Mauro Porcini - SVP & Chief Design Officer at PepsiCo | The Human Side of Innovation

How does a company like PepsiCo create true value and start to move the needle on what the perception of a company actually is? The beauty of these big corporations is the scale they have and their ability to have an impact to reach as many people as possible. He is PepsiCo's first ever chief design officer. In the past eight years, a men's team have won over 1,100 design and innovation awards. He's been recognized with several personal awards including fortunes 40 under 40, GQ, Italia's 30 best-stressed men. I really think that if we focus everything we do on this idea of human beings, we can really create an amazing value for our companies. But it shouldn't be the reason that drive us. The reason that drive us should be the fact that we need to do it because our society needs it. Talk to me about the human side of innovation. What is the human side of innovation? There are first of all two dimensions of this humanity in the world of innovation. The first dimension is... Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Cleary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts like My First Million hosted by Sam Parr and Sean Perry. They interview some of the most incredible business leaders, Alex Ramozi, Sophia Amaruso, Hassan Minhaj, who shared their journey to success and how they made their first million. On a recent episode, they featured the acquired podcast host Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal to discuss how they scaled their multi-million dollar podcasts. Don't sleep on My First Million. If you want to get inspired, if you want to learn from the best, you got to tune into My First Million wherever you listen to your podcast. Today, my guest is Mauro Porcini. He is PepsiCo's first ever chief design officer. In the past eight years, him and his team have won over 1,100 design and innovation awards. And in 2018, PepsiCo was recognized by fortune in its driven by design list. He was previously 3M's first chief design officer, and he's been recognized with several personal awards, including fortunes 40 under 40, GQ Italia's 30 best-stressed men and fast companies 50 most influential designers in the United States. In 2018, Porcini was awarded a knighthood by the president of the Italian Republic. Now, we spoke about creativity. We spoke about curiosity. We spoke about ethical business, forced change, via COVID, human centricity, design and innovation thinking, creating true value in how to build a life around Maslow's hierarchy of needs and true happiness. Well, I am Italian, as you can hear from my heavy accent, and I was born 47 years ago in a town called Gallarat in the north of Italy close to Milan. From a beautiful humble family that since I was a child gave me these two values as the most important values that you should focus on. The first one was the idea of culture, knowledge, knowing things. The second one was the idea of being an iceberg, some being kind, being good to others. For my parents, that would translate in the idea of being Catholic, but obviously those values transcend completely any kind of faith and religion and they apply to any kind of person. My parents will see fame and success and wealth actually as threats that will deviate you from being a nice person from the stability of a certain kind of life. So this is the kind of people that somehow educated me in the early part of my journey. My father was an architect, he's an architect, but his passion was painting and so I would be there as a child and still today as an adult observing him painting every single day of his life. My mother was working in finance, but she was forced to the line of work from her grandfather because she needed to go to work right away. That's what she started to do, but at 38 she left to be close to her family and she fucks all her life in writing. She loved writing and translating her thoughts in poems and in prayers also and together my father and my mother over the years published eight books by themselves, self-publishing online using tools that were totally not comfortable to use for themselves without selling a copy of those books literally publishing them and printing them for them and their friends and families and so this is what inspired me early on in the journey. Then I did my own mistakes, I went in different directions, I experimented, I tried all kind of things and later on in life I realized how important it was, what they taught me back then and how today those kind of values are the pillar of the person that I became and so back then I had this inspiration of a mother working in the world of literature, a father passion about the world of art and I was writing and painting myself and it was coming pretty well to me, I was pretty good at doing those things and so my dream as a child was to become either a bride or an author of books or a painter and I ended up becoming a designer completely by coincidence and one of the reason is that as I said at the beginning I was coming from a humble family, we didn't have a lot of money so it was already a miracle that they could send me to university by the way public university not paying a penny for it but even the fact that you had to spend five more years without having an income was a sacrifice for my family and therefore there was all the pressure to get a job as soon as I would get my degree and so the two words of art and being a bride were probably not you know the words at least my parents were seeing as the most you know concrete and the ones where you can get you know a stable income and so I decided to go for architecture because somehow was a little bit more concrete and was combining a little bit of the art and the humanistic approach to what you do with something again that could give me eventually a job but just a few weeks before I do the exam to enter the faculty of architecture at Polytechnic of Milan I bump into another thing that Polytechnic was doing essentially a friend of mine