, embracing radical new ideas, and changing the game.

So what’s the “game”? Well, in simple terms, it’s the market.

These companies go beyond innovating their products and services, their customer experienes and business models. They seek to innovate how their markets work.

Think of it like a sports game. How could you change the game? It could be anything from the pitch dimensions to rules of play, the team composition to the measures of success, the role of the referee to the participation of fans. Even the name of the game.

Now look at today’s most disruptive innovators – 23andMe to Alibaba, Zespri to Zidisha – they reframe, reimagine and redefine the market on their terms – who is it for, why people buy, what they pay and get, and how they work.

I’ve met and profiled over 250 “gamechanger” companies on my travels, in almost every sector, and in every part of the world. Corporate giants and start-ups, from Dubai to Berlin, Colombo to Qingdao.

There is no one way to change the game, but there are definitely some common traits:

  • Audacious – Gamechangers are visionary and innovative, but also daring and original; they seek to shape the future to their advantage.
  • Purposeful – They seek to make life better, in some relevant and inspiring way; they have a higher motive than just making money.
  • Networked – Gamechangers harness the power of networks, digital and physical, both business and customer networks, to exponentially reach further faster.
  • Intelligent – They use big data analytics and algorithms, machine learning and AI, to be smart and efficient, personal and predictive.
  • Collaborative – Gamechangers work with others, from ecosystems to platforms, social networks and co-creation, to achieve more together.
  • Enabling – They focus not on what they do, but what they enable people to do; and thereby redefine their marketspace, find new opportunities and redefine value.
  • Commercial – Gamechangers take a longer-term perspective, adopting new business models, and recalibrating the measures of progress and success.

Do you have a future mindset?

Today’s business leaders need a future mindset. That sounds obvious, but isn’t.

Most leaders have a “fixed mindset”. They keep stretching the old models of success. They stay loyal to the model that made them great, seeking to squeeze and tweak it for as long as possible. They seek perfection – to optimise what they currently do – which leads to efficiency and incremental gains.

Instead a “future mindset” is prepared to let go of the past. To explore the future, to experiment with new ways of working and winning. Failure is a way to learn, and innovation becomes the norm. Change is relentless inside, as it is outside. Innovation is their lifeblood. Like Jeff Bezos loves to say “it is always day one”.

With a future mindset, the CEO needs new attributes:

  • Sense maker – to interpret a fast and confusing world, to see new patterns and opportunities, what is relevant and not, to shape your own vision.
  • Radical optimist – to inspire people with a stretching ambition, positive and distinctive, to be audacious, to see the possibilities when others only see risk.
  • Future hacker – they start from the “future back”, with clarity of purpose and intent, encouraging ideas and experiments, leveraging resource and scale.
  • Ideas connector – da Vinci said innovation is about making unusual connections;  connecting new people, new partners, new capabilities and new ideas.
  • Emotionally agile – whilst organisational agility is essential, emotional agility matters even more; to cope with change, to be intuitive in making sense, and making choices.
  • Entrepreneur at large – keeping the founders mentality alive, hands-on working with project teams to infuse the mindset, to be the catalyst and coach.
  • Having grit – “gamechanger” leaders need to go against the grain, to persist but know when to move on, to have self belief and confidence, guts and resilience.

The future is a better place to start

Start from the “future back”.

Trying to evolve in today’s complex and confused world is unlikely to lead you towards a bright and distinctive future. It will extend your life a little longer, but it will be tough and uninspiring, with diminishing returns.

Instead jump to the future. I tend to start with five years ahead, although it may differ by company. 5 years is long enough to change the world, but close enough to be real. Start by creating a positive, collective and inspiring vision of the future market. What will it be like? What will people want? Why? How? Where? Then consider how to win in this new world.

This is where “moonshot thinking” can be really useful. “Why be 10% better, when you could be 10 times better?” 10 times more profits, more customers, more quality, reduced cost, reduced time. Whatever. By giving yourself a “How could we do it 10x better” challenge you take a new perspective, solve problems in different ways.

Be inspired by ideas from other places.

Explore how ARM or GE, Inditex or Netflix, Glossier or Novo Nordisk have changed their markets. Choose any of my 100+ “gamechanger” companies! How did they do it? How did customers respond? (Remember, they often serve the same customers as you!). You can’t learn much from competitors, but you can learn a lot from relevant parallels.

Copy. Adapt. Paste.

Customer insight also matters. Deep dives and design thinking, exploring the emerging trends and deviant behaviours. This can enhance and validate your ideas, but the problem with most customer insight is that it is filtered by our current world. You need something to disrupt your thinking.

I have a great box of disruptive techniques. Some are really simple – like break then remake the rules, like imagine its free then find a way to make money, like reverse polarities and many more. The point is to disrupt your conventional thinking.

From this, ideas rapidly emerge. You need lots of ideas about the future. But these are fragments of the real answer. The real creativity comes in fusing together into bigger “concepts”. These could be customer solutions, or new ways of working, new revenue streams, or new business models, and new market scenarios.

Once you have a clear and collective ambition for the future, it’s time to work backwards.  “If this is how we want to be in 5 years, where do we need to get to in 3 years, and then in 1 year?  Therefore what do we need to start doing now?” You develop a “horizon plan” for your business; a strategy roadmap if you like, but developed backwards.

The important thing is that by working backwards, you have jumped out of the morass of today. You’ve avoided the assumptions, limitations, problems and priorities of today’s thinking. You have a more inspiring “gamechanging” future, and have started to map out the steps to get there. Most likely with different priorities in the short-term too.

Of course the steps on this journey might change, but it’s going to be an exciting adventure.

Change the way we think, resolve the conflicts

In today’s busineses, we have created artificial divides in how we think and operate. Digital and physical seem like two different worlds, global and local seem like alternative strategies that cannot combine, many still struggle to align value to customers and shareholders in a mutually reinforcing way, and short and long-termism continues to confuse our priorities.

Our thinking within business, has created separate and apparently conflicting approaches. The opportunity is to make the combination of both approaches world – “fusions” if you like – to be innovative in the way you combine apparent opposites.

Digital and physical are two sides of the same coin.

There is only one world, unless you believe Ray Kurzweil, and it is the real one. It’s human and physical. Digital technologies are incredibly powerful, enabling people to connect, to work, to learn, to play in new ways. From mobile phones to blockchains, 3D printing and augmented reality, digital allows us to do more, do it faster, do things we could never do before. But it’s still about humanity.

Start with people. How can you enable them to achieve more? To live better, to have more fun, to do better for the world. Whatever matters. I work closely with Richard Branson and his Virgin teams. Their mindset is to “start from the outside, and then work in”. Design a better customer experience. Built on your ambition and insight, and then explore how you could deliver it with new and existing capabilities.

Global and local are opportunities for every business.

I love Amazon’s “Treasure Truck” … Most of us have never connected with Amazon beyond the website and the delivery guy. Amazon is huge, global and anonymous. But the Treasure Truck is real. It travels around the country, bringing its pop-up store to local neighbourhoods, fun and games, bargains and demos. For Amazon, it’s a chance to make real connections, listen to people, and to be local.

We can all see a backlash in society against relentless globalisation, huge corporations, and social inequality. We see a lack of trust in brands, and know that authenticity matters. Etsy shows us that even the smallest and most local artisan businesses can also be global. For every business, local and global markets are within reach, however it’s also about combining scale and standardisation, with relevance and individuality.

Ideas and networks should be the core of your business.

Gamechanger businesses need a compelling idea, a core purpose, an inspiring proposition, that can spread fast and contagiously. In a digitally-fuelled world, the most innovative businesses embrace “ideas and networks” to drive exponential impact – like WhatsApp creating $19bn in three years, Airbnb $40bn in 9 years, Alibaba $476bn in 18 years, Amazon $740bn in 23 years.

Think about that concept of “exponential” … The power of networks – be it franchisees, or distributors, or customers and users – lies not in the number of members, but in the connections between them. Networks have a multiplying effect. Exponential. Consider, for example, Rapha, the sportwear brand that brings together people with a passion for cycling, who conveniently meet at their “Cycle Club” stores, and buy their premium gear. A fantastic “ideas and networks” business.

Finally this idea of short-term and long-term being in conflict with each other.

Jeff Bezos never has this problem, nor Elon Musk, nor Richard Branson. They focus on the long-term, recognising it will require some years of investment to get there. They all of course lead privately-owned companies. But every public company has the same ambition to innovate and grow. And so do most of their investors, actually.

The reality is that any company’s stock market performance is based on its future earnings potential, not its past. The better you can engage with equity analysts, journalists and investors themselves to explain why you will deliver a better future worth waiting for, then you get their support. If you don’t engage them in your future vision, plans and innovations, then they will default to looking for short-term evidence. It’s really in our hands, to work together to create a future we want to invest in. And to share the greater risk and rewards.

Time to embrace your future mindset

We live in an incredible time … More change in the next 10 years than in the last 250 years … remember? I know that sounds a little crazy, but think about Hyperloop in 3 years, a tipping point to electric cars in 5 years, Mars missions in 8 years. They are all real, and possible.

Digital platforms connecting buyers and sellers in new ways, blockchain having the potential to transform relationships and trust, 3d printing having the potential to transform value chains to deliver anything personalised and on-demand, AI and robotics giving us the capabilities to be superhuman in our minds and bodies.

These are just some of the fantastic new capabilities that enable us to innovate beyond what we can even imagine today. The future isn’t like the future used to be. We cannot just evolve or extrapolate the past. Today’s future is discontinuous, disruptive, different.

It is imagination that will move us forwards … unlocking the technological possibilities, applying them to real problems and opportunities, to drive innovation and growth in every industry, in every part of our lives.

Imagine a world where you press “print” to get the dress of your dreams, the food of your fantasies, or the spare parts for your car. Instantly, personalised and on demand. Think then what does that mean if we don’t need the huge scale of manufacturing plants, warehousing and transportation. Maybe we will even subscribe to the IP catalogues of brands, rather than buy standard products, in the ways we currently subscribe to Netflix.

Time to embrace your growth mindset … Unlock your Einstein dreams and Picasso passion … Embrace your Mandela courage and Ghandi spirit. Be more curious, be more intuitive, be more human. Ask more questions. Don’t be afraid to have audacious ideas, to challenge the old models of success, and turn future ambitions into practical profitable reality.

How else did Zespri reinvent the Chinese gooseberry as the kiwi fruit? How else will SpaceX reach Mars by 2025? How else did Netflix came to be, or NuTonomy, or Nespresso, or Nyx?

This is why 23andMe’s Anne Wojicki wont give up in her quest to make DNA analysis available to everyone, and to ultimately find a cure for cancer. And it’s why Jack Ma didn’t give up as he rose from $1000-per year English teacher to technological royalty.

The secret is the future mindset.

To realise that the future is malleable. So we need to grab hold of it, and shape it in our own vision. To our advantage.

This is what “gamechangers” do.

More ideas from Peter Fisk …

Gulf Bank is one of the largest banks in Kuwait, founded in 1960, with a broad offering of consumer banking, wholesale banking, treasury, and financial services. It recognises that the banking sector is changing rapidly around the world and in Kuwait. This change is driven by new technologies from big data to digital platforms, new start-ups and increased competition, and changing needs and expectations of customers.

Why does “leading the future” matter?

The bank’s future is a leadership challenge – choosing where and how to drive innovation and growth, and how to work together to implement strategic, operational and cultural change across the business. In dynamic markets, clarity of vision and strategic priorities become crucial, as does the choice of which markets and innovations to focus on. Technology-driven innovation needs to be focused to ensure efficiency and competitive advantage, implementation must be aligned with process and cultural change, to avoid confusion and optimise the impact.

