Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer, Pepsico, interview with Philip VanDusen

Hello everyone, welcome back to the Brand Design Masters podcast. I'm very excited about this episode today because I'm joined by Maro Porcini and Maro is the senior vice president and creative director of PepsiCo and for the last 10 years he and his team. has won more than 1,800

design

and innovation awards and in 2018 PepsiCo was recognized for its business success by Design List. He was previously a

design

director at 3m, and over the years, Morrow has received a slew of awards, including the company's Top 50 Fastest Awards. influential designers in America fortunes 40 under 40 and ages AD list of the 50 of the most influential creative personalities in the world now in his position at PepsiCo Morrow built design and innovation as a core competency within the company for the first time in its more than a hundred year history and I personally had the honor of being hired by Morrow to serve as vice president of global snacks at PepsiCo in the early days of building that innovative initiative of developing Design within PepsiCo and I remember the experience of working with Morrow as one of the most formative, inspiring and enjoyable experiences of my career, so when I

interview

ed him for this PepsiCo role I was totally spellbound by Maro Porcini and Morrow has a passion and love for design and innovation like no one else I have known in the world. industry and I know that you will love hearing this

interview

as much as I love having it with Morrow, so come listen to the interview with Marlo and I hope you really enjoy it.

Hello everyone, welcome back to the Brand Design Masters podcast. I'm Philip van deusen and today I'm very excited because I'm here with Maro

porcini

and Maro is the senior vice president and

chief

design

officer

of PepsiCo and actually my old boss, so I'm very excited to talk tomorrow today because he just publishing his first book called The Human Side of Innovation, The Power of People in Love with People, which is available on Amazon and I'll leave the link in the description of this podcast so you can watch it, so let's jump in. Now, um, tell us a little bit about um, real quick, about how you came up in design, because a lot of my audience are creative professionals and I'm sure the first question on their mind is: how do you become a director? of design for a major corporation, so what are the final notes from that trip?

Well, first of all, Philip, it's a great pleasure to be here with you today and with everyone listening to us and eventually watching some of the clips, how? First you become a design director and you start your professional journey without the goal of becoming a design director or something like that, but following what you love and know sounds great and it's beautiful to say in a podcast or an interview, but it's really really what happened to me and the more I read, the more I read stories of people who have been doing something interesting in life and the more I realize that this is actually a common trait of many people who achieve something. uh, you know, in your journey, your professional journey, the starting point is doing what you love to do with total passion and when you do it, as a consequence, you're going to go the extra mile. extra effort in what you are doing you are going to study to improve every day what you are doing you will have a drive that you don't have if you don't love what you do every day the second In some ways, the thing is to think about where you want to go, but you know which one It's your dream, what's your vision, what's your plan, but no, not in Germany.

Fame, wealth and positions more in terms of what you can do to create value for yourself. and for society through what you are good at what you love, so in the case of design, you know what can I do as a designer to create value for people for society, therefore for the companies for which job, I think value for you is just A consequence of all these things is a major shift in people thinking, "I'm going to create value for myself first, which means I need the next job, the next position, and I'm going to see everything else as a lever for that to be completely different." kind of approach and you know, in my personal journey I started as an industrial designer um and then when I did my thesis on wearable technologies and through that I joined Philips Design working on wearable technologies at Phillips, so imagining the future of society 20 years in advance and thinking about how we are going to interact with technologies using them to increase our comfort, connectivity, safety and style, that's what I did back then for about a year and then I created my own agency. in the digital world and try, on the one hand, to work on what you expect from the digital world, what you expected back then, the identity of brands and companies and, above all, in our case it was the identity of being Italian celebrities who They were working on music on television, but then, in parallel, what we were doing was trying to figure out how to create something that no one had done before in the world.

We were working on one of the main projects, on what was later called cryptocurrency, for example, and a variety of other things, but it was really innovation applied to the digital world, but it was too early, the Internet collapsed and the Internet bubble burst. and we closed the agency and I stumbled upon 3M, the Minnesota technology company. I joined the company to work as a design coordinator. In the European business in the company's consumer category, one of the company's six categories and the focus was on industrial design. 10 years later, I left the company and was the company's design director at multiple design centers around the world. from Japan to China, the United States, Italy, Brazil and and we and they joined Pepsi 10 years ago.

