An innovation masterclass; how Mauro Porcini created a culture of innovation at Pepsi

27:41You keep dreaming. You go to school, university, and you're right to these companies. Some of us still dream. You dream that you can change the brand, the company, the function, that industry eventually. And then once again, very soon, people will remind you that dreaming is childish, that you should just, you know, get to the ground, you know, be practical. Some of them will even tell you how arrogant it is from you to think that you can change this company has been like this forever or this brand has been like this forever. And so at a certain point, you start to think that you're right and you are wrong and you stop dreaming.

28:15So many people stop dreaming. And so the first truth is, don't stop dreaming. Think big. Think big. Then dreaming is not enough. You know, there are few people that dream and they live in the comfort of the dream. You need to find a way to then land a dream, to execute, to make things happen. And so the unicorn is somebody that knows how to balance these two dimensions, the ability to dream, but also the ability to make things happen. Now, in innovation, this is pretty obvious. It's rare to find, and people don't talk enough about this, and in companies, we don't talk enough about this double skill and double ability.

28:58But again, if you talk about innovation, obviously you need to do these two things. But there are other characteristics that have been really, really important for me personally, my personal journey, and for us as a team, as a design team. There are three over all of them. Then you can reconnect to many others. One is kindness, one is optimism, and one is curiosity. Let's start with the less obvious kindness. Kindness in a corporation, in the business world. What? I mean, they teach us, they taught us all this time that actually you need to be tough, that the sharks are the ones succeeding. I mean, there is management schools that talk about putting people against each other and with a Darwinian kind of way, the strongest, the fittest will succeed.

29:45This was true. I don't think that was true even in the past, but it was more understandable in the past when you didn't need the kind of efficiency, productivity that you need today in this world where those barriers to entry we were talking about earlier are down. Today you need teams to work in full synergy in the most effective possible way. And so kindness, I wish it was enough, you know, you need nice, kind people in any kind of community, but I wish that was enough. But even if it's not, kindness is an amazing way to connect people, to build these synergies. You know, if you have in your team people that are not kind to you, they don't care about you, you're not going to trust them.

30:35If you don't trust them, you're going to do all kinds of activities to protect yourself. Now multiply these activities for 300 ,000 people, the number of people we have in PepsiCo, and understand the level of inefficiency that you're building in your company through these redundant activities. This is lack of productivity that is invisible. Nobody talks about this. When you talk about productivity, you talk about cutting people, unfortunately, or cost of any kind. Nobody talks about investing in kindness. Imagine if you have a boss, your supervisor, that is not a kind, trustworthy people. If somebody actually is quite the opposite, what are the probabilities that when this person has a blind spot, is making a mistake, you're going to help this person?

31:20Not very high. Let's say that you're really, really kind, you're going to do it anyway. what are the probabilities that this person wants to be helped by you very low so all of this is building inefficiency so kindness is an amazing driver of productivity that's one quickly briefly optimism if you innovate you said it earlier if you are in innovation and 80 percent of what you do fails fails you need to be optimistic you need to look at a glass half full you always need to think, appreciate the progress. And this has been very powerful for me over the years. You know, I am an optimistic kind of person by nature.

31:59So that helps, helps a lot, but still, no matter if you are or you're not, there are moments that are really, really tough. So what helped me was the ability to step back and look at the past and understand that where I am today is different than where I was in the past. And this is all progress. Even in the most difficult moments, actually are moments where I grew, I learned, I became a better person, a better leader, a better designer. And then remembering the future, the goal, the vision. But you need to have the goal. You need to have the dream. Else you're just in the middle of a tough moment, of a crisis, but you don't have the dream.

32:36And eventually you are not able to appreciate where you're coming from. And then that's when you lose faith and you stop innovating. And then the last one to close is this curiosity, curiosity, this insatiable curiosity that push you to travel, to read, to talk to people, talk especially with people different from you. Instead of fearing diversity, you embrace diversity because you know that in diversity there is the precious gift of knowledge, a different perspective. They know things, they see things in a way that is different than mine. So I can learn, I can learn. And innovation is all about this, understanding things in a different way from your perspective, from your biases, the ability to change perspective.

