Mauro Porcini
The Human Side of Innovation
In this episode of Brave UX, Mauro Porcini shares how designers can rise to the top, the dangers of associating your self-worth with work, and why he’s changing the status quo from the inside.
Highlights include:
- Why do you run towards the fire?
- How has the focus changed since becoming a father?
- What gives you the right to talk about love with business people?
- Why have you disassociated your personal worth from your work?
- What does it take to scale human-centred innovation across the globe?
Who is Mauro Porcini?
Mauro is a Senior Vice President and the-first-ever Chief Design Officer of PepsiCo , the largest food and beverage company in North America and second largest in the world. At PepsiCo, Mauro and his team of 300 designers have been on a decade-long mission to infuse the corporation with a human-centred culture.
Before joining PepsiCo in 2012, Mauro invested 10 years at 3M, building out the business’ global design function. Something he appears to have been quite successful at, as he also became the company’s first-ever Chief Design Officer, with the CFO of The Wall Street Journal referring to him as, “… the man putting 3M on the design map.”
Mauro’s second book, “The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People” has just been published. It is described as “… a manifesto for a genuine, authentic, and deeply humanistic approach to innovation, one that aims to create personal and social value first…”.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of TheSpace InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings and expert advice of worldclass UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Mauro Porcini. Mauro is a Senior Vice President and the first ever Chief Design Officer of PepsiCo, the largest food and beverage company in North America and second largest in the world. This is a business whose brands like Pepsi Cola, Soda Stream and Doritos are available in over 200 countries impacting the lives of hundreds of millions, if not billions of people. At PepsiCo, Mauro and his team of 300 designers (possibly not dissimilar to the 300 Spartans) have been on a decade long mission to infuse the corporation with a human-centered culture, spearheading a new approach to innovation that is by design guiding the way in which the businesses, products, platforms, and brands evolve.
- Before joining PepsiCo in 2012, Mauro invested 10 years at 3M building out the business's global design function. Something he appears to have been quite successful at as he also became the company's first ever Chief Design Officer, with the CFO of the Wall Street Journal referring to him as "the man putting 3M on the design map". Mauros second book, the Human Side of Innovation: the Power of People in Love with People. is literally just about to be published; available online and in store from the 1st of November. It is described as a manifesto for a genuine, authentic and deeply humanistic approach to innovation. One that aims to create personal and social value first. More on that soon. Mauro has accumulated a litany of impressive awards and recognition over the years. Too many to mention however, the one that he is the most proud of receiving is the title of Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia, an Order of Knighthood, for extraordinary merit and the preservation and promotion of national prestige abroad, bestowed on him in 2019 by the President of Italy. Speaking of Presidents, Mauro is the President of the Politecnico di Milano Foundation in the United States, a member of the board of directors of the Design Management Institute, as well as a representative on Design For Good's member advisory council. And now, seeing as I have taken up half of our time together and probably butchered the Italian in this introduction terribly, I had better welcome Mauro to this conversation on Brave UX today and beg for his forgiveness. Mauro, welcome to the show.
- Mauro Porcini:
- Thank you so much for having me. And come on, I'm going to butcher so many English words in this time that we have together. So just a couple in Italian. I'm perfectly fine. And actually you are really good.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I actually think Mauro that I prefer English with an Italian accent. I have to say.
- Mauro Porcini:
- It's funny cause we love the American accent and American love Italian accent. I think you often love something that is not, that's similar to yourself or somebody or sometimes you hate it actually depends. There is people that fear things that are different and diverse and there are people that instead are attracted by the diversity and the difference.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about love. I understand that in your life recently, something pretty magical happened, something pretty special. You and Carlotta welcomed baby Betrice into the world. And now for someone in your position who lives to your own words, a fairly hectic lifestyle, you're frequently traveling across the world, probably more so now that it's opened up a little bit more. And you've recently said about this, about your passion for what you do prior to Betrice arriving in this world, I need to do more and more and more. I really need to drive innovation to the next level in my life. So how, if at all, has your thinking about that level of energy you need to put into innovation, your goals, the things that you set out to achieve in your career, how has that changed if at all, since becoming a father?
- Mauro Porcini:
- Well, it's even more, and just to be clear, it is not about the achievements. The goal says I need to become even more famous or have more money or it is not about those kind of goals. It's more about embodying the kind of values that I think are important in life for any person, for anybody, and therefore I think are important for my daughter as well. I want to double down in on those values. And by the way, I've been doubling down on those in the past few years when Betrice was just a project, but I knew she was going to come sooner or later my Italian book, she was not born yet. She was not even, Carlotta was not even pregnant yet, but we knew sooner or later somebody would've come. So there is a dedication to my family and then to whoever will come in the future.
- That was Betrice. But let's pause for a second about this idea of embodying those values. I think it's so important when you need to somehow inspire people around you. It could be your daughter, your son, your family or your teams or anybody somehow connected to you and you want to build a certain kind of culture in that organization on your family or with your children. I think the step number one is to leave what you preach is to embody those behaviors is to be the person you want others to be. For multiple reasons, first of all because you become a role model because they see in action what you're talking about. Second, because they understand whoever they are. Again, this is true also in the business world, the word you are talking about is authentic. It's real. You really believe in it. You believe in it so much that you live it every day.
- And especially if I think about my business world where I pitch the idea of innovation and changing the world for the better. And I talk always about the mindset and the behaviors and the ways of thinking of these great innovators and how they should drive the business, but also they should conduct their own life. Obviously the more you embody that and the more you story tell that embodiment meaning that you share what you do with the world. And that's why I'm so active in social media. That's why I write books, that's why I have a podcast. That's why I try to communicate as much as possible what I do because I believe that if you embody those behaviors and you talk about it and you share it with the world, then the world will be like, okay, they may love it or hate it, but if they love it, they will follow you.
- They will join you, they will work with you to make those dreams happen and that's great. And then [laugh] with your daughter and with your family, well if they hate it, we have a problem. But in general they will understand that you are passionate about what you do, you believe in what you do. And this is what I learned so much from my parents. They embody those behaviors that they wanted me to embrace. They never pressured them on me, they just leave them. And one of these values was the passion for what they were doing. They love, love, love what they were doing and they were doing what they loved. And so that's something that stayed in me from the very beginning. At the beginning very intuitively. And then later on it became more and more I became more and more aware about the value of doing what you love and following your dreams and your passions.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's talk about your parents. Let's talk about life for you when you were younger and when you were living with them. And I understand that although your parents were from the south of Italy you grew up in the northern part of Italy and gal, gal before Maru moving to Verre what motivated your family to move from the south to the north
- Mauro Porcini:
- Job? Imagine, I dunno, for people that are in the United States for instance, is people from Latin America moving to the United States for literally a better life. And today there is a stream in Italy for instance, of people coming from Africa. There are migration all around the world. And I don't know the details of all the regions of the world, but I'm sure people can relate. And it's funny because it's possible that in a time in history you are the person migrating and then later on decade after you are instead in a stable position and you have people migrating to your region. And it is for me, so mind blowing that people forget their history where they come from their families all the past of their personal history and eventually they reject people migrating to them, they beat walls and they push back. And anyway, I'm diverging back then my parents moved to the north and it was a form of racism from the north towards the south.
