Business Recoded

Have the Courage to Create a Better Future for Yourself and Your Business

Peter Fisk

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781119679868
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119680000
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

CMI MANAGEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 - SHORTLIST ' Business Recoded is a great source of inspiration for leaders who want to explore, shape and prepare themselves for the future.'
ALEXANDER OSTERWALDER, author of Business Model Generation and The Invincible Company

'It is not often that we have moments of magic in any business. What Peter has given us is more than just ideas and inspiration, but a whole way of thinking about how we could reinvent our future, and start making it happen tomorrow.'
ALBERTO UNCINI-MANGANELLI, GM and SVP, Adidas

'With energy, enthusiasm and a deep reservoir of fantastic examples, Peter Fisk maps out what each of us needs to do in order to re-calibrate ourselves and our organizations to create the future. Business Recoded is persuasive and compelling.'
STUART CRAINER, founder, Thinkers50

'Peter Fisk's excellent new book, Business Recoded, will help 'recode' your business by tapping into the minds of some of the world's most brilliant business leaders. It's a must-read for anyone in need of a quick fix of inspiration and tried-and-tested advice.'
MARTIN LINDSTROM, author of Buyology and Small Data

'Peter Fisk is a terrific storyteller with an encyclopaedic grasp of best business practices across the globe. If you want to disrupt the future of your business, this book is your decoder ring.'
WHITNEY JOHNSON, author of Disrupt Yourself

'A brilliant collection of practical guidelines intended to refresh and reinvent our mindsets, from a global thoughtful leader with vast experience in management development.'
SANTIAGO INIGUEZ, President of IE University.

' Business Recoded is definitely a must-read for leaders that want to succeed with their organizations in our fast-changing world.'
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ, author of The Project Revolution

Business needs a new code for success! Change is dramatic, pervasive and relentless. The challenges are numerous. The opportunities are greater.

Incredible technologies and geopolitical shifts, complex markets and stagnating growth, demanding customers and disruptive entrepreneurs, environmental crisis and social distrust, unexpected shocks and uncertain futures.

The old codes that got us here don't work anymore. Moving forwards needs a new mindset.

Business Recoded is for business leaders who seek to progress in today's rapidly changing world, and to create the organisations that will thrive in tomorrow's world. It explores how to lead a better future, to reimagine your business, to reinvent markets, to energise your people. It describes how to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact. It dives deep into the minds of some of today's most inspiring business leaders - people like Anne Wojcicki and Jeff Bezos, Emily Weiss and Devi Shetty, Daniel Ek and Tan Le, Mary Barra and Masayoshi Son, Satya Nadella and Zhang Ruimin.

Learn from the innovative strategies of incredible companies – Alibaba and Amazon, Babylon and BlackRock, Meituan Dianping and Microsoft, Narayana Health and Netflix, Patagonia and PingAn, Spotify and Supercell, and many more.

The book is built on 7 seismic shifts driving a more enlightened future of business, unlocking 49 codes that collectively define a new DNA for organisations and their leadership. It's about you – realising your future potential - by developing your own codes for more enlightened progress, personal and business success.

Do you have the courage to create a better future, for you and your business?

SHIFT 1
AURORA: Recode your future

HOW WILL YOU REINVENT YOUR BUSINESS FOR A BETTER FUTURE?

From profit machine to enlightened progress.

Aurora is the Latin word for dawn, originating from the ancient Roman goddess of the dawn. In meteorology it describes the luminous bands that occasionally form in the upper atmosphere when charged solar particles align with the Earth's magnetic field.

Consider the stretching aspirations of these companies:

• Adidas, the global sports brand, believes that “through sport we have the power to change lives”.
• Bulletproof, which creates innovative foods, including great coffee, exists “to help people perform better, think faster, and live better”.
• Google seeks “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
• IKEA rises above its flat-packed creations to say it is here “to create a better everyday life for the many people”.
• Nike wants “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world” and notes that “if you have a body, you are an athlete”.
• Shopify seeks to “make commerce better for everyone, so businesses can focus on what they do best: building and selling their products”.
• Tesla, for all its focus on fast and stylish cars, has a more worthy aim, “to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy”.
• Whole Foods wants “to co-create a world where each of us, our communities and our planet can flourish,” adding “with great courage, integrity and love”.

What is the purpose of your business?

CODE 1: WHAT'S YOUR FUTURE POTENTIAL?

Rise above the chaos and complexity of today, let go of the obsession with what got you here, and instead focus on creating a bold, brave and brilliant future.

As 1999 ended, optimism was sky high as a new millennium of possibilities approached. For me it was particularly exciting as my first child, Anna, was born just weeks before the start of 2000. As clocks chimed to ring in the new millennium, my wife Alison and I stood outside our home at midnight, our new baby asleep in my arms, as the most dazzling fireworks display I have ever seen lit up the skies around us.

However, economies move in cycles, and within three months of celebrating a new century, I vividly remember the day of the dotcom crash. The starry-eyed dreams of many online entrepreneurs came crashing down. Some survived, but many others didn't, including my own venture. I realised that, now with a young family, I needed to be smarter at building a business, and at anticipating the future.