33:23So the more people you talk with that are different from you, the more the chances to evolve your perspective. The beauty, and I close, in a conversation, respectful conversation between two people that are different from one another, is that perspective number one of one person meets perspective number two. And through that respectful dialogue, you build the innovative perspective, perspective number three, that didn't exist before the conversation between individuals. I love your three points. I was going to come back on them because they're absolutely brilliant. And the kindness thing I think is so undervalued because if I think of all the most destructive cultures I've worked in, they're those cultures where people think success is undermining other people or making other people look bad so that they look good.

34:11Whereas actually the best cultures are the ones where people will go out of their way to help them. So, you know, if you fail, they'll, you know, they'll come in and help you. Whereas I've been in situations where if you fail, instantly everyone disowns you. It's like immediately, it's like the old phrase, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. But actually, failure should attract people to go, how can we help? How can we make it better? How can we support you? And that kind of thing. And I love your optimism point because the most, I think probably the best talk I've ever done in my life was, I just started at Suntory, which is the third biggest drinks business in the UK.

34:50and I just joined and we were doing this kind of meet the exec thing with everyone in the company could sign up to come along and listen to one of the exec members talk and the idea was to get closer to the people and share a bit about what we've learned on our journeys and everyone else in the exec had their own function as the topic so you know the finance talked about how to read a p &l or the salesperson talked about how to sell and because I was new they just gave me any topic I wanted. And I just read this amazing book called Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed that basically said when a plane crashes, the black box will give them such rich information about why the failure happened that future lives will be solved.

35:29It's the future lives we save rather because what you learn in a crash will save many, many crashes in the future. And so I decided rather bravely to do a talk on my five most epic failures in front now this is this is the first time i'd spoken at the company in front of you know everybody and um in fact the way they'd done it is you had to sign up to go and listen to the talk and mine had been over subscribed by like three or four times it was absolutely packed you know everyone was like why is this new guy going to talk about how he's failed but the thing the twist in the story which you reminded me of is that my biggest successes came after those failures.

36:06And that's why I don't think we value in companies enough is that those people that experiment, they try, they fail. What they learn in that failure is so valuable and actually makes future success possible. And I think we forget that. And then your curiosity point as well, I thought was fascinating because when I was at Britvik doing the, we called it the seed brand team. So basically the, you know, I ran the unit that had all the sort of future, you know, future stars in sort of thing. and I had a dawning realization that I was actually really lonely nobody else in the company knew what I was doing or had done what I was doing I was kind of like on my own kind of you know forging this new kind of path and what I did then is I started reaching out to other innovators or entrepreneurs and I met a guy called Adam Morgan who wrote eat the big fish and he introduced me to his network and I met lots of other people but actually I found that diversity of meeting challenges and startups and just networking outside the business suddenly gave me so much inspiration because in an organization you start to learn how things are done and you start to think like everyone else you start to try and you know write the same calendars and do the same processes and and even look the same way you know you sort of become uniform don't you but innovation happens when you step out you know and you go and you go and meet people that are different to you businesses that have got the same challenge but operating in entirely different sectors that are trying to you know do life-saving or whatever you know and that's where the inspiration comes out let me let me just totally remind me i totally totally agree i mean we have so many people that work from nine to five or eventually from seven to midnight just on those projects on the company they travel they go from new york to london or to tokyo and you need to stay in the meeting, in the meeting room, talking about your business all the time.

38:00And if you get out of the meeting room, you need to justify yourself of why you went for dinner, you know, in Tokyo, because you need to be productive and come back. And this is so bad for those people, but for the companies they work for. You know, I always tell my team, when you travel to a city where you have never been, when you travel, especially on the other side of the world, take one extra day, pay by us and get lost in the city. Go out, have fun, observe people, go to restaurants, exhibits, museums. I do it all the time with my teams. When I go to visit the 17 design teams around the world, there is the business reviews, you know, all the typical meetings, but we always carve out half a day, one day to go out together, to go to stores, to go to museums, to be inspired.