- Because of this, the south was poor and people would move to the north and then north were feeling somehow superior and a different kind of obviously situation. And so here I was born three years after they moved to the north. And so they still had that heavy accent from the south I south, I will identify them right away as people from the south. And they didn't have many friends and they still don't the way they live. And so here I am in growing up with my family, talking with this very heavy accent from the south. But I grow up very quickly in the first few years of my life surrounded by the culture of the north going to school in the north. All my friends were from the north. And so I start to grow suspended between these two worlds, this the north and the south.
- And one of the instinct of any human being is part of the ma pyramid is what defines us is this need of belonging. We want to belong. This is, and this is why I'm, you know, see for instance here in the United States, so many kids coming from different parts of the world, especially those parts that are the victim of racism of people in this part of the world, they reject their original culture. They want to belong, they want to be American. They don't want to be identified as different because we have this instinct of belonging. Other people though they have some form of anomaly, a genetic anomaly and they don't feel that need so strongly. And that was me. I had the need of self-expression probably to the extreme but not the need of belonging. So what happened to me is that I was not from the south because definitely I was from the north where every time I was going to the south people would make fun of my accent.
- But I was not really completely from the north because I had this words that were coming with an accent from the south. And so what happened is that instead of trying to belong to one of the two dimensions, I crafted my own dimension in suspension, this gray area where I was like, that's me. I'm going to be me. And that's my identity. Obviously I say this today with full awareness. I had no clue that that was happening in my mind, in my soul back then. And I realized that this has been somehow a theme of my life. Today I am suspended between America and Italian. I am an American citizen now and an Italian citizen obviously. And I'm exotic for the Americans and exotic for the Italians and I'm special for both. But if I was just Italian living in Italy, it would be different If it was just America, living in America, it would be different.
- Now I'm seeing the positive of this. Other people could see the lack of belonging completely to one unique community. And the same, I'm an anomaly in the world of design. I have so many designer friends, especially my cultural context of Italy. So the designers, the design furniture and cars and they look at me in my position and then don't understand completely what kind of designer I am. And they're starting more recently. And finally some form of respect is coming from Italian awards and everything. But for the longest time they were like, well what is that? And now finally they're understanding. And then I think the Italian design system is also realizing the huge opportunity if they understand this new dimension of design of what the designers from the country could do in the world. But in the meantime, for sure, I'm not a business leader, I'm not a marketer and I've been always an alien in the world.
- So here I am once again living suspended between the world of design, the world of marketing and I am exotic and special, but for the designers and for the marketers because they bring something to the table of unique. Now what is the difficult, and now I close up this gray area of this suspension that you are by yourself that you need to, it is literally exploring a new territory and you need to define all the rules and the playing field and you need to be ready not to be accepted by anybody essentially because they don't know exactly where to place you. And that means that in a company they may not know, they may not have a job for you, there is not a position for you. Now, right now we establish design in Pepsi cause there is an entire capability. I did the same in the past 3m, but it's not been easy.
- The job description, the titles of these people, the levels, having multiple senior people in the organization, everything is a battle. Everything is trying to explain what these people do because they didn't exist before or even the fact that by inserting them in an organization you're stepping on the toes of so many different functions. You start to do things that other functions were doing in the past, marketing r and d and they're like, wait a second, but I was doing that before. Why are you doing that? And you need to find ways to beat bridges and connect and working together. So long story short, this gray area, this suspension is beautiful because you can build your unique and different identity but it's also very challenging because everything is new and everything needs to be built from scratch all the time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Why do you run to the
- Mauro Porcini:
- Fire? That's a very good question. I never really thought about this. I think one of the key reasons is that that kind of fire is the fire of my life is not the fire that I am in my heart. I don't see as that as a dangerous fire I see as is. I see that as something that ignites my life and from the very beginning I've been always active in doing something all my life. I always had the goal and somehow the goal in my private life, in my professional life, it gives meaning to my life is I feel a profound joy in the journey towards a goal even more than achieving the goal itself. When you get to the goal, there is the pride of achieving the goal, but then it's there and then it goes back in your history and the things you did.
- But it doesn't give me happiness as such. What gives me happiness is the journey to get there. There is a famous Italian poet from the 1800, his name is Giacomo party the royal poem that we all study school in Italy called El Salvato del Village, the Saturday in the village and essentially is a poem when he describes the happiness and the joy of the people during the Saturday preparing the holiday of the Sunday. And the meaning of the poem is there is so much joy in that Saturday and all those hours that you spend in the preparation and connecting with others and talking and chatting and having fun together and then when the event arrive you enjoy the event. But how many times it happened to us mean to me For sure you're there preparing that trip or preparing that event or preparing something and it's so beautiful.
- All the preparation now you are there, you're like, yeah, this is great. It was even better the way I was imagining and everything I was doing to get there. And even just the physical journey of getting to a location. I mean there is so much in that idea of journey. And by the way, one of the points of your party in the poem is that why you are enjoying and you try to be present and you are trying to enjoy in the moment anyway. Well the Monday is arriving, there is already something else and it could be negative or positive is positive. Again, if you have a new goal, if you have something, a new dream, a new vision or something, a new project else, for many people that love to be focused on creating something, if there is nothing after that goal, then you are empty.
- And that's why I spent my entire life always trying to achieve specific goals and every time I achieve a goal, there is a new one that I am preparing already before achieving a goal. I'm preparing the next one for myself and I drive everybody crazy around me. If I think about PepsiCo, I'm sure many of the designers that were with me from the beginning are like, okay, come on. We reach that position, we build that organization wide all the time, new goals and new things to do and new ambitions and yes is the fire, that is the energy of my life versus the fire that could be perceived by many as a threat in your life.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So taking that notion, this always having something on Monday to look forward to this, not dwelling too much on the success of the moment and always looking to the future for what's next and how to fill your life up with that new energy that comes from that pursuit. I understand that your father and your grandfather are both fine artists, painters and about them. You've said, and I'll quote you now, as a kid my house was always filled with their art and experimentation. They pursued their passion no matter what with a genuine naive, positive attitude and what you've just told me there and what I know of you from the things that I've listened to you speak about and watched, you seem to embody very similar qualities to the ones that you described in your father and your grandfather. There you have a very strong bias towards taking action and doing new and interesting, exciting things. I understand you even physically embody this by having this need to tap your feet all the time. There's literally energy crackling from
- Mauro Porcini:
- You. How do you know that? Did I write about this in
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The book? You talked about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now this exudes, you know, exude what it is that you've been describing here physically. Do you attribute this part of who you are to what you observed in your father and your grandfather when you were growing up?