Most people took their inspiration from a Seattle-based start-up called Amazon. A few years earlier, in 1993, Jeff Bezos was working on Wall Street, a 30-year-old rising star of the hedge fund world. On his desk a report landed describing how the emerging internet could become a huge virtual marketplace, that could reach across the old boundaries of nations and markets. Tim Berners-Lee at CERN had just launched the World Wide Web earlier that same year, enabling anyone to start to build a business online, simply and cheaply.

Within a few weeks Bezos left his high-flying job, packed a campervan and drove west with his young wife, still asking huge questions. In Seattle, where most tech people clustered around Microsoft, he set out his business plan with a dream to create the world's largest bookstore. Initially he called it Cadabra, then considered Relentless, but eventually settled upon Amazon. Within three years, he took the business public with an IPO. Anybody who invested $5000 in Bezos's company back then would be worth around $5 million today.

At that same time, Anne Wojcicki, a 25-year-old junior investment analyst, was sitting at her desk on Wall Street, not far from Bezos's old office.

She read that the future of healthcare was all about data, genetic profiling of each individual enabling personalised medicines and care. No longer would people need to rely upon standardised drugs with limited effectiveness, seeking to address already-developed illnesses often too late. Instead, healthcare could be transformed to become personal, positive and proactive.

Like Bezos, a passion to create a better future was stirred inside her, and within weeks she quit her job and headed to San Francisco to start up a DNA profiling business, 23andMe.

At the time it cost around $300 000 to sequence an entire human genome. Wojcicki sought to dramatically reduce the cost by using a technology called genotyping, which spot checks specific parts of a gene for mutations known to be linked with certain diseases, instead of a creating a full sequence. They launched the brand to consumers in 2007, with testing packs available by mail order for $999, and later directly from the pharmacy's shelf.

The revolutionary genetics business combined ideas of new genome technology and crowdsourced funding, into a model that has since reduced the cost of DNA profiling to $99 and is likely to fall much further in the coming years. She now leads a healthcare revolution.

LOOK FORWARDS NOT BACK

Yet we spend too much time looking backwards, not enough time looking forwards. And as a result our future defaults to an extrapolation of what we have done, not what we could do. In a world of turbulent change, a future based on the past, can be quite limiting, and with diminishing returns.

Of course, we take comfort from looking backwards. It is much easier to define, to evaluate.

As an individual, when was the last time you went for a new job? You most likely tried to demonstrate your future potential by describing what you've done in the past. You proudly laid out your resume, eloquently describing your past experiences, impressive qualifications and previous achievements. It might well be impressive, but it's an old story.

As a business, you probably do the same. Daily schedules, meetings and reports, are spent poring over the past. Performance is all about what we have done, last quarter, last year, and compared to previous years. Strategy is too often based on what we have done, our existing capabilities and assets, and we limit our future by what we currently do.

Yet we all know that what got us here is unlikely to be what gets us to where we want to go.

As individuals, and as organisations, we know it is not what we have done that matters, but what we can do, could do, next. Yet what we do next is most likely to be a repeat of what we've done, unless we change something. What is that change that will unlock more than was previously possible? What is the key to our future potential?

Looking forwards is a rare luxury.

A few weeks in the year are typically allocated to future planning. And of that, only a few days maybe even hours, are allocated to a serious discussion of future possibilities, vision development, and plotting out new directions. Ideas for the future are captured on flipcharts, slides and slogans, before their magic is quickly lost in a furious round of budget negotiations focusing on limiting expenditures rather than unlocking new revenues. Inspiring ideas for tomorrow are quickly diminished by the machinery of managing today.

It shouldn't be like this. And in a turbulent world of relentless change, it can't be.

Business leaders need to have their heads up, not down.

Of course, we need success today in order to create tomorrow, but creating the future matters more. Most business leaders will claim they are powerless to jump out of this cycle, to spend more time looking forwards. They are slaves to quarterly reporting demanded by investors, and short-term attitudes of many analysts. But that is largely an excuse.

Paul Polman, when CEO of the British/Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever, famously decided to end quarterly reporting, arguing that he could never get anything else done, and that his projects to invest and develop future ideas were always compromised by an inevitable desire to make today's result look as good as possible. In a showdown with investors, he made the case that they too should be much more interested in long-term growth, rather than short-term glory. He won his battle, and Unilever began to thrive.

The challenge is to focus on the future, to engage everyone in exploring and creating your future potential. A business's economic value is measured as the sum of future cashflows, not past profits. These can only grow through more future-focused initiatives. The alternative is to squeeze ever more revenues and fewer costs out of the existing business with diminishing returns. That's not much fun, and certainly not the w...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• INTRODUCTION
• SHIFT 1: AURORA
• SHIFT 2: KOMOREBI
• SHIFT 3: TRANSCENDENT
• SHIFT 4: INGENUITY
• SHIFT 5: UBUNTU
• SHIFT 6: SYZYGY
• SHIFT 7: AWESTRUCK
• DOING MORE
• ONLINE RESOURCES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT