CHAPTER 8

THE UNICORN’S SOCIAL GIFTS

The unicorn’s social gifts are the set of traits that are indispensable for working in an effective way with other people, moving with ease in a dense network of social relations. These gifts can apply to our interactions with our teams, colleagues, bosses, senior management; with customers, external partners, investors, and anyone else with a role in a business ecosystem; and also with family members, friends, acquaintances, and others surrounding us in our private life. These are fundamental characteristics for doing innovation holistically, utilizing a community’s collective know-how, and avoiding dangerous roadblocks on the way.

Unicorns Are Kind, Sincere, and Trustworthy

Unicorns possess humanity, generosity, and sensitivity. They are transparent, sincere, honest, and inspire trust. They are kind. Any innovator should be a good person. Not all of them are, obviously, but this is the kind of innovator I look for, the best kind, the ideal kind, the unicorn. This is the innovator that I want for the world! If the aesthetic measure that we’ve spoken about earlier relates to what is beautiful, then the ethical one is about what is good. Having leaders with good hearts is thus clearly an ethical asset for a company. This should be enough to close the discussion; but, obviously, in the world in which we live, we see some people, every day, who aren’t kind but nevertheless hold positions of power, in many fields and situations—and thus also in the world of innovation.

The idea of the kind leader might seem a little idealistic to many, simply gratuitous to others, and to some simply meaningless. I would like to say something to all of these people.

First, if you believe that kindness is not a necessary ethical value in the business world or is insignificant, then, quite simply, this saddens me, and I’m sorry for you, your company, your community, and the people dear to you. But even if this is what you truly believe, these gifts nevertheless have a reason to exist that might still be relevant to you.

It’s only recently that I’ve realized the incredible business value of kindness and trust, which until a few years ago was for me only an ethical value that I took for granted, a filter that I used automatically to select collaborators and friends. The people who surround me in my private life are, in general, kind people. I have a priori rejected the unkind, negative, malevolent, untrustworthy, and insincere people. I simply don’t manage to relate with them in any way, and usually I don’t even have to really make the choice: we don’t get on with each other—case closed.

At the same time, I have always looked for kind people for my team. My group is made up of hundreds of individuals spread across every continent, and I can’t control every single hire, but I do have daily and direct supervision over my closest collaborators, as well as an important part of the second level as well. And I’m completely intransigent about this point: having a kind soul, being sincere, and looking out for others is indispensable. This applies to my collaborators and to their teams. This way of being thus permeates the entire design department, like a cascade. When someone without these characteristics finds a way into our ecosystem, usually that individual doesn’t last long in the organization, because they don’t find fertile ground in our group culture.

Let’s now talk about the importance of this gift. I have about a dozen people who report directly to me. These are kind, transparent, honest, respectful people who love working together and trust one another. Passing time together is a pleasure; it warms your heart and does you good. This is the first, most visible, and most immediate value: kind people surround themselves with other kind people and love sharing spaces and moments. In contrast, who would want to spend the majority of the time in an office with malevolent and insincere people who can’t be trusted? If such a person is imposed on your team, you try to avoid that individual as much as possible. This creates a form of inefficiency; team members avoid one another, they find it difficult to work together, and consequently they don’t create synergies and aren’t productive.

Now, if there’s a member of your group whom you don’t trust, what are the chances that you’ll delegate to that person the team’s success—and therefore also your personal success—by counting on the person to effectively play an assigned role in the group? The chances are very low, obviously, because clearly it would be too risky to trust that person. And so you try to protect yourself beforehand by creating a series of backup activities to neutralize the risk, defending yourself and your team in case that individual doesn’t do what the person is meant to do. This then triggers a whole set of redundant activities, which in their turn impact the organization’s productivity in a deeply negative way. For example, imagine how inefficient it would be for your company if a global business leader led a project that was supposed to be activated in every market in which the enterprise operates, but then the leader of the Chinese (or American, Italian, South African, or Mexican) team went ahead with another project in parallel, simply because that person wanted to make sure there would be a plan B in case the global project didn’t succeed as intended—a triumph of inefficiency. Sincerity, transparency, kindness, and reciprocal trust would have avoided such a situation. Now multiply this problem for the number of people and teams you have in your organization, and you will understand very quickly the scale of unproductivity that the wrong culture can generate.

