Mauro Porcini:

Do not set for yourself the goal of becoming wealthy, famous, of reaching a specific position. Set for yourself, the goal of becoming extraordinary in creating a lot of value before anybody else, for yourself, happiness, satisfaction. Through that you are creating value for somebody else. Through the generation of that value, you're making your life enjoyable and worth living. And this is so important in our world today.

Chris Do:

Okay, the day has arrived, ladies and gentlemen. My next guest I met initially in Geneva backstage and he had an heir of confidence and importance about him, but I have to admit, I did not know who he was and then luck or fate would have it that we would run into each other again in Pasadena of all places where we both spoke at the AIGA National Design Conference. And then for sure I know who this person is and it's not that often that we get to speak to someone of his stature, of his influence of his prominence.

And as I go through your bio, I'm not even going to tell you who it is just yet, let me just tell you his bio, and I don't even do this for regular guests, but here we are. He's the senior vice president and chief design officer at a really large company. We'll get into that. He's won more than 1800 design awards and innovation awards. That is incredible in itself. He was previously 3Ms first chief design officer, featured in Fast Company's, 50 most influential designers in America, Fortune's 40 under 40, and Ad Age list of the 50 world's most influential creative personalities. Oh my gosh. How do we do this? Mauro, please, for people who don't know who you are, please introduce yourself. Tell us what you do and tell us a little bit of your backstory.

Mauro Porcini:

Well, first of all, you're too kind, Chris, as you can hear from my accent, heavy accent. I'm Italia.

Chris Do:

What accent are you talking about?

Mauro Porcini:

My name is Mauro Porcini. I'm the chief design officer of PepsiCo. I've been in this position for more than 11 years. I started in July 2012. I moved to the United States in 2010 to move to the headquarter of the company I was working for at the time that is 3M. So tech company, Minnesota, and then I moved to the food and beverage industry, New York City, the magic New York City. Today, I'm an American citizen on top of being an Italian citizen. I love America, I love Italy. I love what I'm doing, and I think this keyword, love, is something that really define my journey and what I'm trying to spread and pitch, and celebrate every day with my work, with my life.

Chris Do:

It may be like this, a stereotype of Italians, but you love life, you love culture, you love food, and maybe this is a theme we get to explore. Now, as a kid growing up, I didn't even dream of being a designer professionally. It wasn't until much later on in my life that I'm like, "Oh, you could be a graphic designer." Never in a million years would I ever dream of playing a role in which you get to shape on a daily basis As chief design officer vice, did I read this right? Was it vice president?

Mauro Porcini:

Yes.

Chris Do:

Senior vice president.

Mauro Porcini:

Even senior vice president.

Chris Do:

Senior vice president. I mean, how did you even get this? How do you even get this kind of job? It's a dream on top of a dream.

Mauro Porcini:

Look, I love the way you shaped the question, because like you, I didn't even dream to get this position and I didn't care about any kind of position like this. My dream was really, really different and nothing to do with positions or achievement of a certain status or wealth or any of these. I grew up in a family where there are three very important values. One was this idea of culture, of knowledge. My parents were celebrating people with culture, with knowledge. They were in awe of university professors as an example, because they will spend their life researching on a specific topic and becoming the master of that topic. So that was one value. The second value was this idea of being a good person. Today, I call it being kind. In Italian, there is a very powerful word [foreign language 00:04:59] to be a good person.

Once again in English you'll translate in the way, but it is very powerful that word [foreign language 00:05:06] in Italian and [foreign language 00:05:08] or kind are words that are not very fashionable right now. You want to be successful, you want to be an influencer, you want to be renowned. You want to arrive to positions like the one the two of us have in different ways, right? That's the goal. The goal is not to be kind. The goal is not anymore the one of being a person of culture or a very knowledgeable person, a person that knows things. Well, I grew up with those myth. My parents, again, were not celebrating when we're watching TV or we were encountering people, people that were rich or famous. They were celebrating people, that kind of culture.

And I was just witnessing this by osmosis, absorbing all of these. And for me, it was just normal when I was growing up. There was a third value, a third thing that I was observing. They loved so much what they were doing. My father is an architect, but he's not been a very successful architect. And he was spending all his free time painting. Art, painting, drawing was his passion and he will do it all the time. When I was a kid, and still today, I'm 48, he's in his 80s. Every day he paints, he sketch, draw. My mother was working in finance. She didn't have a university degree, she didn't have the money to go to university. She went straight to work and she found a small career, a normal career in the world of finance.

She hated it. She didn't like it at all. At 38 she left work also to be very close to her kids, and it was a major sacrifice for our family because she didn't have a penny. So to lose that income was a sacrifice. My mom wanted to stay closer to us children, but the other thing she wanted to do was to be close to the world of literature and philosophy. And I remember writing every single day and still today, she writes and together they've been self-publishing eight books that they don't sell. I mean, you can buy them, but it's not their goal. It's all about loving what they do and then sharing it with the people they care about. So I grew up with those kind of values. I wanted to get as much knowledge and culture and learn as much as possible. I wanted to be a nice person, but it was just a must.

It was not even a goal. And I wanted somehow to do something I loved. So there was not trade off on that. I wanted to do something I loved. And I realized now, I couldn't really define that in this way at that time, but I realize now that somehow I wanted to touch the life of people with my creations. My dream back then was to become a writer because I love like my mom, literature and philosophy. So my myths were the poets and the writer and the philosopher from the past. And then the other dream was to become an artist. I wanted to be an artist. Drawing and writing were becoming very natural to me. Now, I also needed to get some income, some revenue to support myself in life because I don't come once again from a wealthy family, it was a miracle I could go to university. I could go to university just because university in Italy, thank God, is free.