38:49And by the way, to also know each other in a better way. But again, it's so important to be exposed to different kinds of thinking, different cultures, because those help you change in perspective. Now, if you need to, anyway, to be one of those unicorns, committed to the company, in love with your purpose, with your dream, what you're trying to do with the company. If you have those kinds of people, trust them, empower them. Because the day they go out in the city or they read a book, you know, in their vacations, nothing to do with your company, when they meet other people, they're always thinking, how can I, what am I learning that I can take back to the business?

39:35And in the worst case scenario, when they come back from the trip, as an example, in the worst case scenario, they will come back with tons of more energy. In the best case scenario, there will be an idea, an insight, something that they saw that is inspiring them to do things in a different way when they're back here. In fact, every successful innovation I've ever done has been when I haven't done my job. I've not been doing the thing that I'm supposedly paid for. It's always when I'm doing the thing that I'm not paid to do, you know, whether it's going to go abroad and go to a conference or set up a podcast.

40:10I mean, I set this podcast up. No one asked me to do it. I just thought it would be a great way of meeting interesting people and, you know, kind of networking kind of thing. And that led to, you know, led to lots of success. But it was never the job, you know. So you're right, you have to take yourself out of the environment, don't you, and put yourself somewhere else. That's a key characteristic. Something that I observed, actually, in the way you talked about the 24 characteristics of successful innovators is how much of them balance this tension in them. And like, it's like you have to sort of be able to do both things.

40:40So, I mean, a few things I picked up on there is like you have to have vision, but also know how to execute. You know, you have to be intuitive, but also analytical. Or you have to take risks, but also know when to be cautious or, you know, see the big picture and see the detail. You also talked about like, you know, being humble, but also confident as well and those kind of things. And being in the short term and being in the long term and those sort of things. So there's something about being able to kind of, you know, hold two things together, you know, and being able to juggle the ambiguity and see, you know, that balance those things, which I think is quite unique because we're trained to be, you know, good at studying or good at art or good at, you know, maths or good at, you know, chemistry.

41:21But actually, you've got to blend those things together, isn't it? It's like the ability to do more than just one thing. Look, if you read the philosopher, the ancient philosophers, all the answers to all our questions in life, they're already there. You know, in philosophy, you find all the answers to everything. And one of the things that most of the philosophers understood already back then is that in balance, there is the solution to everything. It's literally finding the balance between polarizing and, but without killing the polarization. You need that polarization, but you need to manage the tension.

42:00You see also what's going on in the political environment all around the world. In the United States, we are in the middle of the elections. There is this division, this polarization that is not managed in a meaningful way by creating respectful dialogue between the two different perspectives and point of views. the two point of views are against each other, not in a constructive way. So this is true, therefore, for everything we do as human beings, and therefore also in our business and innovation, always finding a way to somehow balance different dimensions, put them in dialogue, understanding you personally, where you are really, really good, and where eventually you have gaps or opportunities, these weaknesses of any kind, but you need the awareness of those opportunities.

42:56You need to understand how to somehow create a dialogue with people that are really, really good in those areas where you're weak eventually or where you have a gap. And you need to build, therefore, a system around you, a team or a community of people that help you fill in those gaps. But you need to be a really good orchestra director, you know, able to manage all these different dimensions. But it all starts with awareness. The reason why I decided to write down these characteristics already, it was something like 16, 17 years ago when I was at 3M, I wrote them down because the first step is being aware of what is important.

43:35If I, as a young person, I go to a company and they don't tell me that kindness is a superpower, I'm not going to practice it. Actually, quite the opposite. If they tell me that it's the opposite, I'm going to do the opposite eventually. So if they don't tell me that humbleness combined with confidence is really important, I'm not going to do it eventually. So it was very, very important to build first awareness about these characteristics. Once you know that they are important, you invest in them. Many times, many people ask me, can you become a unicorn? Can you teach people? Can you coach people in becoming unicorns?