You might be asking why kindness is a part of this: surely you may trust a bad but talented person in your group to do what the person is supposed to do. The big difference is that kind people have not only their own futures at heart, but also those of other people on their team. Sooner or later, if they need to, bad individuals will put their own interests before those of their organization, and they will do so with few scruples—especially when others are in difficulty. Kindness is not a guarantee of trust and transparency, but it raises the probability of these, as well as guaranteeing a set of other benefits. Kind people don’t take advantage of moments of difficulty but are ready to help the people surrounding them, in those moments more than ever. Each of us faces a mathematical certainty in our lives: sooner or later, these moments of difficulty, in our private or professional lives, will come. And in those moments, we need a hand from the people around us; we want their support and comfort. If that happens, all of us benefit: we do, the team does, and the company as a whole does, too.

In the most difficult moment in my private life, my work team picked me up, held me, protected me, and saved me. Without their kindness, things would have gone very differently. That moment opened my eyes more than ever, not only to the ethical and personal value of kindness, but also to its business value.

What makes the presence of just a few negative individuals within a community of otherwise positive people really very dangerous is the ability of those few individuals to generate and expand their negative energy within the group, creating unnecessary short circuits, separating kind people from one another, fragmenting existing synergies and trust, and creating disconnections that otherwise wouldn’t exist. And this negative energy, yet again, impacts the team’s productivity, as well as creating an unpleasant working environment and consequently lowering the group’s engagement overall.

Too many companies, too much of the time, overlook this aspect and reward professionals who have produced brilliant business performances despite their personal and interpersonal behavior. Individuals who generate results at the expense of their team’s health represent a cancer within a company, a slow and invisible sickness that destroys the organization from within, without too many symptoms, working through a body that seems healthy until it’s too late, right up to the point when the metastasis has spread everywhere.

Kindness and trust produce efficiency and productivity. In a team of innovators, synergy, collaboration, and co-creation are the basic conditions for the success of the group and the project, and kindness and sincerity are precious values. I know that my team members can trust me, and I can trust them. I know that there’s a strong synergy and that the common interests of the group, of the company, of the collective vision, of the shared dream, take absolute priority. We are kind to one another, there’s a positive vibe, the air is clean, the atmosphere is healthy, and we’re ready to support one another. And if sometimes we argue—just as in a family, between brothers and sisters—then we also know how to make things up in the end, with a pure soul and a candid heart. Kindness meets with productivity, sincerity with efficiency, ethics with performance.

Unicorns Are in Love with Diversity

Unicorns thrive on diversity. Rather than being afraid of it, they purposely seek it out. Diversity is above all a mindset, entirely focused on the recognition and celebration of the unique character of every individual and on the consequent inclusion of this uniqueness within our communities. These criteria might be gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, sexual orientation, physical ability, or religious and political beliefs. But, within each of these categories, there is an infinite diversity of thought, feeling, style, and behavior. Imagine how reductive it would be to believe that everyone belonging to a gender—women, for example—all had the same way of thinking. Imagine how reductive it would be to believe that all Christians or all communists or all African Americans were similar, with the same behavior and style. It would represent the triumph of the stereotype. And it would be deeply disrespectful to both the community and the individual concerned.

True diversity is much deeper. It’s the diversity that you find within every category, the kind that distinguishes each person as a citizen of the world, as a unique and irreplaceable being. This is a precious, real, concrete, widespread kind of diversity that should be celebrated, nurtured, explored, and amplified.