- Mauro Porcini:
- Well that's another interesting question I think, and I've been asking this question to myself for years, for many reasons and now you asked me about my daughter. I think children make you ask yourself questions that eventually you are not asking before or the same questions you'd now try to answer to these questions with a different kind of goal in mind and sensitivity and D, so here I am thinking about education and the connection between cultural education on one side and DNA and genetics on the other. I do think that on one side there is a little bit of genetic in it and there reason again, now this is talking, I'm sure there are psychologists and human scientists that could give you a much better explanation, but this is a simple observation of reality. Two kids, two brothers or sisters coming from the same family with exactly the same education maybe one year apart or in some cases twins.
- If I think about my wife, she has a twin brother with opposite characters. So there must be something that is genetic somehow. If I think also about the differences between my brother and I, then there is education and then when I talk about education, there are values that your parents in this specific case explicitly try to teach you another instead that are just the results of their behaviors. Now even in the case genetic though play a very important role and I was having this conversation with some friends that have young kids just a couple of days ago and I had this conversation multiple times with other friends about taking the role of parents lightly. Today we read so many books and there is so much pressure on being a great parent and the reality is that we have a role that is super important for sure, but we can't anyway condition and design entire life of these little kids and future adults.
- We just can't. And the reason why we should take it lightly is this, I am the result in the positive of things that my parents were embody. For instance the passion for whatever they did. But there are other things that define me today that are their reaction to things that my parents didn't embody at all. They were actually the opposite. As an example I say earlier my parents didn't have many friends, they're not really social people, they don't have friends and especially my mom, the main friend of my mom was a twin sister. They were symbiotic relation and so I rejected that. I didn't like that at all and I am really social. I became like literally I love friends and share my house with people. We have this beach house in the Hamptons that is completely designed to host people and we have people over every weekend.
- For my mother, the idea of having people over was trauma, tragedy. She couldn't deal with it psychologically and it's not extreme. It's really like this. She was really struggling. I mean I say this also, well my mother doesn't speak English so when I'm saying she's not going to listen to what I'm saying, so I feel free to talk about this. We are having, we're planning the baptism of my daughter in Italy and then there is the wedding of my brother and the wedding is on a Saturday. The baptism is on a Thursday and there is the parents of Carlo, my partner are coming to the north of Italy for the Baptist and we stay also for the wedding and they will meet my parents for the first time. I was chatting with my brother the other day and he was telling me, wow, three big events for mom and dad in the matter of three days.
- And they get super, super, super emotional and my father is weak with his heart and he was worried. I was like, well let's try to contain the emotions. So these are my parents. They're not used to meet with people and connect with people and be social and join events. For me it's the opposite. I mean it's the joy of my life. So very long answer to your short question. I think partially you are inspired by things you love in your parents, but you are also inspired by things that eventually you don't love and these things may be just their character and you're just different, but sometimes it may be mistakes. I was talking with another friend and he was telling me, well I am the resilient person I am today. And this guy is a big celebrity in Italy. He became very successful. He's an actor, he is a writer and I am like this because my father wouldn't spend any time with me, he wouldn't talk to me.
- He was always working. He had a bakery, he was making bread at night and then selling the bread during the day working all the time. And he was the old Italy where he was okay for a father and for a man not to really have any relation with the kid and just work. And that was a women thing back then in their mindset. It's like this is the opposite of what I'm trying to do with my two songs this friend was telling me and yet, and yet I am the person I am. And I would add, he didn't say this but he's the kind person that he is and he has that empathy and he has that resilience because of that. And I close, I swear I close so many times now I am here with friends that are successful, they're wealthy and we all we're have kids of the same age.
- We are having kids right now and everything. We're all wondering how can we artificially recreate the condition to stimulate the resilience to understand that life is not easy to understand that you need to face roadblocks and you need to overcome them. I mean these kids will grow up in a very comfortable environment and I want them to have that. I couldn't have it. I was with my brother and my parents sleep in one room and if my mom was buying an ice cream for me, she wouldn't buy it for herself. It was complicated. And so I wanted to give the comfort, but how can I inspire them to that idea of resilience and the fact that life is not easy and that not to take for granted many things that eventually I will be able to give them. That's I think is going to be the biggest challenge I'm going to have as a father.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's many things that you've mentioned there. There's many directions I could take this. I'm interested in this tension between becoming who you are as a result of the positive influence of your parents and also this active rejection of some of the characteristics that they embodied like your parents lack of a social life that you have actively rejected and you've taken on a very active role in being the social glue. What it sounds like in many of your friends and in your family's life and this notion as children grow up, they can see and observe and experience the world in the context that the parents provide. There's so many things in that. How has becoming a father, given the pressures and the demands of your role, how has this changed again if at all, the value that you attribute to the things in which you spend your time on?
- Mauro Porcini:
- Not much. Mostly because I came to the realization of cherishing your private life many years ago through a traumatic episode as often it happening in the life of people where you reach awareness all of a sudden or before the time before events like becoming a father. So to me, the traumatic event was many, many years ago. It was at the beginning of my 3M journey. I was in the middle of that 3M journey actually. And at a certain point, somehow the company betrayed me. And to be clear, 3M didn't betray me at all and I still love the company, but certain individuals in that company decided to hurt me. And when somebody decided to hurt you leveraging certain things that can lever leverage in a company, it is not easy then for the company to protect the person. Essentially something happened. I was like, wow, I gave everything to this company and I love this company to death and I sacrifice my personal life to build so much value to this company and then this company could let me down from one day to the other and it's gone and everything's gone that I did.
- And if you center everything around the company about your job, about what you do, if you identify yourself with that, you are screwed because they wiped away your life. And that's the moment that I realized. And then in that difficult few weeks, because then everything was so in a matter of few weeks, but in those difficult few weeks, who was there? Well my family, my significant order, my parents, my brother my friends. And then something similar happened later once again. And that was just the final reinforcement of everything. So back then I realized that it was so important to even be a better designer, a better business leader, a better executive on these companies to have the right balance, to find time for yourself, to invest in people you love and why I say even better for those companies because at that point you are a complete person.
- You don't rely too much on the company, you don't need to succeed in the company to be happy to realize yourself. And when you don't put your happiness, you know, don't connect it to the next position you're going to have in the company or to the achievements you're going to have in the company. Many magic things happen. First of all, when you struggle in the company, there is a difficult project or something's not go working properly with your team or with your boss. You go home and you have a life, you have friends, you have family, you have interest and the obvious and you can recharge your batteries. Change complete perspective put was whatever is happening in the company in the right perspective and the day after you go back and you have that energy to tackle the problem and manage a problem in ways that you wouldn't have if the problem was a black hole in your life and it was all your life and you were so focused on that.
- So having that kind of balance is important for that is important also because once again, if things don't go as you wish, you have other things to rebalance everything that is going on in your life. So there are many different reasons that they just mentioned too of what you need absolutely to find the right balance. Cause we are hearing this war to go after our happiness. Our ultimate goal is to be happy. And work was invented thousands of years ago by people that were thinking, okay, we are a collective or human beings, we have specific needs defined later on by Maslow as safety, physiological needs and a sense of belonging and connection and transcend and all the needs that transcend yourself. So you have a series of needs as a community and to help each other, let's organize ourself inventing the idea of work at the service of our happiness, at the service of ourself.