A “future mindset” is about business leaders taking a key role in defining and shaping the future they imagine for the bank, and then turning this into reality for all stakeholders. “Leading the future” demands both vision but also courage to change, to let go of the status quo, to challenge existing practices and conventions, to explore and experiment in ways that drive innovation, to get ideas and inspirations from other sectors where disruption is equally dramatic, and to take the responsibility for not just the bank’s performance today, but the Gulf Bank of tomorrow too.

Agenda

Part 1 : Designing the Future … innovation and growth, inspired by a changing world

World Changing

  • Making sense of today’s world, the challenge and opportunity
  • East and West, Tech and Human, Profit and Purpose, Start-up and Corporate
  • The future isn’t like it used to be, we can’t keep doing what we used to do
  • Moonshots, 10x not 10%, and having a bigger ambition

Reimagining the Future

  • Learning from the world’s 100 most disruptive innovators, how to change your game
  • Having a purpose that inspires your people, and enables society to achieve more
  • Harnessing the power of new business models, platforms and big data.
  • Starting from the future back, thinking from the outside in, working fast forwards

Courage to Lead the Future

  • Defining the DNA of the future business, and how it is different
  • What it takes to be a great leader, inspired by Bezos and Branson, Ma and Musk
  • Start with a future mindset, jump ahead, look forwards not backwards
  • How will you be the change, how will you achieve more?

Part 2 : Delivering the Future … practical insights and applications to Gulf Bank

Insights from a changing world of banking

  • DBS Bank, Singapore
  • Atom Bank, UK
  • Comm Bank, Australia
  • Umpqua Bank USA
  • Ant Financial, China

Deep Dive 1 … Creative Disruption (Group work, 25 mins)

  • Rulebreakers – what are the conventions of banking, how could they change?
  • Firestarters – how would a new start-up seek to challenge Gulf Bank?

Deep Dive 2 … Inspiring Vision (Group work, 25 mins)

  • Dreamers – what is your future vision for Gulf Bank in 2025?
  • Differentiators – how will we be different and better than NBK, Boubyan, and others?

Deep Dive 3 … Change Agenda (Group work, 25 mins)

  • Change drivers – what are the most significant changes we need to make?
  • Change priorities – which of these are the priorities, short term and long term?

The 7 new codes of business, and what happens next

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

The most innovative businesses see the world differently.

They don’t just seek to imitate the success of others, to compete in the markets of today, to frame themselves by their relative differences to competitors. Instead they play their own game.

I call them “gamechangers”, and here in Dubai, I will be previewing the World Expo 2020, and taking inspirations from companies all around the world who are shaking up markets, embracing radical new ideas, and changing the game.

So what’s the “game”? Well, in simple terms, it’s the market.

These companies go beyond innovating their products and services, their customer experienes and business models. They seek to innovate how their markets work.

Think of it like a sports game. How could you change the game? It could be anything from the pitch dimensions to rules of play, the team composition to the measures of success, the role of the referee to the participation of fans. Even the name of the game.

Now look at today’s most disruptive innovators – 23andMe to Alibaba, Zespri to Zidisha – they reframe, reimagine and redefine the market on their terms – who is it for, why people buy, what they pay and get, and how they work.

I’ve met and profiled over 250 “gamechanger” companies on my travels, in almost every sector, and in every part of the world. Corporate giants and start-ups, from Dubai to Berlin, Colombo to Qingdao.

There is no one way to change the game, but there are definitely some common traits:

  • Audacious – Gamechangers are visionary and innovative, but also daring and original; they seek to shape the future to their advantage.
  • Purposeful – They seek to make life better, in some relevant and inspiring way; they have a higher motive than just making money.
  • Networked – Gamechangers harness the power of networks, digital and physical, both business and customer networks, to exponentially reach further faster.
  • Intelligent – They use big data analytics and algorithms, machine learning and AI, to be smart and efficient, personal and predictive.
  • Collaborative – Gamechangers work with others, from ecosystems to platforms, social networks and co-creation, to achieve more together.
  • Enabling – They focus not on what they do, but what they enable people to do; and thereby redefine their marketspace, find new opportunities and redefine value.
  • Commercial – Gamechangers take a longer-term perspective, adopting new business models, and recalibrating the measures of progress and success.

Do you have a future mindset?

Today’s business leaders need a future mindset. That sounds obvious, but isn’t.

Most leaders have a “fixed mindset”. They keep stretching the old models of success. They stay loyal to the model that made them great, seeking to squeeze and tweak it for as long as possible. They seek perfection – to optimise what they currently do – which leads to efficiency and incremental gains.

Instead a “future mindset” is prepared to let go of the past. To explore the future, to experiment with new ways of working and winning. Failure is a way to learn, and innovation becomes the norm. Change is relentless inside, as it is outside. Innovation is their lifeblood. Like Jeff Bezos loves to say “it is always day one”.

With a future mindset, the CEO needs new attributes:

  • Sense maker – to interpret a fast and confusing world, to see new patterns and opportunities, what is relevant and not, to shape your own vision.
  • Radical optimist – to inspire people with a stretching ambition, positive and distinctive, to be audacious, to see the possibilities when others only see risk.
  • Future hacker – they start from the “future back”, with clarity of purpose and intent, encouraging ideas and experiments, leveraging resource and scale.
  • Ideas connector – da Vinci said innovation is about making unusual connections;  connecting new people, new partners, new capabilities and new ideas.
  • Emotionally agile – whilst organisational agility is essential, emotional agility matters even more; to cope with change, to be intuitive in making sense, and making choices.
  • Entrepreneur at large – keeping the founders mentality alive, hands-on working with project teams to infuse the mindset, to be the catalyst and coach.
  • Having grit – “gamechanger” leaders need to go against the grain, to persist but know when to move on, to have self belief and confidence, guts and resilience.

The future is a better place to start

Start from the “future back”.

Trying to evolve in today’s complex and confused world is unlikely to lead you towards a bright and distinctive future. It will extend your life a little longer, but it will be tough and uninspiring, with diminishing returns.

Instead jump to the future. I tend to start with five years ahead, although it may differ by company. 5 years is long enough to change the world, but close enough to be real. Start by creating a positive, collective and inspiring vision of the future market. What will it be like? What will people want? Why? How? Where? Then consider how to win in this new world.

This is where “moonshot thinking” can be really useful. “Why be 10% better, when you could be 10 times better?” 10 times more profits, more customers, more quality, reduced cost, reduced time. Whatever. By giving yourself a “How could we do it 10x better” challenge you take a new perspective, solve problems in different ways.

Be inspired by ideas from other places.

Explore how ARM or GE, Inditex or Netflix, Glossier or Novo Nordisk have changed their markets. Choose any of my 100+ “gamechanger” companies! How did they do it? How did customers respond? (Remember, they often serve the same customers as you!). You can’t learn much from competitors, but you can learn a lot from relevant parallels.

Copy. Adapt. Paste.

Customer insight also matters. Deep dives and design thinking, exploring the emerging trends and deviant behaviours. This can enhance and validate your ideas, but the problem with most customer insight is that it is filtered by our current world. You need something to disrupt your thinking.

I have a great box of disruptive techniques. Some are really simple – like break then remake the rules, like imagine its free then find a way to make money, like reverse polarities and many more. The point is to disrupt your conventional thinking.

From this, ideas rapidly emerge. You need lots of ideas about the future. But these are fragments of the real answer. The real creativity comes in fusing together into bigger “concepts”. These could be customer solutions, or new ways of working, new revenue streams, or new business models, and new market scenarios.

Once you have a clear and collective ambition for the future, it’s time to work backwards.  “If this is how we want to be in 5 years, where do we need to get to in 3 years, and then in 1 year?  Therefore what do we need to start doing now?” You develop a “horizon plan” for your business; a strategy roadmap if you like, but developed backwards.

The important thing is that by working backwards, you have jumped out of the morass of today. You’ve avoided the assumptions, limitations, problems and priorities of today’s thinking. You have a more inspiring “gamechanging” future, and have started to map out the steps to get there. Most likely with different priorities in the short-term too.

Of course the steps on this journey might change, but it’s going to be an exciting adventure.

Change the way we think, resolve the conflicts

In today’s busineses, we have created artificial divides in how we think and operate. Digital and physical seem like two different worlds, global and local seem like alternative strategies that cannot combine, many still struggle to align value to customers and shareholders in a mutually reinforcing way, and short and long-termism continues to confuse our priorities.

Our thinking within business, has created separate and apparently conflicting approaches. The opportunity is to make the combination of both approaches world – “fusions” if you like – to be innovative in the way you combine apparent opposites.

Digital and physical are two sides of the same coin.

There is only one world, unless you believe Ray Kurzweil, and it is the real one. It’s human and physical. Digital technologies are incredibly powerful, enabling people to connect, to work, to learn, to play in new ways. From mobile phones to blockchains, 3D printing and augmented reality, digital allows us to do more, do it faster, do things we could never do before. But it’s still about humanity.

Start with people. How can you enable them to achieve more? To live better, to have more fun, to do better for the world. Whatever matters. I work closely with Richard Branson and his Virgin teams. Their mindset is to “start from the outside, and then work in”. Design a better customer experience. Built on your ambition and insight, and then explore how you could deliver it with new and existing capabilities.

Global and local are opportunities for every business.

I love Amazon’s “Treasure Truck” … Most of us have never connected with Amazon beyond the website and the delivery guy. Amazon is huge, global and anonymous. But the Treasure Truck is real. It travels around the country, bringing its pop-up store to local neighbourhoods, fun and games, bargains and demos. For Amazon, it’s a chance to make real connections, listen to people, and to be local.

We can all see a backlash in society against relentless globalisation, huge corporations, and social inequality. We see a lack of trust in brands, and know that authenticity matters. Etsy shows us that even the smallest and most local artisan businesses can also be global. For every business, local and global markets are within reach, however it’s also about combining scale and standardisation, with relevance and individuality.

Ideas and networks should be the core of your business.

Gamechanger businesses need a compelling idea, a core purpose, an inspiring proposition, that can spread fast and contagiously. In a digitally-fuelled world, the most innovative businesses embrace “ideas and networks” to drive exponential impact – like WhatsApp creating $19bn in three years, Airbnb $40bn in 9 years, Alibaba $476bn in 18 years, Amazon $740bn in 23 years.

Think about that concept of “exponential” … The power of networks – be it franchisees, or distributors, or customers and users – lies not in the number of members, but in the connections between them. Networks have a multiplying effect. Exponential. Consider, for example, Rapha, the sportwear brand that brings together people with a passion for cycling, who conveniently meet at their “Cycle Club” stores, and buy their premium gear. A fantastic “ideas and networks” business.

Finally this idea of short-term and long-term being in conflict with each other.

Jeff Bezos never has this problem, nor Elon Musk, nor Richard Branson. They focus on the long-term, recognising it will require some years of investment to get there. They all of course lead privately-owned companies. But every public company has the same ambition to innovate and grow. And so do most of their investors, actually.

The reality is that any company’s stock market performance is based on its future earnings potential, not its past. The better you can engage with equity analysts, journalists and investors themselves to explain why you will deliver a better future worth waiting for, then you get their support. If you don’t engage them in your future vision, plans and innovations, then they will default to looking for short-term evidence. It’s really in our hands, to work together to create a future we want to invest in. And to share the greater risk and rewards.

Time to embrace your future mindset

We live in an incredible time … More change in the next 10 years than in the last 250 years … remember? I know that sounds a little crazy, but think about Hyperloop in 3 years, a tipping point to electric cars in 5 years, Mars missions in 8 years. They are all real, and possible.

Digital platforms connecting buyers and sellers in new ways, blockchain having the potential to transform relationships and trust, 3d printing having the potential to transform value chains to deliver anything personalised and on-demand, AI and robotics giving us the capabilities to be superhuman in our minds and bodies.

These are just some of the fantastic new capabilities that enable us to innovate beyond what we can even imagine today. The future isn’t like the future used to be. We cannot just evolve or extrapolate the past. Today’s future is discontinuous, disruptive, different.

