Peter Fisk on Business Innovation

Peter Fisk  provides perspective on his creative approach for helping businesses be innovative, what it takes, pitfalls to avoid, keys to success, and his vision for the future of business.  

Peter is a global thought leader – author, futurist, speaker – whose career was forged in a superconductivity lab, accelerated by managing supersonic brands, shaped by working with some of the world’s best companies in Europe, North America, and Asia, evolved by leading a digital start-up, and formalized as CEO of the world’s largest marketing network.
He works with business leaders to reimagine their markets and strategies for a better future. He brings together the best in strategy and innovation, brand and customer thinking to drive smarter, sustainable growth.

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Music by Iain Mutch 

Transcript

Roy Sharples: 0:07

Hello, I'm Roy Sharples, and welcome to the unknown origins podcast. Why are you listening to this podcast? Are you an industry expert? Looking for insights? are you growing your career? Or are you a dear friend helping to spur your pal on? I created the unknown origins podcast, to have the most inspiring conversations with creative industry personalities and experts about entrepreneurship, pop culture, art, music and film and fashion. Every successful artist, entrepreneur and business needs to innovate continuously, or risk being surpassed by competition in the long run. The digital revolution has democratized information and accelerated the pace of change, that there's a world that is increasingly technology mediated, changing how we live, learn, work, and get things done. And it's blurred the boundaries between physical and virtual life, where the edges are no longer the boundaries. Peter Fisk is a global thought leader, author futurist speaker, whose career was forced in a superconductivity lab accelerated by managing supersonic brands. shaped by working with some of the world's best companies in Europe, North America and Asia, evolved by leading a digital startup and formalized, a CEO of the world's largest marketing network. He works with business leaders to reimagine their markets and strategies for a better future. He brings together the best in strategy and innovation brand and customer thinking, to drive smarter, sustainable growth. This new book, business recorded challenges leaders to have the courage to create a better future, harnessing the opportunities of a post pandemic world through seven shifts built on deep dives with 49 of the world's most inspiring business leaders today. It is shortlisted for CMI business book of the year 2021. And was reviewed by the Financial Times with Wow, the book you have to read now. Hello, and welcome, Peter. It's fantastic to be here, Roy. Thank you, sir. What inspired and attracted you to the innovation space in the first place? Peter?

Peter Fisk: 2:23

Wow, what a great question. Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso. You know, I spent my my early years doing something crazy, which was to study physics, I went to uni, I had no idea what I wanted to be or to do. And I was intrigued by the world, I thought, I'm quite good at this. And I wanted to learn all about how it works. And then I ended up living in Switzerland and going into a lab at CERN, going about two kilometers underground, putting some different carbon and barium based components into a test tube of liquid nitrogen every day, and waiting for something to happen. And it was the most boring thing in my life. And I eventually decided I did not want to be a physicist because it was just too slow. And the breakthroughs were too rare that I came out and I decided I wanted to be a marketer. And within the, within a few years, I was managing the Concorde. But so, so that was my early times. But Albert Einstein, really, he inspired me because he was he was really crap at mathematics. Actually, we always think of him as kind of like a logical person, but he was terrible at the analytical mathematical stuff. He went out walking in the Swiss Alps, near to where I was living, and he dreamed of new connections. And he, for example, he dreamed of how energy was connected to matter, E and M. And then he came home, and he had this wonderful wife, who was a mathematician, and she worked out that they were just c squared. And so together they came up with equals mc squared. So what I learned from that, was that, that it's not about the the logic, it's about the bigger picture at the creative connections, which you can make the intuitive things, which allow you to step forward, you can then find the C squared later on. So using a bit of left brain, and then apply your right brain to it. And a castle was actually the opposite. And so he, he, his dad was a mathematician at the University of Madrid. And he learned trigonometry, and trigonometry allowed him to, to to master perspective. And so his mathematical bringing allowed him to see new perspectives, which is why he trained with all these impressionist painters in Paris like to lose their track, but then he can have Like said, I want to do something different. And he created a new genre, Cubism. And he made the leap forward. Again, not just by measuring the perspectives itself or copying what other people have done by by doing things in a different way. And when I wrote my first book, which was called marketing genius back cool 15 years ago, it was inspired by Albert Einstein's left to right brain and Pablo Picasso's right to left brain. And it's how you connect the two together, it's how you connect, logic and intuition, or intelligence and imagination.

