CHAPTER 6

A NEW HUMANISM

We have seen that society is changing, driven forward by new technologies, globalization, and the digital world. Many of the old barriers protecting the generalized mediocrity that we have witnessed up until today in the mass market and in society are gradually crumbling away. We are entering into a world where we have to innovate as never before because there is no alternative, no way out: either you innovate, or someone else will in your place. And that someone else, sooner or later, will also take your place. We are entering an age of innovation—the age of excellence.

We went on to analyze and decipher a new way of doing innovation, whether of products or brands, that places the human being at the center of everything—a human-centered and humanistic way, because that’s the only way to innovate successfully in the age of excellence. I shared with you the advantages of this new approach through a series of personal stories, and I have tried to describe some of the universal principles of this way of working.

At this point, if you are interested in diving deeper into the details of the processes, frameworks, and tools of this design-driven and human-centered approach to innovation, you will find a vast literature that deals with this topic. Shelves of books have been written on these details; there is a world of content digitally distilled from conference stages and university classrooms. This content represents the results of the individual reflections of experts, theorists, and practitioners, as well as the output of their endless debates. Indeed, when we speak about innovation, the majority of the discussion crystallizes around precisely these details: the processes, frameworks, and tools. And often—far too often—the discussion stops right there. The fundamental element, the one that really makes all the difference, the variable that is extraordinarily indispensable for the success of any given project, is often neither mentioned, analyzed, deciphered, nor celebrated.

We talk about processes, frameworks, and tools, and then in the end we don’t talk about her, about him, about the human beings whom those processes, frameworks, and tools are meant to manage, interpret, and utilize. Or, at least, when we discuss the topic of innovation, we don’t talk about these human beings enough.

We Are Innovation

The kind of human being cited in the literature of innovation is usually the object of the innovation process, a target to be studied, dissected, examined under a microscope, and displayed for research purposes. No doubt anthropological and ethnographic approaches to innovation are fundamental. And experts the world over stress this focus on the human being constantly, in the pages of their textbooks or in the meeting rooms of the companies that invest in their services. As highly paid consultants, they repeat to these companies the same thing, over and over again: “Get out of this meeting room and go out there, into the world. Get to know the people who buy and use your products; meet your users, talk to them. Let me show you the process to do this.”

But there is another kind of human being who is usually omitted from the cultural debates about innovation as expounded by experts and theoreticians, as well as in practical and strategic discussions in the meeting rooms of companies big and small. I mean the kind of human being who is effectively in charge of coming up with new ideas, who is supposed to observe, analyze, think, prototype, and produce: the human entrepreneur, the innovator, the dreamer, the designer, the marketer, the researcher. And then there is the human being who has to sponsor the approach, fund it, build it, lead it, inspire it. These human beings are the CEOs, the business leaders, the investors and shareholders. And, finally, there are those human beings who are in some way, however marginally, in contact with the innovation processes, who collide and interact with these processes, sometimes facilitating them and sometimes even blocking them.

What we don’t talk about often enough are the characteristics of all these people—how they think, act, and make decisions; the dynamics of their interactions, the expressions of their mindsets, the consequences of their collective cultural habits, which are in direct relationship with an organization’s ability to effectively innovate. And yet, this is the key variable for the success of any given project. Too many books, companies, agencies, universities, and leaders treat innovation exclusively as a process. But a process is only a tool, and a tool without a human being to use it is simply meaningless. A tool will never produce innovation; it is the human being who does so, by posing the right questions; finding intelligent answers; generating creative connections; transforming information and intuitions into concepts, prototypes, and products; taking the initiative; running risks, with optimism and courage, with passion and resilience.

A tool is like a brush: put it in Picasso’s hands and then put it in the hands of your tax adviser, and the results will be dramatically different—at least, so long as your tax adviser is not the reincarnation of Picasso. A brush is necessary to be able to paint, just as the canvas and colors are, but all these are simply instruments: it’s the artist’s talent that makes the difference. Nevertheless, there are institutions that pay millions of dollars to hire consultants with the goal of making a better brush for the organization, with the finest wood and the very best bristles, made from the pelts of badgers, mongoose, squirrels; conical, flat, forked, jagged, fanned; usually sourced at prohibitive prices. Time and capital are invested in discussions, presentations, projections, and predictions. And then they forget to speak about Picasso, how he thinks, how he sees the world, how he holds the brush, how he finds inspiration, how he deals with the errors on his canvas, how he engages in a dialogue with the world around him, how he analyzes his subject, how he expresses himself, why he does all of this and more. In many organizations, paradoxically, the conviction is that it is much more difficult to produce the right kind of brush than to find, train, lead, inspire, and retain the Picassos.