Innovation is a process that begins with empathy and is based on the ability to observe the world around you through an unusual and unexpected perspective in order to grasp moments, form ideas, and see things that no one has seen, formed, or grasped before. It should be clear, then, how important it is to have diversity in a team working in the field of innovation. Someone who has a background different from my own perceives, analyzes, and interprets the same situation from a different point of view; the union of our perspectives through dialogue and respect provides the potential to forge an entirely new and unheard-of perspective. That’s where first intuitions and hypotheses come in, activating the journey of innovation: precisely from my perspective colliding in a positive way with yours, generating another one that is entirely new.

These two people could be a Latinx person and someone from East Asia, a person of color and a white person, someone with an analytic approach and someone with an intuitive one, someone who’s sedentary and someone who’s sporty, an older person and a younger one, a designer and a marketer, a heterosexual and a homosexual, a woman and a man, a wealthy person and a poor one, a Jew and a Muslim, an introvert and an extrovert. In order to facilitate this kind of opportunity, we need to design organizations with a diversity of backgrounds and thought, encouraging a diversity of opinions and styles, integrating them into a healthy, dynamic, and balanced dialogue.

Diversity, even before it is reflected in physical and visible differences, has to first be a trait of the group’s culture. Otherwise, our teams will have different aspects, but their way of thinking, and the results of their actions, won’t reflect that apparent diversity. Diversity in innovation needs to be wide-ranging and authentic. It can’t be reduced to a few stereotypical categories; it has to sustain a truly diversified culture. This is the only way to generate real value through innovation processes—for our organizations, our business, our society as a whole. And this authentic interpretation is also the only true way to embrace the more traditional and visible forms of diversity.

Nevertheless, there are minorities who have been discriminated against over the course of history in incomprehensible and atrocious ways. And this aspect, when we talk about diversity, can’t be overlooked and forgotten. It needs to be vividly impressed in our minds. As leaders, brands, and companies, we have an ethical and social responsibility to give these specific communities an amplified voice and shine the light of visibility. This should be the duty of every individual on this planet, but it’s especially the duty of people who have the resources and platforms to do so in a tangible and impactful way. True diversity, integrated into a company’s culture, is a moral duty and a fundamental driver of innovation.

In our design team, diversity is a mantra, completely organic and inscribed into our genetic code. On the one hand, it’s supported through a conscious and structured program of recruiting, retention, and career growth, which creates a lucid, explicit, and conscious focus on systemic social problems; on the other, it is so natural for our working environment that it functions on an unconscious level—it’s in our very way of being and existing. We have more than forty ethnicities represented in our Design Center in New York alone, with a complete balance of women and men, as well as individuals representing the LGBTQIA+ community and a variety of religious faiths, socioeconomic backgrounds, political affiliations, and lifestyles.

And yet, there is still a long way to go before arriving at an ideal situation, in order to rebalance the distortions of history, prejudice, cognitive biases, and structural hurdles that are all too real—evident social barriers extraneous to the healthy safe space we are building. What we should never forget is that diversity and innovation cannot be separated. Innovators don’t fear diversity; they love it with a visceral passion. Practicing innovation without diversity of thought and action is like exploring a jungle with a blindfold on, or swimming out into the ocean with stones in your pockets.

Diversity is one of those areas in which doing the right thing from an ethical point of view corresponds completely with doing the right thing from an economic one, because diversity is at the basis of innovation and progress. Not engaging with diversity is myopic, ignorant, and senseless. When you understand this fundamental principle, everything should become still more simple, obvious, and clear.

Unicorns Are Empaths and Have an Elevated Emotional Intelligence

We have already spoken about the importance of empathy and its role in the innovation process, along with strategy and prototyping. Innovators have to be empathetic toward the users they are designing for, or rather have to be able to understand these users in a profound way, seeing things from their point of view, putting themselves in the users’ shoes.

But this is only one aspect of the empath’s role in a professional team. Empathetic innovators are individuals who also understand the people around them in a visceral way, within the context of the company and the external world, from their team to their peers, the supervisor to the sponsor, the client to the investor, the consultant to the journalist. This empathy is one sign of innovators’ emotional intelligence (their EQ, or emotional quotient). This is a gift that allows innovators to be lucidly aware of themselves in relation to others, establishing relations on an emotional and spiritual level with their neighbors, immediately understanding who is in front of them, reading the room on every kind of occasion. People with high emotional intelligence are emotional bridges, facilitators of dialogue, connectors of souls.