from high school calls me one day I remember the day as it is today I described it in the book as if it was literally yesterday today and he tells me look there is a new faculty called the Zen Industrial Industrial Design that the Polytechnic was starting just last year and thinking I'm gonna do the exam for that and you know admission exam and let's see how it goes so intrigued by these two words industrial design design was talking to me about art and creativity and innovation something I really loved and industrial was making it more concrete more tangible it was a new faculty so there were more opportunities eventually to find a job after I will get the degree so here I am I go I tried exam and I get I become first I get first in out of thousands of people and so I was like okay maybe this is my destiny what do you think what do you think what do you think allowed you to be first like what you don't have to say I have no clue I really don't know let me look at school I was doing well very very well so I don't know there was a little bit of natural talent maybe I really don't know but you know to get first is not that easy and I really don't know I really don't know but that's what happened and maybe maybe maybe was you know is the first time they asked me something like this and when you were asking I started to think maybe is that curiosity that pushed me to investigate the world already when I was a child and read a lot and and told two people and back then my father gave me a camera when I was eight years old and I would go with my bicycle everywhere and take pictures everywhere and remember always taking this camera with me and today we have social media web instagram we have all these different platforms and by definition a lot of people are there with their phones ready to capture an interesting moment that they can share online I do it all the time I post every day and you know when you do something like this even today especially today that kind of platform and the kind of tool push you to try to be curious to try to catch you know that moment that is unexpected unusual behaviors of people interesting sites in whatever you do amazing experiences that you can share with the world well I had the kind of curiosity since I was a child because of my camera and because I love to take pictures and I love to share them with others and I love to share stories of those pictures or even stories in general that was the other element you know when I talk about daddy that the passion for the world of art and the world of literature I think there were manifestation of something different there were the manifestation of this passion for the for everything is visual and everything you can write but once again those are platform for this desire that people may have to tell stories I always wanted to tell stories that been always somehow communicator and so those stories could be taught through a picture it could be taught to something that you write later on I realized that you could tell stories through a product or brand to anything you do in life I think the success of what I was able to build a 3M and then in Pepsi cup with the thousands of designers have been working with over the years is also driven by the fact that we're not just designing products and brands and driving innovation but we've been able also to tell the story of what we're doing and this kind of stories have been exciting the CEOs of these companies the executive teams our own designers in house the ones we attracted to the company there is this dream first of all this vision and then this ability to share and story tell these stories and the people have been writing over the years somehow and the ability or that passion and desire also to tell stories themselves so it was not obviously not being just about me but about in 30 and so this idea you know combining curiosity ability to dream and desire to share stories somehow nurture your know how grow your culture and so I'm psychoanalyzing myself while I'm talking and maybe one of the reasons why I did well in the past was that I learned a lot through the process very early on without even realizing you have me with this question I love it though I love it well listen this is what we have to do we have to like dive deep into your mind because you've done you when when your chief design officer at PepsiCo when you when you work with 3M when you work with some of the largest brands in the world there's there's some reason as to why you're so successful and the lens at which you look at the world and you look at brand and you look at product and you look at design you look at innovation this is what has allowed you to be successful so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to understand and we're sort of understanding that it was like it was this curiosity it was this thing that was built into you from a very young age that probably was a common thread throughout your career and of course is evolved and expanded but this is what's let you be successful repeatedly this is what allows you to work with one of the largest companies in the world telling their product story and telling their company story yeah and look in the in the book and in everything I do every day in the companies the characteristics that I just mentioned are part of the key traits of the people we we look for and we hire and we grow inside the organization I mentioned curiosity I did I mentioned curiosity randomly it's the first time I associated it to what happened like that and to that test but curiosity is something that we celebrate all the time is one of the key traits of these innovators I talk about in the book is one of the key criteria that we use when we hire people but also when we grow them inside the organization for a simple reason curiosity is that inner desire and passion for learning that makes you look at the world with wonder with the eyes of a child with that with the wonder typical of the children and and you know I saw these traits in so many incredible