The Currency of Joy
Do not set for yourself the goal of becoming wealthy or famous. Do not aim for a specific position.
This is the counterintuitive starting point from Mauro Porcini, the Senior Vice President and Chief Design Officer of PepsiCo. In a world obsessed with metrics, titles, and influence, Porcini advocates for a different currency. “Set for yourself the goal of becoming extraordinary in doing something,” he advises, “creating a lot of value before anybody else for yourself.”
This isn’t about selfish ambition. The value he speaks of is emotional. It is happiness, satisfaction, and the profound enjoyment of your work. It is a philosophy that sees financial success and professional status not as targets to be hunted, but as the natural outcomes of a life lived with purpose and joy.
Chris Do, meeting Porcini, felt this immediately. “I could feel your energy,” Do recalls people telling him after keynote talks. He saw the same in his guest. “You just radiate this positivity.” This isn’t mysticism. It’s the tangible result of a career built not on cynical corporate ladder-climbing, but on a deep, almost spiritual connection to the human side of business.
For Porcini, this energy is the secret ingredient, transforming the work of design from a commercial function into a mission to infuse corporations with a soul.
The Architect of Joy
To understand the man who has won over 1800 design and innovation awards, you must go back to a small town outside Milan. Porcini grew up in a family where the most valuable assets were not money or status, but culture, kindness, and love for one’s work.
His parents, he says, celebrated people of knowledge, like university professors who dedicated their lives to mastering a single topic. The second core value was being a persona per bene, an Italian phrase that translates to “a good person” but carries a much deeper weight of character and integrity. “Kind are words that are not very fashionable right now,” Porcini notes. “You want to be successful, you want to be an influencer... The goal is not to be kind.”
Yet, in his childhood home, it was the primary goal.
The third value was a profound love for creating. His father, an architect by trade but not a commercially successful one, spent every free moment painting and drawing. His mother worked a finance job she hated, but at 38, she quit to be closer to her children and the world of literature and philosophy she adored. “I remember her writing every single day,” Porcini says. Together, his parents self-published eight books, not for profit, but for the love of the craft and to share with people they cared about.
This upbringing instilled a clear directive: pursue knowledge, be a good person, and do something you love. The practical realities of life, however, still loomed. “I also needed to get some income,” he admits. Architecture seemed like the perfect compromise between the world of art and the world of commerce.
A few days before his university entrance exam, a friend called with a suggestion. A new faculty had opened within architecture at the prestigious Politecnico di Milano, established in 1993 as Italy’s first official university of design. It was called industrial design.
Porcini took the test and placed first out of thousands. “Okay, maybe that’s my destiny,” he thought. It was a leap of faith. Within months, he realized he had found his calling. He would learn to create things that go into people’s hands and improve their lives, making them more fun, convenient, and enjoyable. He had found a way to be both a passionate artist and a pragmatic creator, a balance that would define his entire career and is essential for anyone looking to build a sustainable and fulfilling path. This balance between passion and pragmatism is a core tenet in finding a career that pays, a concept further explored in How To Find Your Niche & Turn Passion Into Profit.
The Pragmatic Pivot
Choosing a creative path was not the obvious choice for a student who excelled in every subject. Porcini’s teachers in literature, philosophy, and mathematics separately approached his parents, warning them that they were wasting their son’s talent on design. With his grades, they argued, he should study business, engineering, or medicine.
His parents laughed it off. “Thank God they were there,” Porcini reflects. “If I had other parents, they were more focused on doing what society expects you to do... I would be somewhere else today. Maybe I would be a miserable finance person or engineer.”
This protection from societal expectation allowed him to find a mission, not just a job. To be a designer, for Porcini, is not what you do; it is who you are. It is a 24/7 mindset. “I am a designer at the core,” he states, asserting that even if he became a CEO, he would always approach the role through the lens of design.
This dedication to his identity is rooted in a fundamental pursuit of happiness. “In life, the most important thing is to find your happiness,” he says. “We go after other things all the time in the illusion that they will give us some form of happiness... and then you realize that happiness is driven by so many other variables.”
His parents are the ultimate proof of this principle. They live a humble life, happy without titles or wealth. Years ago, Porcini, having found financial success, offered to buy them anything, even a new house with the garden his father always dreamed of. After much insistence, they asked for just one thing: a trip to Lourdes, the Catholic pilgrimage site in France. They had rarely traveled. The trip was a disaster, their wallets stolen on the first day, but the request itself spoke volumes about their priorities.