44:13I think, you know, for talent in general, part of it is DNA, is natural. Like you're born good at playing soccer or tennis or, you know, good in sports, or eventually you're not very coordinated, you're not that good. So part of it is nature. But the other part is totally coachable, is totally teachable. So we can think about the IQ. The IQ, you're born with a certain IQ, but through coaching and training, you can raise your IQ. I didn't know. You know, I discovered when I was doing research for the book. And the same, you could be born really good at soccer, but if you don't invest, you don't train, somebody that's less good than you probably is going to be better than you.

44:59Obviously, then if you're messy and you train, you're going to be a superstar. But that's another story. So, but it all starts with awareness first. First, the second step is practicing. And then the third one is tweaking and evolving continuously. The problem when you have awareness and you practice and you become really, really good at doing something, you are a really good marketer, a really good innovation leader, a good designer, is that you may fall in the trap of arrogance. I made it. I'm a CMO of a big company. I'm a CDO of a big company. I made it. I know it all. the real leader first of all is the one of knowing, of not knowing as Socrates used to say thousands of years ago as that humbleness that awareness that you're dust in the universe and you have the opportunity to spend the rest of your life learning and learning and learning and bettering yourself knowing that you will never become the unicorn I talk about but enjoying the journey to learn more and more and more so it starts with death and then if you are that smart, you're going to surround yourself with people that know better than you.

46:09They know more things or different kind of things. And so you will learn from them and then you will build a synergy with them to work together to create something extraordinary as a team. And mixing with people that are better than you rubs off, doesn't it? You just get inspired by them. It raises, you know, you are the sum of the company you keep really, aren't you? You know, which is you know, so find as good of people as you can. But you need that confidence, right? You need that confidence and that humbleness to recognize their value, the confidence not to be afraid of the value. And now the confidence starts with, I think something very important is to invest in something.

46:50It could be, you know, the knowledge of design, the knowledge of marketing. It could be some form of know-how. And then you practice and you build your skills and you become the best that you can, the best version of yourself in that specific thing. That will give you a lot of confidence. And if you work in a corporation, it means that you're not going to invest in becoming the best marketer in that company. You're going to become the best marketer in the world. Your context is not the other marketers in the company. When I came to PepsiCo as a designer, my goal was not to do better design than what PepsiCo was doing before.

47:27My goal is to create the best design culture organization in the planet. It doesn't mean I'm going to be able to do it, but that's the drive that I have. And that's really something that we're going to give you motivation and inspiration for the rest of your life. The bigger the goal, the more, you know, the motivation. And again, even when you reach your goal, you have a very ambitious goal or a small goal, you reach that goal. The secret is to keep building new dreams. You know, you use that achievement as a platform to jump higher and higher and higher and spend your life doing that. I love that.

48:03So inspiring. You mentioned something earlier in your comment about balance. I think balance is something that we've forgotten about a lot. And it's interesting. I did a system one we've done. We've looked at tens of thousands of bits of innovation and measured the emotional response to them. And we found this interesting thing that the ideal innovation, most successful innovation, balances elements of surprise with an element of comfort. so we ended up with this kind of phrase that actually the optimum innovation is like 80 % familiar but 20 % new and the more breakthrough the innovation the more familiar you need to try and make it the more familiar the innovation so like it's a new flavor of pepsi for example the more new you need to make it feel and i thought it's really interesting we've actually um we're actually working on this thing at the moment the working out the ideal recipe for innovation based on kind of balancing, because as humans, we like familiarity.

48:53We like, you know, we, we know what we know, don't we? We kind of reassured by it, but equally you need intrigue and novelty and surprise to kind of trigger that. And the, you know, we worked out this kind of optimum balance between the two, but yeah, yeah. Balance is quite important, isn't it? Yeah. And it all goes back, as you say, to human nature. I mean, you need that familiarity that is linked to the base of the Maslow pyramid, the safety, familiarity, safety. And then you move up the ladder and then is all about self-expression, is connections with others, or the emotional connections, is enjoying life all the way to the top, you know, the purpose that you're going to find for yourself in life.