The reason I mentioned all the steps of the journey is that each step gave me something different that allowed me to later become the design director of these corporations essentially in the beginning I was an industrial designer he was I learned how to think about the future and visualize the future and come back to the present and create something to prepare for the future and while I was there I learned the world of graphic design and typography because we were a small team at Phillips and everyone did multiple things so I also had to do things for the I was not prepared for that, I did not study school and they learned the world so I jumped into a completely different reality, it was the digital world and I had to learn to code, create sites of interest and use all the software in the world, but when I was There I was intrigued by what could be done in the digital world.

Beyond pure design. literally entrepreneurship in a digital world, then I joined 3M again as an industrial designer, but this time working in pure technology in a variety of different industries, different from each other, from aerospace to healthcare, consumer products office , etc. and I realized very quickly that to do my job properly, industrial design was not enough. I needed to work on packaging your communication into a digital experience, but no one was asking me to do that, so I learned how to do it. I make a prototype, you know? things I started working in fields that weren't in my job description and I did it by partnering with business leaders who allowed me to do things like this and so I started learning more and more and getting a point of view on different design disciplines In In short, what happened is that in all these years I somehow learned to master in some cases all the different dimensions of design in connection with graphic design, industrial design, digital experience, fashion and connection. . all of them with the commercial objective, the commercial objective of these companies that I was working for and in all of them I learned to develop capabilities to allow everything that you know to allow this Vision to allow all of this to happen, so the hiring of people it is up to the right people to understand the power of those people to empower them to do what they need to know what they had to do without limiting them without preventing them from expressing themselves literally understand that the tools to be successful and reach that dream I needed to trust in all of them and I needed to find the best of the best of the best people out there and this is what the design director needs to manage all the dimensions of design understand the business world and understand people these are the key ingredients and then mix them to generate value to the company you were for or to your own company, so what do you think one of the things you talk about in the book is unicorn designers and there are 24 skills of these people that make them real unicorns.

As you say, it's impossible to find people who have it all, but it seems like, to some extent, as you progressed, you knew you were a master, a master of design and product design, but as you know, you became more adept at navigate these large corporations. learning the various disciplines, production, manufacturing, distribution, all of those things and learning to, um, I don't want to say manipulate them, but coordinate them around a common goal, so to some extent, that's what I saw you in the first few PepsiCo days. What you did at 3M was you took a corporation that wasn't Design Centric had always turned design over to agencies and you brought it in-house and built it as a competition within PepsiCo. organization or you did more or less the same thing it's exactly the same playbook the only difference is that at 3M uh first of all I joined I was 27 so I had less experience second I joined in 2002 there was less awareness about the value of design in the business world outside of industries where design was the main competitive advantage, such as consumer electronics, automotive fashion, etc., and therefore, somehow, due to this type of situation, I needed to learn by doing. and so it took me 10 years to get to a certain um to realize certain things and then when I joined PepsiCo I had this Playbook ready so I knew exactly what to do.

In fact, it was part of my conversation with the CEO at that time to revamp PepsiCo's SEO in the interview I had with her when she joined the company we didn't talk about uh the projects that the entry and the achievements that I had in the company and in the previous companies we talked mostly about how to design culture and because the internet knew perfectly well that introducing something new and she was introducing multiple different things that were new to the company, you needed to understand not only how to master the new discipline, the new approach, but also how to somehow design the culture around you to embrace that new discipline, the new approach, the new methodology, the new capability, she was essentially back then introducing Real Performance for the purpose of building a nutrition business and introducing the idea of ​​these global organizations and managing the tension between global and local, so I knew perfectly well that our culture was important and when I started talking about culture and how to design culture and what happened at 3M and our culture was important in driving the creation of design capacity.