Roy Sharples: 5:37

Connecting diver ent and convergent think ng, to perceive patterns that re not obvious. And using diver ent thinking, to conceive creat ve and radical ideas, dream ng up what doesn't exist, and t en using convergent think ng to review and select the b st ideas to rapidly proto ype and construct the plan, and then bring that plant to li e. The other thing that came cross strongly, Peter was think ng as an outsider to get an ex ernal view of the chall nge, often, by accident disru tion can have a domino effec outside the intention, the i tentional target an area of ex ertise, for example, Apple s iTunes, became a multi edia content and hardware synch onization management syste, an e commerce platform. Origi ally, it was envisioned as a mus c player. And it ended up disru ting the music industry by provi ing consumers with the abili y to legally buy only the songs they wanted to hear at a signi icantly lower cost than on other platforms. And another examp e, is, most famously Coca Cola, which was first invented by th pharmacist, john Steve Pembe ton, the cure headaches befor becoming a household name. Anyway, it's ironic how peopl perceive Einstein, and Picas o, at a surface level, to be ma ters of something they actua ly weren't. Einstein was more reative than critical think ng. And because we're more scien ific, in his approach to artis ry, through the point you made round the appreciation and detai ed understanding of how geome ry worked, then applying that o the Cubist movement that he wa instrumental in estab ishing, I knew I'm over simpl fying this, though those who a hieved greatness do not fit a formula, or follow a struc ure, they follow their own path, and manifest their inner feeli gs about the world by promo ing their innate point of view nd unique talent by being able o see things that other peopl don't to look left when other are looking right, becau e they navigate the unkno n by making those unique conne tions that you mentioned Peter between disparate unive ses to set the path to the futur. What is your creative process? In terms of how do you conceive ideas? Do they follow the sky? Or do you dedicate time to ideate? And find that new ideas? And once you've formed those ideas, how do you then develop them into new concepts, and then bring them to actualization?