It is imagination that will move us forwards … unlocking the technological possibilities, applying them to real problems and opportunities, to drive innovation and growth in every industry, in every part of our lives.

Imagine a world where you press “print” to get the dress of your dreams, the food of your fantasies, or the spare parts for your car. Instantly, personalised and on demand. Think then what does that mean if we don’t need the huge scale of manufacturing plants, warehousing and transportation. Maybe we will even subscribe to the IP catalogues of brands, rather than buy standard products, in the ways we currently subscribe to Netflix.

Time to embrace your growth mindset … Unlock your Einstein dreams and Picasso passion … Embrace your Mandela courage and Ghandi spirit. Be more curious, be more intuitive, be more human. Ask more questions. Don’t be afraid to have audacious ideas, to challenge the old models of success, and turn future ambitions into practical profitable reality.

How else did Zespri reinvent the Chinese gooseberry as the kiwi fruit? How else will SpaceX reach Mars by 2025? How else did Netflix came to be, or NuTonomy, or Nespresso, or Nyx?

This is why 23andMe’s Anne Wojicki wont give up in her quest to make DNA analysis available to everyone, and to ultimately find a cure for cancer. And it’s why Jack Ma didn’t give up as he rose from $1000-per year English teacher to technological royalty.

The secret is the future mindset.

To realise that the future is malleable. So we need to grab hold of it, and shape it in our own vision. To our advantage.

This is what “gamechangers” do.

More ideas from Peter Fisk …

Download: Business Innovation by Peter Fisk

Today’s business world is no longer stable and predictable. It cannot simply evolve from the past and extrapolate into the future. Yet too managers hope that their old models will continue to work. They seek to replicate the success formula of the past, to continuously enhance and improve the status quo, and trust that their luck will continue into the future. We call this a fixed mindset. Instead they need to break free, with a growth mindset.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it”said Abraham Lincoln.

Markets are more crowded than ever before. Competition is intense, from across geographies and sectors, whilst customer aspirations are constantly fueled by new innovations and possibilities. Innovation is continuous and essential. Yet too much innovation is just improvement, keeping pace, not getting ahead. It is quickly imitated or redundant, the advantage is lost, and investment is squandered.

“This is the age of disruption … which is not simply about disruptive technologies, but dramatically changing how people think and behave” says Sebastian Thrun of Udacity.

Energy market

Francesco Venturini, head of Enel X, says that the energy sector is at a crucial inflexion point, with huge change and new entrants on the horizon. Driving this is how the boundaries between energy and other sectors will blur through new business models.

“If I think about electric mobility, utilities are competing with car manufactures; in energy managements systems, utilities compete with digital platform providers; in the field of the smart home, utilities are competing with the tech giants; and so on,” he says. Therefore, traditional utilities, which are not ready to tackle this new ecosystem, are definitely disadvantaged in comparison with those players that decide to deal with these new business models proactively.”

He says this will allow customers access to better pricing models. For example, through demand-side-response services, customers willing to adjust their energy consumption to off-peak, cheaper supply times will benefit from the lowest prices. “Through these new business models, more and more companies will join the game, blurring the line between sectors and increasing competition, with potential pricing benefits.”

New business models

New business models are the most effective way to transform organisations, to innovate the whole way in which the business works. Inspired by a new generation of businesses – Airbnb to Uber, Dollar Shave Club to Netflix – we see dramatically new business models in every market, through collaborative platforms, data analytics and personal recommendations, or subscription-based payments.

Airbnb makes money by helping you to make money out of your spare room, connecting host and guest, then taking a small fee from each. Nespresso makes great coffee, selling discounted machines, and then getting you to sign up to an everlasting and incredibly profitable direct revenue steam of coffee pods.

What if your business started leasing rather than selling, became part of the sharing economy? What if you simply facilitated an exchange between buyers and sellers and took a cut? How about moving to a subscription model, or a freemium model, or a referral model, or an advertising model?

We used to just think a business simply made things, and sold them. Now its much more complicated. Or rather, there are many more innovative ways to achieve success …

The term “Business Model” is over used and under defined. Business models explain how organisations work – how do they create value for customers, and in doing so how they create value for all other stakeholders. They can map the current business, or explore options for the future.

The approach originates from mapping “value networks” in the 1990s, understanding the systems across business and its partners through which value (both financial and non-financial) is created and exchanged – by who, how and for whom. I remember working with Pugh Roberts to create a multi-million dollar dynamic model for Mastercard which showed varying any one driver – such as interest rates, or branding – affected everything else. And thereby being able to test new ideas and optimise the model.

Business models represent the dynamic system through which a business creates and captures value, and how this can changed or optimised. They are a configuration of the building blocks of business, and their creative reconfiguration can be a significant innovation.

Business models became fundamental to business strategy, driven by them but often driving them. Hambrick and Fredrickson’s Strategy Diamond is all about aligning the organisation, achieving an economic logic between strategic choices. They help to align the business, matching the right strategies for outside and inside, using the proposition as the fulcrum, and profitability as the measure of success.

Business models can often appear very mechanical, lacking emotion and easy to imitate. In 2001 Patrick Staehler, in particular seeking to explain the new breed of digital businesses, created a business model “map” driven by the value proposition, enabled by the value architecture, creating economic value and sustained by cultural values. The last point here is most interesting, in that it captured the distinctive personality of a business, its leadership styles and ways of doing business. This is much harder to copy, and also sustains the other aspects.

Alex Osterwalder’s subsequent Business Model Canvas emerged as the most common template on which to map a business model. He popularised the approach so much so that his supersized canvas now features in workshops throughout the world, always with an array of multi coloured sticky notes as teams debate the best combination of solutions for each box. Whilst the canvas lacks the sophistication of value driver analysis and dynamic modelling, it is about testing hypothesise in each aspect, and how they could work together, and that respect works as a thinking model.

Business models have become a practical tool for rethinking the whole business, seeing the connections and then innovating the business. In fact they offer a great platform to facilitate new strategy and innovation thinking. That’s why we’ve created the Business Innovation Program, which combines design thinking, new business models and strategic implementation – a great way to engage your team, to think about new ways to grow, and to create the future, practically.

We explore at least 50 different business model templates which could transform your business. We start with the customer, to explore emergent needs and behaviours, shaping better propositions and solutions, then exploring how to deliver them commercially, and as engaging customer experiences.

Agenda

0900 – 1030: CHANGE, DISRUPTION AND GROWTH

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

1100 – 1230: INNOVATING THE BUSINESS

  • Starting from the future back – create the future you want, then work backwards
  • Working from the outside in – rethinking solutions through customer eyes
  • 10 types of innovation – products and services to business models and experiences
  • Ecosystems, from make or buy, to partner and connect, platforms and communities
  • Innovation multipliers – accelerate ideas further and faster to accelerate growth
  • Creating a growth factory – portfolios, self-tuning and the invincible company

1230 – 1400: BUSINESS MODEL INNOVATION

  • Business models – emergence of business models, 50 models to adapt and apply
  • Linking business models to strategy, business plans and organisation design
  • Rethinking your business model – what is it, and not – and different ways to define it
  • Mapping existing business model – simplifying how your business actually works
  • Innovating new business models – rethinking how your business could work better
  • Developing a business model portfolio – creating the invincible business

1530 – 1700: NEW BUSINESS MODELS IN ENERGY

  • Innovation in energy – how are banks innovating, what are the new models?
  • Rethinking products and services – what would deliver the proposition better?
  • Rethinking channels and brands – how to build more inspiring connections?
  • Rethinking revenues and pricing – exploring alternative ways to make money?
  • Rethinking assets and resources – how to use what you have better?
  • Rethinking activities and partners – what do to do yourself, and by others?

1700 – 1830: DEVELOPING YOUR NEW BUSINESS MODEL

  • Your products and services – what would deliver your proposition better?
  • Your channels and brands – how to build more inspiring connections?
  • Your revenues and pricing – exploring alternative ways to make money?
  • Your assets and resources – how could you use what you have better?
  • Your activities and partners – what do you need to do yourself?
  • How would you change Endesa’s business model? Where will you start?

This year’s Future Book Forum is all about “Growing with communities“.

Communities are the most powerful way in which book publishers can drive new growth, both through selling more books to more people more often, but also by generating new types of revenue streams.

Think about some of the great examples of brand communities through which people engage with brands and businesses today, influencing what they buy, who they trust, and how they achieve more. From Lego Ideas to TED Talks, Xbox Ambassadors to Nike’s Run Club, Disney’s D23 Fans to Bayern Munich’s supporter’s club. Here are some of the most famous:

  • Harley Owners Group – recognised that owners loved much more than the bike, it was the freedom to ride the roads, the thrill to ride together, to hang out at Ace Cafes, to share their passion for life.
  • Glossier – became the world’s fastest growing beauty business, emerging out of a Vogue editor’s blog followers, to become a community where consumers share ideas and advice, but also co-create their products.
  • Rapha Cycle Club – a store for premium apparel became a hub for people who love cycling, a place to indulge in experiences, a service point to fix your bike, an online platform, a starting point for rides, all around the world.
  • Behance – Adobe’s platform for showcasing and discovering great creative work, a platform of over 10 million users, including exclusive tools and project collaboration spaces.
  • Spotify Rockstars – bringing together people who love music, encouraging discussion and recommendations, rewarding and ranking the most active, and also a platform for discovering new talent.

A brand community is a group of consumers who invest in a brand beyond what is being sold. From meaningful consumer retention to new sources of revenue, unfiltered consumer insight and predictable cashflows, branded communities offer many opportunities to drive growth:

  • Enhance consumer experiences – how people achieve more, collaborate and recommend, and create new content together.
  • Ongoing engagement – how people engage with brands continuously, not just at moments of promotion or purchase.
  • Know consumers better – 67% of businesses use communities to gain deeper insights to drive better focus and innovation.
  • Increase brand exposure and credibility, making it easier to sell without selling – typically 35% increase in brand awareness.
  • Reduce consumer support costs – 49% of businesses with online communities report cost savings of around 25% annually.
  • Improve retention and advocacy –  improving retention by 42%, tripling cross-selling, and people pay more too.

Over the last 5 years of the Future Book Forum we have come on an incredible journey together –  exploring how to reinvent books, publishing and printing, in a world that is changing incredibly fast. Exploring the changing technologies – from data to content, machines to channels – but even more importantly, the changing markets – from consumers and behaviours, to influencers and value perceptions.

Some of my favourite moments from recent forums have included the:

  • Business case for change – rethinking the business models for publishing, from books to customisation, events to crowdfunding, modular and premium editions, freemium to subscription revenue streams.
  • Changing DNA of books – for some of us content is still king, including the author and imprint, title and words – for others the consumer is the new king, including data and collaboration, relationships and applications.
  • Innovation in book formats – increasingly a book is not just 300 pages of print, but a more holistic experience that combines physical and digital formats, ongoing delivery to support consumers in different ways over time.
  • Potential of consumer data – from retail data to personal insights, utilising all forms of intelligence to be more personal, predictive and profitable in the way we develop content, target audiences, and engage consumers.

We realised that we cannot continue as we are, that there were far more creative and profitable ways to grow. We realised that digital was much more than ebook formats, better printing and social media. We realised that similar industries like music and entertainment offer fabulous places to learn. We realised that we have some phenomenal assets that we could use in new and smarter ways. We realise that value is less in the book, and more in access to and application of ideas. And we realised that together, we could create new industry-wide approaches.

“Growing with communities” is the next step on our journey.

The genius of branded communities – when done well – is that they create a participatory experience for the consumer, to do more of what they love. Instead of projecting a need for the product onto the consumer and perpetuating the ‘us-them’ relationship, communities dissolve the boundaries, forming a ‘we’ experience, between consumers, authors and publishers.