I think that's where we click and then I talked to her about five different phases that I went through in the new culture. at 3M, those are the same phases that later became the PepsiCo manual, they could be applied to any type of other company, the first is what I call Dinaya, it is when the company does not realize that they need something different and they say okay, we don't need design, we're having success for over 100 a year. Without design, why design? But sooner or later someone realized that you need a new coach. It has to be the CEO or someone who is at the top of the company because it needs to be someone who can drive change, as well as the resources and credibility to drive that change when this person arrives, hire someone to initiate the change, to Sometimes you can try to hire people from outside for higher levels, they change consultants and everything, but usually that's it. it doesn't work, you know people internally to drive cultural change and that's why in the case of 3M, the higher up this kid was outside of Italy, they left him there in Italy, you don't know, at first they didn't transfer me to the United States . and it was kind of a prototype and experiment in the design world, thinking you know this is the experiment you do to validate that idea, if the experiment wasn't going in the right direction, you probably know the company would be whatever it would have been whatever. .

You know, no one will realize that he's just someone out there on the periphery of the American Empire. It's playing with design, so it was an experiment for sure and it made sense because it was 20 years ago, again, design wasn't as established in the business world as it was before. It's today and here I am, I take my suitcase and I travel to Minnesota to meet with all these business leaders and RND leaders and I have all these meetings and they all go super, very very good and I remember going to My executive sponsor's office, executive vice president of 3M's consumer business, Dr.

Monozare, and to tell you more, it's fantastic. You know everyone is adopting this ideaof design. It will be much easier than when we thought about promoting design in the organization, and there was always more. a very serious person that day was more serious than ever he looked at me and told me everyone is lying to you but no more exactly I was there it is impossible you know that I saw them you know that I have a very high EQ and emotional intelligence you are not there and it goes on more , I tell you that everyone was lying to you and then he continues with an example with a metaphor to explain what he was talking about he told me imagine that you are in an art gallery and you see a beautiful painting in front of you that you really love and your pockets are full of money that you buy well the painting Mauro you and the design are one of the paintings in the 3mr gallery and these people that you met have their pockets full of money because I put that money there is the budget that I gave them and no one buys you and the design are everyone buying other paintings they are buying the next HR project investing in a plant you know something else but not the design they are not investing in you there was a big aha moment that completely changed my life because first they realized I had reason and then you realize why people behaved like that, they behaved like that because they didn't want to disappoint this child full of hope and visions and all they wanted was to be nice to me, not nice and maybe They were afraid of the executive sponsor behind me, they didn't want to upset Monozari or maybe they were sending me weak signals of the fact that they weren't really buying my idea, but I wasn't reading that because, as human beings, we love to think that we were loved and we are often blind to rejection.

In short, I realized that many times we teach something and people are not with us and we do not realize it and we are not aware of it, so after that I developed a technique to avoid it. those kinds of blind spots every time I preach something to someone I ask for money for a commitment okay, do you believe in this give me people give me the resources to start a project or at least if you can't if I know that I really can't because they don't have those resources , I ask for commitment as what I call a sacrifice, you have to be in it with me visibly and that changed everything because essentially, when you do that, usually nine people out of time leave, they will. say like oh yeah, I really believe what you're saying, but right now is not the right time, let's do it in two months, in three months and then it'll be up here, so doing it is powerful because two things happen, one you give it to yourself. the ability to ask them why they don't want to be with you to answer any questions they might have and maybe you can convert more people, but mostly even if you don't, which is important in that.

The moment is to discover that one person in ten wants to be with you. I call them co-conspirators, so in this phase I call the second phase the hidden rejection phase, when you are rejected, you don't realize the SEC. The phase is what I call the occasional leap of faith, it's when you find those co-conspirators, they take a leap of faith in you in this new capability, by the way, it could be designed, it could be anything else, and they start working with you. To build proof points, it's important for you to know that when I joined PepsiCo I started mapping all the projects that were in fruit in some way, as you may remember the redesign of Pepsi around the world, the Spire machine, there were certain things that were low angle, like, okay, there's a way to show value quickly on these projects, but then I started mapping business leaders as well, they were the potential co-conspirators because if you had a project where you could show the value of design quickly but they did not have a business leader, they understood the end. that focus and empowering me to do things and you know, playing us the right way, meanwhile I was going to waste my time if I had Draco conspirators but they didn't have the right projects, I was going to waste my time anyway because we didn't have the right ability to show impact very quickly, so in a nutshell, a long story in the phase would be proof points and those are very important because they give you that credibility that I'm talking about and you have to deliver them quickly and that's.

