Peter Fisk

Today’s business world is no longer stable and predictable, to be similar to the past and extrapolatable into the future. Yet too managers hope that their own business can be. 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.

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

At the same time, 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.

The best companies seek discontinuity. They seek new ways to get ahead, by making leaps in imagination, by challenging the conventions, by finding new ways to compete and succeed. “Gamechangers” don’t just seek to play the game, they change the game.

Session 1: STRATEGIC INNOVATION by Peter Fisk

Download a summary of masterclass: Strategic Innovation

• Innovation by Leonardo da Vinci … anatomist, sculptor, artist, inventor, architect
• Growth strategies – innovation beyond products, technology, and creativity
• 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
• Blue oceans, design thinking, open and agile, lean and frugal, sprints and hacks
• Innovating how we innovate – profiling your innovation DNA

Session 2: DISRUPT OR BE DISRUPTED by Peter Fisk 

Download a summary of masterclass: Disrupt of be Disrupted

• Disrupt or be disrupted – challenging the status quo, from tech to market disruption
• Start with the right question – what is the problem you are trying to solve
• What would x do – seeing the problem from different perspectives and cultures
• Making unusual connections – seeing things differently, parallels and idea fusions
• 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

Session 3: GAMECHANGING STRATEGIES by Peter Fisk

Download a summary of masterclass: Gamechanging Strategies

• Gamechanging – what do we mean by “the game” and how to “change” it?
• Reframing – change the why – rethinking the context, purpose, applications
• Refocusing – change the who – rethinking the markets, audiences, occasions
• Reinventing – change the what – rethinking the product, service, experience
• Reconfiguring – change the how – rethinking the process, channel, payment
• Innovation to impact – creating a “gamechanging” business strategy

Extract from “Gamechangers” by Peter Fisk

“Moonshots” are the incredible, seemingly impossible, ideas that can change our world.

Google X is a moonshot factory. Full of creative thinkers, optimists, seeking out the big opportunities and most challenging problems, that with a little imagination and a lot ofinnovation might just make our world a better place. From intelligent cars to augmented vision, the [X] team fuses tech possibility with human need, to create more audacious, inspiring futures.

This is how we move forwards.

From Galileo’s vision to Da Vinci’s mechanics, Ford’s cars to Bell’s phones, Apple’s devices to Dyson’s cleaners. They enrich society, and make life better. Markets emerge out of new possibilities, seeing things differently, thinking different things. Brands capture big ideas, innovation turns them into businesses, and future growth.

We live in the most incredible time.

Days of exponential change and opportunities limited only by our imagination. A world where impossible dreams can now come true. A period of awesomeness. From Alibaba to Zespri, Ashmei to Zidisha, Azuri and Zipars, a new generation of businesses are rising out of the maelstrom of economic and technological change across our world.

“Gamechangers” are more ambitious, with stretching vision and enlightened purpose. They see markets as kaleidoscopes of infinite possibilities, assembling and defining them to their advantage. Most of all they have great ideas, capturing by brands that resonate with their target audiences at the right time and place, enabled by data and technology, but most of all by rich human experiences. Social networks drive reach and richness, whilst new business models make the possible profitable.

Our challenge is to make sense of this new world, to embrace the new opportunities in innovative ways, and to be a winner.

What’s your game?

Branson flashed his trademark grin, flicked his shaggy maverick hair.

“Business is like the best game you could ever imagine”

We talked about his multi-billion dollar investments in financial services, media and telecoms, airlines and space travel. He described his responsibility to hundreds of thousands of staff, and millions of customers.

And he was calling it a game.

He was having fun now, challenging the notions of conventional strategies and structures, especially in the biggest companies. The essence of Virgin, he said, is to do things significantly different and better.

He talked about his admiration for kids, and for the next generation of entrepreneurs, especially those in fast-growing markets who have hunger and passion, and was inspired by iconic revolutionaries, Nelson Mandela and Steve Jobs.

“You’ve got to think different, uninhibited like a child, never give up, have an ambition that you really care about, take more risks, be ingenious, make a bigger difference to people’s lives, have incredible fun, but also play to win.”

I asked him what keeps him going. “Doing things different, unexpected and a bit crazy” he said. “It’s about playing the game. But the best way to win is to change the game”.

Whilst he says he’s not too old for an all-night party, Branson loves a game of tennis, and that’s after he’s swum for an hour each morning along the coast of his own Neckar Island.

From his earliest venture, launching a student magazine, he would always do things differently

He launched his first airline with no knowledge of the travel industry, but he had a big idea, to provide low-cost travel that was modern and fun. And he had a brand that at least some people loved. He could see an opportunity to disrupt the market, to be on the customer’s side. When he launched mobile phones, he piggy backed on somebody else’s network, to grow further and faster, and targeted a new generation of consumers.

Even Virgin Galactic, his latest and craziest business, is not all it might seem. He had no experience of space travel. But he got together with glider designer Burt Rutan to do things differently, launching his spacecraft from the back of a mother ship, eventually to be fuelled by his algae farms of the Caribbean, hugely reducing costs and carbon emissions, and enabling daily departures and landings.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that space is not really the frontier. Branson’s real ambition for Virgin Galactic is inter-continental travel. Imagine a one-hour flight from Rio to Jakarta, or Cape Town to Beijing. It could get a little weightless on the way, but could transform the way we think about the world.

Whilst Branson was still playing, it was already evening in Beijing.

Li Ka-Shing was sitting down to a dinner of his favourite snake soup. The Chaozhou-born, Hong Kong-based chairman of Hutchison Whampoa is the richest man in Asia, worth around $30 billion according to Bloomberg.

Yet he lives a relatively frugal existence, wearing simple clothes and a $50 Seiko watch on his wrist, and has donated much of his fortune to education and medical research.

This is a man who sees business as an ancient game, rooted in Chinese culture’s “Wi Xing” where the five elements – wood, fire, earth, metal and water – come together in a mutually generative sequence.