In the world of books, communities are much more than those old book clubs, or a social media presence. They are rich engaging and participatory experiences that change the way people see books, and how they do more. Examples range from Bookabees to Bookstr, GoodReads and LibraryThing, InstaNovels and Hooked, O’Reilly to Springer Nature, Reposed and Unbound.

Building a great brand community has three foundations:

  • Consumer, starting with your target audience, with a captivating reason for members to join the “tribe”, be it a shared cause or interest, from hiphop music, to a love of science fiction novels, or a desire to get fit.
  • Collaboration, engaging with other people, facilitated by the brand and its community “platform”, which might take the form of discussions, recommendations, co-creation of products, or collaborative use in doing what they do.
  • Content, the glue that makes the community work beyond products. This might take the form of more books, newsletters, events, videos, other products and services, merchandise, exclusive offers, and much more.

Underpinning this is a business model that ensures that the community adds real value to its members, but also commercially works for the business. For community members, this means it adds value beyond the brand’s conventional products and services, typically enabling them to use them better, and get more from them. For business, this means having a business model that drives incremental revenue growth. This might be in the form of consumer retention, selling more or different products, but also other types of content, and potentially a subscription to belong.

This year’s forum includes a fabulous program of inspiring examples and practical applications – helping all of us, as publishers and printers, creators and distributors – to step up to the opportunity. From America’s Test Kitchen, which starts with a love of cooking, to Moviestar Riders, sharing a passion for gaming – we have the stimulus and also the power of ourselves as the Future Book Forum community to find new growth, and create a better future for books.

Here’s what happened last year, at FBF18:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm9lfIqpyyM

FBF19 agenda

Here is our agenda for this year’s Future Book Forum, on 20-21 November 2019, hosted by Canon at their fabulous Customer Experience Center, in Poing near Munich:

0900 – 0910 : Welcome, by Canon

0910 – 0920 : Growing with communities, by Peter Fisk

0920 – 0940 : Why publishing still matters, by Mark Allin

0940 – 1020 : The anthropology of communities, by Veronica Reyero Meal

1020 – 1100 : Break

1100 – 1145 : Moviestar Riders, esports community, by Fernando Piquer

1145 – 1215 : Springer Nature and Zapnito, by Ben Johnson and Charles Thide

1215 – 1245 : What’s new and different, panel discussion

1245 – 1415 : Lunch

1415 – 1500 : Growth accelerator, how to design communities in publishing, group work

1500 – 1545 : Growth accelerator, the best concepts for communities, discussion

1545 – 1625 : Break

1625 – 1645 : Books that build better communities, by Leanne McNulty

1645 – 1715 : America’s Test Kitchen, cooking community, by Sara Domville

1715 – 1745 : The best ideas for growth, panel discussion

Book-driven communities

Here are inspiring examples of online brand communities that have become thriving interactive environments in the digital world:

Bookabees is a subscription-based community for children and parents to explore the magic of books, sending you a monthly box of books and other activities.

Booklikes creates your own digital library for books, and a forum to share your blogs, with reviews and recommendations, bringing together authors and readers, with special offers and events.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DJuh_mVcnc

Bookstr is a non-profit platform, previously The Reading Room, which allows readers to discover, recommend, and purchase books with 50% of profits dedicated to helping spread literacy in underdeveloped countries around the world.

Goodreads is the world’s largest platform for readers and book recommendations, now owned by Amazon. Find new books, recommend books, track your reading, join book clubs, win advanced copies, and much more.

 

Hooked describes itself as the future of storytelling. It is a a celebrity-backed startup that produces serialised “chat-fiction” for smartphones, and creating long-form stories that evolve in realtime on Snapchat.

InstaNovels emerged as a collaboration between The New York Public Library and ad agency Mother, a reimagining of Instagram Stories to provide a new platform for the world’s most iconic novels.

 

LibraryThing is platform of 2.5 million book readers categorised by the types of books they love, and linking people by the specific books which they read, review and recommend.

 

O’Reilly online learning is on a mission is to change the world by sharing the knowledge of innovators. Education comes in many forms from books to videos, tutorials and collaborative projects, and much more

Reposed started out as a community of women who love reading and a glass of wine, Reading in Heels, It is now much more, with “everything for a relaxing evening in – gourmet chocolate, relaxing teas, luxury beauty products and elegant stationery”

Unbound is the world’s leading crowdfunding publisher, building a community of book readers who want to be a more active part in a book’s journey from inception to activation.

 

Interview Q&A by Canon with Peter Fisk

“Communities: enabling publishers to go beyond the book”

1. How can today’s publishers engage consumers beyond a book sale?

Consumers are the main drivers in the publishing industry today. Enabled by social platforms, and a distrust in traditional media, consumers have become powerful influences of each, and continuously changing how content is created and consumed. This is a positive opportunity for print and publishing as print is taking on a new, premium role within the customer journey.

Publishers can use print to connect with their consumers on a more valuable and individual level with personalised content, enabled by technologies such as digital print on-demand. The secret is to understand them better. Get to know their interests and passions. Find out how they will use the content. Once this is achieved, then brands can provide tailored content.

Take the example of a home cooking enthusiast who buys a cookbook. The publisher could invite them to an event with their favourite chef, or include a QR code within the book linking to a YouTube channel with exclusive recipe demos. They could even encourage consumers to share their own tips and recipes with one another. It’s about having a two-way ongoing dialogue across diverse communications channels, including both print and digital.

Such interactions are the building blocks of communities, bringing together consumers in an enduring way in which they share their passions and preferences. Communities fundamentally change the way publishers engage with their markets, a shift from selling to enabling, from transactions to relationships, from supply to support, from publisher to facilitator.

2. So what do publishers need to do to learn about their customers’ wider interests?

Publishers need to go where their consumers are – within these communities – and actively become a part of them. You can see examples in many other industries. For example, Lego Club enables children to share their creations with others kids across the world for inspiration, engaging them much more deeply in the brand’s world. Communities engage people beyond the sale of a product, opening up a wider conversation.

And it isn’t always about creating new communities. Some of the best ones already exist – people already do what they love doing. However publishers have the opportunity to add more value in new ways, be it through books that allow people to indulge and share their passions, or in content and services that go beyond what we currently think of as a book.

A great example is cycling brand Rapha, which started in London and now has ‘Cycle Clubs’ around the world where cyclists can meet, have a coffee and go on bike rides. Of course they can buy clothing, get their bikes serviced and more, but consumers don’t just come to the club to buy products. They come to share their passion with like-minded people and for the experience that the community has co-created. This is where the brand adds value.

And there are more examples too: Harley Davidson’s owners group; GoPro’s action photography and sports community; LinkedIn’s business platform; and Glossier, the world’s fastest growing beauty brand, which was established through an online community.

The opportunity for growth is huge and that’s why we have chosen “Growing with Communities” as the theme of Canon’s Future Book Forum which I will again be hosting this year in Munich.

Publishers’ business models need to evolve. They need to be open to the challenges and opportunities of fundamental change. Large companies find such change the hardest, having grown familiar with their old models that made them successful in the past. Small to medium-sized companies have the agility and flexibility to change their business model, but a large organisation with a legacy in the industry may be reluctant to make the switch. The positive is that larger businesses have the scale, the people, the customer database, the IT and the money to try new ways of engaging with customers. And it doesn’t have to be instant. Publishers can implement small, incremental changes while continuing old ways of working.

3. To what extent do you think the publishing industry is already beginning to use consumer insight to drive business growth?

Last year at Future Book Forum, we discussed data’s potential to transform the publishing world – and how it can enable publishers to be more predictive, more personalised, and more profitable.

Many publishers now see data as their most valuable asset and the key to how they can sell, innovate and grow. But despite publishers having access to industry data, retail data and the data they capture directly, they still aren’t collecting all available customer insight. And even if they do, they aren’t using it cleverly to add value to consumers or drive business growth.

By collaborating with consumers, other brands and even competitors, publishers can use data to its full potential, connecting them with their customers and driving innovation. Insight can be used to understand customers better and even to predict their future behaviours and buying patterns using tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI).

4. So how can publishers use communities to grow their businesses?

At its simplest level, an ongoing relationship with a consumer helps brands to understand them better, which allows the develop of new products and services, and also cross-selling of other content that engages the consumer. An educational textbook might be complemented by a practical workbook or online videos for example.

Communities have challenged the traditional ‘book’ and changed our way of thinking around how we consume content. For example, Hooked is a chat fiction app where users co-create stories via a series of posts or text messages – the key part being that the consumer decides what is included in the story.

Alternatively, communities allow for new business models that challenge the traditional publishing model. Take America’s Test Kitchen. It offers a paid subscription service that enables home cooks to access a host of resources online, including recipes, reviews and top tips, as well as printed books and magazines. By integrating its offering, the company generates more than just sales. It’s able to build a community – a platform where people co-create content about their common passion – cooking.

Publishers should no longer just put a price on the product, but on access to a community in which the printed book is just one part of a richer, extended experience.

5. What is your message to Future Book Forum delegates this year?

I would recommend that publishers take a step back and look at the bigger picture.  The growth opportunity is no longer in selling a book but in rethinking how to maximise customer engagement by appealing to their passions.

New content formats are emerging that make publishing more valuable. New business models and revenue streams now exist. And most importantly, audiences play an increasingly crucial role in the creative process and they are influenced by what other consumers value. Publishers need to be ready for this change and how it will impact their business.

We see from other industries the power of communities. Brands needs to step into the consumer’s shoes and understand how to do more for them, and enable them to achieve more. Brand affinity and new revenues will follow.

The biggest opportunity for publishers to grow is through communities, engaging people in what they love and enabling them to get more value out of their relationship with a brand.

Download: Man and Machine: Masterclass by Peter Fisk. 

We are entering a new era of human+machine symbiosis where 50 billion machines in constant communication will automate and orchestrate the movement and interactions among individuals, organisations, and the cities we live in.

Every day people casually use previously unimagined machine power, where algorithms make art and diagnose illness, and automation is an integrated, embedded, and ultimately invisible part of virtually every aspect of our lives.

Since humans first began creating machines, we have shaped them and they have shaped us.

We created clocks to help us orchestrate and coordinate tasks and, in turn, clocks began to govern our lives. We created cars and then cars turned us into motorists, auto mechanics, and commuters. Over the centuries, we have populated our world with machines that help us do things we can’t or don’t want to do ourselves. From steam-powered mills to telephone switchboards to jet engines, our technologies have created new capabilities and conveniences and allowed us to automate and optimize many aspects of human activity.

Over the past several decades, our world has become so saturated with machines that they have faded into the background. We hardly notice them. And we are reaching a new threshold—our machines are getting networked, connected, and in the process gaining capabilities once reserved for computers, enabling new forms of human+machine symbiosis.

As cloud computing and intelligence becomes pervasive and available on-demand, machines will gain the ability to capture and make sense of data, effectively enabling them to see, hear, and quantify sensory information. They will be able to simulate outcomes to optimize planning, scheduling, and strategic decision-making. Products
that were once considered finished upon shipping will be constantly upgraded and enhanced with software. And as the billions of machines that surround us become increasingly autonomous, we will be challenged to embed and encode our most complex ethical principles into the things that surround us. The ubiquity, connectivity, and intelligence of these machines will enable automation at an unprecedented scale.

Download PDF: Leading Change in a Disruptive World 

  • How is the 21st Century Business different from the 20th Century Business?
  • East and West, Tech and Human, Profit and Purpose, Start-up and Corporate
  • Paradoxes provide new opportunities … to reinvent how we work, how we win
  • 100 disruptive innovators shaking up the world right now, every sector and country
  • Defining the DNA of the future business, and what it takes to be a great leader
  • Introducing the 7 new codes of business, 7 paradigms to lead the future
    • Aurora … Create the future, like Masayoshi Son and Emily Weiss
    • Komorebi … Seize the best opportunities, like Anne Wojcicki and Wang Xing
    • Transcendence … Find more purpose, like Larry Fink and Yves Chouinard
    • Ingenuity … Innovate with humanity, like Devi Shetty and David Kelley
    • Syzygy … Transform your business, like Bernard Arnault and Jeff Bezos
    • Ubuntu … Achieve more together like Piyush Gupta and Zhang Ruimin
    • Awestruck … Be a better leader, like Pablo Isla and Tadashi Yanai
  • Why IE Business School’s Global AMP is the best way for business leaders to leap forwards into this new world, to transform themselves and their business.