Over the years I have sometimes hired leaders who were wonderful designers, sophisticated thinkers, sharp strategists, and good people—but who didn’t have an elevated emotional intelligence. Unfortunately, without this general skill, and in particular without empathy, all the rest is in vain, because in the world of innovation and more generally in business, the ability to engage others on an emotional level, both within and outside your organization, is indispensable. The world isn’t a one-man or one-woman show. We are in the era of the one-team show. In our design organization, we even created the hashtag #oneteam to synthetize this idea. Empathy is the glue that makes a team stick together.

Unicorns Are Dialectical Conductors of Multilingual Orchestras

Dialogue allows the glue of empathy to take hold, enabling the surfaces to connect and dovetail, smoothing over the edges for a perfect fit, flattening out collisions that then sound like music. Unicorns create dialogue, harmony, melody; they are conductors of different elements that are reconciled in perfect balance. They are facilitators, interpreters, generators of synergy. Their art resides in the rare and sophisticated ability to know how to listen, to unite—to rebalance matters through transparent conversations, unexpected discussions, and surprising resonances—throughout the multidisciplinary, cross-functional processes of innovation. The scientist concentrating on the microscope and the marketer in love with the spotlight, the legal department and the creative studio, the leaders managing the resources of a company, both human and financial—all of them have to be brought together, to take up their own instruments and play in unison. Knowing how to do so in a seamless and effective way during the innovation journey is an art and gift. And it requires prodigious orchestra conductors.

To act as such conductors, innovators need to be polyglots. They need to speak a range of languages—the language of marketing and anthropology, design and science, finance and law, and more besides—all while maintaining a coherent and constant message but adapting its codes in accordance with the audience, in order to be understood by every professional community, acting as a universal connector and translator, jumping seamlessly from one area to another. This kind of ambiguity is the innovator’s very essence.

As a designer I’ve needed to learn the language of finance in order to make people understand the value of what I was creating and to give me access to the economic resources I was looking for, in exchange for a clear return on investment. I’ve needed to learn the language of human resources so that those colleagues would support hiring the best creative talent, positioning them at the right level in the organization, paying them on a par with those in other, more established roles (such as marketing and research and development), retaining and incentivizing them with the right tools and resources. I’ve needed to learn the language of R&D, to work with engineers and scientists on the feasibility of our visions, to not accept replies such as “you can’t do that” from manufacturing sites or research centers, in order to get closer to lab technicians and make them fall in love with forms and poetry that transcend the functionality of an industrial product. Being ready to learn different cultural languages was partly a mindset that I developed at school, through a curriculum ranging across different disciplines, but above all it’s something I’ve learned in the field, driven by a thirst for knowledge, curiosity, and empathy toward others—my neighbors and those different from me.

Dialogue is a fundamental tool for all of this. This is why the unicorn is also dialectical. In ancient Greek philosophy, dialectics (from the Greek dialeghestai, “to discuss, to reason together”) identified the search for truth through the dialogue of two speakers with different theses. In the Phaedrus, Plato compares dialectics to two opposed but complementary processes. The first consists in “perceiving and bringing together in one idea the scattered particulars, that one may make clear by definition the particular thing which he wishes to explain”; the other consists in “dividing things again by classes, where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of a bad carver.”⁷ For Plato, in other words, dialectic represented a privileged road to arrive from a multiplicity to the unity of an idea, which is both the origin and final goal of consciousness. A unicorn is able to connect all disciplines, all points of view, all backgrounds, in a supreme and final synthesis in harmony with the needs and dreams of the human being for whom the unicorn is designing. And unicorns are simultaneously able to divide up their own vision, intuition, and dreams into intelligible and accessible fragments for a community with different cultural strands. Unicorns can establish a dialectical and profound dialogue with every kind of professional group searching for truth and are able to connect all communities into a unique, mutually cooperative conversation. In this sense, dialectics is a preparatory and enabling social gift, at the service of the entrepreneurial gifts of analysis and synthesis.