innovators I met over the life over my life these are people often that saw everything they've been traveling all around the world I tried all kinds of things and and you see them no matter all the background all the experience they're still able to get excited about something they look at the details of the behavior of people of the way they dress the way they eat what they read everything is able to spark that inspiration that the excitement and is all driven by that curiosity and they are not afraid of that curiosity how many people at a certain point reach faith and success and great titles and wonderful positions and they think that they need to show the world that they know it all because they're there they're up there they're CEOs they're business leaders they you know they're successful and they need to show that they don't need to learn more and so they stop being as curious as probably they were before you know with the curiosity they're drawn into where they are and they stop even if eventually they would love to learn more even if eventually they still have some instinct to ask questions and try to figure out something but they're afraid to show the counterpart the people in front of them the people surrounding them that they may not know something how many people we you know a man in my life that in these positions they don't ask questions anymore they because they need to show the world that they know it all and the reality is that already socrates thousands of years ago taught us all that the wise man and woman the real you know the one they really understand things are the one that know of not knowing anything you know no of not knowing anything means that essentially the more you learn the more you grow the more you understand the more you realize there were literally fragments in the universe there is so much that we can learn and you realize how small you are and this is phenomenal but it's important to have another characteristic of these innovators these leaders that I talk about in the book and that's optimism because if you're not an optimistic person the more you realize the little you know and the potential that is out there the more you you may get the more motivated and the more alive they're like oh my god I would never just can't do it and this translates in your projects and the things that you can do the more you a vision the more you realize how you can change a company how can driving innovation in a project how you can change an industry the more if you're optimistic you get excited by this because you see the potential you keep going no matter roadblocks and the difficulties but if you're not that kind of person if you're pessimistic if you're not able to get energy out of the potential then you go the opposite direction you give up because the challenge is to be you just want to take a second and thank the sponsor today's episode HubSpot now if you're growing a business you've got a ton on your plate you need more leads you need to close deals faster you need to get better insights to connect with your customers you need a CRM one that works from day one gives your teams a central source of truth and helps them do more faster that's why you need HubSpot HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform that will accelerate your business growth without slowing down efficiency with thousands of customizable tools like ad tracking social media management and an AI content assistant your teams will have everything they need to convert prospects to qualified leads plus you can customize your CRM with apps and integrations that meet the needs of your business at any stage so as your business grows HubSpot CRM grows with you get started for free today at HubSpot.com can I can I 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 my how do I build something better than what already exists but that's incorrect because that's not how people that's not how people purchase and how people communicate people need a story behind the product it's not just functioning 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 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 around what is the human side of innovation what is how does design and innovation intersect look there 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 dimensions 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 and and experiences and brands but in general the designers they all do one thing this is what you study a school a school they teach you 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 at 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 the use of our products well what drives us is not to sell them stuff is to create value for them now this needs all of them all together the needs of humanity can be summarized and decodified in the mask of 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 sending yourself something bigger than you the summary of all these needs create 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 will never happy word 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 their artist and is another kind of discipline so there are two dimensions additional 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 desirability viability 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 level of the marketing mix a level 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 are 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 biology or engineering they don't teach you the human factor anthropology semi-autic human science so in design school 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 lucky it's form and function but really they're leveraged for what they can really do and so one year two years five ten fifteen twenty of these at the end of the day also these designers forget what they learn 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 twenty seven enter three am in Italy in the periphery of the American empire I was not hard in some poor 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 three