They live happily without being chief design officers of anything. This grounds Porcini’s philosophy in reality: high-status positions are not a prerequisite for a joyful life. But if you do aspire to them, you need more than just good intentions.
The Physics of Positivity
During the conversation, Chris Do raises a concept his wife, a born-again Christian exploring new-age science, often discusses. “We’re all energy, and energy has a frequency,” he explains. “When you love what you do and you act in service to others, you find your highest joy, you operate at a higher frequency.”
This is the “aura” or “radiance” that people feel from leaders like Porcini. It’s not just a feeling; it’s a tangible force. Porcini agrees wholeheartedly, sharing an anecdote about his one-year-old daughter. “She’s smiling all the time... every time she walks anywhere... people stop and people react and they smile.” Someone told him, “She has an energy.”
This energy, Porcini believes, is connected to an authentic, transparent enjoyment of life and an inherent optimism. It’s a frequency that others can tune into. “When you radiate a certain kind of frequency or energy, other people who resonate... lift each other up,” Do explains. Conversely, a negative environment can pull everyone down. We’ve all felt this; the expression “the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife” is a testament to our ability to perceive energy before we can explain it.
This isn't just hippie talk. There is a distinct business advantage to this. Positive psychology has proven that happier people are more innovative. They generate more ideas, are more creative, and are more generous. This is the foundation of a thriving, collaborative culture.
For those who feel they weren’t “born with it,” Porcini offers encouragement. It starts with awareness: understanding the power of this energy and how to cultivate it. “We all have it in a way or the other, some degree of that energy,” he insists. “Practicing it and trying to... exponentially amplify this... you can for sure increase it.” The journey begins with a conscious choice to focus on joy, positivity, and love, principles that can help anyone master their internal state, a topic also covered in Overcoming Stress, Anxiety & Nerves.
The Human-Centricity Mandate
The bridge from personal philosophy to corporate strategy is human-centricity. For Porcini, elevating design means elevating this people-first mindset within the business world.
He presents a powerful reframe of corporate purpose. For the traditional business world, making money is the primary goal, and creating value for people is a lever to achieve it. For design, the priorities are inverted. “We’re here first of all to create something cool to put in the hands of people,” Porcini clarifies. Making money is a necessary, super-important secondary goal.
This philosophy is embodied in Michelangelo’s famous “unfinished” sculptures, the Prigioni or “Prisoners.” The Renaissance master believed the sculpture was already inside the block of marble; his job was simply to chisel away the excess material to free it. Porcini uses this as a metaphor for life. “We’re born potential, we’re born raw material,” he says. “And then we need to spend our life chiseling away material to define ourselves. We are sculptors of ourselves.”
Too many people, he warns, sculpt themselves in the image of others, mimicking influencers and celebrities. The real work is to define your own unique form. This search for identity is the first of three steps toward a happy life, as defined by many psychologists:
- 1. Defining Yourself: The search for identity, which is more than just your job. You must be a person at 360 degrees.
- 2. Investing in People: A selfless love for your family, friends, and close colleagues. This love, when given freely, is returned, creating joy.
- 3. Transcending Yourself: Finding a purpose bigger than you. This is a way to achieve a form of immortality, to create a legacy that outlives you.
For Porcini, this purpose is to champion a human-centric conscience in the corporate world. By elevating design, he spreads a philosophy that shapes branding, innovation, and business growth around a central mission: creating meaningful value for society. Even this noble goal, he admits, is ultimately about the self. Finding a purpose provides happiness now, because you feel that you are creating something that will last.
The Business Case for Love
This all sounds beautiful, but how does it translate to the bottom line? How do you convince a left-brained executive to invest in love and joy? You become a passionate pragmatist.
Porcini had to learn to speak the language of business, to translate the value of human-centricity into terms the C-suite could understand. “You need that love, that authenticity... but if you just have that, you don’t have the pragmatism, the ability to speak the language of business,” he explains. You must show that love actually creates financial value.
Measuring the direct ROI of a single design change is nearly impossible. The true value of design is long-term and holistic. It requires changing the entire ecosystem. “Imagine if Apple was having a beautiful phone but the packaging was bad, the experience in the store was bad,” Porcini posits. You can’t measure the impact of one element in isolation.