Unicorns Are Respectful

In the realm of innovation, as well as in business and indeed the world in its entirety, respect for others should be a common denominator for how everyone thinks and acts. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, especially when individuals or communities have points of view that are different from our own.

Let us take, for example, two macrocommunities of which we have already spoken at length in these pages: those of business and design. Designers often hold that they understand what society wants, what is beautiful and useful, what’s on trend and what creates value, and they generate product and brand concepts that, in their opinion, align with that kind of ambition and expectation. Just as often, you find designers who think that the world of business, especially in some industries, is unable to understand these ideas, to appreciate their essence and qualities, systematically compromising the integrity of their incredible visions for the most futile and incomprehensible reasons. “This guy in marketing doesn’t understand a thing!” How many times have I heard that sentence? It’s what many designers think. At the same time, the sales and marketing communities often believe that designers are merely creatives, ignorant of the real needs of business, unable to grasp the rules of branding, limited and superficial in their perception of strategy. “Designers are basically stylists. Let’s just leverage and channel their creativity, and keep them far away from the business world before they do any real damage!” That’s what many business leaders think. And yet, when a smart designer and a smart business leader finally find a way to listen to each other, to open up, to respect and understand each other, they often find aspects of each other’s worlds that make them change their ideas.

Let me share an example from my past at 3M. Around 2003, I was very close to a colleague who had gained the position of Six Sigma Master Black Belt. “Six Sigma” is a management discipline focused on generating efficiency in the processes of an organization, utilized over the years by a range of corporations, including Motorola, General Electric, Microsoft, and General Motors, just to name a few. The Master Black Belt at 3M was a role held by high-potential employees on a two-year rotation, in order to train them in these methods, giving these employees the opportunity to apply the methods in real projects in the field. This colleague, Marco (a pseudonym), was intelligent, strategic, a quick thinker, and generous with his smiles. He was very aware of the important role of design and had fully understood the discipline’s potential at 3M. At that time, he wasn’t working on any particular product development project or managing a particular brand, but he often came to me to share his passion for what I was doing, his understanding of the impact that still needed to be revealed, and his willingness to draw on this as soon as he was in a position to do so.

A few months later, the moment came: Marco became manager for the office business unit in Europe (commercializing Post-it Notes, Scotch Tape, multimedia projectors, professional lighting, workspace solutions, ergonomic products, and much more). It was the occasion that I had been waiting for patiently for years—we would finally be able to radically change things in that business!

But over the next few months, I realized that that acceleration in the use and impact of design simply wasn’t happening—and that it wouldn’t be happening any time soon, either. In every other instance, as the designer that I was, I would have thought Marco was just another marketer, among many, who didn’t understand our community’s professional approach. But this case wasn’t like all the others, and so something different happened.

There was a fundamental difference from all the other preceding situations: I knew Marco well, and I knew that he understood the value of design. I respected him! I always respected the other marketers on a human level in the past, but as a designer I usually didn’t respect their ability to understand our creative vision. In Marco’s case, however, I respected his intelligence, his strategic thinking, his empathy—but also his grasp of design. And so I began to ask myself questions that I hadn’t asked before, questions that many designers (or other professionals in other contexts) never ask themselves during their professional lives. “Why was this sensible and intelligent marketer not making use of design, even when he understood its value?” That question, generated out of a position of respect, was a fundamental turning point for my entire professional life—and not just for me.

I found the answer by looking further into the goals that the company’s upper echelons had assigned to Marco and trying to understand what limits, hurdles, and difficulties he might face in reaching them. In other words, I tried to put myself in his shoes, through empathy (it’s not a coincidence that fifteen years later I called my first podcast exactly that: In Your Shoes). Empathy generates respect, and respect generates empathy.