am does innovation leveraging design thinking infusing human centricity obviously was a naive dream you know and I say this in the in the book if you don't have a dream you'll never you'll never be able to make it come true and so you need a dream and a dream is the definition naive at the beginning and by the finisher you'll face so many people that we 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 keep 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 you've grown in your career have you especially a Pepsi almost reimagined the place a design has in a business is that what you're doing right now yeah look both at three am and PepsiCo design didn't exist in this company so I created a capability from scratch so by definition it was my role to reimagine what design could mean in those companies but my mission transcends three am first and PepsiCo now I always look at these companies as 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 the end of the day was always the one of creating something that will touch the life of people that could create some 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 that could be there and could be there also when I was gone when I was there you know I would read all these books of people that were not there you know existing anymore I was like wow you know that that was fein for me the fein driven by culture and the fein 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 from that and so here I am in this 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 or safety to the life of people depending on what you do but anywhere the other if you're driven by the right purpose you're creating value into the life of people for sure you're 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 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 PepsiCo values like sustainability, health and wellness, personalization to really create something fucks on you and what you need and what you want that makes sense for you and then more recently I realize 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 is this human simplicity but really talking about the humans behind this companies this brand this tools this 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 subtitle of 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 where we've been pushing the kind of things we're creating they're all based on this idea of kindness and love is the fifth and 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 now this is a criteria of feature of feature 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 it's the first thing we need to look at is this and then everything else comes and so when I realize that all of these can also create financial value for this company can try productivity efficiency and quality 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 would work for our society we 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 and and we'll talk always with a priest of my parochia 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 extreme experimentation and here I am many years later doing exactly what my mom was expecting me from was expecting from me mother is no that's why but yeah but not at all not at all on the idea of Christianity but of the idea of love and being ambassador of the power of love in everything we do live um you spoke a little bit about creating value and you said you know we sort of touched on this a few times but what does what does true value look like when you've accomplished your mission successfully what does true value look like for a customer because somebody who looks at Pepsi I think that Pepsi is trying to innovate and trying to do things maybe differently but ultimately people still look at it as a company it's very hard to remove uh probably the the stigma of big company big corporation right so how does a company like PepsiCo create true value and start to move the needle on what the perception of a company actually is look uh the beauty of these big corporations and could be also the track in some situations is the scale that they have and their ability to have an impact to reach as many people as possible so let's say that value for the society is to drive a more sustainable ecosystem let's say that value for the society is to have a portfolio of products snacks and food and beverage the weed every day that is more permissible the desire for us and so on so forth let's say there are a variety of different values I just mentioned a couple uh when you work for companies on this scale if the company allow you and power you to drive certain things in the right direction then impact is huge the scale because of the scale of the organization so the F you know the results of what we're doing the world of sustainability is exponentially bigger but we're talking about thousands of times bigger than anything I could have done with my own startup or with a small company even though eventually is less visible uh just the acquisition of sort of stream as an example and the amount of bottles of plastic they were removing from the environment for now until 2025 is my employing and and so what is value for this society I think there is absolute value and this is where we want to go is the line house is a totally sustainable kind of society totally healthy society happy society a society where you create all kind of products and brands totally customized for each individual needs and wants a society by the way beyond corporations without conflicts between communities between political parties between countries so I think we should look at that kind of world and I'm putting in also the such opportunities because brands add the possibility to somehow have a purpose that transcend their products and push certain kind of values in the society that's why I put them in as well and so we need to understand where we want to go and then we need to understand the constraints of today the infrastructure the culture of the system we live in the business models of this society and we need to