Download PDF: Leading Change in a Disruptive World 

The most innovative businesses see the world differently.

They don’t just seek to imitate the success of others, to compete in the markets of today, to frame themselves by their relative differences to competitors. Instead they play their own game.

I call them “gamechangers”, and here in Dubai, I will be previewing the World Expo 2020, and taking inspirations from companies all around the world who are shaking up markets, embracing radical new ideas, and changing the game.

So what’s the “game”? Well, in simple terms, it’s the market.

These companies go beyond innovating their products and services, their customer experienes and business models. They seek to innovate how their markets work.

Think of it like a sports game. How could you change the game? It could be anything from the pitch dimensions to rules of play, the team composition to the measures of success, the role of the referee to the participation of fans. Even the name of the game.

Now look at today’s most disruptive innovators – 23andMe to Alibaba, Zespri to Zidisha – they reframe, reimagine and redefine the market on their terms – who is it for, why people buy, what they pay and get, and how they work.

I’ve met and profiled over 250 “gamechanger” companies on my travels, in almost every sector, and in every part of the world. Corporate giants and start-ups, from Dubai to Berlin, Colombo to Qingdao.

There is no one way to change the game, but there are definitely some common traits:

  • Audacious – Gamechangers are visionary and innovative, but also daring and original; they seek to shape the future to their advantage.
  • Purposeful – They seek to make life better, in some relevant and inspiring way; they have a higher motive than just making money.
  • Networked – Gamechangers harness the power of networks, digital and physical, both business and customer networks, to exponentially reach further faster.
  • Intelligent – They use big data analytics and algorithms, machine learning and AI, to be smart and efficient, personal and predictive.
  • Collaborative – Gamechangers work with others, from ecosystems to platforms, social networks and co-creation, to achieve more together.
  • Enabling – They focus not on what they do, but what they enable people to do; and thereby redefine their marketspace, find new opportunities and redefine value.
  • Commercial – Gamechangers take a longer-term perspective, adopting new business models, and recalibrating the measures of progress and success.

Do you have a future mindset?

Today’s business leaders need a future mindset. That sounds obvious, but isn’t.

Most leaders have a “fixed mindset”. They keep stretching the old models of success. They stay loyal to the model that made them great, seeking to squeeze and tweak it for as long as possible. They seek perfection – to optimise what they currently do – which leads to efficiency and incremental gains.

Instead a “future mindset” is prepared to let go of the past. To explore the future, to experiment with new ways of working and winning. Failure is a way to learn, and innovation becomes the norm. Change is relentless inside, as it is outside. Innovation is their lifeblood. Like Jeff Bezos loves to say “it is always day one”.

With a future mindset, the CEO needs new attributes:

  • Sense maker – to interpret a fast and confusing world, to see new patterns and opportunities, what is relevant and not, to shape your own vision.
  • Radical optimist – to inspire people with a stretching ambition, positive and distinctive, to be audacious, to see the possibilities when others only see risk.
  • Future hacker – they start from the “future back”, with clarity of purpose and intent, encouraging ideas and experiments, leveraging resource and scale.
  • Ideas connector – da Vinci said innovation is about making unusual connections;  connecting new people, new partners, new capabilities and new ideas.
  • Emotionally agile – whilst organisational agility is essential, emotional agility matters even more; to cope with change, to be intuitive in making sense, and making choices.
  • Entrepreneur at large – keeping the founders mentality alive, hands-on working with project teams to infuse the mindset, to be the catalyst and coach.
  • Having grit – “gamechanger” leaders need to go against the grain, to persist but know when to move on, to have self belief and confidence, guts and resilience.

The future is a better place to start

Start from the “future back”.

Trying to evolve in today’s complex and confused world is unlikely to lead you towards a bright and distinctive future. It will extend your life a little longer, but it will be tough and uninspiring, with diminishing returns.

Instead jump to the future. I tend to start with five years ahead, although it may differ by company. 5 years is long enough to change the world, but close enough to be real. Start by creating a positive, collective and inspiring vision of the future market. What will it be like? What will people want? Why? How? Where? Then consider how to win in this new world.

This is where “moonshot thinking” can be really useful. “Why be 10% better, when you could be 10 times better?” 10 times more profits, more customers, more quality, reduced cost, reduced time. Whatever. By giving yourself a “How could we do it 10x better” challenge you take a new perspective, solve problems in different ways.

Be inspired by ideas from other places.

Explore how ARM or GE, Inditex or Netflix, Glossier or Novo Nordisk have changed their markets. Choose any of my 100+ “gamechanger” companies! How did they do it? How did customers respond? (Remember, they often serve the same customers as you!). You can’t learn much from competitors, but you can learn a lot from relevant parallels.

Copy. Adapt. Paste.

Customer insight also matters. Deep dives and design thinking, exploring the emerging trends and deviant behaviours. This can enhance and validate your ideas, but the problem with most customer insight is that it is filtered by our current world. You need something to disrupt your thinking.

I have a great box of disruptive techniques. Some are really simple – like break then remake the rules, like imagine its free then find a way to make money, like reverse polarities and many more. The point is to disrupt your conventional thinking.

From this, ideas rapidly emerge. You need lots of ideas about the future. But these are fragments of the real answer. The real creativity comes in fusing together into bigger “concepts”. These could be customer solutions, or new ways of working, new revenue streams, or new business models, and new market scenarios.

Once you have a clear and collective ambition for the future, it’s time to work backwards.  “If this is how we want to be in 5 years, where do we need to get to in 3 years, and then in 1 year?  Therefore what do we need to start doing now?” You develop a “horizon plan” for your business; a strategy roadmap if you like, but developed backwards.

The important thing is that by working backwards, you have jumped out of the morass of today. You’ve avoided the assumptions, limitations, problems and priorities of today’s thinking. You have a more inspiring “gamechanging” future, and have started to map out the steps to get there. Most likely with different priorities in the short-term too.

Of course the steps on this journey might change, but it’s going to be an exciting adventure.

Change the way we think, resolve the conflicts

In today’s busineses, we have created artificial divides in how we think and operate. Digital and physical seem like two different worlds, global and local seem like alternative strategies that cannot combine, many still struggle to align value to customers and shareholders in a mutually reinforcing way, and short and long-termism continues to confuse our priorities.

Our thinking within business, has created separate and apparently conflicting approaches. The opportunity is to make the combination of both approaches world – “fusions” if you like – to be innovative in the way you combine apparent opposites.

Digital and physical are two sides of the same coin.

There is only one world, unless you believe Ray Kurzweil, and it is the real one. It’s human and physical. Digital technologies are incredibly powerful, enabling people to connect, to work, to learn, to play in new ways. From mobile phones to blockchains, 3D printing and augmented reality, digital allows us to do more, do it faster, do things we could never do before. But it’s still about humanity.

Start with people. How can you enable them to achieve more? To live better, to have more fun, to do better for the world. Whatever matters. I work closely with Richard Branson and his Virgin teams. Their mindset is to “start from the outside, and then work in”. Design a better customer experience. Built on your ambition and insight, and then explore how you could deliver it with new and existing capabilities.

Global and local are opportunities for every business.

I love Amazon’s “Treasure Truck” … Most of us have never connected with Amazon beyond the website and the delivery guy. Amazon is huge, global and anonymous. But the Treasure Truck is real. It travels around the country, bringing its pop-up store to local neighbourhoods, fun and games, bargains and demos. For Amazon, it’s a chance to make real connections, listen to people, and to be local.

We can all see a backlash in society against relentless globalisation, huge corporations, and social inequality. We see a lack of trust in brands, and know that authenticity matters. Etsy shows us that even the smallest and most local artisan businesses can also be global. For every business, local and global markets are within reach, however it’s also about combining scale and standardisation, with relevance and individuality.

Ideas and networks should be the core of your business.

Gamechanger businesses need a compelling idea, a core purpose, an inspiring proposition, that can spread fast and contagiously. In a digitally-fuelled world, the most innovative businesses embrace “ideas and networks” to drive exponential impact – like WhatsApp creating $19bn in three years, Airbnb $40bn in 9 years, Alibaba $476bn in 18 years, Amazon $740bn in 23 years.

Think about that concept of “exponential” … The power of networks – be it franchisees, or distributors, or customers and users – lies not in the number of members, but in the connections between them. Networks have a multiplying effect. Exponential. Consider, for example, Rapha, the sportwear brand that brings together people with a passion for cycling, who conveniently meet at their “Cycle Club” stores, and buy their premium gear. A fantastic “ideas and networks” business.

Finally this idea of short-term and long-term being in conflict with each other.

Jeff Bezos never has this problem, nor Elon Musk, nor Richard Branson. They focus on the long-term, recognising it will require some years of investment to get there. They all of course lead privately-owned companies. But every public company has the same ambition to innovate and grow. And so do most of their investors, actually.

The reality is that any company’s stock market performance is based on its future earnings potential, not its past. The better you can engage with equity analysts, journalists and investors themselves to explain why you will deliver a better future worth waiting for, then you get their support. If you don’t engage them in your future vision, plans and innovations, then they will default to looking for short-term evidence. It’s really in our hands, to work together to create a future we want to invest in. And to share the greater risk and rewards.

Time to embrace your future mindset

We live in an incredible time … More change in the next 10 years than in the last 250 years … remember? I know that sounds a little crazy, but think about Hyperloop in 3 years, a tipping point to electric cars in 5 years, Mars missions in 8 years. They are all real, and possible.

Digital platforms connecting buyers and sellers in new ways, blockchain having the potential to transform relationships and trust, 3d printing having the potential to transform value chains to deliver anything personalised and on-demand, AI and robotics giving us the capabilities to be superhuman in our minds and bodies.

These are just some of the fantastic new capabilities that enable us to innovate beyond what we can even imagine today. The future isn’t like the future used to be. We cannot just evolve or extrapolate the past. Today’s future is discontinuous, disruptive, different.

It is imagination that will move us forwards … unlocking the technological possibilities, applying them to real problems and opportunities, to drive innovation and growth in every industry, in every part of our lives.

Imagine a world where you press “print” to get the dress of your dreams, the food of your fantasies, or the spare parts for your car. Instantly, personalised and on demand. Think then what does that mean if we don’t need the huge scale of manufacturing plants, warehousing and transportation. Maybe we will even subscribe to the IP catalogues of brands, rather than buy standard products, in the ways we currently subscribe to Netflix.

Time to embrace your growth mindset … Unlock your Einstein dreams and Picasso passion … Embrace your Mandela courage and Ghandi spirit. Be more curious, be more intuitive, be more human. Ask more questions. Don’t be afraid to have audacious ideas, to challenge the old models of success, and turn future ambitions into practical profitable reality.

How else did Zespri reinvent the Chinese gooseberry as the kiwi fruit? How else will SpaceX reach Mars by 2025? How else did Netflix came to be, or NuTonomy, or Nespresso, or Nyx?

This is why 23andMe’s Anne Wojicki wont give up in her quest to make DNA analysis available to everyone, and to ultimately find a cure for cancer. And it’s why Jack Ma didn’t give up as he rose from $1000-per year English teacher to technological royalty.

The secret is the future mindset.

To realise that the future is malleable. So we need to grab hold of it, and shape it in our own vision. To our advantage.

This is what “gamechangers” do.