So the best design university in Italy is free. And so I decided to do architecture because it was a good compromise between the world of creativity and art on one side, and the world of commerce in the other. I didn't have many chances in Italy to have a revenue and income by becoming an artist, a stable one or by becoming a writer, an author of books. And so I choose architecture. And just few days before doing the test for architecture, a friend of mine called me and told me, "Look, there is a new faculty within architecture called, industrial design and I'm going to try the test for it and do you want to join me?" So I was like, "Okay, let's try." I did it.

It went very well. I got actually first out of thousands of people, I was like, "Okay, maybe that's my destiny. That's my career." I started with a leap of faith, not having any idea what design really, really was. After a few months, I realized that that university was a dream university. They were going to teach me what I always dream of, creating something to create value for people, understanding people and creating solutions for them that could go in their hands and could improve the life of people in a way or the other, making it more fun, more enjoyable, more convenient, more easy, and so on and so forth. So all of these, and I'm sorry for the long, long answer.

Chris Do:

Oh, I love it. Keep going.

Mauro Porcini:

I promise I'm going to be shorter in the next one. But to say I think there is an important lesson here that I received from my parents by osmosis literally, but that I want to really convey to my kids. Now I have one, to [inaudible 00:09:56] to my daughter. And to anybody interested to listening to us right now, do not set for yourself the goal of becoming wealthy, famous, of reaching a specific position. Set for yourself, the goal of becoming extraordinary in doing something, creating a lot of value before anybody else for yourself.

But I'm talking about emotional value, happiness, satisfaction, enjoying what you do, and then through that you are creating value for somebody else. Through the generation of that value, you are making your life enjoyable and worth living. You are creating something valuable for society, and this is so important in our world today. All of this will generate, also everything else. Look, don't take me wrong, wealth and fame, there's nothing bad on this, but they're just an addition to something else. If you miss the something else, the foundation, you're going to be miserable with your money and with your fame.

Chris Do:

Lot to understand. I love what you're saying and how you shared your story. This is pretty wild for me. So your parents instilled in you some really core principles and then you realize in the real world, "I still have to do something to make a living." And I think it's this balance between culture, the love for knowledge to instill within you. You got to do something that you're passionate about and you feel deep in your heart, but you're also smart enough like, "Okay, I still have to make a living here. And an architecture seems to be a pretty good balance between these two things." What allowed you to have that idea and then switch in your mind like, "Maybe I'll try industrial design." That's a different area, right?

Mauro Porcini:

Industrial design was even safer because it was new in Italy, is the very first faculty of design in Italy. So all these Italian designers, these famous Italian designers, they're all frustrated architects, frustrated artists or frustrated engineers. That's the joke that we always make in Italy. Before Polytechnic, who created the first of official university of design in 1993, and I joined in 1994. So it was safer because the word in Italian was design, industrial. Industrial design. Design was connected to the world of creativity and art. Industrial was giving me some reassurance that there was a connection to the industry, to commerce.

And so look, but even that, both architecture and design, both of them were not that expected choice for me. And I'll tell you something that happened and once again, credit to my parents. I was doing very well at school in everything essentially. And my teachers, especially the teacher of literature, the teacher of philosophy, the teacher of mathematics, separately went to my parents to tell them that they were wasting the life of their kid because they were allowing him to study design instead of sending me with my grades and my curriculum and everything to study business engineering, manage one of the things that you do when you do very well at school. And it was funny, my parents, I think it was a mix of naivete on one side, but also believing in certain principle on the other. I think it's 50/50, they just didn't care.

They came home and they were laughing about that and actually they were almost offended by that, but they were also laughing. But thank God they were there, because if I had other parents that were more focused on doing what society expects you to do on focusing on the fact that if you study business or if you study engineering, if you study certain things, if you have those grades, you may have a better career. You're going to make a lot of money. If they were relying on criteria that are more traditional in the world and in society, I will be somewhere else today. Maybe I will be a miserable finance person or engineer and I don't have anything against finance or engineer.

I may be super happy doing those things, but I wouldn't have found something that for sure is giving me deep joy that is not a job for me is a mission in life, is something that I think of 24/7. For me, be a designer is who you are. It's not a job that you do. And that's why when we talk about people planning career path for myself and for the hundreds of designers that I have, when I think about myself, I don't see myself in any other area than is not designed. I may at this point move to general management marketing, maybe try to become the CEO of a company or things like this, but I will betray who I am inside. That I am a designer at the core. Now I'm talking about big companies and everything. You never know.

Maybe in 10 years time I will be the CEO of my startup and we'll listen to this podcast. They're like, "What the fuck was he saying?" But I am joking. Never say never. But my point is that even if in the future I change trajectory, I don't think it's going to happen. But if it's going to happen, I'm going to be always a designer and I will find a way to delegate to others other things. And that's why I think it's better. I just stay a designer and don't become a CEO or something else because that's what I love to do and that's what really gives me joy. And in life the most important thing is to find your happiness. We go after all things all the time in delusion that they will give us some form of happiness, satisfaction. And then you realize that happiness is driven by so many other variables that often we don't talk about. And for me, the priority is to be happy, to have my family happy, my friends are happy, the people close to me, I want them to be happy as well.