That’s what has happened in recent years to processes such as the celebrated “design thinking,” beloved by so many and rejected by others, a source of huge commercial success for some and a horrendous failure for others. Those who have attacked design thinking have simply been taking aim at the brush. In truth, design thinking was a good brush, for the most part. What needed first to be understood and eventually to be criticized or celebrated was, instead, the way that the brush was being used in each individual project and company. Was there a Picasso behind the brush, or simply an accountant who had taken up painting as a hobby?

To be clear, most of the enterprises out there today are not clueless, and their human resources departments have brilliant minds and important resources, dedicated to deciphering the ideal leadership values, the characteristics of the best innovators, and the culture of a winning organization. But then, when business leaders begin to discuss the strategies necessary to drive forward more radical innovation projects, they turn almost by default to the familiar and stable ground of tools and processes, usually introducing into those processes any talented people who have demonstrated some kind of merit over their professional careers. And most of the time, these talented people have a homogeneous, similar background: each has an MBA, a Type A personality, degrees from top schools, ambition, an impressive analytical ability, a great understanding of processes and data, and a talent for numbers. The basic idea is that if this kind of person has had success in previous roles and is smart and motivated enough, then the person will also understand how to deal with this new challenge called innovation. But frequently this simply isn’t the case, and these people fail.

In this new age of excellence, practicing innovation requires a unique, different, and extraordinary kind of talent. You need a person who can work with analysis and creativity, rationality and curiosity, objectivity and emotions, numbers and brushes, with the head and the heart. And you need someone who embodies all of these abilities in an extraordinary way. Innovation is complicated; it’s difficult and demands a special breed of talent. It’s rare enough to find someone who has the necessary levels of analysis and creativity in a healthy balance. It becomes even more difficult to find someone who balances these qualities in an exceptional way. And yet, that is the human being innovation requires.

Studying the Process Won’t Make You an Innovator

If you want to re-create what people such as Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates have generated with their enterprises, it isn’t enough to simply study their playbooks, processes, and tools. You have to study their hearts and minds, their behaviors and obsessions, decisions and doubts, questions and answers, successes and failures, time and timing. And of course, you also need a healthy pinch of luck! How can we attract people like Steve, Henry, Richard, Jeff, and Bill to our teams? How can we try to become like them? How can we inspire that talent in and extract it from our employees? How can we incentivize people of this kind when they join us? How do we understand them, motivate them, give them a chance to express themselves? These are the great challenges of innovation that we need to focus on, after having designed processes, tools, and organizations—or even before we do.

The big enterprises have solid, sophisticated, almost scientific processes for attracting talent, growing people within the company, and transforming them into future leaders and CEOs. But these processes have historically privileged the left side of the brain, with its analytic and rational thinking rather than creativity, intuition, vision, and imagination. For this reason, when trying to strategize innovation, those organizations often end up living under the illusion that the same army of left-brained people fostered for leadership roles can now also successfully manage the new challenges of the innovation world.

In a cultural context of this kind, it becomes very clear why it’s much more reassuring for many of these organizations to debate processes and tools rather than discussing and reviewing the indispensable soft skills of their team members—the quality of their imagination, their optimism, their intellectual curiosity, and mental agility. And thus these organizations end up hardly ever discussing the aspects that really make the difference between success and failure in every process of innovation, however solid the process might otherwise be.

Over the following pages, I will discuss exactly this: the priceless role of the human being, the most important asset for driving real and meaningful innovation. Up to this point, we have spoken of the human being for whom we innovate, the human being who, finally, needs to be put at the center of everything. Now I want to change perspective and investigate instead the world of the human being who innovates—the innovation driver.

On this journey, my aim isn’t to establish absolute and indisputable truths; I’m neither so ambitious nor so arrogant as to attempt such a goal. I want merely to share with you what worked for me, in the hope that this experience can help and inspire other people who are beginning to go down a similar road—people who understand that tools, data, and processes are extremely important but aren’t enough; people who know that everything starts with a human being, and everything returns to one as well, in a virtuous cycle, from people to people.