Peter Fisk: 8:26

I think there's probably three big things. First one is hypothesis was what was really interesting that you were talking there voice is you mentioned people think science as kind of quite a logical process. The biggest thing in science is that I was taught when I was learning that when I was learning science was that hypothesis is the starting point of any experiment, the purpose of experiment is to is to hypothesize something which you don't know. And then to test, whether it's success is real or not. And so when we come to any form of creativity, or business, even then being able to hypothesize something impossible to imagine a better future in some way, and then to test that is really the creative process. And so Sciences is actually a creative process. Not many people think of it like that, I think, is kind of depicted in white coats, but but but it's a creative process. And I think that the ability to imagine the future to articulate something which hasn't been proven, which which we're not sure about, and to have the courage to, to speak of what doesn't necessarily exist yet. And then to kind of see whether it works to see whether customers like it if you're selling it, to see how your critical audiences respond to it is incredibly important. So I think hypothesis is a first really important thing to jump forwards to leap pulled into the dark in some way. The second the second one is making connections. And you mentioned that and like Einstein and his wife, lead on Leonardo da Vinci. He said that the definition of ivax your knee, as he called it was was connections. And the more connections you could make, the more possibilities you had. And, you know, you look at people like ag lafley. In Procter and Gamble, he always said, you know, look for paradoxes in business things which seem opposites. Because if you can connect, connect things which don't seem connected or don't seem to be connectable, they seem opposites, that maybe you transmit news. So we can resolve a paradox, you can find that you can, you can, you can often create something new, you can innovate a new way of solving a customer's problem, if you want something fantastic quality, but you also want it there very low price, for example. So making new connections and new for me, when I've worked in business, for example, I mentioned that my early career was in the airline industry, one of the projects I worked on was, how do you get flatbeds into a very small space. And at the time, when I started, which was in the kind of late 80s, early 90s. In business class, and particularly first class flatbeds were like kind of having this huge gray armchair, and then trying to be climate, and it took half of the kind of cabin to get, you know, two or three of these chairs in. And what we did was we kind of thought, well, we the biggest challenge is to optimize the the square meters of the of the plane, how can you maximize that space within the plane. And we we looked around the world who is incredibly good at maximizing space, but to prevent, yeah, and, and you can guess what I'm going to say it was yacht designers. So we bought in a yacht designer to design, the first business class flatbed, which folded flat, completely flat, but then folded up again, into a proper seats. And yeah, that would be an example or something like, I worked in the funeral industry, here's a good one for you. I worked in the funeral industry. And, and I discovered that most people never kind of referred to me, they don't write well, they don't plan how they what's going to happen at a funeral. They prefer not to think about it. But if you go to somewhere like the Netherlands, you find that 85% of people have paid for the funeral by the time that they're 40. Wow. And and the reason why that happens is because the major providers of funerals are insurance companies, and insurance companies, deck you when you're young, with kind of mortgages, hope or your house, or to invest in a pension and to take out life insurance. And they say, when you take it taken out those kind of policies, perhaps when you're kind of a young professional, or you're getting married those kind of things, then Then why don't you take out a funeral funeral plan for a few dollars euros extra as well. And then you can plan the funeral which you want, you can plan how you're going to be remembered. And otherwise, you're going to lumber somebody else with cost of it. And what happens is that if you plan your own funeral, you spend about 10 times more than somebody else would. So so suddenly, by reframing the way things happen, you can kind of take a different perspective, and you kind of make something much more engaging and more important. And actually, if you look at funerals in the heartland, that they're fantastic events that are great parties, you're not there because you're deceased, but but everybody else is having a fantastic time, they've got the best DJ, they've got fireworks in the evening. Often you get cremated, because that's more environmentally efficient today. And so you put your ashes into a firework, and you blast off at the end of the date. And everybody says goodbye to you. So, so. So this whole idea of making new connections, seeing things in different ways, reframing the problem, I think, the real starting points of creativity. And once you've got those kinds of concepts in place, it is their process of diversion used and some of those tools, explore and shape your your ideas and your concepts, and then convert in luck. Sounds like the most obvious thing in the world. But, but it really means important, and it's amazing how many people do not give themselves time to divert, they want to jump to the solution incredibly quickly. You remember, you remember people gathering around the flip charts and they kind of just want to put the answers down on the flip chart. They give themselves 2020 minutes to solve the problem. You're actually they're probably not at the provide problem because they hadn't worked out actually what the real question is exactly. So really what you should add before you have a brainstorm of the answers, you'd have a brainstorm with the questions or some people call it a question burst. So what is the real problem we're trying to solve? Let's explore further. Let's explore it further. Let us spend about 30% of the time exploring the question exploring the problem exploring the possibilities before you start to shape the answers and think what might be true and then spend a bit more time connecting the best answers together to get more powerful concepts as a result of that. So your creativity, that creative process to me is ultimately diverged, shape and converge. But there's a lot more magic behind that exactly.

Roy Sharples: 15:36

And that magic can take planning. And although the creative process may seem magical, in part, especially what ideas can come from, and how they are brought to form and life, there are proven techniques, tools, methods, frameworks, and approaches, as you mentioned, their PR, to the art and science of applied creativity, and to make that happen. And as you so eloquently put, as well, Peter, is the creative process is about making new connections between past and present ideas and infusing think themes like economics, politics, social, cultural, technological perspectives, in parallel, that produce new business models, products, services, or experiences, and that the steps and the process involve discovering and developing insights, applying divergent thinking to analyze a problem, generate and evaluate ideas that become concepts, experimenting, prototyping, constructing, and then making that part plan of action and bringing it to form. Peter, what are the key skills needed to survive and thrive as an innovator?