More ideas from Peter Fisk …

Download a summary: Leading Change in a Disruptive World 
  • How is the 21st Century Business different from the 20th Century Business?
  • East and West, Tech and Human, Profit and Purpose, Start-up and Corporate
  • Paradoxes provide new opportunities … to reinvent how we work, how we win
  • Defining the DNA of the future business, and what it takes to be a great leader
  • Introducing the 7 new codes of business, 7 paradigms to lead the future
  • Aurora … Create the future, like Masayoshi Son and Emily Weiss
  • Komorebi … Seize the best opportunities, like Anne Wojcicki and Wang Xing
  • Transcendence … Find more purpose, like Larry Fink and Yves Chouinard
  • Ingenuity … Innovate with humanity, like Devi Shetty and David Kelley
  • Syzygy … Transform your business, like Bernard Arnault and Jeff Bezos
  • Ubuntu … Achieve more together like Piyush Gupta and Zhang Ruimin
  • Awestruck … Be a better leader, like Pablo Isla and Tadashi Yanai

Download a summary: Business Recoded by Peter Fisk

The most innovative businesses see the world differently.

They don’t just seek to imitate the success of others, to compete in the markets of today, to frame themselves by their relative differences to competitors. Instead they play their own game.

I call them “gamechangers”, and here in Dubai, I will be previewing the World Expo 2020, and taking inspirations from companies all around the world who are shaking up markets, embracing radical new ideas, and changing the game.

So what’s the “game”? Well, in simple terms, it’s the market.

These companies go beyond innovating their products and services, their customer experienes and business models. They seek to innovate how their markets work.

Think of it like a sports game. How could you change the game? It could be anything from the pitch dimensions to rules of play, the team composition to the measures of success, the role of the referee to the participation of fans. Even the name of the game.

Now look at today’s most disruptive innovators – 23andMe to Alibaba, Zespri to Zidisha – they reframe, reimagine and redefine the market on their terms – who is it for, why people buy, what they pay and get, and how they work.

I’ve met and profiled over 250 “gamechanger” companies on my travels, in almost every sector, and in every part of the world. Corporate giants and start-ups, from Dubai to Berlin, Colombo to Qingdao.

There is no one way to change the game, but there are definitely some common traits:

  • Audacious – Gamechangers are visionary and innovative, but also daring and original; they seek to shape the future to their advantage.
  • Purposeful – They seek to make life better, in some relevant and inspiring way; they have a higher motive than just making money.
  • Networked – Gamechangers harness the power of networks, digital and physical, both business and customer networks, to exponentially reach further faster.
  • Intelligent – They use big data analytics and algorithms, machine learning and AI, to be smart and efficient, personal and predictive.
  • Collaborative – Gamechangers work with others, from ecosystems to platforms, social networks and co-creation, to achieve more together.
  • Enabling – They focus not on what they do, but what they enable people to do; and thereby redefine their marketspace, find new opportunities and redefine value.
  • Commercial – Gamechangers take a longer-term perspective, adopting new business models, and recalibrating the measures of progress and success.

Do you have a future mindset?

Today’s business leaders need a future mindset. That sounds obvious, but isn’t.

Most leaders have a “fixed mindset”. They keep stretching the old models of success. They stay loyal to the model that made them great, seeking to squeeze and tweak it for as long as possible. They seek perfection – to optimise what they currently do – which leads to efficiency and incremental gains.

Instead a “future mindset” is prepared to let go of the past. To explore the future, to experiment with new ways of working and winning. Failure is a way to learn, and innovation becomes the norm. Change is relentless inside, as it is outside. Innovation is their lifeblood. Like Jeff Bezos loves to say “it is always day one”.

With a future mindset, the CEO needs new attributes:

  • Sense maker – to interpret a fast and confusing world, to see new patterns and opportunities, what is relevant and not, to shape your own vision.
  • Radical optimist – to inspire people with a stretching ambition, positive and distinctive, to be audacious, to see the possibilities when others only see risk.
  • Future hacker – they start from the “future back”, with clarity of purpose and intent, encouraging ideas and experiments, leveraging resource and scale.
  • Ideas connector – da Vinci said innovation is about making unusual connections;  connecting new people, new partners, new capabilities and new ideas.
  • Emotionally agile – whilst organisational agility is essential, emotional agility matters even more; to cope with change, to be intuitive in making sense, and making choices.
  • Entrepreneur at large – keeping the founders mentality alive, hands-on working with project teams to infuse the mindset, to be the catalyst and coach.
  • Having grit – “gamechanger” leaders need to go against the grain, to persist but know when to move on, to have self belief and confidence, guts and resilience.

The future is a better place to start

Start from the “future back”.

Trying to evolve in today’s complex and confused world is unlikely to lead you towards a bright and distinctive future. It will extend your life a little longer, but it will be tough and uninspiring, with diminishing returns.

Instead jump to the future. I tend to start with five years ahead, although it may differ by company. 5 years is long enough to change the world, but close enough to be real. Start by creating a positive, collective and inspiring vision of the future market. What will it be like? What will people want? Why? How? Where? Then consider how to win in this new world.

This is where “moonshot thinking” can be really useful. “Why be 10% better, when you could be 10 times better?” 10 times more profits, more customers, more quality, reduced cost, reduced time. Whatever. By giving yourself a “How could we do it 10x better” challenge you take a new perspective, solve problems in different ways.

Be inspired by ideas from other places.

Explore how ARM or GE, Inditex or Netflix, Glossier or Novo Nordisk have changed their markets. Choose any of my 100+ “gamechanger” companies! How did they do it? How did customers respond? (Remember, they often serve the same customers as you!). You can’t learn much from competitors, but you can learn a lot from relevant parallels.

Copy. Adapt. Paste.

Customer insight also matters. Deep dives and design thinking, exploring the emerging trends and deviant behaviours. This can enhance and validate your ideas, but the problem with most customer insight is that it is filtered by our current world. You need something to disrupt your thinking.

I have a great box of disruptive techniques. Some are really simple – like break then remake the rules, like imagine its free then find a way to make money, like reverse polarities and many more. The point is to disrupt your conventional thinking.

From this, ideas rapidly emerge. You need lots of ideas about the future. But these are fragments of the real answer. The real creativity comes in fusing together into bigger “concepts”. These could be customer solutions, or new ways of working, new revenue streams, or new business models, and new market scenarios.

Once you have a clear and collective ambition for the future, it’s time to work backwards.  “If this is how we want to be in 5 years, where do we need to get to in 3 years, and then in 1 year?  Therefore what do we need to start doing now?” You develop a “horizon plan” for your business; a strategy roadmap if you like, but developed backwards.

The important thing is that by working backwards, you have jumped out of the morass of today. You’ve avoided the assumptions, limitations, problems and priorities of today’s thinking. You have a more inspiring “gamechanging” future, and have started to map out the steps to get there. Most likely with different priorities in the short-term too.

Of course the steps on this journey might change, but it’s going to be an exciting adventure.

Change the way we think, resolve the conflicts

In today’s busineses, we have created artificial divides in how we think and operate. Digital and physical seem like two different worlds, global and local seem like alternative strategies that cannot combine, many still struggle to align value to customers and shareholders in a mutually reinforcing way, and short and long-termism continues to confuse our priorities.

Our thinking within business, has created separate and apparently conflicting approaches. The opportunity is to make the combination of both approaches world – “fusions” if you like – to be innovative in the way you combine apparent opposites.

Digital and physical are two sides of the same coin.

There is only one world, unless you believe Ray Kurzweil, and it is the real one. It’s human and physical. Digital technologies are incredibly powerful, enabling people to connect, to work, to learn, to play in new ways. From mobile phones to blockchains, 3D printing and augmented reality, digital allows us to do more, do it faster, do things we could never do before. But it’s still about humanity.

Start with people. How can you enable them to achieve more? To live better, to have more fun, to do better for the world. Whatever matters. I work closely with Richard Branson and his Virgin teams. Their mindset is to “start from the outside, and then work in”. Design a better customer experience. Built on your ambition and insight, and then explore how you could deliver it with new and existing capabilities.

Global and local are opportunities for every business.

I love Amazon’s “Treasure Truck” … Most of us have never connected with Amazon beyond the website and the delivery guy. Amazon is huge, global and anonymous. But the Treasure Truck is real. It travels around the country, bringing its pop-up store to local neighbourhoods, fun and games, bargains and demos. For Amazon, it’s a chance to make real connections, listen to people, and to be local.

We can all see a backlash in society against relentless globalisation, huge corporations, and social inequality. We see a lack of trust in brands, and know that authenticity matters. Etsy shows us that even the smallest and most local artisan businesses can also be global. For every business, local and global markets are within reach, however it’s also about combining scale and standardisation, with relevance and individuality.

Ideas and networks should be the core of your business.

Gamechanger businesses need a compelling idea, a core purpose, an inspiring proposition, that can spread fast and contagiously. In a digitally-fuelled world, the most innovative businesses embrace “ideas and networks” to drive exponential impact – like WhatsApp creating $19bn in three years, Airbnb $40bn in 9 years, Alibaba $476bn in 18 years, Amazon $740bn in 23 years.

Think about that concept of “exponential” … The power of networks – be it franchisees, or distributors, or customers and users – lies not in the number of members, but in the connections between them. Networks have a multiplying effect. Exponential. Consider, for example, Rapha, the sportwear brand that brings together people with a passion for cycling, who conveniently meet at their “Cycle Club” stores, and buy their premium gear. A fantastic “ideas and networks” business.

Finally this idea of short-term and long-term being in conflict with each other.

Jeff Bezos never has this problem, nor Elon Musk, nor Richard Branson. They focus on the long-term, recognising it will require some years of investment to get there. They all of course lead privately-owned companies. But every public company has the same ambition to innovate and grow. And so do most of their investors, actually.

The reality is that any company’s stock market performance is based on its future earnings potential, not its past. The better you can engage with equity analysts, journalists and investors themselves to explain why you will deliver a better future worth waiting for, then you get their support. If you don’t engage them in your future vision, plans and innovations, then they will default to looking for short-term evidence. It’s really in our hands, to work together to create a future we want to invest in. And to share the greater risk and rewards.

Time to embrace your future mindset

We live in an incredible time … More change in the next 10 years than in the last 250 years … remember? I know that sounds a little crazy, but think about Hyperloop in 3 years, a tipping point to electric cars in 5 years, Mars missions in 8 years. They are all real, and possible.

Digital platforms connecting buyers and sellers in new ways, blockchain having the potential to transform relationships and trust, 3d printing having the potential to transform value chains to deliver anything personalised and on-demand, AI and robotics giving us the capabilities to be superhuman in our minds and bodies.

These are just some of the fantastic new capabilities that enable us to innovate beyond what we can even imagine today. The future isn’t like the future used to be. We cannot just evolve or extrapolate the past. Today’s future is discontinuous, disruptive, different.

It is imagination that will move us forwards … unlocking the technological possibilities, applying them to real problems and opportunities, to drive innovation and growth in every industry, in every part of our lives.

Imagine a world where you press “print” to get the dress of your dreams, the food of your fantasies, or the spare parts for your car. Instantly, personalised and on demand. Think then what does that mean if we don’t need the huge scale of manufacturing plants, warehousing and transportation. Maybe we will even subscribe to the IP catalogues of brands, rather than buy standard products, in the ways we currently subscribe to Netflix.

Time to embrace your growth mindset … Unlock your Einstein dreams and Picasso passion … Embrace your Mandela courage and Ghandi spirit. Be more curious, be more intuitive, be more human. Ask more questions. Don’t be afraid to have audacious ideas, to challenge the old models of success, and turn future ambitions into practical profitable reality.

How else did Zespri reinvent the Chinese gooseberry as the kiwi fruit? How else will SpaceX reach Mars by 2025? How else did Netflix came to be, or NuTonomy, or Nespresso, or Nyx?

This is why 23andMe’s Anne Wojicki wont give up in her quest to make DNA analysis available to everyone, and to ultimately find a cure for cancer. And it’s why Jack Ma didn’t give up as he rose from $1000-per year English teacher to technological royalty.