Why do you remember we had a snack organization, a beverage organization, a nutrition organization? You were focused on the snacks, right? It wasn't so important to be successful everywhere. It was important that we could be the least soundproof points in some of the organizations because those test points would have actually been very powerful if I went back to the other organization and said, "See, we did it there, we're not going to do it with you, for what or with the other regions of the world". You know, we started with China and then all the regions came.

Today we have 15 design centers around the world, so again the point of an occasional leap of faith is that you need to act fast, you need to create some test point, that test point has to be visible, right? You don't have to do everything perfect and everywhere, just do it here and there and what's going to happen then is that when people take advantage of those proof points they will come to you and say: wow, I want to do in my business what you do. did! in that business and I'm going to say, okay, it's like cross-divisional jealousy develops, right, yeah, as soon as someone gets the Eye of Indra and people see how cool and sexy that thing they're working on is, they're like oh we have to do something great and sexy too, right?, you say something, but if you say something really important, it could be the CEO's eye.

Audi could be, you know, financial income or it could be a new connection that you build with a customer, it can be many different things and that's why it's so important. This is one of the qualities of unicorns: understanding the person you are talking to and the possible co-conspirator and understanding what drives them, what is important to them, because maybe for this person at the time of their career be very important to get a lot of visibility with the label because this person is thinking about the next job, so you understand that that is a lever that you can offer because yes, you know, we.

You are doing things that are very visible and this is sponsoring me so I am going to offer you this in addition to the fact that I am generating value for your business but perhaps you have someone in front of you who does not understand that design can generate value for their business, they still do not believe, but we believe that eventually you can generate visibility with SEO, okay, in the phase that I am going to take advantage of, that gives me, I will show you the effects that I am going to also generate value for you in the business, but all this is connected with the ability of these design leaders to have empathy, not just empathy for the people you design, empathy for the people around you, your potential internal customers.

I don't like to call them out on the road, but you understand what I'm talking about, the cocoa Spiriters, your boss, your teams, you know they all surround you, that's part of the vision and the dream of changing the organization for the better, so that this is the third. phase occasionally for Faith and then once you start to have a critical mass of projects you move on to the fourth phase, which is what they call the search for trust, it's where the company says wow, yeah, now this is no longer the CEO toy. or you know the trend of the moments, this is something that is really generating value for the organization, so we need to scale it up, we need to move from startup mode to scale-up mode and this is where new challenges come because you need First of all, capabilities to be able to build processes and tools and work at scale, but as you do that, you have to be very careful not to kill what made that topic great in the first place: the passion, the intuition, the love, the entrepreneurial spirit, and so on. is.

The challenge of the Quest for Trust is to self-balance the processes and scale them with passion, intuition and love and to do that once again you need the right human beings who are able to create the right balance between the two dimensions and that is why I call application. To gain trust, I could have called it the scaling phase, but finding trust connects to a specific struggle that you have in this phase, and as you scale, the company starts to lose confidence that that can actually work at scale and In fact, many of these first basemen die in the face and instead you need to build enough trust in all the different leaders and individuals so that those big risks that they are starting to take by investing millions or hundreds or millions of dollars in capacity will generate every worthwhile term and then if you do that, at that point you integrate the culture within the organization and you move to the fifth phase, what I call holistic awareness, when the new culture is fully within of the company's DNA, so this has literally been a big part of my conversation with Indra when I interviewed we talked about this, so going back to your first question about what a CDO does, a design director does it well, he needs running projects, of course, you need to understand the business, of course, but if they are introducing something different and they usually do because even if they work in a design-driven company, all their projects will be innovative by definition, they have to be, otherwise Otherwise they will not be doing their job, so there is always this component of disruption and innovation in everything. are you doing well as a city or do you need to understand how to take everyone with you how to design secure code and by the way the interesting thing is that you can use the empathy strategy tools of design thinking and prototyping even when design culture you understand the people in front of you you understand the company strategy and then you create prototypes Solutions some will work others will not work you will learn from that and create an organization that is better and bad one of the things I think many creatives who work within corporations and agencies They even struggle with how to elevate the importance or adoption of design within their organization and one of the things you talk about in the book that I saw.