Peter Fisk: 16:49

I wrote my most recent book, called business with coded and I went around 50 business leaders, and I started with a shortlist of about about 300 people who I wanted to interview. And eventually I got it down to 50 of people who I really wanted to tell the stories of. And some of them were big companies, similar with small companies, and some of them were Asian or Latin American. Some of them were in developed markets Europe in America. And I talked to these people, the biggest thing which struck me was that the people who are being most successful right now are the most curious. Yeah. And then most interested in the future, they ask the most questions. They're curious about me. They're curious about what I've seen. They're curious about their world. They're curious about what their people think they are curious about what might happen next. And if you look at most business leaders, 1010 years ago, they were probably obsessed about just making things happen. They were obsessed about today's business efficiency, delivery, and performance. And they were really curious. And I think so. So curious. Curiosity is become incredibly important because we live in this world where we're facing uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity constantly. And it's, you know, it's not going to go away. And so being interested in what's going to happen next, and where you could go, is really important. You could say, you know, curious is one of five C's, let me get this right. So curious is first the customer customers The second key to customer anticipation, not just what the customers want today? What do they want next? context framing is the third frames of context, I think, is really important. So what is the frame by which you're going to put it in? So like funerals, instead of thinking them as a negative experience? How can you think of them as a positive celebration? creative, creative fusions could have fusions I think, is the 40. And the fallacy is another really important one courage. It's the courage to step up the courage to dare to do is have the courage to say something which nobody said before the courage to try something which you did, or whether it's been a work in art and the courage to kind of stand up and explain that to the people and to encourage them to follow you. So I think curiosity and courage are probably the two, which I think are most important if you want to survive and thrive. As a business in that innovated today.

Roy Sharples: 19:19

Spot on Peter. Being a lifelong student, by staying curious and being open minded, and always learning and questioning and analyzing and providing an alternative in search of authentic and new as you were, particularly in this PR, Mohammed Ali came to mind. And he was the ultimate beacon and signpost for change who shook society up especially in America during the Civil Rights Movement and rejecting what he termed his slave named Cassius Clay, converting to Islam and refusing military service to go to war with Vietnam, a sacrifice that cost him the heavyweight champion. ship and have banned from boxing ring at the pinnacle of his career. And this was during a conservative time in history. And these were courageous actions to take a moral stand that helped push society forward. And hey, even after all these organs had stopped, laid to rest on his deathbed, his heart continued to beat for another 30 minutes, which is scientifically unheard of, and a further justification that the heart is the soul. As you reflect, what are the lessons learned in terms of the pitfalls to avoid, and the keys to success that you can share with aspiring business innovators?