At 3M and now at PepsiCo, Porcini developed a multi-layered framework to demonstrate design’s value beyond a simple sales lift. Instead of relying on one impossible metric, he tells a comprehensive story across several dimensions of impact:
- Financial Growth: The ultimate goal is top-line and bottom-line growth, plus market share, measured over a three-year horizon to account for the time it takes for holistic changes to take effect.
- Impact on Users: This is measured through qualitative data like social media sentiment and the enthusiasm surrounding a new launch. When Pepsi launched its new design, it generated 7 billion impressions with 99% positive sentiment.
- Impact on Customers: This involves transforming the relationship with retailers like Walmart or Home Depot from a supplier to a strategic partner, co-creating better in-store experiences for their guests.
- Impact on R&D: This includes the number of new ideas and patents generated, and the success of those innovations landing in the market.
- Impact on Strategy: Design thinking plays a key role in the company’s strategic planning, helping to answer: Where is society going, and where should our company be in the future?
- Impact on Communication: This is about shaping the employer brand and how the company is perceived by shareholders, media, and future talent. A design-driven company is often a company that is loved.
- Impact on Cost and Process: By building a strategic internal design function, PepsiCo has tracked savings of “many millions of dollars” over 11 years, reducing reliance on expensive and inconsistent outside agencies. This includes savings on cost of goods and increasing perceived quality.
By crafting powerful stories around these value dimensions, Porcini has made an undeniable case for his team's growth to over 300 designers across 17 global design centers. He delivered full effectiveness and efficiency together. This approach of clearly articulating value is a cornerstone of any successful brand strategy.
The Competitive Advantage of Being Human
Porcini argues that the imperative for human-centricity is more urgent today than ever before. For decades, big companies were protected by high barriers to entry: scale of production, distribution networks, and massive communication budgets.
“All these barriers... are crumbling down under the winds of globalization, new technologies, digitization,” he says. A startup can now compete directly with a mega-brand. This new reality leaves both big and small companies with only one true path to differentiation: refocusing everything on people and creating something extraordinary for them.
This means being the best across every single touchpoint. The best product, the best story, the best service, the best experience. “If you’re weak in one of these dimensions, that’s where a competitor will come in,” Porcini warns. A startup can identify that single weakness and exploit it, unburdened by the legacy constraints of a large corporation. This relentless focus on delivering an exceptional product and experience is a theme also explored by pioneering designers like Robert Brunner in his work with Apple and Beats, which you can learn more about in this conversation on great product design.
Therefore, what was once considered a “soft” skill or a “nice-to-have” philosophy, the human-driven approach to business, has become a hard-nosed survival strategy. It’s the magic that allows you to connect creating value for people with creating value for the company.
Porcini’s career is a masterclass in bridging what seems like an impossible divide. Once, when he was a teenager, a family friend, a man he describes as a “prophet,” posed a riddle at the dinner table: “What do you think is the biggest distance in the universe?”
The answer, the prophet revealed, was the distance between the heart and the mind.
Humanity has always struggled to reconcile these two poles: rationality and emotion, pragmatism and passion. The people who make history, Porcini believes, are the ones who find a way to unite them. They are the passionate pragmatists.
His advice is a challenge to every creative, leader, and entrepreneur. Stop seeing the heart and the mind as opposing forces. Start building the bridge between them.
Your greatest work lies on the other side.