- And then over the years we forgot the work was at the service of our happiness and we put ourself at the service of work and we are betrayed that idea of happiness and what we invent the work for. And we are confusing the idea of happiness with the idea of fame, of material success of profit. And there are two problems with this kind of misunderstanding. The first one is that you focus everything in on the wrong things and even when you achieve them, you think you're going to be happy. But if you just have those, you are not going to be happy. And we see how many miserable, rich and famous people we have out there, they are not happy at all because eventually they just have that fame and wealth. The second problem that I have with this is that if that's everything you try to reach in life, well most of the people are trying to reach famous wealth.
- We fail because it's not that easy to become famous and rich. It's just the fact. And so if that's what you try to do in life, it's going to be very, very hard for you to be happy. If instead what you wanna build live is create some, be somebody that somehow build value for others that creates some form of value for others. And all the positive energy you put out will come back to you. If you invest in yourself, in your culture, in your connections with others in your love, well that's achievable. It's achievable by everybody. And by the way, the secret is that that's what makes you happy is not the other thing. Now the other thing is beautiful once you have that to have also wealth and fame, I'm not against it and that would be very hypo, but absolutely you need to prioritize first what is important in life, what really makes you happy, and everything else after.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I want to come to your book shortly. But before we do that I do want to just go a little deeper with you here on what we've been speaking about.
- Mauro Porcini:
- And by the way, everything I just described to you is all in the book. That book is really about the closing chapter is about how to design happiness and how these three steps that is about you love that is about you and others around you. And then transcendence is something bigger than you. And so this idea that if you can practice these three dimensions in your work anyway, but definition, your job and your work cannot be enough for transcendence and this for the other two dimensions, transcendence and love with others. You need to find space in your private life to go after those kind of values and they welcome therefore what happened after the tragedy of covid, this idea of hybrid working and a new balance work and life, that's so great because we are putting back human beings and happiness at the center of everything versus putting work at the center of everything and having people thinking that work is the channel to reach your happiness. Well in reality, once again it's just one fragment is a component but it cannot be the center of everything. We need to give back time to people simply because we reach a level of productivity through new technologies globalization to the new way of producing goods in this world compared to 100 years ago. We have a level of productivity that essentially generate so much additional time that the society should give back to people instead of giving back just to shareholders and investors. Informal money obviously.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So just coming back to when the knives came out at 3M and the reflection that you clearly have done on that situation and how it sounded like it helped to reframe the way in which you were giving yourself to your work so that you weren't giving all of yourself anymore, but not in a negative sense, not in a sense that you were withholding your best efforts, but it almost sounded like you have been more free to take the actions that you've taken since coming to that realization with less perceived risk than you were before. And I'm curious to know whether or not you see that as being true and whether or not being able to reframe the value that's inherent in you as being not entirely wrapped up in the value that you're giving to the corporation, whether or not that's actually fueled in some way the success that you've had since.
- Mauro Porcini:
- Look, I think first of all, I think corporations understand that the work-life balance is important. That is the reason why starting from hr, they build over the years they've been building all these policies or on the different balance work life, they understand that if you don't, you burn out people and you have a series of mental health problems that affect your company at the end of the day and is invisible often. And so it is a cancer from within. So on a very theoretical level, companies get it. You have people in hr, that's their job. And if you are a great HR leader, you study, you read, you go to conferences and obviously you are right to that conclusion. You must, I mean the best HR organizations of the world get it and they talk about this. So on one side there is that enlightment of especially the big companies that can afford that kind of thinking.
- On the other side though, there is human nature, there is the status quo and there is the culture of especially it could be the culture of the company, it could be the culture of the country. I live in the United States. I remember years ago I was reading one of the trends in the United States a research I was reading was calling this trend, no Vacation nation, A nation where the idea of taking a vacation time off it seemed like, oh my god, it's bad. You're not dedicating yourself to your job. Hard work. We need to work hard. And I remember again when I moved to years ago, the entry of an employees were five days of vacation per year. I mean these people are people that eventually live away from their families because maybe they live in Minnesota and their families are in New York or in Texas.
- Those five days what you do, you go back to your families and you meet them. And so you don't have time to invest in yourself to travel, to change mind, change perspective, discover the world. So all the time that you give back to people is so important and yet often you are trapped into the overall culture of an organization, a community or a country that stop you from doing the right thing unless you emancipate yourself. Unless you reach the kind of awareness and you're like, you know what? I'm going to do things differently and I'm going to be okay with it. But it's not easy. If I think about my journey, I need to double down on the results or whether I was delivering to the company so that I could afford to be different and behave in a different way. I expose myself on purpose through social media so many times showing how much I love life and I enjoy life and I have a life outside the work.
- But the beginning when I started to do it before PepsiCo, when I was still in 3m, it was not easy because people are like, but is it working? And of course I'm working, I'm working like crazy. But I wanted to extract those moments of personal enjoyment to tell the world you need balance. And the more I started to reach certain positions, the more I doubled down on that message saying to the world that it's okay to find a balance. And by the way I talk about balance between time that you are physically in an office and time that you are physically outside. But the other thing that I was communicating is that the two dimensions were all also completely blurred somehow in some way. And what I mean is that I was driven anyway by the same values, by the idea of innovating, by the passion for what I do by always thinking about generating value for people.
- No matter if I was in an office doing a project of design for PepsiCo or I was in a personal situation with friends in other kind of context, I would always extract interesting messages that are always consistent with one another no matter if the message is coming from a personal experience during a vacation or is coming from a business meeting. And that's why I started to also consciously blurring a little bit the professional social media platforms with the personal social media platforms. You can find a personal post in LinkedIn or something that starts from my personal life and somehow then I extract a message that is relevant for the business community as well. Obviously as well as you go in my personal platforms and there are, I share projects or things that are going on in my professional life. So what I'm saying is there is a perfect blending emerging of the towards in term of behaviors, mindset, philosophy, and purpose.
- But then I try to build space for both the dimensions and make sure that I am full and complete in my life and I don't have just one dimension overcoming the other. And as I said earlier, when you do it, then you go back to the business dimension, you can bring so much energy back, so much inspiration, so many, so much learning and this is very important. And the idea of sharing these true stories making sure that even the company itself understand what you're doing, that is a strategy that is part of the value you bring back to the company. Even that is been very important for us, for me during the years so that what I was doing wouldn't be misunderstood but would be appreciated for the value that actually was generating back for the company itself.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I feel like the level of challenge that you've been putting to the business community has been increasing as you've got runs on the board and you've had more success in your career. And this book book that's about to come out the human side of innovation, the power of people and love with people seems to, at least to me to speak rarely to that, you know, speak about love, you know, speak about these concepts that are so innately human but don't often make their way into the nation's boardrooms. These aren't things that business people comfortable with expressing usually within a corporate context. And you do this, you do this quite freely. I mean this is inherent clearly to who you are and what you're about, but how do business people respond to this? You know, speak in boardrooms, you speak at conferences, you bring this up in meetings, no doubt you're talking about it on podcasts and on your social media. Do these business people that you run into, do they see this as a piece of art that they're willing to leave on the gallery wall or is this something that you are seeing business people become more comfortable with thinking and acting and living in these terms?