What I did when I first came to PepsiCo was to use the idea of ​​the shiny object and create this vision and in this case the one I particularly remember was this very modernist soda fountain. TRUE? You were innovating this soda fountain. and it was like it was the beautiful soda fountain icon on the iPhone. I mean, it was wonderful to talk about the use of the shiny object because I think it's one of those things that creatives within companies can learn to use to draw attention to what they're doing and somehow generate that emotion and that passion that can lead you to those co-conspirators, so talk a little bit about that and how you do it, yeah, and that's how I understand the shiny object is one of the superpowers or prototyping that I talked about in the book , so if there's anything to your empathy and prototyping and prototyping strategy it's that idea that when you have an intuition, you immediately translate it into a Post-It North like yes into a sketch on a piece of paper in a rough prototype with more Cap until you get to something that is very visible, it's beautiful, it's exciting, it's the shiny object, well, there are multiple values ​​very quickly, the first one is when you create a prototype, you align everyone around an idea.

If I say knife right now, you know, you will visualize a knife. I will visualize a different knife and all the people listening to us right now will visualize more and more knives, but if I draw a knife, first I have a prototype knife. every error in the line of sight everyone around that idea how many times we are in a meeting we talk about something we all think we are aligned and then we leave the meeting everyone goes in different directions because we really weren't so the first Power of creation Prototypes are lineups of people, no matter where you are, what position in the company and what geography you are in, the second power is to allow others to create with you, so if I design the knife, the specialist in Marketing can tell me that the brand is not visible enough and ergonomists can tell me that the handle is not comfortable enough and then other people can think that I am a bad designer because I design a bad knife and that is actually what the thinking of design in action. empower and allow marketing and all other functions to co-create with me.

I can take out the knife and show it to customers. Consumers are not in a formal environment, you know, not just in consumer research. I can do it in my daily life you know maybe I have a meeting for something else with a client and at the end of the meeting I showed him an iPhone like what do you think about this or I go to the store in front of the office and show him that thing that I'm designing for people and I get feedback. All of this is what I call the power of co-creation, internal co-creation and then external co-creation and finally we come to the power of the shiny object, so when you start to have a product that is well defined, then you have a prototype that looks like the real object or very similar to it and you present yourself to people because you need to sell that idea, you need these people to sponsor it or you need these people to sponsor itsponsor people to allow you to take it to the market or a variety of other things.

It's very important to bring something that excites people. In the book I talk about the fact that you know these CEOs or business leaders, they get funding requests every single day the whole time you think you're the only one there and you know you're proposing something great and everyone should love what you're proposing the reality It's that these people have people asking them for money as long as they need to prioritize what they need. To do that, they need to make decisions and therefore go there with something that excites them as human beings, not as business leaders.

We all love products that you know are beautiful, that are functional, that are meaningful to us wherever the other is so powerful to create. that excitement that is totally irrational is something that comes from your gut or in the book I describe a little more scientifically what happened in your brain, but essentially I start from a part of your brain that you don't really control rationally, you have that emotion and in At that point the meeting becomes almost a way of finding a rational reason to believe so that emotion comes to life that you love that brother so much that you want the product to come to life in your company with your brand and now you are going to listen to people That they propose that idea to you in a different way, it is simply psychological.

It's so powerful now that it can create a different kind of problem than I had in the past, that people get so excited about that idea and they want you to bring it to market tomorrow and if you're still in development and you don't have all the answers yet , the shiny object will take you to people's addresses. I mean, it will get you into a difficult situation because you need to go too fast because of that emotion, but I always find that to be a very good problem to solve. I've compared it to the lack of enthusiasm when you propose something, so that's the power of the shiny object, essentially there is trust in the organization that we are talking about, trust seeking and also because imagine that you develop a product in a small team that spears. the products in the markets and this product is very disruptive, it is very new for people, even in the market, it often takes time to get used to things that are very disruptive and fall in love with it.