TRANSCRIPT
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 through the generation of that value
you're making your life enjoyable and worth living I want to highlight one of those things which is about energy like we're all energy and energy has a frequency 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 I
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 I don't what are you talking about I can feel your energy you just radiate this positivity and now I'm experiencing with you do people say this to you and how
do you respond to that okay the day has arrived ladies and gentlemen my next guest I met initially in Geneva backstage and he had an air of confidence and importance about him but I did 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 AIG 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 tell you who it is just yet let me just tell you his bio and I don't even do this for regular guest 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 three M's first Chief design officer featured in fast company's 50 most influential designers in America Fortune's 40 under 40 an ad age list of the 50 world's most influential creative personalities oh my gosh how do we
do this marrow 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 well first of all you're too kind Chris um as you can hear from my accent heavy accent I'm Italian what accent are you talking about
and my name is Maro porini I'm the chief design officer of PepsiCo I've been in this position for more than 11 years I started in July 2012 uh I moved to the United States in 2010 to um move to the headquarter of the company was working for at that time 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 and I think this keyword love is something that really
Define my journey and what I'm trying to spread and Peach and and celebr bre every day with my work with my life you know it may be like this um 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 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 she Chief design officer Vice did I read this right was it vice president yes Vice senior vice president senior Vice presid senior vice president I mean how did you even get this how do you even get this kind of job like it's a dream on top of a dream you look
I love the way you shape 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 uh and nothing to do with positions or um achievement of a certain status or wealth or you know
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 a of University professors as an example because they will spend their life researching on a specific topic and
becoming the master of that topic uh so that's was one value the second value was this idea of being a good person today I I call it being kind in Italian there is a very powerful word person to be a good person once again in English you will translate in that way but
it's very powerful that word buano in Italian and and b or kind are words that are not very fashionable right now you want not be successful you want not to be an influencer you want to be Renown you want to arrive to positions like the one the two of us have in different
ways right that that's the goal the goal is not to be kind the goal is not anymore the one of being a person of culture a very knowledgeable person a person that knows things well I grew up with those meth my parents again were not cele celebrating when we were watching TV or
we were encountering people people that were rich or famous they were celebrating people that that kind 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 being a very successful architect and he was spending all his free time painting art painting drawing was his passion and he would 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 he draw my mother was working in finance she didn't have a University degree she didn't have the money you know 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 at work also to be very close to her kids and and it was a major sacrifice for our family because we didn't have a penny so to lose that income was a sacrifice but 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 her writing every single day and still today she writes and together they've been publishing 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
mast you know it was not even a a goal and I wanted somehow to do something I loved so there was not you know tradeoff on that I wanted to do something I loved and I realized now I couldn't really Define that in that way in this way at that time but I
realize now 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 meat 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 very coming very natural to me now I also needed to get some income Revenue you know to support myself in life because I don't come once again from a wealthy family it was a miracle that 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 Poly Technical 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 order I didn't have many chances in Italy to become 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 architector and just few days before um joining architect 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 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 Des that's my career I started with a lip of Fi 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 easy and so on so forth so all of these and I'm sorry for the long long
answer I promise I'm going to be shorter in the next one but 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 you know now I have one to beatric to my daughter and
to anybody you know interested to listening to us right now do not set for yourself the good 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're creating value for somebody else through the generation of that value you're making your life enjoyable and worth living you are making 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 are just an addition to something else if you miss the something else the foundation you're going you're going to be miserable with your money and with your Fame okay a 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 okay I I still have to make a living here and an architecture seems to be like a pretty like 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 it's like that's a different industri 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 that's the joke that we always make in Italy before po technico created the first official University of design uh in 1993 and I joined in 1994 so it was safer because the 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 um um 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 in 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 you know my curiculum and everything to study business engineering Med you know one of the the things that you do when you do very well at school and it was funny my parents you know I think it was a mix of nav one side but also you know believing
in in 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 like you know actually they were almost offended by that um but they were also laughing and and but thank God they were there because if I had other
parents they were more focus 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 have you're going to make a lot of
money you're 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 not I don't have anything against Finance or engineer I may be super happy doing those things but but I
wouldn't have found something that for 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 247 for me to 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 that I have you know when I think about myself I don't see myself in any other area that is not designed I you know I may at this point move to General management marketing maybe you know try to become
the CEO of a company or things like this but I will betray who I am inside that you know 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 SEO of my startup and we will listen
to this podcast I like what the was he saying but anyway I'm joking Never Say Never but my point is that even if in the future I you know I I I change trajectory I don't think it's going to happen but if it's GNA happen I'm GNA be always a designer you know
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 you know we go after other things all the time in the illusion that they will give us some form of Happiness satisfaction and then you realize that there are that happiness is driven by so many other variables uh that often we don't talk about and and and and for me
