The pace of business change is continuing to accelerate. According to a recent McKinsey Global Survey, business leaders expect that by 2026, half of their companies’ revenues will come from products, services, or businesses that haven’t been invented yet. Innovation is critical for companies to survive and thrive. So how can employers ensure they have talent strategies in place to have the right skills to create and drive new ideas forward, and could innovation be the catalyst that accelerates skills-based hiring?
My guest this week is Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo’s first ever Chief Design Officer and author of a new book on people-centric innovation. In the book, Mauro does a deep dive into the skills, culture and philosophy companies need to innovate. It was brilliant to hear his views on what employers need to do to attract, retain and develop people with the diverse skills required for effective innovation.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The role of Chief Design Officer at Pepsico
• How business cultures have changed
• Designing the future with human-centric design
• The 24 skills needed for innovation and the importance of identifying and developing them in leaders
• Building a culture of innovation
• Process versus people
• The power of kindness, optimism and curiosity
• The relationship between kindness and productivity
• Recognising and recruiting innovators
• Redesigning the recruiting process
• What does the future look like?
Mauro’s book – The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:17]:
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 484 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The pace of business change is continuing to accelerate. According to a recent McKinsey Global survey, business leaders expect that by 2026, half of their company’s revenues will come from products, services or businesses that haven’t yet been invented. Innovation is critical for companies to survive and thrive. So how can employers ensure they have talent strategies in place to have the right skills to create and drive new ideas forward? And could innovation be the catalyst that accelerates skills based hiring? My guest this week is Mauro Pacini, PepsiCo’s first ever chief design Officer and author of a new book on people centric Innovation. In the book, Mauro does a deep dive into the skills, culture and philosophy companies need to innovate. It was brilliant to hear his views on what employers need to do to attract, retain and develop people with a diverse skills required for effective innovation. Hi Mauro and welcome to the podcast.
Mauro Porcini [00:01:36]:
It’s a pleasure to be here with you.
Matt Alder [00:01:38]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do.
Mauro Porcini [00:01:45]:
I am the Chief Design Officer of PepsiCo. I’m the author of a book. The title is the Human side of Innovation, the Power of People in Love with People. And my mission in life is the one of driving design and design thinking as a way to build value for companies, but mostly once again for people, society and the world out there.
Matt Alder [00:02:10]:
Fantastic stuff. Really want to talk more about your book, but before you do, I suppose by way of background, tell us a little bit about yourself and also a little bit about your work at PepsiCo.
Mauro Porcini [00:02:22]:
Well, as you probably can hear from my accent, I am not American even though I’m an American citizen right now. But I am Italian. I was born there and I grew there from a family. Put two things in front of anything else that prioritized two things in life when they were growing me. One is the idea of culture, knowing things, knowledge, the dream. One of the two dreams they had for me was to become a professor university because I would invest all my life in growing that knowledge and the culture. And the second value was the idea of kindness, being a good person. And indeed the other dream, the most important dream that they have for me was for me to become a priest because that’s what was embodying for them, that idea of kindness and being good to others. And then I grew up looking at them, witnessing them every day, following their love, their passion. And in particular, my father was an architect and a high school professor but he would spend every single day painting and sketching and drawing. And my mother was working in finance but she really didn’t like the work. And she would spend every day writing something, poems and thoughts in her diary. And over the years they published the self published eight books just for themselves, not with intent of selling or anything. And so I mentioned these three things because they’ve been so important for me to become who I am today. This idea of kindness, this idea of culture and learning all your life and then this idea of doing what you love, following your passion. And ideally that that was my case is the case for me. Transforming what you love also in your job. It was not the case of for my parents. And that’s inspiring as well because no matter their jobs, they found a way to carve out time for what they really loved. I was fortunate enough to combine the two things in what I do today.
Matt Alder [00:04:26]:
And tell us a bit more about what you do at the moment.