- Mauro Porcini:
- I love this question. It's a very smart one. Luke has been a journey. You need to understand when you can push and when you need to step back. And so you say that in your question already, I can afford to talk about certain topics today because of the track record of successful projects that I landed in the world and therefore the business value, the financial value that was able to give for these companies. If I was entering this company path secret three and before right away talking about love and kindness and people would've rolled their eyes be like, okay, he is a nice guy for sure, but we don't really need this shit.
- They would've used probably exactly the word. So what I did was first of all, peer proof points as fast as possible. That's really needs to be one of the main goal that you set for yourself. Show value, show value in all possible ways that is financial value, tangible value. One of the criteria should be out tangible and visible is the value and building to the company and prioritizing that because the more tangible, the more they're going to invest in you and what you're pitching. The more you start to have those proof points, the more you can start to talk about the enablers that drove you to deliver those results. So essentially if I start to generate a series of projects that are very successful and I talk about the empathy of my team that was able to enable essentially my team to generate those projects that are being successful, people will be like, okay, I mean I see that actually the projects are successful.
- If you talk about this, they may be truth, maybe yes, maybe not. If you talk about this consistently in time, so your story is consistent in time and you every time connected to something that is tangible and visible, people will start to believe more and more about that specific value, your portion. Then the next step forward. If you start to link that intangible value, we talked about empathy, kindness, optimism, the characteristics of these incredible innovators that I call the unicorns in the book, you link those values two, productivity, efficiency, financial return, and essentially you show that those superpowers are the ones that made those projects happen, that made change or the evolution of the culture happen. They generate so much business value for the company. They will be like, wow. I mean that's interesting and the reason why they probably are going to believe you is that you're been generating that value.
- You're been generating value where eventually they thought you are going to fail. So they will understand that somehow there is something different in what you did, but it's not something you come up with after years and all of a sudden you're like, oh by the way, this was all about love. No, it is really from the very beginning you start to hint that idea, you start to share it, but the beginning needs to be love, few things, few fragments of the vision and then more fragments and then more proof points and then it grows. Both things grows together. The more proof points that are tangible and financial driven, the more you can start to talk about what is really enabling the success story.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You are in a design role where you have a huge amount of influence and the ability to scale the principles and the kind of things that you've been talking about on this podcast, but also on other podcasts in your book, this innovation is an active love. This notion of bringing these characteristics of the unicorns that you speak, of these designers that can operate with the empathy that is required to truly understand the people who they're serving, you know can do this and you're encouraging other people to do this. And I just want to touch on something that you've said previously about the challenge of scale and that as you've said, we are forced to reconnect with people and create something that is extraordinary for them and this needs to be driven by love. People inside these companies are really thinking, okay, I care about this individual, I care so this love, this caring about the person that we are seeking to serve through design this act of love. How do you do this in a way that scales to millions if not billions of people across many cultures? What does this actually look like when it hits the machinery of the corporation?
- Mauro Porcini:
- Yeah, I mean I love this question for a reason that the answer is that it's all about people. When you talk about scale, a lot of people think about processes and tools and ways of working and those are important if you don't have them, is impossible to scale up an idea. The problem is that when you have an idea, you have a dream, you have something that works on a small scale and you exclusively use processes and tools to scale it up. Most of the time you kill the solar. That idea, this is very obvious in the business world. For instance, when a big company acquire a startup or a small company, the biggest fear of the company is to kill the culture of the startup, to change, to kill actually the soul and the heart of the startup. And often they end up doing it, even if they're aware of the risk, they end up doing it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Okay.
- Mauro Porcini:
- It is just, it's just the nature of the machine. That's why in the book, but in my entire life I celebrate the power of people because the only antidote to this is people. You need the processes and tools, but you need to protect in that the soul of people. You need people that instead of seeing themself exclusively as cogs in a machine, they see themself as smart cogs in that machine because you still need to play a role in the machine. If it would be very naive to say, well, the machine can work without all these cogs, then we wouldn't have any kind of service, any kind of, I mean their care system would be disaster. We wouldn't be able to go to a restaurant, we will live in the wild, wild west. We need the cog. But the cog needs to need to be smart and they need to be able, for instance, to exchange themself in the machine and find new ways to connect with each other that are creative and essentially adapt and make the machine faster and more efficient and better through that agility, through that other adaptability.
- And so going back to the question, you need people that understand how to move in the machine, how to move within the processes and tools and ways of working, and therefore they need to understand the language of the different parts of the organization. They need to be able to navigate it in a great way, in a very effective way. But then they need to protect the intuition, the love, the problem solving ability, the creativity. The one when those cogs start to, they stop because the machine is facing a difficulty because or because the machine is becoming obsolete, because there are new machines that are coming to the market, new startups and new companies. So those cogs are able to re-engineer themselves, to rethink themselves, to reconnect in different ways to overcome any kind of roadblock that you may face in the journey as a machine. And this is what I think is really the big difference between a bureaucratic organization, just process driven and agile human-centric organization and understand that people are at the center of everything.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How does profit fit into this picture? Is there an inverse relationship between the amount that a company profits from its customers, from these people at seeks to serve and to love and how much it loves them?
- Mauro Porcini:
- I think for many, many years, profit has been replacing this idea of love, meaning that you had this people in this companies, they were thinking, okay, my goal is to grow the business. That's my goal in this company and I see the product and the creation of value for the people I serve as one of the levers to grow the business. But if I have the right barriers to entry and if I manage other levers like pricing, like promotion, like other levers that you have at your disposal as a business leader, I may still grow the business and I can still profit out of a product that eventually is not ideal, but because it's not ideal, eventually I can extract even more financial value out of it. What is changing today is the competitive landscape is effectively the fact that you are as a company, you are under attack by the proliferation of new brands and new products and new organizations that are coming to market with products that are relevant to the people out there.
- You know have thousands or millions of people out there thinking, how can I take your product, your brand down? And what do they do? Well, they focus on the needs and wants of the people that interact with your products and brands, their frustrations, their dream. There are met needs and as soon as they find one a met need, one opportunity, that's exactly where they end. It could be that your product is fun, is great, and your brand is phenomenal and the service is stellar, but you're not sustainable enough. Well, that's exactly when they end, where they enter good product, great branding and service, also sustainable. And one in the past they couldn't because there were those barrier to entry. Today they can go straight to your end users through eCommerce platform. They can build their ecosystem of communication through social media. They can bypass essentially those barriers to entry with a product that is better for people.
- And the summary of all these different products out there start to create not just the market share pro problem to the existing products, but mostly a mine shell in the love shell problem, they're making those brands and products obsolete, not relevant anymore, not cool, not meaningful not something depending on where they're attacking your product or brand. And so both the big and small are left with just one option. They need to focus on creating real value for the human beings out there at 360 degrees in every single dimension they need to create extra ordinary products. We are living in what I like to define as the age of excellence. Excellence is your best competitive advantage. You cannot protect any form of mediocrity anymore with your barriers to entry. And so this is where once again, building cultures inside these organizations that put love at the center of everything, meaning love for the people you serve, moving from customer satisfaction to people love.