Searching for Unicorns

I joined 3M in July 2002. After just a few months, I began putting together the first nucleus of my design team in Milan, and in 2005 we started building a team in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In 2009, while continuing to consolidate the groups based in Italy and America, we were getting ready to form new teams in Shanghai and Tokyo. It was then that I realized that a problem was becoming increasingly pressing. I was looking for the best talent I could find on the market, and I’d given a series of very precise indications to the human resources team about the kinds of technical skills I was looking for. I then integrated into these directions some general advice about the kind of mindset and attitude that I needed candidates to have. We were also leveraging external recruiters, some of the most famous in the design world, the very best available in the industry. The headhunters and our own HR team were searching for designers, going through profiles, pre-interviewing them, and then proposing them to me. Over the years I found myself looking over thousands of curricula and project portfolios, and once I had selected the best candidates, I conducted hundreds of interviews with people who, on paper at least, embodied all the right criteria.

By following this structured and strategic process, I managed to find amazing talent—but I also met with many people who, despite having all the right technical characteristics I was looking for, didn’t possess the other gifts that I believed were indispensable in the extremely complex world of innovation. I am talking about a series of “soft skills,” both intellectual and emotional, that are intrinsic to the very essence of the serial innovator—a way of thinking, feeling, and acting that, over the course of my professional life, I have found to be fundamental for navigating the intricate world of business on the powerful yet delicate wings of imagination and creativity. These are traits that I found in people who were able to reach extraordinary heights, both personally and professionally, but that I haven’t seen in people who have fallen along the way. Over the years, I have hired amazing talent who embodied these qualities, and I have also hired professionals who didn’t possess these skills. But these errors of evaluation have also been steps along a natural learning curve, part and parcel of the intrinsic complexity of the recruiting process, and have turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because by antithesis and contrast these errors helped me understand, better and more deeply, the key characteristics of the ideal innovator.

In 2009, in view of an acceleration in hiring connected to the growth of our teams around the world, I realized that the time had come to reduce every form of inefficiency in our recruiting processes. Over the years, I have learned to give to our HR team and recruiters increasingly detailed indications not only about the technical requirements of a role, but also about the emotional and intellectual ones. But this approach wasn’t effective enough. One of the main problems I found was connected to the fact that I wasn’t just hiring simple designers—that is, professionals trained to imagine, design, and create products, brands, and experiences. The role I was giving to our community of designers at 3M—and then later at PepsiCo—was much more diverse. The role was based on the fundamental pillars of the discipline but then expanded into areas that had been little explored until then, at least not in a constant and consistent way, in organizations of the complexity I was in and in industries for which design had not previously represented a primary competitive advantage.

First of all, we needed designers with a holistic approach to the discipline, embracing all branches of the profession, from graphics to product design, to digital and experience design, all the way to strategy and beyond. This meant coming into conflict with the hyperspecialized world of traditional design.

In the second place, we were positioning design on the same level with innovation, interpreting the two terms as synonyms, something that required design leaders with a very particular mindset. That mindset is commonly practiced in many design universities but is not explicitly taught or formalized in a specific educational path, and thus is not always embodied by every designer.

Finally, we were introducing a new and different way of working, which demanded that the designers would be able not only to do their design work but also to explain the value of their work in a way that could be understood, appreciated, measured, and leveraged by other communities—business and R&D above all. The designers also needed to speak the language of those communities.

We thus needed people who could move with flexibility within a system that wasn’t entirely ready to welcome them, who could leap over every hurdle, getting into the processes and conversations in a proactive way, positively and empathetically. We were innovating in terms of not only the products and brands, but also the very organizations themselves and their culture: this was our big metaproject, which transcended all the other projects and, in a certain sense, embraced them all. Doing all this meant that our designers needed to be very special people with a whole set of characteristics that were far from ordinary. The keyword was “extraordinary.” Being extraordinary couldn’t be exceptional; it had to be the starting point.