understand from within how we can change the system scale as fast as possible but obviously you know it's going to be incremental unless there are things that disrupt the system COVID for instance is for sure one of those elements that all of a sudden disrupt our ecosystem and for instance in a manner of one year made hybrid working a reality but these companies a company PepsiCo was already going in that direction flexible working policies were already in place in the way I was managing my teams were already you know very aligned to flexible working but somehow there was the overarching culture within the company in society in every other company out there they needed to be in the office so even if there was flexibility still was not accepted by society until a traumatic event accelerated everything and and today thank God this idea of hybrid working at least in a company PepsiCo is absolutely accepted is the way we work and essentially this kind of disruptive event accelerated something that was already somehow happening in the society and that's been happening for hundreds of years probably in a very slow way because these entities are very slow to evolve the amount of hours we were working a century ago it's much higher than the amount of hours we work today the place of work is different today once again from the past and probably we are moving towards a future it could be in 20 years in 50 years in 100 years where people will work less traditional kind of work and we use part of their time in other activities that can drive their happiness that can really have them focusing on the three dimensions of happiness that I talk about also the book is the way I close the book the first one is yourself your self realization self expression and again the job is for sure a big element that be component of it if you have a job but it could be many other things the second dimension is the people surrounding your family your friends your close one and is an exchange of love is the love you give and then you get it back you don't give love to get it back just to be here but you get it back if the people you are giving love to are your friends and your family the third dimension is something that is bigger than you transcends yourself is a cause is a purpose you have in life and again it could be I don't know charity work that you do or it could be you know in the case of your job something bigger than you and your company that you're trying to drive you know the idea of me driving kindness happiness and the role of designing society to create value for the world is an example of purpose apply to what I do at work so this hybrid model of work is giving us the possibility to invest in our happiness because work is a component of it and you should find way to apply those three dimensions to your work but obviously especially the second and the third dimension there is so much space outside of work for you to apply them and if you instead sacrifice your entire life just for work this society is going to create a society of people and happy and in fact if you look at the data this is the data where we see we see out there the level of happiness depression and society and not just in corporations schools universities if we if we see at the suicide rates in universities in the United States it's mind blowing it's very high and it shouldn't be like this but why is like this because of this pressure we put in our kids from very early on they need to perform they need to perform they need to perform instead we should teach them that they need to be happy that's what we need to do in life to be happy is my parents telling me about you know the value of culture and being a nice person as as driver or something bigger and then the example that they gave me leading by example of their passion for what they were doing art and writing essentially they were teaching me that in life the most important thing is to be happy and instead too many times in social media the media even families and communities we keep hearing that the goal should be to get rich wealth fame when I hear people talking about how can I get rich how can I get wealthy I lose my mind because that shouldn't be the goal also because by the way that's your goal you child you young adults at the beginning of your journey the most of you will fail you want to achieve that because not everybody can be rich not everybody can be famous you shouldn't be your goal but the real truth is even if you get that even if you get rich even if you get famous if you just went there for that if you just have that there is a high probability you will be miserable extremely unhappy and in fact the suicide rate even in those categories is very high money and fame don't give you happiness we need to teach people in every kind of context including companies including our families from young adults all the way to mature people that happiness is what we need to drive this should be the filter number one for everything we do for the way we treat our themes our families our friends our communities for anything we say and we do in any kind of context and platform what's up everyone just want to take a second thank the sponsor of today's episode brevo now brevo is a game-changing platform that has the potential to supercharge your business if you want to expand your customer base supercharger revenue who does it right brevo is the go-to platform brevo you used to know it is send in blue is designed to fully empower businesses to thrive with brevo you have all the tools you need in one easy to use platform to cultivate meaningful relationships and drive sustainable predictable growth brevo makes it simple and accessible to create engaging personalized email campaigns SMS or WhatsApp messages stunning landing pages automated workflows whether your goal is customer acquisition retention loyalty brevo checks all the boxes that has a toolkit you need to turn the one time browser into the longtime customer beyond just marketing brevo is a unified platform it allows you