Mauro Porcini [00:04:29]:
Well, I work three dimensions of design for the PepsiCo Corporation. The first one is designing the identity holder brands we have in the portfolios from Pepsi to lay’s to Quaker and many, many more we have in in our portfolio. The second is leveraging design thinking to build experiences around those brands. Essentially is a new way to build brands in this global social media driven high tech society we live in. And so this goes from collaborations in the fashion world between Pepsi and the Square, Pepsi and Puma, Nike and Gatorade brand and many others, all the way to building restaurants in New York inspired by the world of colas or experiences in the fashion world during, you know, a fashion week in Shanghai and many, many others. Essentially is, is the idea of engaging with people so much, creating so much excitement in a meaningful, relevant way for them that they’re gonna take out their phone, take pictures, watch videos and share them with the world, becoming generators of content for us and building a completely different kind of connection with our brands that is based on love and, and, and emotional loyalty versus simple satisfaction for a need that we fulfill through our products and brands. And then the third dimension is thinking about the future. Where the world is going, where society is going, where we will all be in 20 years, in 30 years, and then going back to today and try to understand how to prepare the company but mostly the industry for the future. This is where we have products like Gatorade, GX wearable technologies that you put on your skin. Like a smart patch that you put on your skin to measure your sweat in the composition. And send and then sending information to an app that suggests you the kind of concentrate of Gatorade that you need. And then you have a smart bottle, sustainable. You fill with water, you put your pod, you get your perfect intake, what you need, what your body needs and the bottle monitor everything you’re drinking and send back the information to an app. This is an example of four pillars of innovation that we are investing on that are common also to many other industries. Sustainability, health and wellness. Personalization enabled by tech.
Matt Alder [00:07:04]:
Amazing stuff. And I know that these are some of the themes that you pick up in the book. I know it’s been recently published. Tell us more about the book and its core message.
Mauro Porcini [00:07:13]:
Well, there are two main messages in the book. The first part of the book talks about how the world is changing under the winds of globalization, new technologies, digitization. So what we’re observing every day, and now all these changes are forcing companies to, to build brands in very different ways. We live in a moment in which it’s so important to put people, the people we serve. What some companies call consumers is a word that I don’t particularly like. But putting people before anything else, before the goal of increasing your market share, of generating more revenues or increasing profitability, or before the goal of leveraging a patent or a technology that could really disrupt the market, all of this is a thinking that is not working in this new world as it used to be for a variety of different reasons. So in the book, I talk about how everything is changing and you need to refocus all your efforts on what, what we call human centricity, putting people before anything else. What, what that means is that you want to hire people that come to the company thinking, wow, this company is a platform to create something amazing for people out there, amazing products and services and brands versus people that come to your company thinking, well, I’m gonna grow this company from A to B and I’m gonna look at the product as one of the levers for the growth. But if I grow the business leveraging other levers, distribution, pricing and so on, so forth, I can still win, I can still become an amazing business leader, I can still do good for, for this company and grow well, is a slightly different culture. The first one is a culture of individuals that put other individuals before anything else, thinking, I’m going to generate business value for the company if I generate human value first. The latter culture instead is I’m going to generate business value for the company. And if I can generate also human value first for people, that’s a great added value to what I do. This kind of culture doesn’t work anymore in the world we live in today. That’s the first part of the book with all the reasons why it doesn’t work. The second part talks about the fact that, well, once you understand that and you want to introduce this idea of human centricity and you start to introduce all the tools, the methodologies, the ways of working. For instance, in my world is the world of design thinking. You introduce this idea of design thinking within your company. Well, that’s what I did for many, many years in my previous life in 3M before arriving to Pepsi in the tech company from Minnesota. You do all of this. At a certain point you realize that those tools, those methodologies, what you buy from this consultant, pay millions and millions of dollars, you know, for them to sell you those tools and methodologies is not enough. It’s just not enough. I was looking at all the projects I was running with this design driven approach and some of them were doing very well and many others were failing. And over the years I came to a realization that it’s pretty obvious now, I’m gonna say, you know, in this podcast, but so many times we don’t talk about these in companies. The realization was that what was really making the difference in each of these problems, product projects, was the people behind the tools and the methodologies. And yet this company invest in these ways of working tools, methodologies, and now data and all these different kind of additional tools that technology is giving us. And when things don’t work in the proper way, very rarely they focus on who was the person behind that tool and the collective people behind the tool in the team, how they think, do they have the right ability to analyze those data with the right empathy, the right sensitivity? Did they have the right ability to push things through the system? The right resilience, the right courage, the right intuition, the right vision, the right kindness and ability to connect with others, to bring everybody with them. A series of skills, maybe the book. I talk about 24 different skills of these incredible leaders that I call the unicorns that are so important. They literally made all the difference of the world in what we’re able to do with design in PepsiCo in 3M. And yet we’re not scientific in, in, in identifying them, growing them, filtering them. And some are more obvious, some are less obvious. If we can talk with, if you want, we can talk more about some of these characteristics. Some are really unexpected in this working environment and are actually the one that made the biggest difference in what we did with design in these companies.