To make things as clear as day, I decided to draw up a list of all of the qualities that I believed were indispensable for finding one’s way through this complex context, and I shared it with the HR department. These considerations from 2009 then formed the basis for two important articles that I wrote for the journal Design Management Institute Review, as well as the content for countless presentations at conferences around the world.³ This public, published approach had two aims. On the one hand, I wanted to produce a document that could be shared with any recruiter working with us, in an efficient and consistent way—an official manifesto describing the mindset I was looking for in our designers. On the other hand, I wanted to communicate this profile of people to the whole world, so that those who were interested in joining our team could use the manifesto as a mirror, to evaluate independently whether they were right for the challenge.

This list then became a live document: over the course of the years, it has remained unvaried in its essential elements, but it has evolved in form and tone, enriched by important additions inspired by experience in the field. In the pages of this book, it can now find a new life, in an original, previously unpublished way, enlightened yet again by that therapeutic process of analysis and reflection that writing a book represents. It is a list that I drafted while thinking of the designers I was hiring, but it can be applied in its entirety to any innovator, from any cultural or professional background, whether in marketing, finance, science, medicine, law, communication, music, sport, or any other area in which one wants to innovate—including one’s own life. Indeed, it’s a list that was profoundly inspired by the children I was planning to have one day in my future. The list was made for them, as a compass for their lives, personal and professional.

Without doubt, one of the greatest challenges that I have had to deal with over the years has been the utmost difficulty of finding people who possess all of these characteristics—the key characteristics of the ideal innovator. I have realized this over time, month by month, year by year, when I found myself rejecting dozens upon dozens of profiles proposed by our recruiters. Often these were people who were exceptional on a technical level but lacked a whole series of other gifts.

A few years ago I was chatting with some members of my team at PepsiCo about this difficulty: Did we want too much? Were our ambitions too high? Were we looking for profiles that simply didn’t exist? We reached the conclusion that maybe we were looking for impossible profiles. But nevertheless, we would never stop looking! We wanted to find unicorns, those mythical, incredible creatures who are rare and difficult to capture or even to spot. That description perfectly depicted the kind of people we were looking for. Since then, we have called these people the unicorns. We were on the hunt for them, using the net of our imagination, ambition, vision, and fantasy. And we would never rest until we had hundreds of unicorns in our company, enlisted in our army of dreams.

We Can Learn How to Become Unicorns

Over time, I realized that this list was not only fundamental to our talent search, as an official filter to scan and evaluate the candidates we were considering; it also provided us with a very precise tool to be leveraged in a variety of other ways.

First of all, it represented a collection of skills that we could all aspire to, aim for, and align ourselves around. It constituted a kind of personal and collective compass to better ourselves.

Second, it served as a point of reference for our teams when coaching and growing our talent—for everyone, but especially for the high-potential people and the younger individuals, who were “raw material” to be shaped in ideal ways to become the best version of themselves and the perfect leaders of the future.

Finally, the list became a lens to better find and identify the right partners in other departments, in agencies, in the companies of our customers—anyone who could be a potential coconspirator, ally, or sponsor; people our organization needed, across every discipline, to drive true, tangible, and impactful innovation.

And through this process, we also realized that the talent of these unicorns was not just something people were born with. It was also characterized by a set of skills that could be nurtured, grown, educated, and amplified. We will talk more in depth about this topic, but first, let’s define the key gifts of these innovators.

The Skills of the Unicorns

I divided the skills of the unicorns/innovators into three groups.

The Entrepreneurial Gifts

• They are visionaries, experimenters, and executors.

• They are original and have a unique perspective.

• They are intuitive and analytical.

• They are proactive, look for the root cause, and go the extra mile.

• They are on top of trends—and eventually trendsetters.

• They are people in love with people.

• They are risk takers but cautious too.

• They are aesthetes with an aesthetic sense.

• They are holistic designers.

• They are both business savvy and tech savvy.

The Social Gifts

• They are kind, sincere, and trustworthy.

• They are in love with diversity.

• They are empaths and have an elevated emotional intelligence.

• They are dialectical conductors of multilingual orchestras.

• They are respectful.

• They are charismatic storytellers.

• They are generous mentors.

• They avoid taking themselves too seriously and know how to have fun.

The Enabling Gifts

• They are curious.

• They are humble but confident and self-aware.

• They are attentive listeners but quick to decide and act.

• They are optimistic and resilient.

• They are comfortable with discomfort.

• They are change agents.

Let’s go through all of these characteristics one by one.