to streamline your business ops scheduling meetings managing tasks and projects all in one place it's an ideal growth tool for marketers SMBs and sales teams looking for one consolidated toolbox to scale their business it's trusted by over 500,000 businesses across 180 countries it includes leaders like Sadexo Louis Vuitton car 4 eBay Michelin they all rely on brevo's robust technology and extensive integrations to deliver unparalleled customer experiences reduce costs drive sales this is what you got to do get started with brevo for free by clicking our link below or going to brevo.com slash success and use the promo code success to save 50% on your first three months of the starter and business plan that's brevo.com slash success promo code success and sign up for free I think that's so smart and actually I think that you you came from Europe and you know that it's very different in Europe than it is in North America North America is very US is very bad for this so I actually think that the there's nothing positive about COVID at all but if you can say that there was one positive thing that came from it it's the fact that everybody's remote everybody has hopefully more options as to where they want to work and I think that that's forcing companies to be more aware of work-life balance and putting employees first because if I can work from home I can work from any company I'm no longer required to stay with a garbage company that treats me that treats me horribly I can go work for anybody and I think that that's actually a good thing because it'll force companies to be better that's my opinion I hope so I'm praying that's the case I look I I hope the certain companies and I look I I say this with sincerity PepsiCo I love the way they're embracing this I love the way Ramona Guarta the CEO of the company during COVID embrace human centricity if I didn't think this I wouldn't just mention PepsiCo and that would just you know go on with your thoughts but I believe in it so I hope the companies that PepsiCo there are a variety of their embrace this kind of idea and essentially can push the others that didn't embrace it yet to go in that direction the more companies embrace this idea of human centricity and work-life balance the more opportunities people will have to get out of the companies that don't and go to companies that instead do this for sure is today in this moment becoming a wonderful company advantage to find the best talents out there so offering something and this is is extremely important but I think is an ethical need is an ethical goal that every company should have again we invented the idea of work thousands of years ago in the prehistoric time to essentially delegate to others the creation of goods products services that we need a personally I could produce X I couldn't do more than that so I ask you my friend my family to do something else and together we can generate that for our community and then you scale it up and you started to create the cities organizer under the idea work and then companies and multinational corporations and brands but the initial idea was the one of using the practice of work first of all as an act of love creating something for myself and for others because of their needs to reach that happiness second as a tool to reach that happiness to fulfill needs from the basic one the way to the top of the muscle pyramid to help others then we forgot about this and we substitute the act of love and the interest of other human beings that you are serving through your products with the economic interest with the financial interest with the extraction of as much profit as possible out of the system and and we transform work in a driver of the economic profit and many people became cog in this machine and it's time we rebalance all of this and we really understand that work is a platform to reach happiness and when I talk about people in love with people that means that you need to think about your company your business as a platform to love other people so to create products and brands and experiences are really meaningful to them they're really adding value to them and then the first people people in love you need to think about your companies as entities that are there to make people happy including their employees including the people working those organizations and again I'm seeing this happening I'm seeing no matter the ecosystem we are in no matter you know how societies organize I see the conscious effort of companies to try to change things and the progress is they were doing and so I'm just positive also because if I look at the new generations especially if I look at the new generations these are people that are growing up without the idea of boundaries and staying against the order and country against the other country they're growing up with the idea that racism is not a good thing that you know we should be diverse simply because well when you go in the metaverse and you meet people they're from everywhere from around the world in fact if you grow in a city like New York or in a metropolis where you have a you're exposed to people different than you is more difficult to be racist to hate diversity simply because you understand that those people no matter the color of their skin gender their political orientation the sexual preferences they're like you they're exactly like you we're all the same and all different in the meantime who are the people that are afraid of diversity the people that are not exposed enough to the kind of diversity and so they're afraid of something that they don't they don't know and instead of opening their mind and trying to get out of their comfort zone and embrace something that is different they fear it and they want to push it away and then unfortunately sometimes some people leverage that fear to amplify that they even more and challenge it in wrong directions but probably the same people that are so racist if they were educated in a different way if they were raised in connection with people that