- When you try to satisfy somebody, you try to do everything you can to fulfill a specific need. But when you love somebody could be your parents, your family, your children and your friends. You try to do more. You try to surprise them, you try to excite them, you try to do something that is magic is more than what they may ever expect and is. Holistic is in all the dimensions. And this is what should drive our organizations. And we should look at people not as customers or consumers, people to sell something to. We should call them people. Human beings. If you look at people as consumers, you will just think as a culture in your company, that will be the culture of your company. You will think, how can I sell stuff to these people? If you look at them as users, it's already better because at least you look at them as people using the product.
- And therefore you will try to create something that is desirable and it's functional. But if you look at people as human beings, then you're going to be interested on creating value in their life beyond the product itself. You'll be thinking, okay, of course I can touch the life of these people just in one dimensions through my product and my brand. But then we try to understand how I can help these people as much as boss who will through my entry point. And the product is the product and we do something for you. It's a piece of clothing, it's a cell phone, it's a car, great, I'm going to help you through that. But the brands could go above and beyond the product category. We talk about purpose today for this brands and every market of the world is so focus on the purpose of their brands.
- And that I think is something wonderful because essentially what that means is that those brands have such a wonderful platform to reach millions or hundreds of millions, in our case, billions of people every single day, that if you don't use the platform to do good for the society, you're just wasting an unbelievable opportunity and is almost irresponsible not to use the platform in a positive way. And thank God brands are moving that direction. Why? Because of those barriers to entry are down. Because if you don't do it, other brands are doing it. And in fact, you see the most of the purpose coming from the startups and the small brands, and now the big ones are finally adapting because they understand that even the dimension is important today, and it was not dimensional in the past.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Those brands, those big businesses are now ready to buy that piece of art on the gallery wall, so to speak. Now, Mar, I'm curious, given the nature of your passion, your clear passion for people, do you feel any tension between this love that you have for your, I won't say consumers because that's a word that you take issue to or issue with, but these people that PepsiCo is serving, these people that buy the product. Do you feel any tension between the love you feel for them and the effects that some of those products, if they're over consumed, are having on some of them?
- Mauro Porcini:
- Look, I think we live in a ward where consumer is somehow the norm, right? We grew up in this kind of society and we see that everywhere in fashion, in food and beverage, in consumer electronics. Why do I need to change my phone every year? Why? I mean why or my car? This idea of access, Rifkin in the late nineties deify, that idea moving from possession to access, access. Well it is interesting, of course I access music today. I don't buy music. I access the service of music. I access the idea of having a car to release. I access so much around us, but access means that the moment I stop producing wealth, producing, having an income, I'm screwed because I don't own anything anymore. I access my apartment to rent. And if I stop having the money to access all those things, I'm left with nothing. [laugh],
- Not even a house, I'm going to sleep in the streets. So my point is, we live in a society. This is all about consumerism. This is how we build the society, not even us, the people before us. Now it's our choice to try to scream from outside and complain and be like, oh, we should live in a different kinda world. Or if we want to join this companies and organization that at the end of the day are made by human beings with kids and families and empathy and sensitivity. Because often people forget about this. You're like, oh, the big corporation, you know, see just the black hole of the big corporation. You don't realize that there are human beings in the company that have kids, that they care about the future of their families and their environments and their neighborhood. And so what I'm saying is that what I found in a company like PepsiCo is that they're giving me the possibility, the platform, the resources to start evolving the system, change the system from within.
- And so I call any dreamer out there, any person. They wanna change the world to try to join this companies and try to change with them instead of just challenging them because that's so easy. And you are challenging by challenging these companies. You're challenging the world. We live in the entire world. While if you join them and you find leaders that let you push the envelope in the right direction, everything we're doing in sustainability in Alton Wellness, personalization to create better value in the life of people, purpose of our brands and everything we're giving back in the world of diversity and so on and so forth. I mean, do this from a platform like the one of PepsiCo with the billions of dollars we have at our disposals with the billions of people we reach every day, the impact of what we're doing is gigantic.
- So I take sustainability, I add the much bigger impact than I could have ever had ever had with any stuff top out there through PepsiCo, through the things we did. For instance, we saw the stream professional or just swap, changing the use of plastic to 100% recycled PT or eventually avoiding plastic at all in some brands and product categories and a variety of other initiatives that we are running and driving and pushing. I'm having by far, exponentially more impact than any startup type I could have ever joined. So are we there yet? Not at all. Obviously the entire society is not there yet. We are destroying our planet, but there are better chances to come in this company than try to move the needle in the direction from within than to be out there and exclusively complain about everything's going on in the world or in these companies just prospecting an ideal world that is so difficult to reach tomorrow morning.
- So let's move these machines. Let's go towards the ideal world, but let's do it step by step is the same thing that happened with the creation of designing the company. If I was arriving and be like, oh yeah, I want 300 designers right away, 15 design centers and I one design integrating everything we do in the company, the company would've been like, what? I mean go back to where you came from. But instead I started to work within a system was not ideal for design and I started to build proof points and incrementally change things. And we are with design where we're today, and there is so much more than we can do. Sustainability, health, wellness, all the other dimensions is the same thing, is a journey. And by the way is a journey of these companies that need to be embraced by the people out there.
- What again, often we call consumers because they need to embrace the products. Eventually the companies like this launch to push a different direction if a launch so the stream professional will sustainable I mean reusable bottles. So totally sustainable, healthy drink inside. If I push the same approach for Gatorade that you can find in a plastic bottle, but now you have Gatorade GX and you have a reusable bottle and we have pods. If we push certain kind of things out there, we need people to embrace it. We need the media to talk about this. We need the celebration of this effort so they can be amplified. Cause at the end of the day, this company produce what people out there want. And if a company stop producing what people out there want, another company will come and we start to produce that thing anyway. So I see not just PepsiCo, but many other companies doing a conscious effort to change the game.
- We need to reward that effort by buying those products, embracing those products, and trying together to change at a higher speed with a faster pace. But the good news though is that I think we are going in the right direction. We get there simply because if we don't, we're going to destroy our environment and they won't. And the planet will keep going on anyway without the human beings don't the planet earth and the universe doesn't need this. Human beings, if the human beings decide to be a virus to planet, a third planet, a third will get rid of us. If human beings will decide to be at the value to planet a third and live in full synergy with other animals and nature, then planet Earth will be super happy of having us with it planet a third for the rest or for many, many centuries to come.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mauro, you speak, you spoke of the importance of having, you only very briefly touched on the importance of having leaders who supported what you were doing. You also very candidly spoke about the importance of having proof points to actually demonstrate to the business that what you're doing in design has benefit and therefore there's worth in investing further in it so that you can do more with it. You've said, and I'll quote you again, now, all of us find closed doors. It's part of the game. If you innovate, innovate and make changes, you will encounter resistance. It's natural and you should respect it. So thinking about your journey over the last 20 years in 3M and PepsiCo, how much of what you've been able to achieve has depended on having senior leaders more senior than you, the ceo for example, understanding and believing in both you, but also in what it is that you represent, what it is that you've contextualized for them, that design can do for the company.