49:34And so understanding how to create something that gives them the safety, the feeling of safety, but then solve all the other needs we have in the pyramid is really the secret. It's not easy. Also because those things change with society, you know, with time. And so we need to be on top of what's going on in society. You may have a product and a brand that's been really successful in the early 2000s, and eventually today is not that relevant anymore. So to be in tune with the people we serve is key. But then once again, you go back to having the right people in-house. They really care about the people they serve.

50:11You know, the subtitle of the book, The Human Side of Innovation, the subtitle is The Power of People in Love with People. There are three dimensions of this love. And these summarize, you know, everything. The first dimension is the love for the people you serve. So literally thinking of those consumers as your daughters, sons, parents, family members, and really caring about creating something good for them. The second form of love is the love for what you do. And there is tons of stats and researches that show that people that love, the successful people are people that love what they do. Because the love gives you resilience, optimism, the ability to go against all odds and overcome all kinds of roadblocks and difficulties.

50:59And the third form of love is the love for the people surrounding you. is your teams, the people that are with you every day. So caring about them, being there for them and really work together and enjoying, loving, you know, working with them. In a world where it's so important to have all the different vertical skills in a team, you need the best marketers, you need the best designers, the best scientists, the best everything. Yeah. It's so important to build the right connection amongst these people. It's interesting what you say in terms of like, you know innovation takes time we want to keep people for five or ten years not not have 18 months and they get promoted to the you know the next role sort of thing i read something somewhere that the reason people stay in a job is whether they consider they have friends at work and the extent to which they laugh and i just thought that's if you build a culture of as you say love and kindness and so on you're much more likely to keep the people that have got all the knowledge and understanding have failed and succeeded that are going to you know help you make create success Look, the longest study on happiness ever done, you know, that started almost 100 years ago, shows that actually happiness, the first driver of happiness, the most important driver of happiness is relations.

52:14Yeah. So it's relations with family, friends. But obviously we spend the most of our time at war. Yeah. And so that's so important. Actually, I closed the book talking about how to design happiness. And there are three dimensions. that are both personal but applicable to the business world as well. The first one is investing in yourself, defining your identity. We start when we're kids, trying to understand who we are in connection to others. At a certain point, we identify role models and today we have influencers and this is great. Yeah, learn from them, be inspired from them, but then mix everything, blend everything and create your own identity.

52:54Your job becomes very important to build your own identity. It's also important to understand, though, that your job is not your identity because you lose your job and your identity is gone. That's a mistake that many people do. So that balance, once again, in understanding how your job becomes your identity, but how to transcend the job, the company, the brand, your identity is connected to that. I'm a designer, I'm a PepsiCo designer, and I'm super grateful to the opportunity that PepsiCo gave me and is giving me today. But I also have theories that transcend the company. And probably are building a lot of value to the company because of this.

53:30The second dimension is the love for the people around you. Selfless love that you give and you receive back from your close community. Friends, family, and therefore also colleagues. This is so, so important. I met so many people that stay in companies eventually that don't pay them very well. They are in very tough condition. And we all are like, why are you staying there? And then you realize that they love the other people in the company. And then the law of the third dimension, the third dimension is purpose. It is doing something bigger than you, something that transcends your personal interest.

54:05And once again, it sounds really noble. In reality, it's still about you. You are right to the conclusion later in life. Often when you start to feel that you're not going to be immortal. And so doing something that is bigger than you is a way to defeat death, to build memories in people that will remember you as a kind, a person kind to strange. as a person that invented Apple or Virgin, as a person that did something that you left behind yourself. And so this purpose is really, really important and give a purpose to your team. So creating an environment where your people in your company can express themselves, self-identity, find good people around them, and then have the ability, they are empowered to dream and have a purpose and try to change the world in their scale, in their community, that's a secret recipe, not just for building value for your company.

