It's really a pleasure to be with all of you here today. It's been said multiple times today: you are really the future, you are the hope for our world, you're the future of our society, and therefore it's a privilege for me to be here addressing all of you today. So I want to thank the Change the World Academy for this opportunity. I'm not a diplomat, I'm not a business leader, I am just a designer. I've been a designer professionally for about 30 years. I've been a designer in my heart for much longer, I would say for 50 years. I'm going to turn 50 in a couple of months, so design is who I am. I was born a designer even before I realized I was going to do this as a job.
Designers dream. Designers design and develop products, brand experiences, essentially solutions to human needs, to any kind of human needs. Anything that surrounds us is designed by somebody: the chair you're sitting on, the clothing you're wearing, the watches that you have on your wrist, this building, this podium, this mic — everything. Everything was conceived, dreamed of, designed, developed by some human being. This is what designers do: they innovate, they create something that didn't exist before, and therefore they are, in the broad definition, innovators. The title of my speech today is 'The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People,' and it happens to be also, as it was said earlier, the title of my book.
The book starts with these words that I'm going to read to you: 'Innovation is an act of love, or at least it should be. Always, it is a gesture of empathy, respect, generosity, of one human being's devotion to another.' This is the innovation that I hope for. This is innovation that I want for my children and their children, for the society of today and the society of tomorrow. This is the very best innovation: the meaningful, useful, beautiful, sustainable innovation, the kind that continues to improve the status quo now and for always. This is the innovation that the new world we live in requires, not only because it's the right thing to do ethically speaking, but also because, at last, in our global technological and digital society, this is the innovation that we need. And human and ethical needs and goals are aligning in this society more and more with the business goals of enterprises and individuals. Innovation as an act of love is today also becoming good business.
And so this is what I want to talk to you about today: not business, but love. In a world where we are often bombarded by negativity, where social media overwhelm us with all kinds of negative messages — messages about tensions and conflicts going on between countries, between different kinds of human beings, between people with different points of view on the world — today I want to talk to you about the power of love, because love is the most powerful driver of growth: business, economic growth, but also obviously personal growth. And yet it rarely makes the news. And the reason is that, as humans, our brains are wired by Mother Nature to react to danger and to react, therefore, to negative, shocking, upsetting news. This is how we react to the environment out there. This is a mechanism of self-defense. We had it since the beginning of time, as animals. You know, back then, in prehistoric times, we were moving in our tribes in the savannah, hunting for food and escaping from other predators. So it's inside our nature.
But the love I want to talk to you about today is not the love that you can find in romantic novels or in emotional movies. This is a speech about love coming from an executive of a corporation, from the senior vice president, chief design officer of a company with a market cap of almost $24 billion and with almost 320,000 employees in our organization in almost every country of the world. It's a speech about the kind of love that drives innovation, social progress, business growth, and ultimately happiness too — personal happiness and collective happiness. But let's do a step back and let's start from the beginning.
At school, I've been taught many technical skills. You know, in high school and then in design university, I learned mathematics, geography, science, literature, foreign languages. Then I moved to design university; they taught me all the tools of design and design thinking, business, innovation. Many years later, though, I realized that actually many of the things I learned — everything I learned at school — was absolutely not enough to navigate the complexity of life and work. I had to integrate all of that with so many more things that I learned in my life experience, beginning from my parents and then, over the years, from close friends, from unexpected mentors, from visionary leaders, great teachers, even from hostile people and misguided individuals.
After getting my master's degree in design, I had a short experience at Philips. I created my own design agency with a famous Italian music producer, Claudio Chetto, and then in 2002 I joined 3M, a giant tech corporation from the United States. I stayed 10 years there, and then 13 years ago I moved to PepsiCo, where I am still today. In the first years of corporate America at 3M, I had my first realization that really changed completely my trajectory in life, and that informed also the book that I wrote and many of the speeches that I did over the years. I was pitching the most advanced processes to drive innovation, leveraging design thinking to disrupt the way the company was investing in new products, in new brands. I really believed that all these tools, these approaches, could really change the world.
After a few years in the company, looking back at dozens and dozens of projects, I started to see that some of these projects were doing very well, were evolving, arriving to market, creating value for the company and value for the people we were serving. But then there were many others that were not; they were failing in the process, would never arrive to market. At first, I thought the solution to the ones that were not working properly was again to be found in the tools, in the processes — you know, we need better tools and better processes. Until at a certain point, I realized that the real reason that those projects were struggling was to be found in a completely different dimension, and that led to what today I consider something pretty obvious — a conclusion that is pretty obvious and yet is so underestimated in so many companies around the world, big and small, especially in the big ones, with all these consultancies that keep into this company the idea that with ways of working, tools and processes, you can change the world and grow all these companies.
What I realized was pretty simple: what was making all the difference in the world were not processes and tools, it was the people assigned to those projects, to those activities, using those tools and those processes. If you had the right people, most of the projects would succeed. If you didn't have the right people, many of those projects would fail. The question immediately after then became: what makes the people right? I needed to understand and define formally, strategically, what were the characteristics of these people. So I thought about the projects, about many, many people that I met in my life, within the company, outside of the company, people that inspired me for what they were doing around the world, and I wrote down a list — a list of characteristics, of traits — and I sent them to our human resources and I told them, 'Well, these are the traits that I need in every new hire in our team.'
There are 24 characteristics that define the ideal innovators. We call these innovators unicorns, and the reason is that they don't exist. So we look for people that don't exist. In other words, what I mean is that there's no human being that expresses all the characteristics — the 24 different characteristics — in an optimal way. They're unicorns; they don't exist. But that's perfectly fine. That's the nature of this list. It's a compass, it's a direction, it's something to aim for for the rest of our lives, because life is a never-ending journey of learning. Because learning doesn't end with school; actually, most of the times it starts after school, and there is so much to learn. And life can be really this incredible journey where you keep growing until your last day. This is what innovators do.