Peter Fisk: 20:43

I would come back to this idea of connections. Yeah. So, you know, we talked about Leonardo da Vinci, we talked about the idea of connections are very important. The thing I've seen more in COVID, Jr. Last 18 months, with companies who have thrived more than anybody else, other companies who have connected, I don't just mean connected in terms of moving online and hybrid businesses and Omni channels via cancer. I mean, connected ideas. If you look at the most successful businesses in market capitalization growth, so I'm getting financial here, but but the ones who are really successful on the stock markets over the last 18 months, they're companies who connected ideas. So you know, it could be Tesla. So Tesla connects the idea of mobility and energy as two big concept, it actually describes itself its purpose statement, as accelerating the world's transition to clean energy, and makes more money out of its battery business than its automotive business. So batteries for storage of wind and solar power. So if you look in Asia, some of the most interesting companies are companies like kindo. Do. You know that's the my favorite retailer at the moment, but door door is a retailer by which you start off online, and you connect on social media with your friends, you play a game or two with your friends, the games you play, will give you discounts in the stores, you go to the stores, you go with your friends, because they've won, when discount or points will as well, you browse around the stores, you start to multiply the number of people who see it because you can add them to your team and you can share the discount with other people as well. And it becomes a completely immersive experience. If you look at fortnight. eSports is now the biggest sport in sports in the world. eSports has now become the largest platform for lodging music in the world. So if you look at somebody like Travis Scott, you know, he launched his latest music on fortnight during lockdown. And so I don't think people are necessarily going to go back to physical kind of rock concert or realism, the traditional way it will the world still but but some experiences. But I think a lot of the kind of the connecting with people, people in connect with them where they hang out today. And most people hang out in new types of social spaces or gain gamified spaces. And so connecting ideas of all these different types, connecting industries, connecting different platforms connecting different types of entertainment are very important. Then inside your organization or your team of people be in terms of your use. If you're making music, or B you're driving innovation in the company. It's about connecting people in how can you bring interesting people together, look at how many musicians launched launched, what's new music, teaching somebody? Yes. Because when they when they feature somebody, it gives it a twist. It's not their normal stuff it gives it reaches a new audience, but using the halo brand of somebody else at the same time. So it's almost like co branding, we'd call it as marketers, but it's reaching new audiences. And it's adding to what you already got. And I think the third one is really connecting organizations. So that might be connecting startups together. It might be connecting big and small companies together so that they have the benefits of scale, but they also have the benefits of agility and freshness. So how do you connect organizations of all different types together as ecosystem so in order to go further, but also to add value into our active topic, more eclectic kind of content and creativity at the same time,

Roy Sharples: 24:29

Manifesting what you feel inside and see from the things you observe in everyday life and making connections from past to present and across multiple disciplines and domains, regardless of how abstract they may appear first, where you end up crystallizing the solution to a problem to then light the way into the future. Peter, tilting forward, what's your vision for the future of business?

Peter Fisk: 24:57

I want business to be the force Solve the biggest problems on Earth, you know, we can we can sit around and we can wait for politicians, we could wait for the good people in NGOs or we can do something about it. And whether it's whether it's social inequality, whether it's economic inequality, whether it's climate change, whether it be plastics, polluting our oceans, your all of these kind of big challenges. You we can, we can wait and we can try to solve them in organizational bureaucratic ways, which leads institution to, or we can use the power of brands, use the power of consumers use the power of business assets, think about how many people work in companies think about how many people touch a brand, Unilever was telling me that 3 billion people touch their brands every day. Now imagine, not just if you've got those 3 billion people touching the brand, but what have you connected those 3 billion people together as a network. So it's not just connecting them with Unilever, it's connecting them with each other. And what if Unilever could create their best shampoos or their their food products or whatever it might be, in a way, which could enable these people to come together to do more good together. And I think that's when you start to get a exponential impact from business. So businesses as platforms to good we talk a lot about purpose and profit today, for purpose, for profit, more enlightened way of making money. Today, I think what you need to add to that is you need to add passion. So that people really want to do that. And you need to add progress so that it moves the world forward in some positive way. So purpose and profit, but passion and progress as well. And that's what I think, really drives business. You know, a lot of the fundamental basics is nothing wrong with a lot of the businesses and the clients, which we have, we still want shampoo, we still want to buy frozen pizza or whatever it might be. But at the same time, the ways in which we consume things, the ways in which we aspire for things, the ways in which we kind of work together as consumers and makers of those things. We could be more Far, far more effective than we are today. And I think that's my vision for business would be it would be a platform that is the force but a platform for good.

Roy Sharples: 27:31

Just how soon is the future? One thing for sure is the future is unwritten. Everything is possible. You have been listening to the Unknown Origins podcast. Please follow, subscribe, rate and review us. For more information go to unknownorigins.com Thank you for listening!