I remember when Apple launched, for example, candy colors. uh Max, many years ago, at first, the reaction was a new core, it was polarized, people loved it, people hate it, edit them and then at a certain point, somehow, by the time it became in something so iconic, so beautiful, everyone talked about it, everyone wanted it and so on. It takes time, the same thing happened within the company, so if you propose something once and finally do it with a rendering or a sketch and that's it, people will be surprised at first, you know they won't be used to something new, so How disruptive, but if you propose something from the beginning, in the first sketch, take the sheet of paper and show what you have in mind and people will react like that, but then you talk about how you know what works and what doesn't.

All the different features that work on the F, you start to take it to the next level and this time it's a new prototype, you get to know it with all the considerations of all the different features and then you start to take it to the consumers, to the customers, you do it. . in front of your business leadership, maybe you use events like Milan Design Week or the Super Bowl to show things to clients in front of business leadership, so essentially what you're doing progressively is building more and more trust in the organization first because they are becoming familiar with it and, secondly, with that new idea and, secondly, because they are witnessing different functions and even external entities, such as clients, consumers, people in general, who build that concept with their ideas and This is really giving them a lot of peace of mind. the organization actually that crazy idea that seemed crazy at first is not crazy, there are so many people involved who support it, who are part of it and who love it, especially when you start talking about customers and then users.

That's the power of prototyping, so let's pivot a little bit, let's talk about unicorns and I want to talk in the book that you talk about unicorns in how to find them correctly, so you're defining this wide range of skill sets that are necessary. for people to be transformative within an organization and, to some extent, you're approaching it more from the perspective of business leaders who are trying to find these people to bring them into building their organizations. I would love to see it from a creative perspective. professional because I train and talk to a lot of creative professionals and when people start their career, they start with a T-shaped skill set, so they are very superficial in a lot of things, but they are very deep in design.

At that point, over their skill set throughout their career, they start to develop a more V-shaped skill set where they add understanding of business, budgets or production and those who market those types of things. . So as you talk about these unicorns, what advice would you give them? For creatives who have more of those initial T-shaped skill sets, what should they really focus on to develop a broader skill set so they can aspire to be that unicorn that people are looking for? I love this question, well there is a war that somehow synthesizes many other things that you must do, you must be curious, curious, curious, curious, in recent years we are using curiosity as a very important filter to identify people within our thieves who deserve that growth within the organization and why, because curiosity drives you first. everyone to study and see life as an endless learning opportunity and that's why when I say study I don't just mean reading books and learning skills and, you know, through formal education I mean seeing an encounter with a person . that is different from you as an opportunity to study and learn and this difference may be due to the fact that you are a designer and the person in front of you is a marketer, a scientist or an engineer and not seeing that.

Furthermore, it belongs to a different type of professional category. I don't care what they think, actually I think I know better because I'm a designer and they know that I come up with an idea, I push it and every time. These business leaders don't get it or the R&D organization doesn't let them know that that product is coming to life and you know, please look at everything that was in your mind, etc., and instead they're trying to see them as their mentors. potentials in the future. world of science in the world of business what are your professors as people you can learn from should be your MBA your doctorate you know that those are the people you can learn a lot from and it says that if you are a graphic designer out of curiosity try to connect with people who work in industrial design, fashion design and interiors in other disciplines and learn from them, experiment, maybe find ways to join other teams and eventually still be a graphic designer if you are a graphic designer, but they also allow you to play with industrial design on this side, you're learning the software to do something like this, you need some basic technical skills, but that's what curiosity pushes you to do, curiosity will obviously also push you to connect with people who are different than you , not only professionally, but as human beings they know all the diversity of human beings.

Curious people love diversity. They see diversity as an incredible opportunity to learn. They understand that in people different from them there is the precious gift of knowledge of things that they do not know. I don't know and other people know and not because their perspective is better than yours, you know there is no one person who ultimately, by definition, knows more than another in these communities, it's just that my perspective got mixed up with yours, which is different, very respectful. dialogue we generate by definition a third new innovative perspective which is the connection of the two and this is the power of curiosity that drives you to continue growing and learning so that you know now returning to my position for years I have been thinking about what are the better tools to grow these people to help you get to know my teams, learn new skills and you know how to help their education and everything, and we're still doing it.