- Mauro Porcini:
- To have sponsors is very, very important. But to expect to enter a company and find the sponsor just because you're brilliant or because what you you're pitching is great or is very naive, you can build your own sponsors, you should build your own sponsors and the way to do it, and first of all, the sponsor needs to be somebody at the top of the company, ideally the co, but it doesn't need to be the CO. In 3m, I didn't arrive all the way directly to the as sponsors in different parts of organization who were not a co level. And the other thing to keep in mind is that you should never have just one sponsor because the moment the sponsor is gone, you are gone with a sponsor and you should have a few and then spend your time building so much value to the company that people will want to become your sponsor.
- We want to push what you're saying in their businesses, in their brands, in everything they're doing. And so how do you build the sponsors? And this is the key question. When you arrive, I where do you start? What do you do first? Well, first of all, you need to identify somebody that is powerful enough as power, enough power, meaning resources to make things happen and to help you pushing the culture you wanna push. And then you need to understand what drives these people, not just in their business world. Obviously if you're the CEO of a company, you are a senior leader, you wanna drive the growth of the company obviously. But you need to understand what drives them beyond that, you know what drives them as business leader. Maybe you are the C CMO of a company right now, the company where you work for, that you work for, but the goal of this person because anyway, there is not space to grow in the companies to move to another company.
- And you know that this person is going to do a certain things towards the goal that is natural. It's normally can happen, or maybe you know that there are other goals that are more personal in your personal life beyond your work. So when we talk about empathy, apply to leadership and culture. Empathy means also to understand other people what drives other people and ask yourself one key question, this is the question I ask myself all the time, not just with the sponsor, how I can help you succeed, how I can become therefore meaningful and relevant to you at the certain point, eventually indispensable if I really add a lot of value to you. And obviously what I mean is how can I leverage design or the culture I wanna build to make you successful? Not just in your business line, in your business world, but also as an individual in your life reaching at the end of the day also part of your happiness.
- And so that's what I did all these years. It was identifying people that potentially could be my sponsors and helping them, offering them something, creating value. To do that, you need empathy. You need to deeply understand what they need and what they want. You need to learn their language so that you learn how to make what you do relevant to them. It may be relevant because it's eventually it adds value to them, but eventually because of their culture, they're not able to see what you are bringing to them. And so you need to learn their culture, you need to learn their language, you need to translate what you do in something that is accessible, understandable by them. And so that's what I did. And then when I started to have a few sponsor, I worked all the time to make sure that everything I was building was embedded in the genetic code of the company.
- It was not just rely on the existence of the sponsor, on the sponsors. I mean it's pretty renowned in the world, the role that Iran has been playing to help us building design in Pepsi in the company. But if design was just Inuit toy today wouldn't exist When Ramon Lata became co and instead Ramon became co and design and Ramon double the size. We have the double of the people that we had under Indra many more design centers, much more integration. But why? Because it was a journey that started with Indra sponsored by many other people, few at the beginning and then exponentially more and more and more during the years. And then when Ramon took over, it had his own vision, his own sensibility, his own perspective, doubling down in sustainability, doubling down in innovation, doubling down in a variety of different dimensions. So it push it and then we start to have even more sponsors, more people that were coming in because of the proof points we're building.
- So a very organic journey with two streams. One is the top down stream of the sponsors, the beginning a few, and then day by day, year after year, more and more they push top down, they protected new coach, they make sure that people list and they pay attention and they help you bust in some of the roadblocks. But then there is a bottom up stream that is super important. And this is the big mistake that many organizations do when they try to build a new culture. There is just the top down and then in the value of the company, in the body of the company, people feel entitled to burn bridges, to go over people that are not embracing what the CO is saying. And so those kind of individuals and those kind of capabilities and organizations and cultures, they last until the sponsor is there and until the CO is there and the soon as the sponsor is gone, they disappear with the sponsor because they didn't build the right rules, the right foundation within the company, through empathy, working with others, collaborating, building proof points with the organization and building real meaningful value and imprinting the value in the genetic code of the
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Company. I feel what you've been talking about here is really relevant to something else that you've said. Now our culture, at least in the west, seems to place more value on those people who are the loudest, the tallest, the proudest, and less value on those people who are not those things. Now listening is a skill that is so simple, yet it's very difficult. It would appear to master for many people. And about this you've said, open your ears and open your mind. Be a sponge with age and promotions, all risk listening less and less. How many times have I talked more than listened? And in doing so I lost the opportunity to learn from some amazing people. How do you know whether you should be talking or listening? What does the conversation look like for you now that you've come to that awareness?
- Mauro Porcini:
- Look, you probably understood this today, just listening to me, to me, how much passion I have for what I say and how much I start and I talk and imagine myself in the media room or with friends. I'm like this boom, I start and I wrote in the book, you just quoted me saying, this is an effort. It's been an effort at the beginning to shut up. And I did it when I realized maybe the day after or the week after or the year after, I realized that I was in the same room with some amazing people and I was just talking and I didn't spend the time listening to them and learning from them. So today what I do is this, I first of all understand that all the time I spend listening to people, let's say there is one hour, if I spend 60 minutes listening to people, that's 60 minutes that I'm potentially learning something.
- If I talk for 30 minutes, I have just 30 minutes of learning. So the first realization is that the more time I spend listening, the more I learn. When I have interesting people in front of me, obviously [laugh], but the interesting people don't need to be the one with the big title or for instance, I'm fascinated by how much I can learn by children just because of the questions they ask you and the things that they make you think because of the way their minds work and process it and process things. So that's the first realization. Every minute that I talk is a minute less for me to learn something. Then the second criteria is that obviously you are with a group of people, you are in a room and you are supposed any way to have a role and play in the conversation even just because your point of view, your questions or challenges or perspectives can add value to their conversation and can eventually push people to add even more value to you through their answers.
- So what I try to do is to really think about how indispensable is what I'm about to say, how meaningful it is in two dimensions. One for the person I am have in front of me is a sort of selfless act of love or is the instinct of mentorship or sharing ideas that you have, you want the others to know about as well. The second thing is how much what I'm about to say is meaningful to the conversation so they can get even back through the answers, through the interaction, through the exchange of brilliant minds in around the room. So this is somehow the technique I use. And by the way, it's totally intuitive. It's not that I'm thinking every time, okay, let me really buy [laugh], measure the value what I'm about to say now. But I try to, let's say if there is an effort in all of this that I did over the years and I'm still doing today because it's not my instinct, it's to try to shut up more than talking. I try to contain myself. That's the conscious effort because sometimes my instinct is I'm going to talk, I'm going to talk, and then I'm like, let's count at the five at least, and let's see, should I really talk or not?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now if you're listening to this people, and I know you will have been, if you're hearing a licking sound going on there, I promised it's not me licking my lips as Mauros been talking, it's actually Moo's dog that's popped up to say hello [laugh].
