Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Why the Best Products Are Built on Empathy Not Data | Mauro Porcini - First CDO of PepsiCo, 3M & Samsung

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

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