Lessons - Why the Best Products Are Built on Empathy Not Data | Mauro Porcini - First CDO of PepsiCo, 3M & Samsung

In this lessons episode, explore why innovation works best when it begins with people rather than products. Discover how design thinking uncovers real human needs and turns them into meaningful solutions, understand how balancing desirability, feasibility, and business viability drive successful innovation, and learn why curiosity, optimism, and kindness can unlock creativity and long-term impact. I can ask you because I find that even the title to the book he wrote, the human side of innovation, it's interesting because when I think innovation incorrectly, I only think of how do I innovate the product. I don't think of design, I don't think of creativity, I don't think of brand, how do I build something better than what already exists. But that's incorrect because that's not how people purchase and how people communicate. People need a story behind the product. It's not just function and utility, there's always a story. Now whether or not it's something you create or whether or not, if you don't create it, then the customer is going to create a story in their head about that product. So talk to me about the human side of innovation, the side that we should focus on that you built your entire career route. What is the human side of innovation? What is how does design and innovation intersect? Look, there are first of all two dimensions of this humanity in the world of innovation, and they are somehow clarified in the subtitle. People in love with people. The first dimension is the second people in this sentence, essentially the fact that we need to refocus all our innovation efforts on the human being, on creating value for people, real value, not value for the company, economic value, value for people first. We can talk more later about what I really mean with that, but the second dimension is the first set of people, the innovators, the entrepreneurs, the designers of the world, and love somehow summarize everything that these people do for the other people. Why design? I mean, and this is the big misunderstanding about the world design in our society. A lot of people think the design is aesthetic. Somebody think that is form and function. When we're lucky, you start to associate the aesthetic factor to the function. Design can be applied to different inventions. You study industrial design or product design. You design products. You study brand design and communication. You design packaging, communication, pieces, eventually more and more. There is the digital world. You design fashion. You design clothing. So you can apply design to different kind of substrates, to different kind of objects and solutions and experiences and brands. But in general, the designers, they all do one thing. This is what you study at school. A school they teach to observe people understand their needs, their wants, their frustrations, their dreams, and figuring out solutions for them. This is the number one focus. That's why, for instance, the design school, we don't call these people consumers. We don't care about them consuming our products or buying our products. We call them people eventually, eventually users because we focus on the use of our products. What drives us is not to sell them stuff, is to create value for them. Now, these needs, all of them, all together, the needs of humanity, can be summarized and decodified in the Mazdo pyramid. From the bottom, physiological needs, safety needs, all the way to the needle, surface pressure, sense of belonging, connecting with others, all the way to the top of the pyramid, transcending yourself something bigger than you. The summary of all these needs, creates what we call happiness. If we fulfill all these needs from the bottom to the top, we reach our happiness. And this is our life. Our journey in life is to reach the kind of happiness. So designers essentially are trained as school to create fragments of this broader social happiness. If the world will be driven by designers and not by business leaders and not by other kind of profiles, we'll never have a happy world. Now, designers has also taught a school that on top of this dimension of the human being, what we call desirability, you need to consider two other dimensions for your product to go to market. Because at the end of the day, designers create products that are a producible in scale and you can sell else, they're artists and is another kind of discipline. So there are two dimensions, additional dimension, feasibility. So you need to understand technology, science, data, you know, to make these things a reality. And then viability, you need to understand the business model. And so these three pillars are the pillars of design thinking. There's a ability, biability and feasibility, the human factor, technology and business or translated in the vernacular of these companies, big and small is what this company is called innovation. Or eventually, if the desirability is the primary focus over the other two variables, this is human center innovation. So design is nothing else than the only education, the formula to drive innovation. There is nothing else. If you study business, you study the viability part, eventually they teach you something about the desirability component, even though they look at that as a, again, a lever of the marketing mix, a lever to succeed. But not the only one. You may succeed with a very mediocre product because you are able to use the other levers in a great way and you're still a successful business leader. But they don't teach you mathematics, physics, material science, you know, our core technology. If you study technology, if you study chemistry or biology or engineering, they don't teach you the human factor, anthropology, semiotic, human science. So in design schools, they teach you these three dimensions. The problem is that then all these designers get out of school and they go in companies and companies trap them in a very niche definition, job description. They ask them to be a static science to design a static or a product. And again, sometimes if you're like his form and function, but rarely their leverage for what they can really do. And so one year, two years, five, 10, 15, 20 of these, at the end of the day, also these designers forget what they learned and school and they lose their way. Some of them try to change the system, the dreamers. You know, this is what happened to me. I was like a naive dreamer at 27, entered 3M in Italy in the periphery of the American Empire. I was not hard in some pole Minnesota. I was hired in Italy as a design coordinator for the consumer business. It was one of the six businesses of the company just for Europe. So imagine it was