Chris Do:

Now, I want to say this for people who are listening to this podcast, but I'm looking at Mauro right now, and there is a kind of radiance from you. Even in this approximation of who you are in pixels and on a screen with phosphors, you can see he is smiling from ear to ear. Your skin seems to be glowing. I mean you're just radiating energy. Now my wife who recently became a born again Christian, is also getting into new age mysticism. She's constantly talking to me about all these new scientific discoveries and I want to highlight one of those things which is about energy.

We're all energy and energy has a frequency, and we vibrate and we send these things out there though we can't see it. It can be measured that when you love what you do and you act in service to others, you find your highest joy, you operate at a higher frequency. And so people have said this to me and I'm like, "I don't know," but I'm going to ask you this exact question to see how you respond to it. I'll do a keynote talk and people come up to me and they're like, "I could feel your aura." I'm like, "Aura? I don't know. What are you talking about?" "I could feel your energy. You just radiate this positivity." And now I'm experiencing it with you. Do people say this to you? And how do you respond to that?

Mauro Porcini:

I believe in this. I don't know how to define it. And actually I love the definition you just gave because it sounds pretty scientific as well. So please send me any reference. I want to study more about this. I heard about this in the past, but I never dived into this, but I really believe in it. I really believe in it. And actually, I was talking about this yesterday with my wife and my nanny because my daughter is like this. She's one year and four months old and she's smiling all the time and she walks around and she's a cute baby, but every time she walk anywhere in a restaurant or in a place and she meets people in an elevator, she look at them, she smiles to them. There is something.

People stop and people react and they smile and they start to talk to her. And we realize that this is not happening with many other children we see around. And so, in one and two and three, at a certain point you see a path, you see a consistency. And it was not me saying this. Somebody came to me and told me, "She has an energy." And that was interesting because it means that somehow there are certain things that start already with you in your DNA, something that you have inside. I do believe that then you can also practice on that energy and amplify it even more. And even if you're not born with that energy to the extreme, you can increase that energy and have it.

But for sure, there are some people that just have the frequency in them. And it's interesting because I think usually, I may be wrong because I'm not an expert, but I think it's connected with enjoying what you do with a real, authentic, transparent enjoyment of many things. Of who you are or what you do, of the people that surround you, of the experiences you're living. An optimism that you have inside as something that the people can feel. The people, they really, really feel this. But yeah, I really believe in the power of this energy, this aura. And for sure you have it. I mean it's tangible. Yeah, there are people enter a room and you just feel it even before they start to talk. Its body language is the expression. There is something there.

But again, there are many people listening to us right now, Chris, that maybe are thinking, "Well, I don't have it. I was not born like this. I cannot." Well, again, there are people that are born like this, but practice [inaudible 00:20:35] starting with awareness. Awareness about the power of that, energy awareness, about how you amplify that energy in you because we all have it in a way or the other. Some degree of that energy. And then practicing it and trying to exponentially amplify this. I think even if you don't have it naturally, you can for sure increase it. And so we can all get there in different ways, in different degrees with a different kind of easiness. But first of all, we need to be aware about the power of this energy and the power of joy and positivity and love.

Chris Do:

I mean people are going to sit there. "What are these two hippies talking about?" We're so not hippies.

Mauro Porcini:

Let's talk about numbers. Data, data, data.

Chris Do:

I run-

Mauro Porcini:

We can talk about that too, right?

Chris Do:

Yeah, we can. And here you are, senior vice president of a multinational corporation, a chief design officer. So we're going to balance this out everybody before you. Let's get the crystals out and burn some incense. Okay, everybody just... When people say, "Your energy is infectious," without even knowing the principles behind this, their body already feels it. And here's what I believe. When you radiate a certain kind of frequency or energy, other people who resonate, like we're talking about frequency and sound and transmission of energy, when they resonate, a whole bunch of things happen because we're constantly pulling each other. We either lift each other up or we can pull each other down. If you've ever walked into a room where there's negative things happening, you're like, the expression they say is, "The tension was so thick, we can cut it with a knife." We feel it before we even understand the physics behind it. And so when two people or a group of people resonate a certain frequency, they're happier.

And we know that there is a distinct advantage to positive psychology. When you're happier, you have more ideas, you can be more creative, you're more generous, beautiful things can come from this. And I want to take it back to your parents. This person who tells you with your education, with your academics, "You're a really bright guy, you could do anything. Why waste your talent on art and design?" And your parents did something so beautiful. They're like, "What? No. We know what we need to do with our child." So they kind of protected you from that, and it's very consistent with this idea of being kind, loving, pursue knowledge, help other people.

And then here you are at probably one of the highest positions that a creative person can achieve. And so we want to balance this, that if you pursue money, if you pursue fame and impact and influence, very rarely do you get it in a way that your soul and your spirit can still be intact in whole. We've seen people like that. I don't want to get political, I don't want to talk about anybody in particular, but when you pursue your love, your joy, and you operate the highest frequency. I think naturally, money, fame, influence and impact just come as a byproduct of you operating at the highest frequency of your joy. Is that what's happening with you, Mauro?

Mauro Porcini:

Look, I think it happened, obviously I needed to balance a little bit what my parents were teaching me in full naivete with a better understanding of our network, navigate corporations, understand the business world. I want to make sure that we give the full message. So you need to be driven by certain principle that starts in your guts, in your heart and in your mind, but you shouldn't do it in a naive way. You shouldn't do it in a random way. Obviously you need to know how to move in the business world, how to pitch an idea, how to strategize, build your business, your capability to position yourself, your personal brand. So all of this obviously is part of that. If you're just positivity, you enjoy what you do and you have a lot of fun doing that, but you miss a series of other skills, soft skills, then staff to arrive to certain position.