the priority is to be happy to have my family happy my friends happy my close the people close to me you know I want them to be happy as well now I want to say this for people who are listening to this podcast and if you're not watching the YouTube video will watch
that when you get a chance but I'm looking at Maro right now and there is a kind of Radiance from you even in this like approximation of who you are in pixels and on a screen with phosphors you can see he is smiling from from ear to ear your skin seems to be
glowing I mean you you're just like rting 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 like 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 like 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 I don't 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 well 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 uh died 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 you know there are babies that are more beautiful and you know but every time she walk anywhere in a restaurant or in a place
you know and she meets people in the 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 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 and that was interesting because it means that somehow there are certain things that start already with you in your
DNA you know 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
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 of what you do of the people that surround you of
the experiences you're living and and and an optimism that you have inside you know as something that that the people can feel the people they really really feel this but yeah I really I really believe in in the power of this energy this Aura and for sure you have it I mean it's
tangible you yeah there are people enter a room and you just feel it even before they start to talk his body language is the expression is there is something there yeah but again there are many people listening to us right now Chris they maybe are thinking well I don't have it I was
not born like this I canot well again there are people are born like this but practice training 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 you know exponentially amplify this I think even if you don't have it naturally you can for sure increase it and and and so we can all get there in different ways with you know in different degrees with the different kind of easiness um but but first of all
we need to be aware about the power of this energy and the power of joy and positivity and love yeah I mean people are going to sit there what are these two hippies talking about like we're so not Hipp Let's Talk About Numbers data data data like IUN we can talk about that
too right yeah we can you know and here you are you know senior vice president of a multinational corporation a chief design officer so we're we're we're going to balance this out everybody before you like let's get the crystals out and burn some in just okay just you know when people say your
energy is infectious without even knowing the principles behind this their body already feels it and and here's what I believe when you 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 we're constantly pulling each other we either lift each other up or we can pull each other down if You' 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 like we
feel it before we even understand like 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 you have more ideas you can be more creative you're more generous
beautiful things come from this and I want to take it back to your parents this this 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 and your parents did something so beautiful they're like
what no we know what we need to do with our child so they 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 Mara look I think it happened
obviously obviously I need I needed to balance a little bit what my parents were teaching me in full na H with a better understanding ing of our Network navigate corporations understand the business world you know 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 obviously you need to know how to move in the business world how to pitch an idea how to uh you know strategize
to build your business your capability H 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 uh then it's tough to
arrive to a certain position now the important message though is you may still be totally happy without being the senior Vice President Chief Des an officer of a company just for clarity now if you also want to have that you need also certain skills to understand you know how to navigate that complexity
but you can be totally happy being an artist having you know 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 job when she was
38 my dad was an architect as 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 are the happiest person I know you 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 right 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 you know 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 one1 of the price of New York so it was not that difficult to help them and and or a car a better car they have a shitty 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 Lord you know you know the where the madon appear because they're super super Catholic their dream was they never travel you know and so that Tre dream was to go where there
was to Lord where there was The Apparition there's been The Apparition of uh the madon and 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
wall and so they were there without credit cards and documents and anything so disaster irony of life but I'm 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 and or with
your own startup and be very successful but you can be happy also without doing all of this now to all of to do all of this you need to understand how to navigate the complexity of the business world my parents were happy with Theos of anything they are still happy without being cidos
of anything is there a happy ending to the story to the travel they watch everything no no they just went back I like you know they they traveled three times in their life outside of Italy once was to go to L another time was to go to Prague but they 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 risked his life so that was really bad thank God it happened in front of me in my house he came to
meet me that 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 they very you know 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 you know literally like the emotion so yeah there's such an inspiration in my life I want to be a a glimpse of that for my daughter 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 they 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 kind of how did how did they even process any of this it's I it was beautiful to see that oh how excited they were and again now you know to change slider topic you know we're talking about design Innovation and that kind of a and
surprise is something that I see constant ly in the innovators no matter the experience you had in life so in the case of my parents yes it was a first they never saw building so high you know and something like this like New York but I met so many people in my life
they had all kind of experiences they 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 thems 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 they experien already everything it's not cool to get excited about something I did this so many times you know 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 you know the wise man and woman I will add are the people that
know of no knowing and and the more you know the more 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 you know in my life the more I was learning the more the
more I started to feel little little in the universe dust in the universe because there is so much to learn and I don't have enough lives you know I I have just one life I would love to have thousands of lives to be able to learn everything that there is to learn and
and it's so you know 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 you know we are born raw energy or raw material you know in in the book when talking about life I I I I make
a metaphor I talk about mikelangelo the artist Michelangelo one of my meth when I was a kid and at the end of his career mikelangelo created the so-called unfinished the nonini in Italian or they are also called the prisoners II essentially these are sculture where he started with a piece of marble the