55:01That's an afterthought, you know, is a consequence. But to build happiness in these communities. And because these people are the people that live in society, live in the world, essentially you're building happiness in society, in the world. Now, a lot of people listening probably like you work in big companies, big organizations, and they want to create innovation and create a change. Now, you had a phrase I've not heard before in your book, which I absolutely love, which is fighting the dictatorship of normal. Can you explain what that is? Because I thought it was a brilliant encapsulation of probably what everyone feels when they're trying to innovate and what they feel like they're up against in the organization.

55:38Look, society in general, forget corporations, society love the standardization, the normalization, you know, the norm. Yeah. They love it because it's controllable. You know, you are part of a mechanism. You are a cog in this mechanism. You have a role and I'm going to control you. The problem is that the world around us keep changing. It changes in society, in your life. You know, it's your personal life. Everything, there are so many different variables and it changes for companies. The difference between now and the past that is changing and the speed of light. In the past, changes will take more time.

56:15So all of a sudden, you need to break the norm. You need to break that dictatorship of the norm and try to still be part of processes and understand how to manage the norm and the standardization and the processes, but also have that flexibility and agility to interpret the situation and change things. And once again, we go back to balance. We go back to this ability to be part of a process, understand those platforms, but then also disrupt and change. Yeah, because often the art is how you create the check, because often, you know, people like you and I will be, our heads will be in the future, but we've got to bring the organization with us.

56:57So it's how you balance the two, isn't it? Like, you know, long-term thinking, but get people there in steps and bring everyone with you. To wrap up, right, I mustn't, I can't miss the opportunity to ask you about the fact that you rebranded Pepsi. Like that must have been a huge kind of moment for you taking an iconic brand with such a history as Pepsi and rebranding it. So what were you trying to achieve through that rebrand? Look, first of all, it was necessary. Pepsi is a brand that's been rebranding itself every 10, 15 years for its entire history. It's this idea of being timely, relevant to new generations and everything.

57:35A few things were changing in this specific moment. We live in a digital world, a new focus on sustainability. health and wellness. And therefore for us was a big, big focus on zero sugar. And so we needed a different kind of identity that could serve all these strategic objectives. And then the previous redesign didn't have the energy that Pepsi used to have in the past. And so we were missing also that element. Now, it was not easy though. It was one of those proactive projects. We as a design team, we pitched this project to the organization, to the company. And I say it was not easy because personally, you know, me personally and us as a design team, we were really successful within the company, you know, with our own credibility and everything.

58:26So a project like this is a risky project. It's a project that could go wrong so easily. When you redesign a brand that is known and loved all around the world, it's easy to go wrong. And so it took a lot of courage to do it anyway. But we go back once again to the love for doing the right thing. You know, we knew that we needed to do it. But the safe solution could have been not to do it. The truth is that often we perceive the lack of action as safe. In reality, it's the worst thing you can do to yourself and to your company. But the action, you know, implies risk as well. So personally, it was really exciting because there was all the adrenaline of dealing with an iconic brand that existed, was invented before any human being in this planet was ever born because it's 126 years ago now.

59:20And hopefully, probably will exist after every human being in the planet will be gone. And so imagine the responsibility of doing something like this and the honor of being part of this. The thing I loved about it is you seem to be inspired by the 1950s and 60s version of Pepsi. So you were kind of going back to the past. But the way you executed it was absolutely digital and modern and flexible, wasn't it? So I think that was a really clever way of respecting the history, but also, you know, unlocking it for the future kind of thing. I thought it was a really clever balance of the two things.

59:56Balance once again. You summarized it perfectly. There we go. Well, maybe that's the perfect point to end then. So Mauro, thank you so much. It's been an absolute blast. This is one of those conversations that I know we just scratched the surface and we could have like talked forever. There's a thousand questions in my mind, but thank you. It's really energizing to talk to you and appreciate you giving us your time. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It was really inspiring also for me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored CMO. I hope you enjoyed that.

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