You can see these phases in Li’s business investments which include construction and energy, mining and technology, shipping and banking. Together they account for over 15% of the market cap of Hong Kong’s Stock Exchange.

Li loves a game before work too. In fact you’ll find him at 6 every morning teeing off at the Hong Kong Golf Club with his playing partner, movie mogul Raymond Chow.

Whilst Asia rises, the old is still important. And that great old “Sage of Omaha”, investor Warren Buffett, still knows how to play too.

Twice as wealthy as his Asian peer, Buffett loves to surprise his shareholders when they gather at “the Woodstock of business”, Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. Forget slick graphics explaining the complexities of financial markets, this is different.

As the lights dim, there’s a roar off stage, and 80 year old Buffett rides on dressed in a leather jacket, on the back of a shining Harley Davidson. He grabs a guitar and starts playing a song.

His review of the year. His shareholders love it.

In fact it’s interesting how playful the world’s most famous entrepreneurs are.

Mark Zuckerburg began writing software at the age of about 10. As his father once said “Other kids played computer games, Mark created them”. Whenever he came across somebody else’s game, he would hack into the code, change it, to make it better.

Facebook itself started out as a game. Enrolled at Harvard to study psychology and computer science he was quickly distracted, famously creating a game called FaceMash which invited fellow students to vote for the hottest girls (and guys) on campus.

Soon he changed the game, under pressure from some of his peers and University administrators. Facebook was born. And a billion people followed.

Living in the zigzag zeitgeist

More than half the world live inside a circle based 106.6° E, 26.6° N, and within 4100km of Guiyang, Guizhou Province, in southwest China. A quick snapshot of our changing world demonstrates the dramatic change which surrounds us, and is or will disrupt every business:

• Middle world …Global population has doubled in the past 50 years, with a shift from low to middle income groups, a new consumer generation (OECD)
• Young and old …As life expectancy has boomed, now over 70, and births have declined, from 5 to 2.5, we live longer, with different priorities (UN).
• Mega cities… Urban populations will grow from 3.6bn in 2010 to 6.3bn by 20, representing 96% of the global population growth (World Bank)
• Flood warning… By 2050 at least 20% of us could be exposed to floods, including many cities, an economic risk to assets of $45 trillion (World Bank).

Brands come and go with much more regularity, products are built across the world, small business working together in networks:

• Business life… Over 40% of companies in the Fortune 500 in 2000 were not there in 2010. 50% will be from emerging markets by 2020. (Fortune)
• Made in the world… 55% of all products are now made in more than one country, and around 20% of services too (WTO)
• Small is better… 70% of people think small companies understand them better than large. The majority of the world’s business value is now in privately owned.
• Corporate trust… While 55% of adults trust businesses to do what is right, only 15% trust business leaders to tell the truth (Edelman).

Technological innovation is relentless, currently digital and mobile, but rapidly becoming more about clean energy and biotech:

• Always on …24% of world population has a smartphone, typically checking it 150 times per day, spending 141 minutes on it (Meeker)
• Digital markets …80% of websites are US-based, 81% of web users are non-US based, 70% of the value of all e-commerce transactions are B2B (IAB)
• Instant content… Content on the internet tripled between 2010 and 2013. 70% is now video. The half-life of social content is 3 hours (bit.ly)
• Future energy… By 2017, there will be close to $11 Billion in revenue from 35-million homes generating their own solar or wind power (GIGAom)

Customers feel increasingly ambivalent to brands and companies. In a world of infinite choice, their priorities and preferences have changed:

• Bland brands …73% of people say they wouldn’t care if the brands they used disappeared. 62% say they are not loyal to any brands (Ad Age)
• Customer emotions …70% of buying experiences are based on how people feel, loyal customers are typically worth 10 times their first purchase (McKinsey).
• Service costs… 7 times more to acquire customers than keep them, 12 positive experiences to make up for one unsolved negative experience (IBM)
• Family life …The amount of time parents spend with their children continues to go up, fathers spend three times more than 40 years ago (Meeker)

  The end of the world as we know it

When Henry Ford launched his Model T in 1908 his Detroit assembly line, his innovative product, and his pioneering marketing machine, transformed an industry. His efficient mass-production methods reduced prices, improved quality, and created vast wealth. He dominated the market, and by 1918 half the cars in America were Fords.

It was the third wave of the industrial revolution.

The first wave of the industrial revolution had been about invention – from the forging of iron in the Shropshire valleys, the spinning jenny for making textiles, and James Watt’s steam engine. The second wave was about application – Robert Fulton’s steamboat on the Hudson River, Alexander Bell’s telephone, and Thomas Edison’s light bulb.

 

The third wave was about transformation, when the innovations take on a scale, and can change the world – from the mass production of cars, railways and airplanes, huge factories and modern medicines. This transformed people’s lives, improving health and education, the growth of cities and international trade.

 

Whilst the industrial revolution had begun in the north of England, making Britain powerful and wealthy, it soon spread across Europe and to America, and in later years beyond, particularly to Japan. It was 250 years of disruption, after 7000 years of a society based around agriculture.

Now, as that age closes, we are in the midst of the digital revolution – embarking on the third wave of a new age that will change the world again, even faster.

The first wave, about invention, started with transistors that led to integrated circuits, rise of computers and the miniaturisation of machines … from video games and mobile phones through to 1990 when Tim Berners Lee introduced the World Wide Web.

The second wave, about application, is well known to us today. Internet and mobile communications pervade our lives, shopping on Amazon with our Apple iPads, a world of knowledge through Google and Wikipedia, a world without borders by Facebook and Skype. First distracting us, now embraced as the way we live.

The third wave of the digital revolution is when everything changes, when digital is transformational, when power really shifts.

Whilst the last 20 years of technology has inspired us, it is only now that the game really changes – when the “gamechangers” shape the future. Mass production is rapidly becoming obsolete, 3D printers are already replacing factories, companies work in virtual networks, products bought on demand and customised by default, whilst personal channels are replacing stores which used to second guess what people wanted.