As is so often the case for business leaders in many companies, Marco’s role was being measured over the short term. Within the first year, he needed to generate a defined revenue, with a defined profitability, and earn a defined market share, with specific and limited resources. These goals and resources and this timeline had been assigned to him considering the current business model and strategic levers and not taking into account any other disruptive activity. This model implied that any long-term investment not forecast up front would carry the concrete risk of negatively affecting Marco’s ability to achieve his business goals in the short term. And design was a long-term investment by definition. Accelerating the use of design would have then impacted on his annual performance, his compensation, and his overall career. And in some cases, in some companies, in some business cultures, missing a target and failing a year can even mean losing your job. This obviously has an effect on someone’s private life—for example, the person’s ability to maintain a certain lifestyle, to support a family, to guarantee a good education for children, and so on. The repercussions, in other words, are serious and real. It’s no wonder that many professionals demonstrate caution when it comes to the decisions and choices they make throughout their careers.

The situation was made even more complicated by another variable: the majority of the managers in most organizations are evaluated on the basis of their own performance on a yearly basis, but innovation projects have much broader temporal horizons, seeing the first effects years after their kick-off. If these managers regularly rotate through positions every two or three years as they progress in their careers, then they have no official incentive to develop long-term innovation programs, leveraging their current budgets and putting at risk their short-term goals, to create winning solutions that will benefit their successors, not themselves. If the managers do so nevertheless, as does happen in a variety of situations, it’s because they are aware that this is their duty as leaders in their organization. But the company essentially doesn’t provide them with any concrete stimulus for long-term innovation, which relies entirely on these managers’ sense of responsibility if it is to happen. Good luck with that!

As the psychologist Abraham Maslow wisely noted, the primary instinct in the majority of people has always been to guarantee themselves stability and security. This need is at the base of his pyramid of needs. The desire to innovate as the form and expression for other needs, positioned higher in the pyramid, is in second place. If the first layer isn’t there, it’s difficult to rise up to the second. And even if some fearless, less risk-averse individuals do exist, such people are few and far between. The world’s companies cannot entrust themselves to anomalies in order to generate innovation.

In Marco’s case, as in countless other situations since then, I realized that in order to promote the use of design in the company, there was little sense in continuing to push managers to act in a way that was reckless and self-destructive for them, going against structural obstacles much larger than they were. I needed instead to work with top management, in sales and marketing, human resources and finance, in order to redefine objectives, allocation of resources, incentives for long-term projects, annual compensation criteria, and strategies for entrepreneurial innovation. Being responsible for design at 3M didn’t mean simply managing design projects, as they were asking me to do, and then complaining if business leaders didn’t work the way we wanted them to. That responsibility meant, first and foremost, designing the conditions, culture, processes, and metrics for making those projects possible—even if nobody was asking me to!

And, indeed, the big challenge in this case was exactly that: the focus of that metaproject—culture, processes, metrics, organization, and business goals—wasn’t really my responsibility; it was a role shared by a whole series of other departments. I could only try to influence them—not an easy task! But that’s what I decided to do. And that’s why, over time, I became chief design officer of that corporation instead of being fired a couple of years after I joined: I did what the company needed me to do, instead of doing what the company was (at first) asking me to do. My respect for Marco had helped me to understand better what my role in the company could be and should be. And it changed my professional life.

Respecting individuals with a different point of view from your own creates exceptional value, allowing you to transform your perspective through the conscious effort of trying to understand other people’s. And this has two potential consequences.

On the one hand, it allows you to realize things that you’d never understood before, as was the case with my working relationship with Marco. This realization then helps you to reach a new awareness of yourself—of your role and your potential—and helps you to evolve, to adapt, to improve, to build new bridges, new bonds, new collaborations, new partnerships that you wouldn’t have embarked upon otherwise. It’s a win-win situation.

The other possible outcome is that respect allows you to understand in a deeper way how other people think, their drives, culture, difficulties, and fears, allowing you to identify the real causes of their inability to understand the value of what you’re offering them. This helps you to adapt your language, codes, and content, the form and essence of your communication, without distorting the message or meaning, in order for that message to become more accessible, better understood, and more relevant. In this way, other people will finally have access to your perspective; they will appreciate it, and they will become allies. Yet again, it’s a win-win situation.