raw material and then he started to Chisel out the material freeing the shape that is in his mind was already inside the storm his philosophy was and and so he left the the the sculpture Al Dawn 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 sculpture is the one of chiseling way 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 chinging away material to Define ourself we are scultures of
ourself and now we decide how to scul ourself too many people Unfortunately they refer to influencers celebrities role models of any kind and they start to scult themselves in a similar way to these influencers and celebrities mimicking them trying to be them this happen at every level you can happen also at work
trying to be the person you know that your boss or somebody else that you admire in reality what we should do is yes as you know 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 even be a kid that makes an unexpected question absorb absorb absorb but then Define your own sculture Define who you want to be by the way this is one of the three major steps to reach
your happiness you know happiness as defined by many uh psychologist and human scientists is defined by three steps in life the first one is defining yourself is is the search for your identity that is so strong especially when we're younger because when we're younger we're there and a certain point you know 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 you know who we want to be the job that you choose is a component big component of this but it's not the only one you know if 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 you know a person at 360 Degrees the second dim menion to reach happiness the second step is to invest in people close to you to love people close to
you your family your friends your close 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 by you know 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 in my job there are two 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 podcast I have my own podcast and I do all these activities outside the second is that design is by definition a human Center 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 hands of people or if you want to you know in a more elegant way to
create something meaningful for people and then obviously we need to make money with that but is a secondary goal a necessary one a super important one but a 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's a different philosophical approach to 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 will have these people not just designers but that kind of philosophy will spread across the organization ation in other functions to shape
companies really with that kind of purpose purposeful approach to branding Innovation and business growth so this is an example of purpose now even this it could you know in your private life could be charity could be activities that you do to help others even this that sounds so Noble so selfless even this
is all about you 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 remember 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 remember because you are a kind person you were doing a lot of kind act 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 through the kind of love and and kindness and purpose that is bigger than you okay lots to unpack there love it I've been talking to tomorrow he's the senior vice president
and chief design officer of pepso his book The Human Side of innovation the power of people in love with people is available on Amazon will 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 I I want to ask you this this question and I believe you're you're prepared to to to answer this in that you 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
our designers and design thinking into the organization what is the benefit to them if they're left brainers they're like wait you you you know first she went down this hippie road to like joy and love and all this and then you're talking about design it's like is there a tangible benefit a metric
that will impact businesses when you celebrate incorporate design it's very very difficult to define a metric the measure what you're doing with design first of all we need to dis make a distinction between defining the ROI if you want of the design capability versus Des 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 co down every single function so you need marketing Finance each are all the functions to understand design centricity or in other words the synonym is human centricity so if you that's the first point the
second is that the ultimate goal should be that you're growing financially your company that's the truth because this company are there to make money so is is Topline growth is bottom line growth is market share you know all the typical Financial variables now for that though that means that you cannot reduce design
to well I change the aesthetic of a product let's see if I'm selling more products and they 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 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
can of Pepsi that you find in Walmart or Target or wherever you buy it is going to be infused with that 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 Orizon 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 experience later on imagine if Apple was having a beautiful phone but the packaging was bad the experienc 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 that 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 know you give yourself one year two years three years depending on your business it could be even more in Industries where the change is heavy
from a investment standpoint life cycle standpoint manufacturing standpoint so it depends on the industry so that's one thing now is 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 the patients they want to
see value earlier so when I was steing 3M I Define a series of additional layers of value the first one is how 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 this with this
layers the first one is how you impact the users and again you can measure in different way this but is even you know very qualitative is the way people comment your product react to your product in social media as an example the conversation they having for instance for peps is the enthusias that
people had when we launch the new design I mean 99% positive sentiment with 7 billion impression H that was like Wow people really really love what we're doing with this new design but so first of all how you are 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 Kaur in in in trim was Home Depot and many others is helping them redefining the experience that their guest have in their stores with not just Our Brands but eventually our category beverages food do it yourself equipment and and other things becoming strategic partners of them seeing how they see you
company as a partner versus A supplier of vers you know 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 is
the the idea that you are able to land and the idea you're GNA and the the success you're going to be able to generate through those ideas success is not being just eventually successful products but you could be successful in size and then you you leverage for other products and other Ventures then
is the impact on strategy is how design thinking is helping you def in the strategic planning of the company where is the world going where is society going where is food and beverage going and where PepsiCo should be in the future once their design start to be a role in those convers 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 is nothing else than business strategy with human centricity because that's what
design driven strategy is about then is impact on communication and employer brand brand essentially is how your compan is perceived by different Target audiences from shareholders media the new talents that could 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 I'm going to it's going to be a different story the one that that 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 design 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 the output the quality of what you're doing