Now the important message though is that you may still be totally happy without being the senior vice president and chief as an officer of a company just for clarity. Now, if you also want to have that, you need also certain skills to understand how to navigate that complexity. But you can be totally happy being an artist, having a normal, totally normal life, not having a team under you, not doing a certain kind of work. And it's perfectly fine. And this is where my parents for me are an amazing example of this. My mom left her job when she was 38. My dad was an architect, as I say, not very successful. And because of that, he was a teacher at school in high school of technical drawing as well. He didn't really enjoy too much what he was doing at work and what he was really, really enjoying was drawing and painting and everything.

Now my mom and my dad in their humble life and what they were doing and everything, they're the happiest person I know. Now I made some money, I have some money. So I told them, mom, dad, what can I do for you? I want to give you back also materially. And I remember a few years ago I told them, "Look, tell me anything, anything. I want to do something for you. You did so much for me." But I meant materially. It was the birthday of one of the two of them. So I told them, "Look, anything, literally even you want to buy a bigger house." I knew that my father, his dream was always the one of having a little garden. He always, always dreamed that they live in a small apartment still today. I was like, "I'm going to help you." They live in a town outside of Milan where apartments are really, really cheap compared to New York, one 10th of the price of New York. So it was not that difficult to help them or a car, a better car.

They have a shitty little car. And they were like, "No, no, we don't want anything." I'm like, "Please, please, please, please, please." You know what they asked me at the end? That they could have asked me anything. They asked me a trip to Lourdes where the Madonna appear because they're super, super Catholic. Their dream was they never traveled. And so that trip, dream was to go where there was to Lourdes, where there was the apparition. There's been the apparition of the Madonna, and the irony of life is that they went there at the end and the first day they were there, it was just a weekend. The first day they were there, somebody, a very bad person stole their wallets.

And so they were there without credit cards and documents or anything. So disaster, irony of life. But I'm telling this story, I mean this was the irony of the specific moment, but to say you can be happy becoming the CEO of a company, the CDO or the CMO, or with your own startup and be very successful, but you can be happy also without doing all of this. Now, to do all of this, you need to understand how to navigate the complexity of the business world. My parents were happy with CDOs of anything. They are still happy in CDOs of anything.

Chris Do:

Is there a happy ending to the story, to the travel story?

Mauro Porcini:

No.

Chris Do:

They lost everything. No?

Mauro Porcini:

No. They just went back and they traveled three times in their life outside of Italy. Once was to go to Lourdes, another time was to go to Prague. But they were afraid to travel by plane, they traveled by bus and unfortunately when they came back after a few days, my father had a thrombosis because he didn't move the legs too much and he risk his life. So that was really bad. Thank God it happened in front of me in my house. He came to meet me the morning so we could save him right away and take him to the hospital, urgent care. And the third time went well, they came to the United States by miracle. So one of the very first time they take a plane, they come all the way to New York and to see them here in New York, they were like, my mom, when she saw the Statue of Liberty, she started to cry literally like the emotion. So yeah, they're such an inspiration in my life. I want to be a glimpse of that for my daughter.

Chris Do:

I love that. So they've traveled three times, two of which had some really bad outcomes at least one time when they went to come visit you in New York had a really good experience. I can only imagine what that's like for someone who hasn't traveled, who doesn't live in a big city. This is a culture shock on levels that it's hard to, how did it even process any of this?

Mauro Porcini:

Right. It was beautiful to see they're all, how excited they were. And again, now to change slightly topic, we're talking about design, innovation and that kind of awe and surprise is something that I see constantly in innovators, no matter the experience you had in life. So in the case of my parents, yes, it was a first, they never saw buildings so high and something like this, like New York. But I met so many people in my life that had all kind of experiences, that have been traveling all around the world and they're still able to have that kind of awe and wonder that I saw in the face of my parents when they came to New York. And this is what innovators do.

They still have that sensitivity, that empathy, that ability inside themself to get excited by things, to discover always something new in things that eventually they already saw. To appreciate that, to have also the confidence of expressing this, how many people, at a certain point in their life when they reach a certain status or they want to project that they know everything, that experience already everything. It's not cool to get excited about something. I did this so many times I have did or it's not cool to admit that you don't know something, that you are surprised by something. By something you see in nature, by something you see in a company, by something you see in experience with another person, by something you read in a book.

But the real innovators, the confident leaders, they are not embarrassed by admitting that they don't know everything. Socrates already told us thousands of years ago, the wise man and woman I would add, are the people that know of not knowing. And the more you know you learn, if you are really learning, if you are really getting the culture I was talking about earlier, the more you realize how much more there is to learn. In my life, the more I was learning, the more I started to feel little in the universe, dust in the universe because there is so much to learn and I don't have enough lives. I just want life. I would love to have thousands of lives to be able to learn everything that there is to learn.

It's such a manifestation of essentially ignorance. When you see people that pretend and project this idea that they know everything. And by the way is the biggest limit you can put to yourself, because the moment you stop learning, the moment you stop asking questions about things that you don't know, the moment you stop getting excited about things that surround you is the moment you stop growing and our life should be a journey of continuous growth. Again, we are born raw energy or raw material. In the book, when talking about life, I make a metaphor. I talk about Michelangelo, the artist, Michelangelo, one of my myth when I was a kid. And at the end of his career, Michelangelo created the so-called unfinished, the [foreign language 00:33:16] in Italian or they're also called the prisoners, [foreign language 00:33:20]. Essentially these are sculpture where it started with a piece of marble, the raw material, and then it started to chisel out the material freeing the shape that is in his mind was already inside the stone, his philosophy. And so he left the sculpture half done, to convey this message.