- Mauro Porcini:
- She's there. I have these two dogs and they stay all the time in front of me and usually they sleep, but then from time to time they wake up and especially Bella, the white dog for the people eventually looking at us right now she loves to lick me. It's their way of kissing you and showing affection, but she's like obsessed with this. And so yes, she was licking my hand close to the mic.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, Bella's probably hungry and I know that we've run over. So Mauro, I must bring this down to with a final question now for you so you can get on with your day. You've been very generous with your time. Now you've got one of the biggest design jobs on the planet and I think that's pretty evident. It's got a glaMaurous lifestyle, a talented wife, a beautiful baby, a house in the Hamptons, and it would be very easy to look at you and think, man, that guy has got his life made. He's got it made. And to a large degree, maybe you do. I mean you have all of the outward trappings of success and you've certainly got some of the inward reflections that speak to me that you know exactly what you're here to do and you've spent a lot of time thinking about how you do that.
- And yet I watched something that you said, and I think you started to touch on this earlier on in our conversations, and it was a very personal glimpse behind all of the outward trappings that make you who are in the public spectacle. And you said, I'll quote you again now, I thought I was in control of my life, my private personal love life. And then you lose control and you don't expect it. And so it's very painful to manage, but I think it's also been one of the most enlightening experiences of my life and made me a better person. What have you learned that you feel is the most important thing for people who are listening to this episode to remember as they play their own game of life?
- Mauro Porcini:
- Look, first of all, I've been lucky in life for multiple reasons. One reason is that I did things and went in the right direction very often. And so I was doing good at sports, I was doing the good school, I was good in the social life, and then I started doing things at work and I started to go in the right direction. This is what I always thought, but then I realized a couple of things. One was that actually a lot of those things were going well in my life, well in my mind, meaning that I, I always had this super optimistic vision of everything. But for instance, I open a company and he failed, my agency failed, I had to close my agency. That was not good. And yet I realized this just few weeks ago, not even years ago, weeks ago, I was talking about that.
- And for the first time in my life I was like, wait a second. I remember that as an amazing success, but if I failed, but why? Because I'm such an optimistic person that I saw what that agency gave me a wonderful experience with an amazing person that was my partner and I learned so much. And then I use all the learning at 3M. So first of all, the first message is be positive and enjoy the moment. I was always happy. I was happy also when I had one room and the four of us, me, my parents and my brother was sleeping in the room where when we couldn't afford an ice cream, I was happy. I didn't desire to be richer or famous in the future or no, as I said earlier, always the journey was something that I love always the potential, what you could do and what you could do in life.
- And so for many, many years I live life thinking of having these superpowers because I was thinking and everything was going well in my life. Now, it did go well just to be clear. I wouldn't be where I am but there have been many difficulties and roadblocks and situations that were very challenging in my childhood and then later on, and so first optimistic vision of the world, but then something else happened in between 2015, 2016, I went through a very painful divorce. And as you mentioned earlier, I lost control of my life, meaning that until then I was thinking that I was always in control. One of the things, and there were two components of this control. One was the actual control, meaning that I was doing things and things more or less were going well, but the other control was the control of my mind.
- I was a positive thinker and I, as I said earlier, will see things even if they were not going in the right direction. I will always look at the positive side, but that painful divorce and everything that happen in connection to the divorce impacted also my positivity. And so I felt in the spiral, in the loop that brought me to depression. And this is something that I never experienced in my life. I never thought I could even be possible for somebody like me to be depressed because I'm the opposite and I've been always pretty stable. So I didn't think it was possible. So I realized that I was not invincible, that I realized that there is a pain out there that I thought didn't really exist. I never saw mental issues and depression as something that was an actual disease. I always thought, well, come on, I mean you're depressed, be more positive.
- And except obviously if you have a serious problem and that, but in general, the reality is there are so many people that have mental issues that are invisible to others. So I realized that then amplify to the extreme my empathy and my sensitivity in everything I do, making me a much better person. And then he builds so much awareness about the value of kindness, of love. That moment in my life made me look back at the person I was before that had kindness and love and empathy within himself, but he build a new layer of awareness that it never add until the point about the superpower of kindness or love and all these dimensions. So that after the crisis, I invested so much more in those dimensions and I started to become an ambassador of those values out there. Also because the kind people around me, both I work and outside my friends are the ones that literally save me.
- And when I say save me, I mean save me. Because you're right to a point where even if everything is perfect, you're like, you almost don't want to live anymore. But I never arrived to the extreme thought of taking my life because I was surrounded by a support system. There was incredible of beautiful people, nice people, kind people, and that was really life saving. And so after that I was like, wow, I, I'm going to transform my life in this mission of spreading this idea and spreading. And when I realized that, obviously it all started from a personal realization in my personal life, the power of friendship and love to help people your personal life. But then I was like, okay, but I have a platform in the business world as well and I have hundreds of people in my organization. And so that's when I started to look back with more consciousness, consciousness and awareness about the traits of these people, the kind of people that I hired.
- And then realized that actually I was adding anyway kind people and people with this kind of characteristics just because that was my background, thanks to my parents. But then I became aware about those superpowers and I started to really celebrate them and pitch them and drive them. And then in the past six, seven years, you hear me talking about this in every podcast, in every article, in every interview in my book is the title of my book. And so that's what I meant. That moment changed my life and made me a better person. And it's probably the most difficult moment of my life because maybe I had older difficult moments, but for what happened to me, meaning that I reached the bottom mentally. And I think it's a beautiful lesson, this idea that in the most difficult moment of your life when you think that, wow, where do I go? That's what you learn the most where that's why you better yourself the most. That's why you grow the most. And so now even when I face other moments that are small difficulties of your everyday life, I always remind myself also this that in the difficulties is when you stand up, you grow, you become a better person. And so they're all part of the journey that is called life.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a beautiful note to end on. It all makes sense now, Mauro, thank you for being so open and honest and for sharing some very powerful and informative messages for the people that are listening to our conversation today.
- Mauro Porcini:
- Thank you so much for having me today. Thanks for everybody listening to us and good luck to everybody in your journey, in your life journey, your professional journey, and be kind and spread this idea of love that is useful for the business, but mostly useful for yourself, for ourself and for our society.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mauro, if people wanna pick up a copy of the human side of innovation or if they want to follow you in some way to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Mauro Porcini:
- Well, you can find it in all the places that sell book, but an easy one is Amazon usually. That's a very easy one. And I'm very active body. My LinkedIn, our opportunity, and in my Instagram my opportunity as well, I post every day and you can reach me there and we can have conversations there if you like.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks Mauro, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, complete chapters on YouTube so you can hop around and get to the bits of the conversation that you want to hear. Again, you can also find Mauro in the show notes. There'll be links to his new book that's coming out into all of his social media as he's mentioned. So please check those out. If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders and UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review. Subscribe to the podcast as well. So it turns up every week and pass the podcast along, pass the conversation that you've just heard along to someone who you feel would get value from what we've just discussed. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, or you can find a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes as well, or head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co nz. And until next time, keep being brave.