The secret is the future mindset.

To realise that the future is malleable. So we need to grab hold of it, and shape it in our own vision. To our advantage.

This is what “gamechangers” do.

More ideas from Peter Fisk …

Agenda:

  • Sensemaking in a world of relentless change, turning challenges into opportunities
  • Disrupt or be disrupted, responding to change with more radical innovation
  • The future isn’t like it used to be, so we can’t keep doing what we used to do
  • 100 companies changing the world right now. What can you learn from them?
  • Start with a future mindset, jump ahead, look forwards not backwards

Download a summary

The energy industry is highly complex and technologically challenging, presenting plenty of opportunity for innovation. This complexity, coupled with tremendous pressure to reduce costs, extend oilfield life, and reduce environmental impact, has led to the formation of a diverse startup ecosystem in the oil & gas industry.

Oil exploration, for example, is particularly primed for digitization due to the vast quantities of data involved. Analytics startups like DrillingInfo and OAG Analytics are targeting this space with products to crunch geologic data to help choose the best drilling locations and well configurations.

Top oil & gas companies are also investing significant R&D spend and venture funding in analytics, seismic imagining, hydraulic fracturing, and environmental impact technologies. This investment is complemented by startups offering new technologies to the oil & gas industry.

The most innovative businesses see the world differently.

They don’t just seek to imitate the success of others, to compete in the markets of today, to frame themselves by their relative differences to competitors. Instead they play their own game.

I call them “gamechangers”, and here in Dubai, I will be previewing the World Expo 2020, and taking inspirations from companies all around the world who are shaking up markets, embracing radical new ideas, and changing the game.

So what’s the “game”? Well, in simple terms, it’s the market.

These companies go beyond innovating their products and services, their customer experienes and business models. They seek to innovate how their markets work.

Think of it like a sports game. How could you change the game? It could be anything from the pitch dimensions to rules of play, the team composition to the measures of success, the role of the referee to the participation of fans. Even the name of the game.

Now look at today’s most disruptive innovators – 23andMe to Alibaba, Zespri to Zidisha – they reframe, reimagine and redefine the market on their terms – who is it for, why people buy, what they pay and get, and how they work.

I’ve met and profiled over 250 “gamechanger” companies on my travels, in almost every sector, and in every part of the world. Corporate giants and start-ups, from Dubai to Berlin, Colombo to Qingdao.

There is no one way to change the game, but there are definitely some common traits:

  • Audacious – Gamechangers are visionary and innovative, but also daring and original; they seek to shape the future to their advantage.
  • Purposeful – They seek to make life better, in some relevant and inspiring way; they have a higher motive than just making money.
  • Networked – Gamechangers harness the power of networks, digital and physical, both business and customer networks, to exponentially reach further faster.
  • Intelligent – They use big data analytics and algorithms, machine learning and AI, to be smart and efficient, personal and predictive.
  • Collaborative – Gamechangers work with others, from ecosystems to platforms, social networks and co-creation, to achieve more together.
  • Enabling – They focus not on what they do, but what they enable people to do; and thereby redefine their marketspace, find new opportunities and redefine value.
  • Commercial – Gamechangers take a longer-term perspective, adopting new business models, and recalibrating the measures of progress and success.

Do you have a future mindset?

Today’s business leaders need a future mindset. That sounds obvious, but isn’t.

Most leaders have a “fixed mindset”. They keep stretching the old models of success. They stay loyal to the model that made them great, seeking to squeeze and tweak it for as long as possible. They seek perfection – to optimise what they currently do – which leads to efficiency and incremental gains.

Instead a “future mindset” is prepared to let go of the past. To explore the future, to experiment with new ways of working and winning. Failure is a way to learn, and innovation becomes the norm. Change is relentless inside, as it is outside. Innovation is their lifeblood. Like Jeff Bezos loves to say “it is always day one”.

With a future mindset, the CEO needs new attributes:

  • Sense maker – to interpret a fast and confusing world, to see new patterns and opportunities, what is relevant and not, to shape your own vision.
  • Radical optimist – to inspire people with a stretching ambition, positive and distinctive, to be audacious, to see the possibilities when others only see risk.
  • Future hacker – they start from the “future back”, with clarity of purpose and intent, encouraging ideas and experiments, leveraging resource and scale.
  • Ideas connector – da Vinci said innovation is about making unusual connections;  connecting new people, new partners, new capabilities and new ideas.
  • Emotionally agile – whilst organisational agility is essential, emotional agility matters even more; to cope with change, to be intuitive in making sense, and making choices.
  • Entrepreneur at large – keeping the founders mentality alive, hands-on working with project teams to infuse the mindset, to be the catalyst and coach.
  • Having grit – “gamechanger” leaders need to go against the grain, to persist but know when to move on, to have self belief and confidence, guts and resilience.

The future is a better place to start

Start from the “future back”.

Trying to evolve in today’s complex and confused world is unlikely to lead you towards a bright and distinctive future. It will extend your life a little longer, but it will be tough and uninspiring, with diminishing returns.

Instead jump to the future. I tend to start with five years ahead, although it may differ by company. 5 years is long enough to change the world, but close enough to be real. Start by creating a positive, collective and inspiring vision of the future market. What will it be like? What will people want? Why? How? Where? Then consider how to win in this new world.

This is where “moonshot thinking” can be really useful. “Why be 10% better, when you could be 10 times better?” 10 times more profits, more customers, more quality, reduced cost, reduced time. Whatever. By giving yourself a “How could we do it 10x better” challenge you take a new perspective, solve problems in different ways.

Be inspired by ideas from other places.

Explore how ARM or GE, Inditex or Netflix, Glossier or Novo Nordisk have changed their markets. Choose any of my 100+ “gamechanger” companies! How did they do it? How did customers respond? (Remember, they often serve the same customers as you!). You can’t learn much from competitors, but you can learn a lot from relevant parallels.

Copy. Adapt. Paste.

Customer insight also matters. Deep dives and design thinking, exploring the emerging trends and deviant behaviours. This can enhance and validate your ideas, but the problem with most customer insight is that it is filtered by our current world. You need something to disrupt your thinking.

I have a great box of disruptive techniques. Some are really simple – like break then remake the rules, like imagine its free then find a way to make money, like reverse polarities and many more. The point is to disrupt your conventional thinking.

From this, ideas rapidly emerge. You need lots of ideas about the future. But these are fragments of the real answer. The real creativity comes in fusing together into bigger “concepts”. These could be customer solutions, or new ways of working, new revenue streams, or new business models, and new market scenarios.

Once you have a clear and collective ambition for the future, it’s time to work backwards.  “If this is how we want to be in 5 years, where do we need to get to in 3 years, and then in 1 year?  Therefore what do we need to start doing now?” You develop a “horizon plan” for your business; a strategy roadmap if you like, but developed backwards.

The important thing is that by working backwards, you have jumped out of the morass of today. You’ve avoided the assumptions, limitations, problems and priorities of today’s thinking. You have a more inspiring “gamechanging” future, and have started to map out the steps to get there. Most likely with different priorities in the short-term too.

Of course the steps on this journey might change, but it’s going to be an exciting adventure.

Change the way we think, resolve the conflicts

In today’s busineses, we have created artificial divides in how we think and operate. Digital and physical seem like two different worlds, global and local seem like alternative strategies that cannot combine, many still struggle to align value to customers and shareholders in a mutually reinforcing way, and short and long-termism continues to confuse our priorities.

Our thinking within business, has created separate and apparently conflicting approaches. The opportunity is to make the combination of both approaches world – “fusions” if you like – to be innovative in the way you combine apparent opposites.

Digital and physical are two sides of the same coin.

There is only one world, unless you believe Ray Kurzweil, and it is the real one. It’s human and physical. Digital technologies are incredibly powerful, enabling people to connect, to work, to learn, to play in new ways. From mobile phones to blockchains, 3D printing and augmented reality, digital allows us to do more, do it faster, do things we could never do before. But it’s still about humanity.

Start with people. How can you enable them to achieve more? To live better, to have more fun, to do better for the world. Whatever matters. I work closely with Richard Branson and his Virgin teams. Their mindset is to “start from the outside, and then work in”. Design a better customer experience. Built on your ambition and insight, and then explore how you could deliver it with new and existing capabilities.

Global and local are opportunities for every business.

I love Amazon’s “Treasure Truck” … Most of us have never connected with Amazon beyond the website and the delivery guy. Amazon is huge, global and anonymous. But the Treasure Truck is real. It travels around the country, bringing its pop-up store to local neighbourhoods, fun and games, bargains and demos. For Amazon, it’s a chance to make real connections, listen to people, and to be local.

We can all see a backlash in society against relentless globalisation, huge corporations, and social inequality. We see a lack of trust in brands, and know that authenticity matters. Etsy shows us that even the smallest and most local artisan businesses can also be global. For every business, local and global markets are within reach, however it’s also about combining scale and standardisation, with relevance and individuality.

Ideas and networks should be the core of your business.

Gamechanger businesses need a compelling idea, a core purpose, an inspiring proposition, that can spread fast and contagiously. In a digitally-fuelled world, the most innovative businesses embrace “ideas and networks” to drive exponential impact – like WhatsApp creating $19bn in three years, Airbnb $40bn in 9 years, Alibaba $476bn in 18 years, Amazon $740bn in 23 years.

Think about that concept of “exponential” … The power of networks – be it franchisees, or distributors, or customers and users – lies not in the number of members, but in the connections between them. Networks have a multiplying effect. Exponential. Consider, for example, Rapha, the sportwear brand that brings together people with a passion for cycling, who conveniently meet at their “Cycle Club” stores, and buy their premium gear. A fantastic “ideas and networks” business.

Finally this idea of short-term and long-term being in conflict with each other.

Jeff Bezos never has this problem, nor Elon Musk, nor Richard Branson. They focus on the long-term, recognising it will require some years of investment to get there. They all of course lead privately-owned companies. But every public company has the same ambition to innovate and grow. And so do most of their investors, actually.

The reality is that any company’s stock market performance is based on its future earnings potential, not its past. The better you can engage with equity analysts, journalists and investors themselves to explain why you will deliver a better future worth waiting for, then you get their support. If you don’t engage them in your future vision, plans and innovations, then they will default to looking for short-term evidence. It’s really in our hands, to work together to create a future we want to invest in. And to share the greater risk and rewards.

Time to embrace your future mindset

We live in an incredible time … More change in the next 10 years than in the last 250 years … remember? I know that sounds a little crazy, but think about Hyperloop in 3 years, a tipping point to electric cars in 5 years, Mars missions in 8 years. They are all real, and possible.

Digital platforms connecting buyers and sellers in new ways, blockchain having the potential to transform relationships and trust, 3d printing having the potential to transform value chains to deliver anything personalised and on-demand, AI and robotics giving us the capabilities to be superhuman in our minds and bodies.

These are just some of the fantastic new capabilities that enable us to innovate beyond what we can even imagine today. The future isn’t like the future used to be. We cannot just evolve or extrapolate the past. Today’s future is discontinuous, disruptive, different.

It is imagination that will move us forwards … unlocking the technological possibilities, applying them to real problems and opportunities, to drive innovation and growth in every industry, in every part of our lives.

Imagine a world where you press “print” to get the dress of your dreams, the food of your fantasies, or the spare parts for your car. Instantly, personalised and on demand. Think then what does that mean if we don’t need the huge scale of manufacturing plants, warehousing and transportation. Maybe we will even subscribe to the IP catalogues of brands, rather than buy standard products, in the ways we currently subscribe to Netflix.

Time to embrace your growth mindset … Unlock your Einstein dreams and Picasso passion … Embrace your Mandela courage and Ghandi spirit. Be more curious, be more intuitive, be more human. Ask more questions. Don’t be afraid to have audacious ideas, to challenge the old models of success, and turn future ambitions into practical profitable reality.