The message is that the sculpture is already inside the raw material is already inside the marble, and the role of the sculptor is the one of chiseling away material to free up the prisoners inside the marble. This is somehow our life. We're born potential, we're born raw material and then we need to spend our life chiseling away material to define ourself. We're sculptures of ourself and now we decide how to sculpt ourself. Too many people, unfortunately, they refer to influencers, celebrities, role models of any kind, and they start to sculpt themself in a similar way to these influencers and celebrities, mimicking them, trying to be them. This happen at every level. It can happen also at work trying to be the person, your boss or somebody else that you admire. In reality, what we should do is yes, absorb as much as possible the energy and the learning and the lessons that we get from others of any kind.

You don't need to be an influencer. You could be a mom, you could be a person you meet in the street. You can even be a kid that makes an unexpected question. Absorb, absorb, absorb, but then define your own sculpture. Define who you want to be. By the way, this is one of the three major steps to reach your happiness. Happiness is defined by many psychologists and human scientists is defined by three steps in life. The first one is defining yourself, is the search for your identity that is so strong, especially when we're younger. Because when we're younger we are there and the certain point we need to move from being the children of somebody to become real adults in life. And often we struggles and we try to figure out who we want to be. The job that you choose is a component, big component of this, but it's not the only one.

If your job defines you, you're screwed because you lose your job and you lose your identity. So is that plus other things. You need to be a person at 360 degrees. The second dimension to reach happiness, the second step is to invest in people close to you who love, people close to you. Your family, your friends, your close ones, including by the way colleagues that work very close to you. This apply also to the business world. This is very important. The love needs to be selfless. You don't do it to receive it back, but if you do love in a selfless way, people close to you, you will receive it back by definition from your parents, friends and close ones and you will enjoy, this will give you joy, that exchange. Then there is a third step and often it comes later in life and it's somehow part of our journey.

For many of us it comes later in life for sure, for me, and is transcending yourself, finding a purpose that is bigger than you. And this can happen both in your private life as well as in your job. For instance, in my job, there are two kind of purposes. One is the one of elevating as much as possible the role of design in corporations, not just in PepsiCo, in the business world. That's why I write books or I participate to podcasts. I have my own podcast and I do all these activities outside. The second is that design is by definition a human-centered kind of approach to business. Design is all about creating value for people, for society, creating something meaningful to them. We're not here to make money for our companies. We're here first of all to create something cool to put in the ends of people or if you want to in a more elegant way to create something meaningful for people and then obviously we need to make money with that.

But it's a secondary goal, a necessary one, a super important one. But the secondary in our priority list, while for the business world to making money is the primary goal and to create value for people is a lever. So it is a different philosophical approach to things. So if this is true by elevating design, I'm going to elevate a conscience, a human centricity in all these companies because you'll have these people, not just designers, but that kind of philosophy will spread across the organization in other functions to shape companies really with a kind of purposeful approach to branding innovation and business growth. So this is an example of purpose. Now, even this, in your private life could be charity, it could be activities that you do to help others. Even this that sounds so novel, so selfless, even this is all about yourself. Why? Because at a certain point in life you realize that sooner or later you won't exist anymore, you will die.

And so doing something bigger than you is a way to become immortal, to create a legacy, to be remembered after you're gone, you may be remembered because you did something in the world because you're Steve Jobs and you created Apple and Pixar. Or you may be remembered because you are a kind person, you are doing a lot of kind acts to strangers, to different kind of people, and people will remember you with a smile in their face. But this purpose that transcend yourself is giving you happy happiness now because you realize inside your guts that you are becoming mortal to the kind of love and kindness and purpose that is bigger than you.

Stewart S.:

Time for a quick break, but we'll be right back.

Chris Do:

Want to experience the shift that happens when you get yourself around the right community, resources and support to scale? We're ready to show you inside The Futur Pro membership. The Futur Pro membership was created for established creative service providers, coaches and consultants that want to take their business to the next level. Go to thefutur.com/pro to learn more and join us inside.

Stewart S.:

Welcome back to our conversation.

Chris Do:

I've been talking to Mauro. He's the senior vice president and chief design officer at PepsiCo. His book, The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People is available and Amazon. We'll include the links in the description below. It's not often I get to talk to someone at your level and how many people you must have to oversee and manage. So I want to ask you this question, and I believe you're prepared to answer this and that you've been talking a lot about the power of design. I'm curious, what is the business metric that you're seeing when organizations big and small elevate, celebrate and empower designers and design thinking into their organization? What is the benefit to them? If they're left brains, they're like, "Wait, first you went down this hippie road to joy and love and all this, and then you're talking about design." Its like is there a tangible benefit, a metric that will impact businesses when you celebrate and incorporate design?

Mauro Porcini:

It's very, very difficult to define a metric that measure what you're doing with design. First of all, we need to make a distinction between defining the ROI if you want of the design capability, versus defining the ROI of how a company is design driven. Because to be really design driven is the role of every function of the company from the CEO down every single function. So you need marketing, finance, HR, all the functions to understand design centricity or in other words, the synonym is human centricity. So that's the first point.

The second is that the ultimate goal should be that you are growing financially, your company. That's the truth because this company are there to make money. So it's top line growth, it's bottom line growth, it's market share, all the typical financial variables. Now for that though, that means that you cannot reduce design to, "Well, I changed the aesthetic of a product. Let's see if I'm selling more products and they're making more money with this redesign of the product." You cannot reduce everything to that because the real value of design is the impact that it's going to have on your business or on your brand in the long term.