Now, what are those traits? I have just a few minutes at my disposal; I don't have the time to go through all of them, but I'm going to mention a few. First of all: dream, dream, dream, dream. You know, we are all born with that ability. As children, we dream, we fantasize all the time. The more we grow, though, the more people start to tell us, 'Well, that dream is a little bit childish, it's naive.' But we maintain, we preserve that ability to dream. We go on in life, we go to high school, we go to university, we still dream. We get out of school, we go to these companies, and we're there and we dream, and we tell these companies, 'We can change this company, we can change these products, we can change this brand, we can change the industry, we can change the world.' And then people look at you and they're like, 'You're so childish, you're so naive. You know, people failed trying this before you. Why are you so arrogant to think that you can change the world if nobody else was able to?' And so we start to think that dreaming is wrong, and we stop dreaming.
Now, there are a few people, though, that preserve that ability. They are the real innovators, the ones that keep dreaming. Now, dreaming is difficult, but once you dream, it's nice. So dreaming is not enough. You know, to live in the comfort zone of the dream and just keep dreaming is not enough. The real innovators are able to dream, but then they act on it. They transform the dream into execution. They are able to move from the dream to a plan and then a prototype, something that they bring to market. And this is really what innovators do: dream, act, prototype, and fail. Make mistakes — it's perfectly fine. From those mistakes, you learn, you grow.
I've been working for so many years with scientists. Scientists know very well that to arrive to one patent, one innovation, you need to do thousands of experiments. The problem in our society is that what scientists call experiments, the business world calls mistakes and failures. So we need to change the approach to innovation in the business world, and we need to understand how to make it possible for people to experiment. But in your life, you control your life: make those mistakes, put yourself out of your comfort zone, try things, prototype, fail, learn, go on, and you will succeed.
There are many other characteristics, and again, I don't have a lot of time at my disposal, but there are three I want to mention: kindness, curiosity, and optimism. Let's start with curiosity. Curiosity is the ability to interact with others, is the ability to and the desire to read physical books, online, travel, talk to strangers, talk especially with people different than you — people with a different color of their skin, different political views, religious views, people that have a different perspective. Because in that diversity there is the precious gift of knowledge. They have a perspective that is different than yours, and therefore you can learn from them. The connection of my perspective with your perspective is going to create a new, original perspective that didn't exist before. That's what innovation is about.
Optimism. If you change the world, if you really try to change the world, you will find roadblocks and closed doors every single day, difficulties all the time. Innovators are optimistic people. Now, you have it by nature, but you can also amplify that optimism when you are in the middle of a very difficult moment. And I tell you, I've had so many difficult moments in my life. First, look at where you're coming from, the progress that you did. Celebrate that progress. Appreciate with full mindfulness where you're coming from. Even if you made many mistakes today, you learn, you know more than what you knew a week ago, a year ago, 10 years ago. And then you need a dream, because the dream gives you the excitement to overcome all kinds of roadblocks, the resilience to go on no matter what.
And finally, kindness. I need to thank my parents. Since I was a kid, they told me that kindness, being a good human being, was super, super important. So it was very natural for me. At a certain point, though, I realized it was a superpower. I am here today talking to you because of kindness and love that helped me so much in my journey. No matter the world is telling us that eventually you need to be mean to succeed, you need to be tough — jerks, you know, are succeeding — it's not true. Kindness today is an amazing driver of effectiveness or productivity, the ability to connect with others, building trust. Kindness is the ability to look at somebody — could be your boss, could be the team working for you, could be your peers — and think, 'How can I help you succeed?' Now, you do it in a selfless way, but when you do it, you're going to become indispensable. You're going to build synergies with people that are different from you, that bring to the table different perspectives, different knowledge, different skills, that together are going to change the world.
So this is what is going to drive success — material success, business success — but so much more than that. Society, when we talk about success, totally misleads us. It makes us think that material success, fame, and wealth should be our goal. So we're all running after fame and wealth. You know, it's everywhere; you open social media, it's all about that. Well, it's not. It shouldn't be our goal. First, because very few people will reach that fame and wealth, so if you link your personal success to fame and wealth, most of you are doomed. But mostly because even if you reach it, it doesn't mean you're going to be happy. There are so many successful, famous people totally miserable. And actually, if you look at the most successful countries from an economic standpoint, they have indexes of happiness that are really low compared to many other countries. That's not our goal. Happiness should be our goal.
And there is a very simple recipe to reach happiness, defined by human scientists, and I'm going to close with this. There are three things. First: love yourself and love what you do — your job, what you're doing at school, your hobbies, your extracurricular activities. Love what you do. If you find yourself in a job that you don't love, find ways to change the situation; eventually, at the end, change job. But you need to love what you do and love yourself. Love others close to you — your family, your friends, your fellow students, your colleagues — in a selfless way. Give love, but by the nature of that community, you will get it back, and it will give you so much happiness and satisfaction.
The third dimension of love needs to transcend yourself. It's bigger than you. Do something that is bigger than you. People arrive to this usually later in life because they understand that life will end sooner or later. And so if you do something that is bigger than you — it could be creating incredible products that change the world, all the way to random acts of kindness to strangers — you will live forever in the memory of others. You will defeat death in their way. Be people in love with people. This will drive the best success you can think of, that is your personal happiness, and if we all do it, it's going to be collective happiness in our society. Thank you.