anyway a small part of the big business. And here I am with this dream of changing the way 3M does innovation, leveraging design thinking, infusing human centricity. Obviously, it was an naive dream. You know, and I say this in the book, if you don't have a dream, you'll never be able to make it come true. And so you need a dream and a dream is by definition naive at the beginning. And by definition, you'll face so many people that will try to stop you from dreaming. They will laugh about your dream. They won't understand your dream. But the real innovators, the one that keeps pushing, no matter all these resistance from the system, but also trying to connect the dream with the reality of the business, of the process of the company, of the reality, the living. This is what they do. They combine the dream with execution and operations. So have you now, as you've grown in your career, have you, especially at Pepsi, almost reimagined the place that design has in a business? Is that what you're doing right now? Yeah, look, both at 3M and PepsiCo design didn't exist in this company. So I created the capability from scratch. So by definition, it was my role to reimagining what design could mean in those companies. But my mission transcends 3M first and PepsiCo now. I always look at these companies as unbelievable platforms to give me access to billions of people and resources to push something that is bigger than the company itself. And my dream, you know, we have been talking a lot about my child, my dream as a child at the end of the day was always the one of creating something that could touch the life of people, that could create somehow value into the life of people. For instance, my dream of writing books, you know, the idea of creating something that could touch the imagination of people and could be there and could be there also when I was gone, when I was dead. You know, I would read all these books of people that were not there, you know, existing anywhere. I was like, wow, you know, that, that was fame for me. The fame driven by culture and the fame driven by impact in the life of people, you know, in your heart, in your soul. So I was always driven. And that's why by this idea, and that's why I told you, when I started design university, I realized that it was something I always wanted to do, but I didn't know a school existed for that. And so here I am in these corporations. And the first meta dream, the big dream is being for years, the one or somehow adding value to the life of people, touching the life of people. When you design something, you impact the life of people. You add a moment of convenience, of style, of fun, of safety to the life of people, depending on what you do. But anywhere, the order, if you are driven by the right purpose, you are creating value into the life of people. For sure, you are touching the life. If you're driven by the right values, you're creating positive value. Or you can make the life of people very difficult or complex or deep, you know, in a variety of different ways, you can make a nightmare, you know, eventually, even in the life of people. So we have a big responsibility, these as companies and designers, entrepreneurs and innovators in this world to touch the life of people and create a kind of value. That was the big meta dream. The second dream is the one of driving, for instance, through the platform of PepsiCo, values like sustainability, health and wellness, personalization to really create something foes on you and what you need and what you want that makes sense for you. And then more recently, I realized another value that comes out of the book in a very powerful way, I think, because I really believe in it and I talk about this all the time, that these human simplicity, but really talking about the humans behind these companies, these brands, these tools, these processes and especially certain values, the people don't talk about enough, like the power of kindness, the power of people in love with people that is subtitled on the book, the power of optimism that we talk about, the power of curiosity, the power of a series of skills, that often you don't look for in people, in companies, sometimes actually you do the opposite, in companies often, and you see it in the literature of management, in the coaching that is done, to business leaders often, you look for the opposite of kindness, you want people to be tough, to be a little bit rough, eventually, to put people against each other to extract as much values possible out of them, and what I'm trying to do instead, in PepsiCo, what we've been pushing, the kind of things we're creating, they're all based on this idea of kindness and love, is the filter number one, before anything else, and this is a feature, this is not a nice thing to do for a book, and you put it in a book, and you're gonna sell the book for this, no, this is a criteria officially, officially given to our human resources, to find the people we're looking for, and kindness being a good person is criteria number zero, I call it zero meaning, that is before the first one, you know, the first thing we need to look at is this, and then everything else can, and so when I realize that all of this can also create financial value for this company, can try productivity efficiency and quality, I was like, wow, and I have a platform with hundreds of thousands of people following me in social media, I was like, wait a second, this should be my mission as well, I want to push this because I know it works, and it can work for so many other people, and not just for your company, and it's the reason why probably many people would embrace that, but if those companies embrace that, this will work for our society, we'll create a better world, a better society, and so it became really probably number one mission for me today, and it's funny, and I will close, my mom, when I was a kid, and would talk always with the priest of my parochia, of my neighborhood, and both of them, they dreamed for me to become a priest, and the reason was, that they thought I could be a great ambassador of the values of Christianity in the world, because I was like, you see me now, you know, I love to talk, I was a storyteller already when I was a child, and so it's funny, because I found myself, I went in all kinds of directions in my life, experimenting all kinds of things, and going wild, and really in this myth of the extreme experimentation, and I am many years later doing exactly what my mom was expecting me from, was expecting from me, mothers know that's why, but yeah, but not at all, not at all, on the idea of Christianity, but on the idea of love, and being ambassador of the power of love in everything we do in life. 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