You know, we have all of them. There are types of training, courses, possibilities and opportunities, but the truth is that either you are moved by the sacred flame of curiosity, you really want to learn and at that moment you are going to learn every day everywhere because everything can be an occasion to learn. . If that doesn't drive you, I can offer you as many tools as you want, but you will never grow anyway and, paradoxically, if you look, you will know that I don't have the right percentages, but just to give you a dimension in my experience. to educate, formal education is five percent of what you are going to be in life, 95 depends on you and today you have so much out there that you know, available to learn and grow, the Internet gives us many opportunities to learn everything that we want So, eventually we don't need anything formal, although obviously we want to have formal education, it is very, very important because it helps us in many ways, but at a certain point we have to understand that, by the way, this is already up to us. of school, especially after school, but already in school, the braver you are, the more you see that opportunity in school to learn from other classmates in your class, from your teachers, from teachers who are not your teachers but who They are in school and if you go to them and you don't knock on their doors I'm sure they will listen to you I'm sure they will answer you That's what I did when I was at the Polytechnic of Milan I would connect with all kinds of people outside of my classes and courses and sometimes even to tell you the truth, I got in trouble doing that because maybe I pissed off some of my professors, but they, but I learned so much from that interaction that I would. over and over again, it's actually one of the reasons I started the journey positively to find a job at Phillips and it's all because I stepped outside of what school was giving me, you know, the teachers were assigned to me. and everything and I was fascinated by the feelings that I learned, I listened to others about what they were doing and I found new teachers to do my exam and my physical exam with them outside the traditional way and by the way all that I always thought was the most normal thing in the planet but I was one of I don't know where three or four students in the entire Academy here did something like that out of the normal way we found different teachers and everything and so on up to that that for me was normal, I love it, I'm just going to do that.

Later I realized that I should follow my passion, what I love and my dreams. I was really going off the traditional path and creating some problems along the way, but in the end. I'm really benefiting from that approach. I love what you said about you knowing that the Internet is now almost making traditional educational paths obsolete. In fact, you're talking about, to some extent, your ability to design your own education and, to some extent, what you just said. about going outside the normal path of things was that you were designing your own education from the beginning in um in uh designing this project outside of the norm just to summarize the things of a brother, the title and the focus of In your book, you know Human-centered innovation.

At the end of your book, you go ahead and start talking about how to design your happiness. Can you talk a little bit about how you're taking people to focus on the love-centered aspect of innovation and your work? and how can you translate that to the design of your life, yes, look, in words of human science, it is quite clear that both reach your happiness in life, you need to do certain things, the first thing is to focus on yourself, define yourself yourself and your identity through self-expression in the world to really be in your community in society, so essentially the first step is to focus on yourself and who you are, this is the first step that we focus on when we are younger, we're trying to define ourselves and that's what we do in school and then when we start our professional journey it's all about me, me, me, you know who I am in society, what I'm going to do, what my job will be, the second dimension is, by the way, this self. -identity and self-expression work is an important component because we spend a lot of time and work that is not the only one and should not be the only one if it is the only one if you lose your job you are lost because you lose your identity so this is something super important to remember The second dimension is the connection you have with other people close to you.

It is the love you give and then you will receive love in return. You do not give love to receive it. The return should be selfless, but you are giving it to people close to you. So, by definition, they will give it back to you. Here happiness comes from exchange or love with people close to you. It could be family. They could befriends. co-workers who are very close to you and a close community, the third dimension that usually comes later in life is transcending yourself, going beyond, it is usually the moment in life when you realize that you want to have another purpose. so what you are doing you want to live a legacy you want to do something positive beyond your personal interest is once again connected to your personal interest because you are essentially trying to defeat death by becoming immortal by creating memories of what you or the value you build in This world and those memories could be the ones you know from creating a legacy team in an organization that didn't exist before to do charity work that is impacting Humanity, to the small act of kindness you can do in your nearby community and then beyond that super close community in the majority of your community that will make you be remembered as a kind person who did good in his life and these are the three dimensions, there is a personal life component. of these dimensions and there is a professional life component to this, so we are talking to designers and and and and and that is the type of creative people, that is the title you have at work, it means finding your way, understanding what makes you unique, Hey you.