Matt Alder [00:12:11]:
Absolutely. Really want to dig into that because I think it’s absolutely fascinating. I know it will be incredibly interesting to everyone listening. Just before we do though, I suppose just a bit more about the culture of organizations. So you talk about a culture of innovation and you were sort of talking a little bit about that there. Tell us a little bit more about that and how it can change an organization.
Mauro Porcini [00:12:33]:
Well, again, I study a school first and then I heard from so many consultants when I joined these companies that to drive innovation you need specific methodologies. I’ll give you an example of one of them. The double diamond of design thinking. You’re right. You observe the people out there and then you start to create a series of, of hypothesis. So the first phase is divergent. You just fantasize, essentially. You create concepts and, and then once you start to have a few, you start to test them. You talk again with people and then you start to converge. When you arrive to specific, more focused solutions, you diverge again and then you converge again. And, and this is why you create this diable diamond shape. And this is how it’s called, that process. So you’re like, okay, great, I’m gonna do that and I’m gonna put people in a team with cross functional that are, that have different kind of background. So I’m gonna put designers, marketers, R and D, organization engineers, scientists and so on, so forth. And then you start this process. And for so many years, so many companies believed that by applying that kind of process, you will solve the problems of your company. That process will really make the difference. And when I witnessed this happening so many times when the process didn’t work, instead of trying to understand if there are at the right people behind the process, they started to blame the process. Design thinking is not working. You see, we tried it here in these projects, but it’s not working. And the reality is that it was all about the people you are assigning to the specific project with that process. You could see also I remember hiring so many big design firm and innovation firm. They sell you the methodologies, the ways of working. And then the reality is that depending on what people were assigned to the specific project, the output was completely different. And so that’s when the realization came that you needed to really understand who are the people that work on the process, on the project. And you need to be really strategic in the way you identify them, you grow them inside your organizations.
Matt Alder [00:15:00]:
So let’s talk about that and talk about the people. So you talk about these unicorns. How do we define that? What are some of the skills that are really important here?
Mauro Porcini [00:15:09]:
Well, some of them are more obvious. For instance, the ability to dream, to think big. We are all born with that ability. As children we dream by definition, we fantasize and then society try to stop us, try to normalize us, tell us that dreaming is childish. And yet we try to preserve that ability to dream. We go to school, we get out of school, we go to these companies. And when we enter the company companies, we still think that we can change things. And then people come to us and they’re like, no, you can’t. Who do you think you are? Are you so arrogant to think you can change this company, this industry, this product, this society? This is what usually we face. We, we live in a society that prefer the norm, the standard, because it’s more controllable, is more stable than people that go in all kinds of direction. Dreaming too much. So the ability to dream is very, very important if you want to change things, but it’s not enough. You have a few people that are able to dream, but then you also need to be able to make things happen, to land things. And landing things means also to be able to take compromises, to take trade offs, understanding that you are taking them, still progressing towards the tree, understanding how to balance the long term vision with the day to day kind of activities. Now something like this is not happening that much. Many times we have leaders in key positions that don’t have that kind of ability to dream. Or we have performance reviews that are not focused on rewarding the ability of these people to think big. There is a beautiful article on Fortune in these days that talks about performance reviews in corporations and challenge their ability to actually incentivize people. And they mentioned researchers actually talk about the fact that some of these performance reviews are demotivating even the people impacted by them. And one of the questions that they ask is should we focus on different kind of values? As the one that I just mentioned, that ability to create a vision for the team on top of the, you know, results that you bring in the short term. But how do we reward people for thinking big, to prepare the company for results that will come out of the performance review cycle in two years, in three years, in four years. So all of this is, is not discussed enough inside this organization and often it’s not happening. And when you have these visionary people is because they want, want to be visionary. So I’m not taking that for granted, but at least when you talk about leadership, people talk about this. There are other characteristics that people don’t talk too much when we talk about innovation and changing the game, for instance, the power of kindness, the power of optimism, the power of curiosity. And they are so important to build the right teams that can really navigate not just the more traditional functional innovation capability of the company, but in general, the fact that we live in a world, we live in a society where we need to innovate, we need to flex and change and adapt because things are moving around us at the speed of light and changing at the speed of light. And so no matter what you do, what is your job, the age in which you go to school, you learn something and you do that for the rest of your life is gone. So you need to innovate even on what you do as yourself, you know, as a talent within this organization, what you do as a team, what you do as a company. And so these abilities are important. Let’s start with curiosity, for instance. Curiosity is what drives you to see life as a never ending opportunity for learning. The curious people doesn’t rely on their bosses, their companies to give them the tools to learn. The curious people understand that there are so many tools out there to grow and learn. They see their colleagues in other functions, the colleagues in design, in marketing, in, in R D, as mentors, as professors, as gates to learn, you know, in that discipline. And then they read books, they travel, they see anything as an opportunity to grow. They see different people as a chance to learn new things. They, curious people, love diversity by definition because they know that in diversity there is the previous, the precious gift of knowledge. In diversity there is the precious gift of knowledge because you know that somebody with a different kind of background, with different biases even from yours, will have a different perspective on things. And innovation is all about looking at something with that everybody look at every day. And then one day for the first time changes slightly perspective and seeing something that nobody ever saw before. This is where innovation starts from and connecting with others through dialogue, respectful dialogue, reading, traveling in a curious way is so, so important. And yet we see multiple people in key positions in these organizations that are not curious at all. They go to work, maybe they have great technical skills, but then they have zero interest in learning in, in connecting with others and growing intellectually and culturally. Another characteristic that I mentioned is optimism. If you try to change things, if you try to drive innovation in These organizations, in everything you do do, by definition, you’re gonna face roadblocks all the time. And if you’re not optimistic, sooner or later you will give up because the burden is too much. But if you’re an optimistic person, then by definition, you will keep going on and on and on. Now, optimism, as all the other traits of the unicorns, is partially something you’re born with, but then it’s something also you can nurture, you can grow. For instance, a technique that I use when I face a very big problem, and it’s so difficult to go on, I try to step. To step back, and I try to put things in perspective. I remember, first of all, the dream. The dream is so important to keep going in the moments of difficulty. And then I look back and I remember, and I try to focus on the progress I did, because in the moment of difficulty, you just see the challenge and you don’t remember. Actually, you did so many positive things to get where you are, you know, in that moment. On top of it, I try to remember other moments of difficulty in the past that actually helped me so much to become a better leader, a better person, or eventually even to advance certain ideas in the organization. And so I try to understand that that moment of difficulty is just a step towards my dream and actually is a step that could give me a lot of energy and a lot of awareness in that journey and finally to close the power of kindness that is so, so important. And yet we go often to these companies and we hear that kindness is weakness. Often, you know, is a vulnerability. And the reality is that kindness is so powerful to connect people one with the other. Let’s take a few examples. If you go to your work, to your company, and you’re surrounded by people that are not nice to you, that are not kind to you, what do you do? Well, you go to your meetings, you do your meetings, and then you rush out of the office as fast as possible because you don’t want to spend time with these negative people. But if you are, if you love the people around you, if you care about them and they care about you, what do you do? Well, probably you’re gonna spend time with them, maybe a meal, maybe a drink here and there. And in that quality time, that’s when you build those unbelievable bonds and synergy that helps you solving problems, when these problems will arise in your projects, in your business, also in your private life, because you will bring those problems to work. Or if you have people surrounding you that you don’t trust, they’re not kind to you. That could betray you any moment. What you’re going to do? Well, you’re gonna do a series of activities to protect yourself from them, to protect yourself from any kind of potential betrayal they could do to you and your team. This series of activities are not necessary to the company. They are redundant by definition. Multiply all those activities for the number of people of your company. In our case, it’s hundreds of thousands of people. And understand the level of lack of productivity totally hidden, totally invisible inside these organizations. And yet when we talk about productivity, we talk about optimizing processes, cutting costs, eventually laying off people. And very rarely we talk about productivity and increasing productivity by investing in kindness. There are many other examples I make in the book. But this gives you the idea there are so many different traits that often we don’t focus enough on that make the difference between an effective team able to drive innovation in everything they do versus things that are by far less effective and less successful at the end.
Matt Alder [00:24:30]:
I mean, there is some amazing points in there and really, really, really fascinating stuff. I suppose the question would be how can organizations sort of identify and recruit these types of people into their business? Because you know, there are lots of things that you’re describing there that wouldn’t be part of the current sort of recruitment process that that many companies have. How should companies get these types of people into their business?