In the past we created average products for average people. We made the products ourselves in big factories that absorbed significant capital investment. We needed to sell huge scale to secure a return on investments. Markets were largely homogeneous because every competitor was close to average, therefore we could measure results by market share. We used mass-market, broadcast advertising with average messages, at times to suit us, pushing people to buy more of what we wanted.

This game doesn’t work anymore. That was the industrial age. Soon we will see the end factories, shops and advertising.

Digital is by its nature, not about size or geography, capability or experience. It is borderless and democratised, enabling anyone to have an impact. Mikael Hed sits in Espoo creating games like Angry Birds that entertain the world, Eric Magicovsky could be anywhere raising $10 million from 69000 people on Kickstarter to launch his Pebble smartwatch. Vicky Wu flies between LA and HK building “prosumer” demand for her latent fashions with ZaoZao.

This is the third wave of the digital revolution, where ideas can change people’s lives, where anybody can change the game.

Where the future begins

The value of business lies not in what is does today, but in what it seeks to achieve tomorrow. That might seem a little idealistic, given the short-term obsession of many organisations with operational performance, yet it is the future that most interests investors and private owners who now dominate the business world, hoping to see their investments grow through future profits.

Most business leaders are “heads down” in a relentless battle to survive, to hang onto the status quo. But that can only lead to diminishing returns. The more enlightened leaders are “heads up” looking at where they are going, making sense of how the outside world is changing with every day, identifying the new needs and expectations, the new competitors and challenges, opportunities and possibilities.

The best businesses go to where the future is.

They disrupt before they are disrupted. They sell before they are worthless. They recognise that existing success is increasingly driven by out-dated beliefs and , a once-profitable niche that has now become the mainstream, a previous innovation that has been widely imitated, an economy of scale that has become irrelevant, a temporary monopoly that is no more.

As we explore the shifts and trends, the white spaces and technological breakthroughs, the new attitudes and behaviours, we need to learn to think in a different way.

The change is exponential. So we need to jump on whilst we can. Catch the new wave, or better still, learn to ride with the successive, and ever more frequent waves of change.

When we look around us at the companies who are challenging established positions, shaking up conventions and waking up tired consumers, they are not the big companies but the small ones. They are the speed boats, fast and flexible, rather than super-tankers, steady and stable.

The challenge is extreme. It demands that we rethink where we’re going, and how to get there, rather than handing on to what made us great before.

In a fast and connected world, complex and uncertain, a winning business cannot hope to keep doing what it does, and do better. It has to do more, or different.

We are all in the ideas business

In Hong Kong there is a great 100 year old business that explains our future potential. For much of the last century Li and Fung was focused on low-cost manufacturing of textiles. That was until salary levels grew, and places like Indonesia were able to achieve much lower cost bases. The business reinvented itself as a virtual resource network, helping brands to find the right partners for the business, in terms of expertise, quality, and price.

Walk into a Li and Fung office in Sao Paulo or Istanbul, Barcelona or Toronto – or any one of their 300 offices in over 50 countries – and the small team of sourcing experts will help you find the best designers, manufacturers and distributors for your brand. Every pair of Levi jeans you buy are made with the help of Li and Fung, and around 40% of the world’s textiles. If you need finance, they’ll find you an investor, and if you need merchandising, processing or customer service, they can find the right partner for that too. Their business model can be based on fees, on commissions, or an agreed mix.

Actually, all you need is a good idea. Take it to Li and Fung and they can make it happen with you.

Those ideas are not the product of years of experience, of big organisations with thousands of employees, of rigorous “big data” analysis, and scientific labs. Those things can help, but they can also hinder. Fresh perspectives beat conventional wisdom, youthful insights connect with millennial markets, right brain intuition is an equal to left brain intelligence, and collaboration can achieve this even better.

And we haven’t even started on Steve Jobs. From the revolutionary Apple Mac that transformed computing. The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. Not just incredible products with beautiful designs, but new business models creating entirely new markets, changing the world.

Or James Dyson, with his bagless vacuum cleaner. Ratan Tata, with his dramatically affordable Nano car. Amancio Ortega with his ready baked Zara clothes. Or further back in time … Henry Ford, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, Pablo Picasso, The Beatles, Nicolas Hayek, Ted Turner and many more.

Great ideas are the result of better thinking.

We need to think – to see things differently, and do different things – to open our minds to new possibilities, to outthink the new competition.

• Think bigger… redefine the markets we are in, reframe our brands in more useful contexts, recreate the strategies for success
• Think smarter… refocus on the best customers and categories, reinvent every aspect of our business, realigning with new partners.
• Think faster… reenergise people with new ideas, resonate with customers new priorities and aspirations, and achive more together.

Beyond the connectivity and applications, the social networks and artificial intelligence, we now live in a world that is more equal and accessible, where people are more knowledgeable and capable, than ever before.

It really is a world limited only by our imaginations.

Back at the moonshot factory of Google X, they have a mantra which says “Why try to be only 10% better, when you could be 10 times better?”

10 times better provides much more than a temporary competitive advantage, it has sufficient capacity to change the game. The effort required to think in a bigger frame, to innovate things more radically, to deliver them faster, is relatively small compared to the benefits.

But that requires one more thing. To think different.

Apple, or rather its ad agency Chiat Day, conjured up that phrase, but it matters more than ever. The best companies today don’t just play the game, they think bigger and better, smarter and faster, in order to change the game.

“I am a Gamechanger”

I believe in the future

A world of infinite possibilities

I see opportunity when others see impossibility

Thinking bigger, reframing my perspective.

Seeing things differently, thinking different things.

I explore. I challenge. I risk. I venture.

Rethinking. Imagining. Reinventing. Igniting.

We are all in the ideas business.

Creating, designing, innovating, together.

I embrace my childlike wonder and curiosity

I take flying leaps into the known.

Playing the game. Changing the game. Playing to win.

I want to contribute to something bigger than myself.

I want to make life better, the world a better place.

Change is my opportunity, to seize and shape.

Aiming higher, with a purpose beyond profit.

Harnessing the power of brands, the potential of people.