How else did Zespri reinvent the Chinese gooseberry as the kiwi fruit? How else will SpaceX reach Mars by 2025? How else did Netflix came to be, or NuTonomy, or Nespresso, or Nyx?

This is why 23andMe’s Anne Wojicki wont give up in her quest to make DNA analysis available to everyone, and to ultimately find a cure for cancer. And it’s why Jack Ma didn’t give up as he rose from $1000-per year English teacher to technological royalty.

The secret is the future mindset.

To realise that the future is malleable. So we need to grab hold of it, and shape it in our own vision. To our advantage.

This is what “gamechangers” do.

More ideas from Peter Fisk …

“Creating Innovative Futures” Keynote

Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s keynote “Creating Innovative Futures”

Alibaba to Amazon, BYD to Bytedance, Grab to Glossier, Rapha to Riot Games, Zespri to Zipcars. Every sector has business has been fundamentally disrupted by new technologies, new ideas and new brands in recent years. Innovation is fast and dramatic, and relentless. In the world of textiles, there are new rules too, from millennial consumers to digital retailers, addictive influencers and sustainable priorities, Textile innovators are seizing the opportunities of this changing world: 1Atelier to Bolt Threads, Boohoo to Cabi, EcoAlf to Etsy, Threadless to Welspun.

  • Finding new opportunities to grow in a fast changing world
  • How the world’s most innovative companies innovate in every sector
  • Wining in the textile world, fabrics to fashion, intelligence and influence
  • Harnessing the power of entrepreneurs and business ecosystems
  • Starting from the future back and outside in, for start-ups or scale-ups
  • Leading for growth, making the future happen faster

“Innovating the Whole Business” Workshop

Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s workshop “Business Innovation”

Innovation in most companies is still mostly about products and services, whereas innovation has most impact when applied to business models and customer experiences. We therefore focus on business innovation, driven by your purpose and opportunity, and by thinking hard about what is the problem we are trying to solve, and the impact we want to make. For start-up entrepreneurs or corporate leaders, the challenges are similar – where to focus, how to think differently, who to work with, what business model to embrace, and how to make the future happen faster.

  • Business innovation, what is it, who drives it, and why it matters
  • 10 types of innovation, going beyond products to business models
  • Future back – future drivers, stretch moonshots and growth roadmaps
  • Outside in – deeper insight, reframing problems, creating more ideas
  • Creative disruption – rule breakers, border crossers and game changers
  • New business models – new revenues, new partners, new businesses
  • Accelerating action – fast and agile, viral and sustainable, blitzscaling impact
  • Innovation leaders – growth mindset, whole business, amplifying potential

Useful background

TechXtile Q&A with Peter Fisk

  • What are your assessments and predictions for the future of the Turkish economy?

Overall growth in Turkish economy will continue to be slow, and I would expect it to be around 1 to 1.5% in 2020, compared to average global economic growth of around 3%. Economic and political tensions will continue to bring uncertainty, whilst exchange rates and trading confidence will continue to be challenges.  However we should always remember that these are averages. There will be some sectors, and in particular individual companies, who will do far better than this, and others worse.

Whilst we live in a volatile and uncertain world, it is also a world of rapid and relentless change, unlocking new markets and opportunities. If we look at the macro nature of economic cycles, what are known as Kondratieff waves, we see that there is a recurring cycle of growth and stagnation.

What is interesting is that innovation follows in an opposing cycle, in that times of stagnation or decline, are the times of greatest innovation. Crisis, downturns and slowdowns, are when matters are shaken up, and when creativity comes to the fore. Now is the time to rethink your business, rethink how your business works, and to rebuild for the future.

  • Would you share your observations about Turkish companies, in what topic are they making more mistakes, and what advice would you like to give them?

The challenge as always is to think big and small – to explore the global opportunities beyond Turkey, whilst also being able to look to the best opportunities in local markets. I have worked with many Turkish companies over the last 15 years or so – from multinationals like Koc and Sabanci to Eczacibasi and Turkcell, Akbank and Garanti, Pinar and Ulker.

What I see is great creativity, but also a sense of myopia. A great company like Koc is struggling to reinvent itself in the digital age, as it knows it must. Whilst Ulker has made ambitious strides to become a global player through acquisitions and diversification.

Companies need to think beyond their home market, beyond their core products, beyond their existing business models, beyond their old capabilities, beyond seeking to survive for today.

  • What kind of strategies should be followed by companies that want to be innovative?

Strategy used to an evolutionary process, seeking to stretch and sustain the success of the past. Today it is a revolutionary process. Start from the future back, rather than trying to tweak today. See how your industry, your customers, your competitors are changing – both at home and around the world. Learn from other sectors, rather than just imitating the competition. Most importantly, see the future, and shape it, in your own vision rather than others.

Companies like Aster Textile have done this incredibly well. As a textile company they looked beyond fabrics, to see a rapidly changing fashion marketplace, with millennial behaviour and social influencers, the rapid decline of traditional high street retailer and slow business models. They said how can we be part of this new world, and were open to change anything and everything.

  • What are your suggestions for advertising, promotion and marketing?

The most important thing is to start with the real customer – not an intermediary brand or distributor – but the consumer. We should be obsessed with how people are behaving, dreaming and changing. What are the trends in the market? How are fashions changing, and what is driving that? What are the ideas in other geographies, other sectors, other segments, that are catching on? What’s happening in the margins not the mainstream. Then work with partners, such as designers or retailers, in order to respond to this changing audience.

However we know that every aspect of marketing has changing.

Advertising no longer works, it is interrupted and average. Instead people turn to their friends, and other influencers, including the social superstars. They want newness and difference, they want to be individual. The mobile phone is the starting point to any transaction, and indeed the old idea of high street buying is disrupted by subscription models, freemium models, community models, and much more. Birchbox to Boohoo. Stitchfix to Threadless are great examples.

  • What should companies do in the times of economic crisis, what to do and what to stay away from?

Economic crisis is the time to survive – and thrive. It’s the time to ensure you have sufficient cashflows to keep going, by staying lean and focused. But it’s also the time to experiment and innovate. If its bad for you, its usually also bad for your customers, so they are looking for alternatives, and ways to keep living but in new ways.

Most great innovators were born out of economic crisis. The current crop of creative “hero” brands like Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, and many more, were born out of the economic downturns of 2000-2 or 2008-10. They offered an alternative to the old ways. Sharing models, platform models, personalisation models, subscription models, emerged out of the need to do things differently, and for consumers desire to live better, but in new ways.

  • What will be the benefits of Techxtile Challange to the Turkish textile sector in the long run?

Challengers need to look beyond the product. They need to think differently about how textile businesses will succeed in the future.

To me, too many textile business are still product centric. The danger is that you end up competing in price driven markets, trying to sell innovative products to existing brands and retail channels who themselves are in decline. Regardless of your innovation, will most likely be forced to reduce prices, as if you were a price-driven commodity, as the brand or retailer’s own business struggles.

The value added of your creativity is lost. Instead you need to look beyond today, beyond the conventional industry models to see the future.

In a world of fast fashion but also environmental concerns, mobile channels and influencer trends, you need to think different about your whole business. Look to Bolt Threads. Look to Eileen Fisher. Look to Depop. Look to Rapha. Look to Zozo in Japan. See what they do. Take the best bits, combine them, and do them better.

Recoding Fashion

Consumers buy twice as many new clothes as they did a decade ago. They discard millions of tonnes of unwanted textiles a year, with almost a third incinerated or going to landfill.

On top of often poor labour conditions for garment workers, the fashion industry is responsible for 20% of the world’s waste water, and 10% of carbon emissions. Global climate protest movement Extinction Rebellion is asking for people not to buy any new clothes for a year as part of a “fashion boycott”.

A new generation of innovative bio materials may offer part of the solution, replacing wasteful textiles like cotton and leather.

While leather is a by-product of the meat industry, much of the hide is discarded, and large amounts of water and unpleasant chemicals are often used in its production. Meanwhile, faux leather alternatives often take hundreds of years to biodegrade.

Potential solutions to this include Piñatex, a leather-like substance made from discarded pineapple leaves, which has been used in collections by Hugo Boss and H&M.

Another is mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms – a “wonder material” that is being used to create food, packaging and textiles. As mushrooms are plentiful and don’t need much looking after, the material can be grown into a fixed shape within a few days.

Bolt Threads uses mycelium to create its Mylo “leather,” which has been incorporated into designs by Stella McCartney. She has also used its vegan “silk”, which is created by bioengineering yeast. “I’ve noticed that consumers are now much more interested in seeking out a sustainable alternative,” says Jamie Bainbridge, Bolt Threads’ head of product development.

“The current alternatives to leather, like polyurethane, are very inexpensive. But they are often petroleum-based which, like raising livestock, isn’t great for the environment.”

As with many innovations, the biggest challenge Mylo faces is affordability – unlike PVC it costs a similar amount to real leather. It also remains to be seen if production can be scaled up to a point where it can hit High Street shelves.

Like leather cotton is very resource-intensive with about 15,000 litres of water required to make one pair of jeans. As 40% of the world’s clothing is made using cotton, finding an eco-friendly alternative is one of the main focuses for sustainable textile developers.

Tencel, also known as Lyocell, is one alternative that’s been around for decades on the fringes of fashion. It is made by extracting cellulose fibre from trees and its manufacture is thought to use 95% less water than cotton processing. Very similar to cotton in feel, it forms a component of many High Street clothing items.

Austria’s Lenzing Group says it is seeing “strong demand” for the fibre and is building the world’s biggest Lyocell plant in Thailand. “This expansion underscores Lenzing’s commitment to improve the ecological footprint of the global textile industry,” says chief executive Stefan Doboczky.

However, most manufacturers are likely to continue to use cotton as it remains cheaper. Dr Richard Blackburn, a sustainable materials expert from Leeds School of Design, is a big fan of Tencel. He believes this extraction method could be extended to other high cellulose plant by-products like stalks, stems and leaves, to create different types of sustainable fibre.

But he adds that consumers need to act sustainably in every area of their lives. “It’s about trade-offs and there is no simple answer. It’s not a case of, ‘if we switched to one fabric all our environmental concerns would disappear’.”

Buying better, buying less

While buying ethically is important, most in the sustainability field agree that consumers also need to buy fewer, higher quality items.

“I don’t think you should consider buying any item of clothing unless you commit to 30 wears. Unless you can do that you’re not even starting to be sustainable. You are creating a waste problem,” says Dr Blackburn.

In recent years, shoppers have viewed clothes “as a disposable item” thanks to cheap prices and clever brand positioning, says Kate Elliot, sustainability expert at Rathbone Greenbank Investments. But she believes they are now falling out of love with “buying an item of clothing, wearing it and then ending up chucking it in a bin”.

“There have been issues around fast fashion for decades, but people have become much more aware of the environmental and social costs.”

 

“The best way to predict the future is to create it” said Abraham Lincoln.

Markets are more crowded than ever before. Competition is intense, from across geographies and sectors, whilst customer aspirations are constantly fueled by new innovations and possibilities. Innovation is continuous and essential. Yet too much innovation is just improvement, keeping pace, not getting ahead. It is quickly imitated or redundant, the advantage is lost, and investment is squandered.

“This is the age of disruption … which is not simply about disruptive technologies, but dramatically changing how people think and behave” says Sebastian Thrun of Udacity.

Today’s business world is no longer stable and predictable. It cannot simply evolve from the past and extrapolate into the future. Yet too managers hope that their old models will continue to work. They seek to replicate the success formula of the past, to continuously enhance and improve the status quo, and trust that their luck will continue into the future. We call this a fixed mindset. Instead they need to break free, with a growth mindset.

LEADING CHANGE by Peter Fisk

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

THE FUTURE BUSINESS by Peter Fisk

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

DARE TO BE MORE by Peter Fisk

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