It's possible, take Pepsi that I'm going to do a series of things that are more about the brand. Limited edition packaging, experiences that are not going to generate right away a major return on investment, but are helping positioning the brand in a different way so that even the normal kind of Pepsi that you find in Walmart or Target or wherever, you buy it's going to be infused with the kind of experience and positioning that is driven by other things. So how do you measure that? It's very complicated. So the first thing is top line, bottom line growth plus market share are important, but you need to measure them depending on your industry. In an industry like ours, on a three years horizon.

After three years of investing in design at 360 degrees, don't tell me, "Well, I'm going to change the product, but then I'm going to change the packaging later on. I'm going to change the experience later on." Imagine if Apple was having a beautiful phone, but the packaging was bad, the experience in store was bad. You can't measure the design of the phone if you don't do everything. Now it's also true that in your company eventually you cannot change everything from night to day, but you need to have a plan to change progressively as much as possible until arriving to change everything. And you need to be awareness as a business that until you do that, it's very difficult to measure the impact of designing the business. Because you need to have everything in place to really drive the change.

So have a plan where you have a horizon to change the full ecosystem and then start to measure how your business is performing from when you change. You give yourself one year, two years, three years, depending on your business, even more in industries where the change is heavy from an investment standpoint, lifecycle standpoint, manufacturing standpoint. So it depends on the industry. So that's one thing. Now it's not the only value you can bring and it's very difficult by the way, to demonstrate your value in this dimension, because it takes years and companies are not that patient. They want to see value earlier. So when I was still in 3M, I define a series of additional layers of value. The first one is, and they're all qualitative even though you can measure them somehow. But I'll tell you at the end what happened in 3M and what is happening in PepsiCo with these layers.

The first one is how you impact the users. And again, you can measure in different ways, but it's even very qualitative, is the way people comment your product, react to your product. In social media as an example, the conversation they're having, for instance, for Pepsi's, the enthusiasms that people had when we launched the new design, I mean 99% positive sentiment with 7 billion impression, that was like, "Wow, people really, really love what we're doing with this new design." But so first of all how you're impacting people and you can again measure it, but you can also witness it.

And I will tell you why this is valuable even when you don't measure it. The second one is impact on customers. This has been very important for us both at 3M and in PepsiCo in the past 11 years is essentially when I work with customers. Customers being for us, I don't know, Walmart, Target, Kroger, Carrefour. In 3M was Home Depot and many others is helping them redefining the experience that their guests have in their stores with not just our brands, but eventually our category. Beverages, food, do it yourself, equipment and other things.

Becoming strategic partners of them, seeing how they see you company as a partner versus a supplier or versus... And so you're going to create value for your company. Then is the impact on R&D on what you do from a research and development standpoint is the number of ideas you bring to the table, the patent you bring to the table. It's the idea that you are able to land and the idea you're going to, and the successes you're going to be able to generate through those ideas. Success is not being just eventually successful products, but it could be successful in size that then you leverage for other products and other ventures. Then is the impact on strategy is how design thinking is helping you defining the strategic planning of the company. Where is the world going? Where is society going? Where is food the beverage going? And where PepsiCo should be in the future. Once their design starts to be a role, start to have a role in those conversations and you start to shape the strategic planning of the company, this is something very intangible.

It's not something that you really see in the market, but it's something very powerful that design can do and it's nothing else that business strategy with human centricity, because that's what design driven strategy is about. Then is impact on communication and employer brand. Essentially is how your company is perceived by different target audiences from shareholders, media, the new talents that will join the company in the future, customers. So a design driven company is often a company that is loved by people in so many different ways for different reasons, but obviously you need to craft different kind of stories depending on the audience you're talking to. It's going to be a different story, the one that I tell potential talent to attract to PepsiCo than the one I'm going to tell a shareholder. But they're all connected to the same philosophy approach to this idea of the same driven human centricity.

And so these are, I will call them soft values and then there is the very tangible value on cost of processes. You can decrease the cost of process by increasing out the quality of what you're doing. For instance, we've been tracking how much PepsiCo's been spending in design between internal people and external agencies, and we have been generating savings of millions and millions of dollars over the years, many millions dollars. And we've been tracking this from the very beginning, 11 years of tracking. So now we have very substantial data. Is the savings on cost of goods? You may decrease the cost of your product and increase perceived quality or keep the same cost, sorry, you can decrease the cost at the same perceived quality or you can eventually keep the same cost or even increase the cost, but exponential increase perceived quality, creating value for your business and your brand and so on, so forth.

So these are few examples of things we are being on one side tracking, but the reality is that tracking all of this is intense. It requires money, resources, and often design functions don't have the luxury and so the way we're using it is not even tracking. I realized again many years ago when I was still at 3M that if you craft stories across all these points and you tell your CEO, you tell your business organization, "Well, we've been doing this in this project, in this project, creating value in all this dimension for you." They will get it. Actually, they will start to see that by themselves because customers will talk to them, consumers will talk to them, so they will start to witness it by themselves, but then you craft the story very powerful showing all those dimensions of value and they would be like, wow.

And by the way, if you do that at the lower cost than just doing it randomly and consistently just jumping from an agency to the other, but if you do it instead from within, strategically working with internal people and also with agencies. We work with tons of agencies out there. It's a super powerful proposition. That's why we keep growing. We have more than 300 designers. We have 17 design centers. We just opened this week, the design center in Istanbul because there is value on one side in a very productive way. In the other is the magic formula of full effectiveness of what you're doing, quality and the efficiency together. So you see, we jump from love and emotion to numbers and data. And this is what I was telling earlier, probably my parents would've never been able to tell this kind of story. The second part of the story, and that's why I'm saying, yeah, you need the love, that authenticity that often you don't expect in this world, in this companies, in this kind of business environments.