Digital networks, technologies and business models.

Fusing the best ideas. amplifying the potential of others.

Mobilising people with a cause, enabling them to achieve more.

I don’t want to live somebody else’s life.

To live in the shadow of somebody else’s vision.

Imagination is my pathway to a better future.

Ideas and brands are my guides.

Partners make them real.

Most of all, I believe in me, and in being more.

To achieve what I never thought possible.

To put a ding in my universe.

I am bold, brave and brilliant.

I am a gamechanger.

© Peter Fisk 2019

Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s keynote: Change the Game of Sports 

Most sports have their foundation in an analogue world. In parallel a digital world of sport has rapidly emerged. And whilst sports club have some of the most vibrant brand communities, in the form of a fan base, they are slow to embrace their collective and commercial potential. Imagine if soccer fans really did start to participate in a soccer match, influencing team choices and referee decisions. Imagine if League of Legends became real, more like the ultimate extreme sports challenge. There are so many great innovations in the sport, but if they fused their concepts, the impact would be much more exciting.

Reimagining sports events:

• Imagine the Champions League meets Fan Dual meets League of Legends
• What will the Olympics look like in 2040?
• How will fans play a more active role?

Reimagining sports participation:

• Imagine Peleton meets Tough Mudder meets Nike Run Club
• Why will people take part in sports in 2040?
• How will they share their passions?

Reimagining sports brands:

• Imagine Apple meets Lulelemon meets Rapha Cycle Club
• What will be the top sports brand in 2040?
• How will it be different?

Sports brands and businesses have a massive advantage over more conventional organisations. They have passion and participation, heritage and hype, dynamic and dramatic. Whilst it is relatively easy to reimagine new concepts, like the idea fusions above, it is even more important to reimagine the business models which could sit behind them. They will ensure that the sports are delivered operationally and profitably, and seize the potential of a world where sports will matter more than ever.

Time for business leaders to “seize the day” or, more appropriately, bǎ wò dāng xià (把握当下).

Time for business leaders to “seize the day” or, more appropriately, bǎ wò dāng xià (把握当下).

• Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s keynote “Learning from Asia”

The world’s most dynamic markets today are in Asia.

China is the world’s second largest economy, a huge new and growing consumer market, and home to many of the world’s fastest growing companies. Alibaba to Baidu, BYD and Bytedance, China Mobile to Didi Chuxing, Haier to Huawei, SAIC to Tencent, Dalian Wanda and Xiaomi. China has shifted from imitator to innovator, fundamentally driving new technologies, new applications, and the new agenda for business.

And whilst China is growing at around 5-6%, many other Asian countries will grow even faster through the next decade: India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines. Collectively these are known at the 7% club. Indeed we could add another list of great non-Chinese Asian companies like DBS and Grab in Singapore, Samsung and LG in South Korea, Uniqlo and Softbank in Japan, Reliance and Tata in India.

• Read more in my article Taming Tigers: Learning from Asian Business Leaders

Whilst the 19th century belonged to Europe, and the 20th century to America, the 21st century is Asian. In particular, it is the “Eurasian” market axis, connecting Europe and Asia, that is likely to grow most significantly. Bruno Maçães argues in his book “The Dawn of Eurasia” that the distinction between Europe and Asia has disappeared, that China’s new “Silk Road” projects are more important than the G20, and that Europe is missing the boat on the third globalisation.

Meanwhile Parag Kanna says in his recent book “5 billion people, two-thirds of the world’s mega-cities, one-third of the global economy, two-thirds of global economic growth, thirty of the Fortune 100, six of the ten largest banks, eight of the ten largest armies, five nuclear powers, massive technological innovation, the newest crop of top-ranked universities. Asia is also the world’s most ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse region of the planet, eluding any remotely meaningful generalization beyond the geographic label itself. Even for Asians, Asia is dizzying to navigate.”

• Read more in my article The Future is Asia: 5 billion people is just a starting point

And as we move rapidly towards the 2020s, the amount of change and uncertainty in markets is likely to increase further, challenging the more structured and analytical approaches of the west. Built into Asian culture and religion is a resilience to cope with change, but also an optimism to thrive on change, which is likely to serve them well.

• Read more in my article The I Ching, the oldest guide on how to deal with uncertainty

Yet this is not just about abandoning your local markets and heading East. What is even more relevant to most companies, particularly in Western markets, is that Asian business do thing differently – they innovate, compete and grow in different ways.

25 years ago I met my wife who is half Chinese. Getting to know her family opened my eyes to a very different attitude to life and work. Whilst the following might seem nice words, I can see how they really do instil a very different approach to work, life and success. From the smallest business, to the huge new corporations, they offer us new ideas and inspiration.

17 Lessons from Asia for Europe

So what can we learn from Asian companies, that we can apply back home?