are different from them they would think in a different way and so my hope is that those kids that eventually are not exposed physically to diversity of culture because they live in a remote place where there is not enough interaction with people different than you because of the digital world will be more exposed to that kind of diversity so the intro to your time when they will be the leaders of the world when they will be the leaders of companies diversity will be just a no brainer is part of who we are is the society we live in and mostly is the richness of who we are as human beings i love that i want to ask one more question i i didn't really want to pivot from this conversation but there's one more point that i need to take out from the book and and i think it's very valuable for people that are listening um design thinking it's a success in some companies but it isn't in others so if you're a business leader listening to this now and you've listened to everything you've spoken about in terms of how to bring design and how to properly understand design and how to apply innovation and human centricity why is it not working in some organizations what do you see is the biggest red flag look this is so important because at the certain points a variety of different agencies and consultant leaders were able to finally uh bring the attention of the world to this new methodology called design thinking and so a lot of companies got really excited by this they were like oh we need to investigate and and and the mistake that many of these companies made was to think that in design thinking as a methodology there was the solution so here they are and they bring in designers of design consultants often not even designers announced just consultants and they start to use design thinking as a tool that double diamond you know the diverging phase of ideation the converging phase of testing and learning and then you diverge again and converge again so the tool the design thinking tool and didn't realize that the main difference was not driven by the tool the tool is like a brush put a brush in the hands of Picasso or put a brush in the hands of your tax accountant and probably the results would be very different unless your tax accountant is the reincarnation of Picasso so it was that you're like Picasso a reincarnation of Picasso talking to me right now thank you stop Siri no I don't know she's still talking and and so companies spend so much time often in defining the best brush with the right Bristol and the right material and they spend millions of dollars with consultant to define the brush and they they think that with the brush they will create the best painting and when they don't get the best painting they blame the brush they get pissed about the brush brush why you didn't create what Picasso was able to do this is what happened to design thinking in many situations where they introduced the right methodologies but they didn't have the right thinkers and by the way design thinking should remind us that the thinking part is the key component of that and that's why years ago I came up with this list of the characteristics of the unicorns you know the ability to observe reality in a unique way with extreme curiosity the ability to extract learnings in a certain way the ability to prototype with courage to push things against roadblocks to change the game within an organization to bring orders with you with empathy not to be arrogant both in your observation of reality and admit that you don't know certain things but also in the way you interact with other functions design with marketing with R&D and so on so far the series of other characteristics that make all the different of the world between successful ideas and no successful ideas between generating the right insights translating them in the right products and the ability to take them to marketing successful way and not same tool same brush you can create the masterpiece of Picasso you can create a scribble or somebody that doesn't have that kind of talented by the way is a natural talent but is also talent nurtured by education like practice and maintenance I love that okay I'm gonna I'm gonna ask one final question to close it out but before before we close this out any last thoughts that you want to leave with the audience and also most importantly where do they connect with you on social media where do they go by your book anything else that you want to leave with us well you can follow me in instagram and link me there is not many other more opportunities so really easily and I post all the time every day so I'm very active there the book you can find it online Amazon bars and novels all the usual the human side of innovation yeah so anywhere okay perfect and and the message I really think that if we focus everything we do on this idea of human beings we can really create an amazing value for our companies all the business value I'm talking about should be though just the reason why the people around us are gonna do it but it shouldn't be the reason the drivers the reason the drivers should be the fact that we need to do it because our society needs it because if we invest in the human being in the way we can build a better world a more sustainable planet and a better society for all of us to leave it that's really the driver of everything okay so last question I ask everyone this you've had an incredible career now chief design officer at PepsiCo what does success mean for you in your life in your career been happy been happy been happy and never you know you may be happy the certain point in your life I'm so happy just that my daughter she's five months old congratulations wonderful family thank you I'm happy we what I'm doing this company I have a purpose in life I have the right work life balance but happiness you know can be there in a moment I can disappear in the future so happiness is a war you need to keep investing in it so success for me is to keep this level of happiness or even bigger for the rest of my life