In both instances, respect allows you to evolve together, opening the doors to new opportunities for both sides, improving matters both individually and collectively, growing and empowering one another. Respect is one of the fundamental engines of growth. This is true for the world of business and innovation, but it clearly has an extraordinary significance for our whole existence.

If people respected one another more—meeting each other halfway, talking despite their differences, appreciating each other for those differences, growing together through those differences—then we would probably have a better world. If individuals with different political views or religious beliefs, different skin colors or sexual orientations, didn’t fall into the trap of lacking respect, on both sides, then we could get back to civil conversation, and we would have a more peaceful, happy, inclusive society, one more inclined to progress, innovation, and collective evolution.

Even when you have the right perspective, when you defend your values, when you fight for the right cause, lacking respect for people who are different from you is a sterile, harmful, dangerous attitude, because it produces divisions and fractures—and, in some contexts and situations, can even generate hatred. And hatred, as well as being an evil cancer for society as a whole, is also the most ferocious enemy to innovation and progress.

Unicorns Are Charismatic Storytellers

Unicorns are storytellers. They are able to express the value of their ideas, fine-tuning their message and their codes of communication in order to reach the hearts and minds of whomever they’re speaking to. Unicorns use their stories, language, words, gestures, pauses, and glances in order to inspire and influence, to excite teams, colleagues, clients, investors, and the media. Unicorns tell stories, and they do it with extraordinary charisma. This is a fundamentally important gift. In a world in which our audience’s attention is constantly challenged by external factors, by every kind of pressure, by a myriad of content, the ability to enchant someone with your story is a precious quality to make sure that people follow your vision with concentration, determination, diligence, coherence, passion, and joy.

I have been storytelling my entire professional life, from the very beginning. It’s always been a passion of mine. I have done so with speeches, conversations, articles, and posts, in conferences, meeting rooms, magazines, and social media—and now with this book.

It’s not been easy; it’s been very complex indeed. But it’s been fun too. Most of what I was able to build over the years has been shared through stories, and progressively, each of those stories became the foundation and the amplifier for more dreams to build and more projects to execute—and ultimately for more stories to tell.

Unicorns Are Generous Mentors

Unicorns have an intrinsic and genuine passion for spreading knowledge and culture. They do so every day, generously, without expecting anything in return. And they do so for the pure pleasure of sowing the seeds of culture throughout their organizations, their communities, and then the whole world. This mindset has a vital role in the context of a company because it exponentially amplifies the sharing of know-how and consequent learning, making the enterprise progressively stronger and more stable.

To be an innovator you don’t need to be a mentor, nor do you need to be generous—but if your team is composed of people of this kind, it will have an exponentially greater potential to grow and succeed. A generous mentor is like the fertilizer that allows your plants to grow faster, stronger, healthier, richer in taste and nutrients. These are the kind of innovators I look for and want on my team.

There are many different ways to be a mentor and also to access these incredible individuals. We’ll discuss these ways in more detail over the following pages.

Unicorns Avoid Taking Themselves Too Seriously and Know How to Have Fun

Unicorns know how to laugh, to be ironic, to make fun of themselves. And they know how to enjoy themselves, too. Science reminds us that smiling and having fun—two distinct but often connected actions—have exceptionally positive effects on personal and group health. Smiling and having fun can increase levels of serotonin, the hormone that regulates our mood; diminish stress; impact positively on our energy levels; amplify our ability to manage challenges; free our minds by empowering focus and memory; increase trust and connection between people; help sleep patterns; and create greater efficiency and productivity throughout the whole community. In brief, the ability to smile, laugh, and have fun is good for you and for your team. It’s an innate and individual ability, but it can be facilitated within a group of people by creating the right culture and applying the correct tactics.