• Values: The Confucian approach is often quoted by Chinese premier Xi Jinping – a philosophy founded on social harmony and collaboration, frugality and hard work, and education – values shared across much of Asia.
• Agility: Taoism is about going with the flow, and adapting to change. The yin and yang symbolise the ability for opposites to co-exist in a positive way, communism and capitalism, centralisation and decentralisation, fast and slow.
• Long game: Private ownership gives Asian companies stability to take a longer term view. Softbank takes a 30 year investment view. Governments work to a 5 year plan, enabling strategic initiatives to thrive.
• State: Whilst this is often seen negatively, government support enables companies to grow with long-term loans, to develop new capabilities together in dedicated zones, and develop shared infrastructure like ports and rail.
• Digital first: A desire to create the future is combined with a willingness to let go of the past, and not be hampered by legacy structures, jumping to the digital world. Look at DBS in Singapore, the world’s best bank.
• Fast and intuitive: Fast decision making is a hallmark of companies like Alibaba, typically leaders in small groups, acting less democratically, and much more of intuition rather than bound by spreadsheets and business cases.
• Research: Huge investments, partly state-funded, go into new science and technologies, in particular fields such as AI, robotics, biotech, and sustainable energy. 3 Chinese electric car companies now outsell Tesla, led by DYB.
• Experimentation: The fast and intuitive approach lends itself to constant experimentation. Companies like Xiaomi continually try new ideas to see what takes off with its huge consumer audiences.
• Scale: The huge size of Asian markets, 5 billion people compared to 1 billion on each other continent, means that even niche ideas have significant audiences, and can then be scaled rapidly though networks and give efficiencies.
• Entrepreneurial: Many western companies struggle with how corporations can be like start-ups. Haier transformed their business into 10,000 micro businesses under one roof, calling it their Rendanheyi model.
• Copying: Another seemingly taboo subject, but still what Chinese companies excel at (as does Apple). Meituan Dianping was recently ranked the world’s most innovative company, yet copies and tweaks business models.
• Ecosystem: Asian businesses are not afraid to openly work together. Alibaba and Tencent are like “Google plus Amazon plus Facebook plus eBay plus payment plus logistics plus wholesale” all in one. Platform models are the norm.
• Relationships: Famously, the Asian concept of “gunxia” plays a huge role in many of these aspects, a relationship based on face and trust, where businesses and individuals commit to collaborate without hussle or strong-armed deals.
• Leadership: We probably know more CEOs of Asian companies than western companies. Why is this? Because trust in companies comes through people, and particularly in ecosystems of employees, partners and customers.
• World view: Many Asian companies see the world, rather than local markets, as their home. Xiaomi for example sees natural affinity and rapid growth across similar emerging markets, from India to Brazil and Mexico.
• Education: Back to the Confucian idea at the beginning, education becomes key to future success. China has 4 times more STEM students than USA, and 33% of all students study engineering compared to 7% in USA.
• Frugal: Whilst rich young Asians have a huge appetite for partying and designer brands, overall they have a frugal attitude and most people save hard. Net household savings in China are 38% compared to 18% in USA and 4% in Europe.
• Hardwork: Jack Ma swears by it: the 996. Which means working long hours 9am to 9pm 6 days every week. Whilst the west have taken life easier, the Asians are working hard.

You may agree or disagree. What else would you add? You may find that the state interventionist approach is not fair, destabilises  competition, and that many of these companies would have failed in their infancy but for such support. You may argue that the Asian “heads down” work ethic could easily be supplanted by machines in an emerging world of AI and robotics, and that Europe is better focused on more human, creative and added-value skills and work. As you walk around Shanghai, you may feel uncomfortable that the Chinese police evaluate you with their data-powered AR-enabled dark glasses, or how social credits drive compliant behaviour, and aspects of freedom and human rights are ignored. Yet Asian companies are fascinating, creative and not going away.

• Read my in-depth stories of many of these Asian companies here 100 Gamechanger Case Studies

This year’s Thinkers50 European Business Forum, bringing together the world’s top business thinkers with Europe’s business leaders, focuses on this topic. How can European businesses learn from the approaches of Asian companies. How can we take the best new ideas and apply them to our own companies here in Europe? For two inspiring days in Odense, Denmark – itself a hub of 21st century robotics – we bring together many different perspectives on this challenge.

In the European Business Lecture 2019, Alex Osterwalder gives his view on how Europe’s companies can be invincible. Also Erin Meyer on how they can work better together, top strategist Scott Anthony on innovating in dual transformation, Kjell Nordstrom gets funky again, Irene Yuan Son takes us to Africa, Navi Radjou contrasts India and America, Erica Dhawan gets you more connected, Haiyan Wang learns from China, and Howard Yu helps us leap forwards in new ways.

I will again be hosting the event, and look forward to seeing you at “the Davos of business thinking” on 25-26 September.

• Learn more of the best ideas from Asia at the Thinkers50 European Business Forum 2019

Time for business leaders to “seize the day” or, more appropriately, bǎ wò dāng xià (把握当下).

Markets are volatile and uncertain, winners rise and losers fall, competition intensifies and customer have a relentless desire for better. Of course biggest is not always best. Market share is rarely a measure of success today. Growth is typically found in profitable niches, where you can grow further, focused and faster.

The best organisations are exponential – they harness technology, but also new business and market models – physical and digital – to accelerate value creation. Think about how WhatsApp created $19bn value in just three years, Uber $60bn in 4 years, Xiaomi $70bn in 5 years or Alibaba $130bn in 11 years. At the same time, its about ensuring that revenues and profitability follow the valuations.

Finding fast growth means opening your eyes to new opportunities – to the fast growth markets of Asia, Africa and South America, or to the new consumers, such as women, millennials and boomers. It means redefining purpose in a way that is relevant, refocusing strategy on markets, and particular the new profit pools, and innovating business models and customer experiences for growth. It also means ensuring that growth is profitable – it is easy to be big, but to create profits, and sustained value, is much harder.

What are the growth engines of business today?

• Markets – finding the best spaces for growth in existing and new markets, for example in new geographies, in niche segments, in adjacent markets, or elsewhere –  in the past we assuming that we continue to focus on the same domains, today growth starts with choice of markets.
• Customers – redefining your business around what your target (new or existing) customers seek to achieve, rather than what you do, gives you huge space to meet their needs better through more joined-up and relevant solutions – enabling them to achieve more, and you to create and capture more value. Digging deeper to explore what really matters, and solve the real problems.
• Networks – forget the old thinking about core capabilities where you had to produce and distribution everything, find the best opportunities and ideas, then bring together the right partners to exploit it. Similarly with customers, they trust each other more than brands and distributors. Networks have an exponential effect, on supply and demand.
• Business models– rethinking the way your business works, in particular the different revenues and cost streams. Consider alternative business models, such as freemium, subscription or time-based –to generate income, to engage customers in more distinctive ways, and drive more profitable sustainable growth in a dynamic world.
• Leadership– in today’s market requires new ideas, and new ways of working. Inspired by the world’s most innovative companies right now, we explore what leaders do to drive innovation and growth – how to create the future in your own vision, to inspire your people and customers. and to ensure that it happens fast and effectively.

Get ready to change your world!