for instance we have been tracking how much PepsiCo has been spending in design uh between internal people and external agencies and we have been generating Savings of millions and millions of dollars over the years many millions dollars H and we've been tracking this from the very beginning 11 years of tracking so now
we have very substantial data H 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 perceive quality creating value for your business and your brand and so on so forth so these are few examples of things we 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
what 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 these dimension for you they will get it actually they will start to see that 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 in instead from within strategically working with internal people and also with agencies we work with tons of agencies out there
you you it's a super powerful proposition that's why we keep growing uh you know we have more than 300 designers we have 17 design centers we just open this week the design center in Istanbul because there is value on one side in a very productive way in the order is the magic formula
of full effectiveness of what you're doing quality and 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 have never been able to tell this kind of story you the second part of the story and that's
why I'm saying right you know yeah you need that 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 and translate the actually the
financial value of love that is not the reason why you love but because we live in a world where Financial value is such an important metric if you can show that actually love create value for your company then it's amazing now I wish we would 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 you know in the way we structure this world we live in so I don't want to be negative about the world we live in um but 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 uh digitization so essentially you know 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 they there was this dynamic balance in your industry few big players
now you are a startup that's what you look for that what is the weakness of the Big Brand I'm gonna go in and I 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 okay I want to quickly recap a couple like big ideas and then before we run out of time we're almost out of time here
I want to ask you this other question so everybody hang in for that 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 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 long term 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 you could you could feel it you can measure it you can capture sentiment and 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 re-evaluate did I get the general sentiment okay totally totally and if you think about you know especially the first part of your summary yes this is what Humanity has been struggling all the time is well philosophy art liter are been uh 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
I just started to study philosophy school and and he asked me 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 you know in a family where currency was culture you know being able to answer something like this to the prophet it was like wow what 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 extremist people that are all about rationality and they're all about emotions and this polarize the conversation but many of the people that have been making history are
been able are people 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 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 the people and 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 like this is a critical thing because I
think we can learn whether you're about to hire 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 let's divide hiring growing and retaining on the hiring part I have no clue don't know I really
don't know I I make so many mistakes I'm you know but and so because of the and why because it's so difficult in one hour interview to you know with a portfolio and a resume a conversation to understand if somebody has it or not so many years ago I devel 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 The Love Letter to design later on you know more recently I
wrote a book about this but the the strategy is make it clear here 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 push 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 you know we're talking about many different characteristics that define these ideal innovators what I call the unicorns and is 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 better every day you will make a lot of mistakes but with awareness you will try to get better so sharing this as much as possible
out there through 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 uh join the company and then working for instance and other 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 uh they know inside out who you are what kind of people you're looking for and their job is to be 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 that that I'm trying to to find so and then another tactic you know 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 in the interviews not with me
you know 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 they again they see people things that I don't see I see other 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 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 and then so walk the talk and then is Empower them let them free give them the freedom to be
themselves and 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 their 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 how about retain well I mean is a mix of that and then making sure that you pay them in the right way and and I say pay
because you reward them you know it will be broader than pay but pay let's not be you know 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 you know the the compensation team
and everything to make sure that we are positioning design in the right way that we have the right titles the right compensation that we are aligned to marketing to R&D is not been easy it's been a journey by the way you know every other year we step it up we we we we
get better and better and better but this is key I mean it would be hypocrit to just talk about vision and dream and this and that and then they're not they're paid I don't know half of a marketer or of a person working Rd H so that's important as well and by the
way I 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 desig in 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 were 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 you know my the subtitle of my book is people in love with people and and there is the introduction to the book of two cosos of the company Ramon laguarta the current Co and indran the previous coo so two cosos 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 right 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 in PepsiCo 11 years ago but in different ways so that's another very important thing that I learned over the years uh you know 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 you know
disrupt because that's what they want you to do you are the designer you're are there to be creative but you also need to integrate yourself within the culture of the company you need because in this way you reassure them they understand that you understand them they're not there to level you but you
are there to work with them to grow the organization and so it's been always to find the right balance between disrupting and integrating yourself and 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 and tell them you know what everything we have been doing delivering this kind of business value was actually driven by law 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 and be like whatever
I mean let's no waste time listening to this guy 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 marar
porini 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 like book in 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 it's better for you
also to be a good person to be kind to share your gifts 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
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 Maro it's been a pleasure thanks for doing this podcast with me Chris thank you for having me and thanks for everybody that been
listening and watching [Music] us
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