But if you just have that, you don't have the pragmatism, the ability to speak the language of business and translate actually the financial value of love that it's not the reason why you love. But of course we live in a world where financial value is such an important metric. If you can show that actually love creates value for your company, then it's amazing. Now, I wish we will live in a world where you don't need to connect love and kindness to productivity and financial value. But this is not the world we live in and there are many good things in the way we structure this world we live in. So I don't want to be negative about the world we live in, but again, it's magic that today you can connect creating value for people with creating value for companies. It was not the case 20 years ago, 30 years ago.

Today is the case because many of those barriers to entry built by these big companies made of scale of production, distribution and communication are crumbling down under the winds of globalization, new technologies, digitization. So essentially many of these mega brands now don't compete anymore just amongst each other. They compete with a new startup that you are creating and you're bringing to market. And big and small are left with just one option, refocusing everything on people and creating something extraordinary for them. The best product, the best story, the best communication, the best experience, the best service, the best in everything.

If you're weak in one of these dimensions, that's where competitor will come in. In the past they wouldn't because there was this dynamic balance in your industry, a few big players. Now you are a startup. That's what you look for. What is the weakness of the big brand? I'm going to go in and I don't have many of the constraints that they have so I can actually go in and change the game. And so the small and the big, they need to refocus everything on what we have been calling today human centricity or design driven approach to business. The human being, create something valuable for them and everything else will come.

Chris Do:

Okay. So it seems to me part of your success, and correct me if I'm wrong, is your ability to navigate these two seemingly opposing ideas to be a passionate pragmatist. So we can dream, we can love, but it's got to make an impact. There's got to be something. So it's not just purely in your mind and your heart. So for people who are like, "I hate people who say just follow your dreams and follow your love." Well, you still have to be pragmatic and you have to create impact for people. And you gave us so many different ways. Some of the big ideas that you mentioned is design can have incredible impact, but it has to be done holistically.

It has to be done over the longterm and it's not going to happen overnight. You have to have a program or a strategy so that you're introducing progressive change as you go and you could feel it, you can measure it, you can capture sentiment, and you talked about all those things because at the end of the day, if what you do doesn't create value for others, for users, for customers, for the planet, then you're probably failing. You need to reevaluate. Did I get the general sentiment okay?

Mauro Porcini:

Totally, totally. And if you think about especially the first part of your summary, this is what humanity has been struggling all the time is what philosophy, art, literature, navigating in all our history is the balance between our heart and our mind. When I was a kid, I tell this story in the book, there was this prophet, I would say, this kind of philosopher prophet that would come to our house and one day we're having dinner with him and I was 16, 15, I just started to study philosophy school, and he asked the family, we're the family around the table with this guy. He asked the family, "What do you think is the biggest distance in the universe?" It was a rhetorical question.

He didn't expect anybody to answer. He was going to teach us a lesson, and here I am, I have this intuition that made me very proud in front of my parents, in a family where currency was culture, being able to answer something that is to the prophet, it was like, wow. The answer was the distance between your heart and your mind is the biggest distance in the universe and humanity has been trying to reconcile that distance all the time. Sometimes you have extreme extremists, people that are all about rationality and they're all about emotions, and this polarized the conversation, but many of the people that have been making history are people that have been able to take the two extreme and somehow find the balance between the two dimensions in unique ways, in meaningful ways, in ways that add value to them, to the people surrounding them and to society.

Chris Do:

I love that. Okay, this is a perspective I need to get from you before we wrap up here, which is, you talk about the power of people and being in love with people and trying to celebrate them. So you're in a position where you get to manage lots of people. How do you identify people's superpowers? This is a critical thing I think we can learn. Whether you're about to hire your first employee or you're managing your 300th employee, how do you hire, grow and retain the kinds of people who share the qualities that you were talking about?

Mauro Porcini:

I mean, let's divide hiring, growing, and retaining. On the hiring part, I have no clue. I really don't. I make so many mistakes. And so because of this and why? Because it's so difficult in one hour interview with a portfolio, a resume, and a conversation to understand if somebody has it or not. So many years ago I developed a strategy to fix that kind of problem. I decided to share what I was looking for in many different ways. I started to write articles. I started to talk about these in conferences. I remember writing a paper for the Design Management Institute, A Love Letter, to design. Later on, more recently I wrote a book about this. But the strategy is make it clear, super loud out there that that's the kind of people you're looking for. That's who you are, by the way. Because if you are clear about the kind of people you look for, then you need to embody those characteristics and that pushes even yourself to really invest time to take those kind of traits to the extreme, to become a role model.

And it's not easy because we're talking about many different characteristics that define these ideal innovators, what they call the unicorns, and it's impossible to have them all to the extreme. So when you write them down and you're like, "I want people like this," obviously you need to practice them yourself and try to get better and better every day. You'll make a lot of mistakes, but with awareness and you will try to get better. So sharing this as much as possible out there to every kind of channel that you can imagine. For instance today, Chris, I'm using your podcast to share this message with potential people that may want to join the company and then working, for instance, another tactic working with recruiters. We've been working with recruiters for many, many years now, 15 years, some of them 20 years, some of them they know inside out who you are or kind of people you're looking for.