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Russian Railways is Russia’s leading railway company and one of the largest companies in the global transport sector. The Company is a natural monopoly and fully owned by the Russian Federation. Our primary goal is to meet the state’s rail transport and employment needs, and to provide services to passengers.

Agenda

1000 – 1130 :  Fast-changing world

Making sense of fast and connected global and local markets, inspired by the world’s most disruptive businesses right now 

• Changing markets, exponential technologies, disruptive innovators
• Learning from 23andMe, Alibaba, BMW/Daimler, WhatsApp/WeChat
• Thinking bigger, thinking different, 10 times not 10%
• Application to Russian Railways: What’s your moonshot?
• Inspired by the world’s 100 most innovative companies – right now!
• Ideas and networks – using the assets of a connected world
• Taking the best ideas from other sectors and places – copy adapt paste
• Application to Russian Railways: Which companies could we learn from?

1200 – 1330 : Gamechanger strategies

Shaping your business and your market to your advantage, by ecxploring how to shake up the market in new and creative ways

• Creating a higher purpose, future vision and better brand
• Exploring 10 different ways to innovate your business
• Changing the who, why, what and how of your business
• Application to Russian Railways: How could you change the game?
• How business models transform business and markets
• 36 different business models to choose from, our create your own
• Learning from Netflix and Nespresso, ARM and Tesla
• Application to Russian Railways: Which model would you choose?

1430 – 1600 : Customer-centric innovation

Engaging the changing customers, finding the best new insights to engage them with more powerful ideas and solutions articulated through value propositions

• New customers, new dreams and expectations, new ways to connect.
• Reframing your business around the customers world
• Learning from Amazon and DBS Bank, Harley Davidson and Rapha
• Application to Russian Railways: What’s our customer purpose?
• Being digital and physical, to deliver better propositions and experiences
• Personal, positive and predictive – going what we do, to achieve more
• Building brands that inspire people and communities, social in a C2B/C2C world
• Application to Russian Railways: How to rethink our value proposition?

1630 – 1800 : Leading the future

Defining your direction and priorities for innovation and growth, and developing a strategy that balances tomorrow and today, and combines vision with agility

• Starting with “future back” thinking rather than “now forwards”
• Innovation that drives profitability and growth, organisations and futures
• Horizon planning, mapping out the directions and choices for future growth
• Application to Russian Railways: What could be our 5-3-1 roadmap?
• Leading the future, leading change, leading innovation – what will you do?
• Making the case to business leaders, to investors and your people
• Inspired by Elon Musk and Jack Ma, Mary Barra and Anne Wojcicki
• Application to Russian Railways: How would you lead the future?

Peter Fisk will be live at the Olympic Park in Seoul, South Korea with an audience of 5000 people, exploring

• What is the 21st century corporation, and how do they win in a technology-driven world of relentless change?
• How do start-up “unicorns” think and act differently, harnessing the power of Industry 4.0 to disrupt and innovate?
• How should incumbents respond to insurgents, building an entrepreneurial mindset and organisation?
• What does it mean for future skills, and the wider implications for today’s children and their education?

You can find the more detailed content here:

• Read the article … Education for the Future: Preparing children for an incredible, exponential world
• Download the keynote … Education for the Future: Preparing children for an incredible, exponential 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 have spent the last 24 months running competitions around the world, to find and rank the world’s most innovative companies by sector and geography.

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 Airbnb, Brewdog to Buzzfeed, Casper to Coursera – 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 Abu Dhabi 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.

• Article: The 10x Leader
• Article: Amplifying Potential
• Book: “Gamechangers: Are you ready to change the world?“
• Book: “Business Genius: A more inspired approach to leadership”
• Workshop: “Gamechangers Program: Leading for smarter innovation and profitable growth”
• Workshop: “Inspiring Leadership … future, people and change“
• Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s keynote “Gamechangers”

Download the summaries of each of my masterclasses “Gamechangers Latin America” at the CMO Latam Summit 2019 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. You can also find all the case studies and videos on this website. Here are the links:

• Gamechangers Part 1: Winning in an Incredible World.
• Gamechangers Part 2: Leading Innovation and Growth
• Gamechangers Part 3: Be Bold, Brave and Brilliant

Why should you be a Gamechanger?

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 have spent the last 24 months running competitions around the world, to find and rank the world’s most innovative companies by sector and geography.

• New article: Who are the Gamechangers of Latin America … the most innovative companies, from Agua Bendita and Cliengo to Rappi and Selina?

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 Airbnb, Brewdog to Buzzfeed, Casper to Coursera – 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 Abu Dhabi 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.

Agenda

0900 – 1100 : WINNING IN AN INCREDIBLE WORLD

• Finding the best growth opportunities in intelligent and connected markets
• Going beyond technologies to find the real drivers of change and future growth
• Learning from Disney and Fox, BMW and Daimler, WhatsApp and WeChat
• Changing the game, rather than doing the same thing faster cheaper or better
• Exploring the world’s 100 most innovative companies, shaking up today’s markets
• And Latin America’s innovators too, from Agua Bendita to Cliengo, Rappi and Selina
• 10 types of innovation, to refocus, redefine and reconfigure your business
• Platforms and ecosystems, blockchain and clouds, big data and AI
• Business models and brand systems, ingredients and licensing, circular and adaptive
• What would make you an “ideas and networks” business?

1130 – 1300 : LEADING INNOVATION AND GROWTH

• Start from the future back, to shape the market in your own vision
• Challenge yourself to be 10x not 10% better, to find your inspiring Moonshots
• Start from the outside in, to understand customers much more deeply
• Learning from Amazon and ARM, Tesla and Nespresso, Lemonade and DBS
• Start from your brand, affinities and communities, stories and influencers
• Learning from HaloTop and JioPhone, Meituan and TikTok, WeWork and Rapha
• How could your brand or business model reach further and faster?