I never miss an opportunity—context permitting—to share a joke with my organization, to use irony to ease the tension, to steer through stressful moments with some laughter. I use my social media platforms to communicate with my own team, with my colleagues and partners, and with potential talent who might join us in the future—and I rarely skip over the chance to share something funny or amusing. I do so not only through my personal channels but also when using platforms on which fun isn’t the standard, such as the professional platform of LinkedIn.

Smiling and fun are tools that I often use to avoid taking myself too seriously, to rebalance the gravity of deeper reflections with the levity of easier thoughts. Using these tools is a way to show humility, to get closer to people, and to show my human side, something that is perhaps sometimes hidden by titles, positions, images, and thoughts, which don’t entirely communicate my real self. And it’s fun for me too!

Even though the ability to smile, laugh, and have fun is a personal and individual gift, as the leader of organizations made up of hundreds of people, I do everything I can to generate situations that can promote that kind of collective culture. I want to come into the office and see people smiling; I want to see them enjoying themselves. I want to avoid the dull gray monotony of sad workplaces, made up of people who are emotionally stuck and take themselves too seriously. And I’m fully aware that their smiles are also signs of productivity, efficiency, and constant and consistent effectiveness, generated by people who love what they do and enjoy doing it.

At PepsiCo, this kind of mindset is something we protect and celebrate. And it’s been the topic of endless conversations, efforts, and plans with my team, and particularly with Leighsa King, our vice president in charge of business, culture, and strategic transformation and one of my most trusted advisers (thank you, Leighsa!). A few years ago we created a Culture Club, led by Richard Bates on top of his daily design role: a small group of people whose mission is to think up, generate, and manage initiatives that forge, maintain, and protect our organization’s creative culture. One of the team’s goals is to program entertainment activities for our department, often bringing together learning and fun. We’ve organized costume parties and competitions and bowling championships; we’ve done ax throwing, magic-potion tasting, and visits to amusement parks. I’ve shared trips with my leadership team in hot air balloons, in small boats, and on horses—and we’ve seen wonderful places. I’ve even learned how to make a chunky knit blanket! During a virtual class online, together with our designers connected from several countries around the world, I was able to make one by myself, in less than an hour, and it became a beautiful holiday gift for Carlotta. You should try it; it’s easy.

That’s what we do. And we do it all for pleasure and with pleasure. We’ve never taken for granted the importance of these moments because we know how difficult it is to organize such experiences with your colleagues, for a whole series of reasons.

The first difficulty is that often, you simply don’t have colleagues with whom you want to spend recreational time; this is the unfortunate truth in many organizations, big and small. And it’s also one of the many reasons that I’ve always used the list of characteristics in these chapters as a filter for hiring collaborators. If your team is made up of positive, kind, sincere, empathetic, generous, intelligent, funny people, who want to smile and enjoy themselves, well, then you’ll also enjoy spending time together. If you don’t have this kind of people around, then all those moments of downtime—dinners, team-building exercises, and more—will simply be torture for many of you and a loss of money for the business.

The other difficulty is that enjoying yourself at work is often seen as taboo, as a result of the distorted and erroneous conviction held by some that these moments of entertainment during working hours throughout the year can somehow impact negatively on team productivity. The reality, instead, is the diametric opposite. Those moments of real living experienced together, far away from working situations, not only do not represent a loss, but actually constitute an exponential amplification of the organization’s productive potential. These moments help to build priceless bonds and connections, cementing the team cohesion that can overcome any obstacle in day-to-day work, generating a deep reciprocal trust that is too often is missing in professional environments, and accelerating the production of that empathy, sympathy, passion, and inspiration each one of us needs when working in a complex organization, engaged in the sacred journey of innovation. These moments speed up the team’s productivity and nurture the quality of the team’s performance, both in the short and long term.

It’s true that this isn’t easy. In order to generate this kind of opportunity, you need the right people, the right leadership, and the right culture. We need to take care of this culture, cultivating it day by day, week by week, month by month, 365 days a year. Try to do so: it’s worthwhile, and it’s fun!