In my case I talk about this in the book living in the gray area of ​​knowing the connection between design and business between Italy and America and finding an original job that really did not exist like this in these companies and for me it was part of the journey that you know for finding my identity in the world and by the way, for clarity, neither 3M nor PepsiCo asked me to play the role I ended up in. Playing at those companies, the job description was very, I mean, at 3M, I was, you know, an industrial design coordinator in the business at PepsiCo, obviously it was much broader, or you know, it was higher like city ​​design director at the company, but I wasn't the The job description wasn't really considering everything we ended up doing, you know, over the years, but I already had it in mind because that's what I was trying to do at 3M and what I'm saying is have a plan for who you want to be. a vision a dream and then go you know in that direction the second dimension that of exchange surround yourself with people who matter to you at work and we are talking about work now so your teams you know in my case I wanted to have people who were good human beings, good people.

I wanted to be surrounded by that kind of love. I wanted to give love and receive it back. So for anyone listening to us today, think about the work environment you're in right now. Are you surrounded by people? that they care about you, they love you in some way, if you're not, that's the place where you want to be or where you want to move somewhere else because I'm telling you there are a lot of places where people are kind and they care, and that's the other dimension and if you are forming a team use these filters as important filters for the team kindness optimism respect is so important it is not that I say things to say in a book and that's all and then the Third Dimension the purpose well thinking about the work, what is the purpose beyond your project, what are you executing, what do you want to do in life and in my case it was the idea of ​​building an incredible design capability in this organization, something that did not exist before and doing something that is stable enough to survive my departure to these companies, so, you know this idea of ​​Legacy where you don't build something that depends solely on you, you build something with the most incredible talents that can survive regardless of whether you exist or not , but all of this, even this, is an enabler for something bigger and if something bigger is creating something of value in the world in society with what I'm doing, all this drive for sustainability, health and well-being, the personalization of emotions in everything we do. and in relation to products and brands, but also the right emotions and the right culture within companies of any kind, all of this is a purpose I have in life.

I want to promote it and for these companies to become wonderful platforms that allow me to do something like this and I will be eternally grateful and grateful to these companies because they allow me to do something like this that transcends the company itself, although obviously these companies let me do it because they understood that if you have the kind of focus you need. They are generating a lot of value for the company for the business tomorrow as well. Thank you very much for coming and speaking with us today. I always end my interviews by asking my guests a question and it's a great question.

I didn't tell them the fact. I was going to ask you this before and it is: do you have a mantra or a Manifesto? You try to live your life in a foreign way, but I have this full understanding just today in the last few years. I didn't do it for many. years, but I was very much on the path and it's kind, you know this idea of ​​love. I've been using the word love in the business world for many, many years, for 25 years from the beginning and there you realize it today. that something was just believing it was my Mantra it was my manifesto but it was intuitively I was that type of person I wanted to surround myself with the type of people you are one of those people you are a wonderful wonderful person Felipe I I am not saying this because I am on the podcast with you .

I have beautiful memories of you, so I wanted that and I just did it and I was lucky in the challenges of building a company. You know, incorporating new design features from scratch was very, very difficult, but the luck is that you can beat your teams however you want, that's why I always surrounded myself with these types of people and recently I realized that, In fact, this is one of the main competitive advantages of these teams: care and kindness. The love you have for each other is a superpower and I wrote about this in the book that connects that tool, effectiveness, productivity and real, tangible business value, but obviously the reason I want to do it is an ethical reason. , the commercial value.

It's now becoming a way to spread this message and amplify it even more because a lot of people we hear from eventually the connection of kindness and productivity more than the idea of ​​kindness should be something that you want to have in every community in every organization. in every company, in every situation, Marl thank you very much for speaking with us, so Marl Puccini, senior vice president and

chief

design

officer

at PepsiCo and also author of The Human Side of Innovation, The Power of People in Love with People, available today on Amazon, an incredible book and you.

I heard a little bit of the incredible value in that here today, so thank you so much for joining us tomorrow and if people want to find you, where's the best place to connect with Morrow? I'm super active on LinkedIn and Instagram that's me, great, thank you very much Maro, I hope to have you back at some point, we'll appreciate it.