1400 – 1500 : BOLD, BRAVE AND BRILLIANT

• How a growth mindset transforms your business culturally, competitively, commercially
• Becoming an invincible business, building a relentless portfolio to surf the S curves
• Fast action 1: What’s your moonshot, your 10x not 10% challenge?
• Fast action 2: How could you reframe your business, your why not your what?
• Fast action 3: What’s the best parallel company you could copy, what and how?
• Fast action 4: How would you focus on doing 80% less, what to stop, starting now?
• Inspired by exponential leaders like Masa and Satya, Emily and Zhang, Elon and Jack
• How will you lead differently, to amplify your impact, and drive exponential growth?

Click here: Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s keynote for Pfizer Upjohn in Dubai UAE on 18 March 2019.

How do you see your future?

We live in an incredible time.  More change in the next 10 years than in the last 250 years. New technologies transforming the ways in which we live and work.

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.

And in this new world, healthcare is undergoing one of the most dramatic changes. And so, with Upjohn Emerging Markets’ new organisation model, the opportunities are huge.

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.

Smarter innovation, faster growth

The best opportunities for business – to find new growth, to engage consumers more deeply, to stand out from the crowd, to improve their profitability – is by seizing the opportunities of changing markets. The best way to seize these changes is by innovating – not just innovating the product or service, the customer experience or business model – but by shaping the market in your vision – the “who, why, what and where”.

In a digitally-fuelled world, the most successful brand innovators 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 days.

In healthcare, look to the disruptions of the likes of 23andMe’s DNA profiling and PatientsLikeMe, Editas’ gene editing through to Infervision’s AI diagnostics, AliveCor’s realtime tracking and Organova’s 3D printed organs. Simple solutions by thinking differently work too, like Narayana Hospitals in India or Aravind Eyecare.

Innovators start from the future back, making sense of change, seeing the new patterns and possibilities, innovation pervades everything they do, rethinking the way the business and the market work, engaging consumers in a world of noise and distrust, to create new value and accelerate new growth.

Summary of keynote

World Changing : Exploring the opportunities of a changing world

• Relentless change brings new challenges and opportunities
• New consumers with new dreams and new expectations
• Applying technology in smarter, human and more distinctive ways
• Thinking bigger to solve problems, 10x not 10%
• So where are the biggest opportunities for Upjohn?

Game Changing : Learning from the world’s best innovators

• The world’s 100 most innovative brands, shaking up the world right now
• Amazon to Glossier, Nespresso and Tesla, Jio and Maituan Dianping
• How can you make unusual connections – the power of copy, adapt, paste
• Being more audacious, networked, collaborative, and intelligent
• What can we learn from them? How could we disrupt the future of healthcare?

Leading Change: Shaping the future in your own vision

• Starting from the future back, then delivering practically now forwards
• Working from the outside in, finding a bigger purpose, more relevance and value
• Delivering experiences that enable doctors and patients to achieve more
• Harnessing the power of people, connected through brand communities
• What will you do?Time to be bold, brave and brilliant

About Upjohn

Upjohn is a division of Pfizer. As an organisation committed to putting patients first, Pfizer has always evolved with the changing needs of the people who rely on us to create a healthier world. That’s why our newly launched business, Upjohn, leverages the strengths at the core of who we are: an entrepreneurial mindset and a sense of purpose.

Inspired by the heritage of a company known for its pioneering science, Upjohn harnesses the power of 20 of Pfizer’s most iconic established biopharmaceutical brands – across therapeutic areas including Cardiovascular, Pain, Psychiatry, and Urology – by thinking strategically and operating nimbly. And with the addition of our U.S. Greenstone portfolio, Upjohn’s commercial model also aims to reach a more diversified set of consumers.

At a time when healthcare is increasingly defined by a growing global middle class, a focus on quality and affordability and the rise of non-communicable diseases, Upjohn combines the agility of a startup with the resources and capabilities of a Fortune 100 enterprise. As a result, we’re able to both innovate and execute quickly, from activating our portfolio to improving manufacturing to advancing research and development.

Today, Upjohn serves more than 100+ markets and has a network of 9 dedicated manufacturing sites bringing quality and reliability. And with roots in innovation and technological ingenuity, Upjohn is poised to take our portfolio of established medicines to the next level, bringing life-changing medicines to patients around the world and trailblazing a new path for the 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 have spent the last 24 months running competitions around the world, to find and rank the world’s most innovative companies by sector and geography.

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 Airbnb, Brewdog to Buzzfeed, Casper to Coursera – 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.

The Future of Insurance

It’s about risk. We profit from it, we fear it, and we find it impossibly hard to quantify.

While not the most glamorous of industries, insurance can be a life-saving protector, pooling everyone’s premiums to safeguard against some of our greatest, most unexpected losses. It is also one of the most profitable industries in the world, with over $2 trillion in annual revenues.

But risk is becoming predictable, which challenges the very concept of insurance.

By 2025, we’ll be living in a trillion-sensor economy, projected to generate bronto-bytes (1000 trillion trillion) of data. So as we enter a world where everything is measured all the time, we’ll start to transition from protecting against damages to preventing them in the first place.

But what happens to health insurance when your insurer is always watching? Do rates go up when you sneak a cigarette? Do they go down when you eat your vegetables? And what happens to auto insurance when most cars are autonomous? Or life insurance when the human lifespan doubles?

For that matter, what happens to insurance brokers when blockchain makes them irrelevant?

So what does the future look like for the insurance sector?

• Research: 5 trends driving the future of insurance
  • Digital and omnichannel
  • Big data and analytics
  • Legacy system transformation
  • Cybersecurity
  • Insurtech and blockchain
• Research: Unpacking the InsurTech Landscape
• Report: Raconteur Future of Insurance
• Case study: How Lemonade reinvented insurance
• Case study: How Ingenuity uses AI
• Case study: ZhongAn, online in China

In October of 2016, a claim was submitted to Lemonade, the world’s first peer-to-peer insurance company. Rather than being processed by a human, every step in this claim resolution chain — from initial triage through fraud mitigation through final payment — was handled by an AI.

This transaction marks the first time an AI has processed an insurance claim. And it won’t be the last. A traditional human-processed claim takes 40 days to pay out. In Lemonade’s case, payment was transferred within three seconds. 