Mauro Porcini [00:24:59]:
Look, I, if somebody has a good, good answer to that, please contact me and let me know because I think it’s so difficult is one of the biggest challenges of my job up. And the answer is that in that one hour interview is difficult to identify the right people. But first of all, let’s start with full awareness about what are the skills. Often we’re not even aware. So we don’t look for kind people, for curious people, for optimistic people. So first, full awareness and try to ask a series of questions, questions to probe a little bit how they are in their life in general. The second thing I do, I usually have people in my team interviewing these candidates and I have specific people with very different backgrounds from one another interviewing these candidates. So that we can all focus on different areas, different skills of these unicorns and we can help each each other. Assessing the candidate. 360 degrees. No matter this, we often make mistakes is part of the game. And so for me the most powerful thing to do over the years has been something else complementary to this. You need people to embody those characteristics. If you work in hr, identify these unicorns. They want to really embody all this, as many of these characteristics as possible and make sure that you tell their stories, that they tell their stories. And essentially now, if I go back to my experience, I don’t want to lecture anybody. This is literally me and my experience, and this is what I’m sharing in the book. What I did over the years is to first identify the characteristics because I realized that the technical skills and few other things were not enough. I gave them to HR and to the recruiters to help me finding those talents. But right away I published them in a paper for the Design Management Institute Review. And then right away I started to use them as the topic of speeches I will do in conferences all around the world. And then they were the topic and theme of multiple interviews. So what I was trying to do was to put the message out there so that people interested to join, join our teams in 3M and then later on in PepsiCo would use those traits as filters to understand if they were the right feed or not. And I would reference them in interviews and in conversations with people. So that, again, communicating that to these people was part of the recruiting strategy. But then, you know, you hire a certain number of people, but then you have all the other people inside your company. And that’s another thing. There are other things that you can do within the company. If you have as many people as possible that embody those kind of characteristics and talk about them and storytelling them, they’re gonna essentially create a halo effect. They’re gonna diffuse those kind of values, that kind of culture inside the organization, especially if they’re leaders hiring more people like them. Then we start to create groups, collectives of people with those kind of characteristics. And then we start to spread like fire inside the organization.
Matt Alder [00:28:24]:
Absolutely. And so as a final question, and I suppose also by way of, you know, summary, in terms of what we’ve been talking about, obviously we’re a very disruptive point when it comes to work and business at the moment. What do you hope the future looks like? You sort of talked about building, you know, for a future in two years, three years, five years. What do you hope that future looks like?
Mauro Porcini [00:28:47]:
Well, I hope and I’m doing everything I can in my, you know, my little scale to make sure that happiness is at the center of everything we do in life and therefore also at work. We spend the vast majority of our life or our week or months and years at work. And so it’s so important that we are happy, happy in that environment. It is so important for leaders and companies to drive that happiness before Anything else. And then these happy people should try to drive through what they do, products, brands, services, happiness for the world out there. This is, you know, the subtitle of the book is People in Love with People. The power of people in love with people. Who are these people they love? The second set of people I talk about is this idea of human centricity. You want to focus, you want to love the people you serve. The first set of people I talked about, the people loving are the innovators, entrepreneurs, the employees of your companies. The love synthesize it all is the care that you have for the people you’re serving through your products, services, experiences and brands to your business in general. You want to care about them, you want to create real value for them. The second dimension is the love that you have for the people around you. You want to take people with you in this journey. You want to excite them, you want to, you want to, you want to be fair to them, you want to be kind to them. And if you do all of this, they will be happy and they will create so much positive energy to drive the company forward. Lead by compassion and kindness and don’t lead by fear. That’s so important today is a major shift that we need to embrace in this new society. And then finally the third dimension of love is the love that you have for what you do. We started this conversation today talking about, this is the example that my parents gave me, that passion to do something no matter what. You just love it and you do it. And, and we have so many studies starting for instance from this beautiful book of emotion of Daniel Goldman on emotional intelligence, you know, a pillar of the world of emotional intelligence published many years ago that talks about how people that love what they do perform by far better than many others. So as individuals, let’s think about this. Do we love what we’re doing and do we love the people surrounding us? And are we really creating value for other people as well while doing all of this? If any of this question, the answer is no, then maybe it’s time to change things. And as business leaders, HR leaders, and in general leaders of any kind of organization and community, are we driving this idea of love and happiness inside our organizations? The positive news that this is not something ethical to have and good to have in our organization, that should be enough to take the decision. But often it’s not the positive news and is the key message of the book that in this new world we live in, hyper competitive, global, digital and technological love in these three dimensions can make your company more effective, more efficient, more productive, and generate higher quality and therefore better growth in the long run.
Matt Alder [00:32:14]:
Mauro, thank you very much for talking to me.
Mauro Porcini [00:32:17]:
Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:32:20]:
My thanks to Mauro. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruiting future.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the monthly newsletter Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