And their job is to build relationships with people out there, know them in depth. They have the time to do it, it's their core job. And so they bring to us people that reflect somehow the traits that I'm trying to find. And then another tactic just talk, being very practical, right? Because I know that I have my biases, I know I have my perspective like everybody else. I bring in the interviews, not with me. I want to separate things. So everybody has a different kind of experience and conversation. People from my team or outside of my team with different perspectives. So they're going to see things that eventually I don't see, and then we get together and we debrief and we talk about what we saw. And often again, they see people, things that I don't see. I see all the things that they don't see, and we come back with a final evaluation of the person.

We try to choose the right people, and yet we don't always find the right one to grow and retain. Then once they're in, if they fit in, the culture of the organization is all about inspiring them all the time. So you need to practice what you're talking about. You need to be what you're talking about, so walk the talk, and then is empower them, let them free. Give them the freedom to be themself. By the way, they're not going to be like you accept that. You want a certain kind of person, but then every person is different. Accept that, empower them and be there to steer that direction, to correct anything that you think is not going in the right direction. But if you empower them, they will enjoy what they do. They will become loyal to the dream, to the vision, to the company, and they will have fun doing it.

Chris Do:

How about retain?

Mauro Porcini:

Well, I mean, it's a mix of that and then making sure that you pay them in the right way. And then I say pay because you reward them. It will be broader than pay, but pay, let's not be, let's be honest, is a key component. And why I'm mentioning this specifically because over the years, obviously I had to work so much with our human resources team and the compensation team and everything to make sure that we're positioning design in the right way, that we have the right titles, the right compensation that we're aligned to marketing to R&D. It's not been easy. It's been a journey by the way. Every other year we step it up, we get better and better and better. But this is key. I mean, it will be hypocritical to just talk about vision and dream and this and that, and then they're not, yet, they're paid, I don't know, half of a marketer or of a person working in R&D.

So that's important as well. And by the way, I think it's interesting to also understand what is the role of a chief design officer? I mean, designing is a part of what I do, but I need to work with finance to justify the cost of our team to define the ROI of the team. I need to talk with HR to understand the position inside the organization, the wiring with the rest of the organization, the right compensation for these people, the rewarding of these people, and so on, so forth. Actually, to be a chief design officer of a company means that you apply what you do with design to designing culture and capability.

On top of it, you also need to design amazing products because you can design the best capability, but if you don't deliver on what is generating the revenue we're talking about earlier to the company, your job is not going to last. And by the way, just to close, we've been talking a lot, especially beginning about love and energy, and the subtitle of my book is People in Love with People. And there is the introduction to the book of two CEOs of the company, Ramon Laguarta, the current CEO, and Indra Nooyi, the previous CEO. So two CEOs decided to put their name on the cover of my book where the subtitle is, The Power of People in Love with People. Very esoteric.

I can talk in this way today because of the credibility I have now by delivering value, financial value. I was talking still about love. People that know me knows this very well, when I started in PepsiCo 11 years ago, but in different ways. So that's another very important thing that I learned over the years. You need always to balance, you need to disrupt a little bit with your vernacular, your vocabulary, the way you dress, the way you behave, disrupt, because that's what they want you to do. You are the designer. You are there to be creative, but you also need to integrate yourself within the culture of the company because in this way, you reassure them.

They understand that you understand them. They're not there to leverage you, but you are there to work with them through the organization. And so it's been always to find the right balance between disrupting and integrating yourself. And so the more you integrate yourself, the more they understand that you are actually delivering business value, the more you can start to disrupt and use certain kind of words and tell them, "You know what? Everything we've been doing delivering this kind of business value was actually driven by love, by kindness, by things like this." But if I was starting talking about this without having proof points, a lot of people will roll their eyes. They'll be like, "Whatever. I mean, let's not waste time this thing to this guy."

Chris Do:

Beautiful. I could sit here and listen to you talk all day. It could be everything that you're saying resonates with my soul. It could be your beautiful Italian accent, but I want to be respectful of your time. Everybody, I've been talking to Mauro Porcini, he's the senior vice president and chief design officer at PepsiCo. His book is out now. You can go and pick it up right now. You can order on Amazon or your favorite bookstore. It's called, The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People. Now, I love where we started, so I'm going to just try to bookend all of this. What I really feel from you is this deep love, passion, joy for whatever it is that you're doing.

So today, you're within an organization we shall see in 10 years. If you're not the CEO of some startup, who knows what's going on. I predict some big changes to happen for you. But it's okay because we're allowed to realign with where we are. We're not static beings. We continue to grow, and we should align with that. What gives us joy. And it's okay for you to love, but it's better for you also to be a good person, to be kind, to share your gifts. And you talked about the kinds of impact that drives your thinking, your decisions, and also the love for knowledge for learning. Because the more you know, the more you know you don't know. And if we pursue these three core pillars, I think even if you're not rich, just like your parents, you live a happy, joyous life. And what more could you ask for in the short time that we have? Mauro, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for doing this podcast with me.

Mauro Porcini:

Chris, thank you for having me. My name is Mauro Porcini. I am the chief design officer of PepsiCo, and you are listening to, The Futur.

Stewart S.:

Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get a new insightful episode from us every week. The Futur Podcast is hosted by Chris Do and produced by me, Stewart Schuster. Thank you to Anthony Barrow for editing and mixing this episode. And thank you to Adam Sanborn for our intro music. If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple Podcasts. It will help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. Have a question for Chris or me? Head over to thefutur.com/heychris, and ask away. We read every submission and we just might answer yours in a later episode. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit thefutur.com. You'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and creative business. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.

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