However, Lemonade’s achievement only marks a starting point. Over the course of the next decade, nearly every facet of the insurance industry will undergo a similarly massive transformation. New business models like peer-to-peer insurance are replacing traditional brokerage relationships, while AI and blockchain pairings significantly reduce the layers of bureaucracy required (with each layer getting a cut) for traditional insurance.

Consider Juniper, a startup that scrapes social media to build your risk assessment, subsequently asking you 12 questions via an iPhone app. Geared with advanced analytics, the platform can generate a million-dollar life insurance policy, approved in less than five minutes.

AXA plans to cooperate with a centralized home hub whereby remote monitoring will collect data for future analysis and detect abnormalities. With remote monitoring and app-centralized control for users, MonAXA is aimed at customizing insurance bundles. These would reflect exact security features embedded in smart homes.

Wouldn’t you prefer not to have to rely on insurance after a burglary? With digital ecosystems, insurers may soon prevent break-ins from the start.

By gathering sensor data from third parties on neighborhood conditions, historical theft data, suspicious activity and other risk factors, an insurtech firm might automatically put your smart home on high alert, activating alarms and specialized locks in advance of an attack.

Insurance policy premiums are predicted to vastly reduce with lessened likelihood of insured losses. But insurers moving into preventive insurtech will likely turn a profit from other areas of their business. PwC predicts that the connected home market will reach $149 billion USD by 2020.

Car insurance premiums are currently calculated according to the driver and traits of the car. But as more autonomous vehicles take to the roads, not only does liability shift to manufacturers and software engineers, but the risk of collision falls dramatically.

But let’s take this a step further. In a future of autonomous cars, you will no longer own your car, instead subscribing to Transport as a Service (TaaS) and giving up the purchase of automotive insurance altogether.

This paradigm shift has already begun with Waymo, which automatically provides passengers with insurance every time they step into a Waymo vehicle. And with the rise of smart traffic systems, sensor-embedded roads, and skyrocketing autonomous vehicle technology, the risks involved in transit only continue to plummet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c99yty788L0

Learning from the World’s Best Innovators

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 Abu Dhabi 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.

• Article: The 10x Leader
• Article: Amplifying Potential
• Book: “Gamechangers: Are you ready to change the world?“
• Book: “Business Genius: A more inspired approach to leadership”
• Workshop: “Gamechangers Program: Leading for smarter innovation and profitable growth”
• Workshop: “Inspiring Leadership … future, people and change“
• Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s keynote “Gamechangers”

What is the future of innovation?

• Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s CEIBS keynote: Innovating Innovation 

Innovation is about turning the best ideas into practical action, to solve relevant problems and create new impact. But it gets lost in today’s world of technology, of short-termism, and brand frivolity.

We embrace innovation to move forwards. To achieve progress. To solve the big problems.

Indeed, we live in an incredible time. With more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years, driven largely by an incredible range of new technologies, but also by new markets and new ideas.

The context drives new approaches to innovation. 10 ways, therefore, in which innovation is being innovated are:

• Future back … In a volatile and unpredictable world, innovation can’t just ride the trends and existing trajectories, instead it seeks to shape the future it wants, in its own vision.
• Outside in … The obsession with product-centric innovation just does not work, in that it is driven by internal prejudice and often to instant imitation.
• Fast forwards … Eliminating the old linear, stage-gate driven approaches, to a more dynamic, iterative, experimental approach to lean and agile development.
• Open sourced … Collaboration in its many forms, with partners and customers, opens up a richer source of ideas, as well as ways to develop and implement innovations.
• Whole business … Products and services, solutions and experiences, business and market models, can all be innovated. Best of all together, they represent holistic business innovation.
• Intuitive decisions … Decision making within a creative process should not by too analytical and inflexible, rather being more intuitive.
• Hypothesis driven … Scientific method is often seen as driven by logic and analysis, but a hypothesis is a creative device which has then to be proven through experiment and practice.
• Asset impact … Increasing an innovation most valuably exists in the form of its IP – its brand, trademark, patent, and so on. Like ARM, developing and owning this can be more valuable.
• Growth mindset … This contrasts a fixed mindset (built around optimising the existing paradigm) with a growth mindset (ideas, experiments, and exploring newness).
• Entrepreneurs inside … Capturing the passion, freedom, courage, resourcefulness and individuality of entrepreneurs within a corporation.

So how can we ensure that innovation is about great ideas, executed brilliantly?

In this CEIBS keynote Peter Fisk will focus on:

Where do new ideas come from?

• We live in an incredible time: Disruption and opportunity, the moments of change and creativity
• Seize the zeitgeist: Change drivers, pattern recognition and consumer trends
• Sense making: The future isn’t like it used to be, new paradoxes to resolve

How do the best companies innovate?

• Having new perspectives: Seeing things differently, thinking different things
• Inspiration: Learning from the world’s most innovative companies in every sector
• Innovating bigger: Changing the game, the market and business, not just the product or service

What are the priorities for business leaders?

• See the future: Start from the future back, and from the outside in
• Create bigger ideas: Engage, inspire and enable customers to achieve more, together
• Be courageous: Lead with a growth mindset, looking forwards not back

These build on the ideas in Peter’s recent book “Gamechangers: Innovative strategies for business and brands”, and includes new research from his next book “Extraordinary: How business leaders create a better future”.

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 have spent the last 24 months running competitions around the world, to find and rank the world’s most innovative companies by sector and geography.

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 Airbnb, Brewdog to Buzzfeed, Casper to Coursera – 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 Abu Dhabi 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 Gandhi 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.

• Article: The 10x Leader
• Article: Amplifying Potential
• Book: “Gamechangers: Are you ready to change the world?“
• Book: “Business Genius: A more inspired approach to leadership”
• Workshop: “Gamechangers Program: Leading for smarter innovation and profitable growth”
• Workshop: “Inspiring Leadership … future, people and change“
• Download a summary of Peter Fisk’s keynote “Gamechangers”