Mauro Porcini's Design Strategy That Made PepsiCo a Household Name!

I like to define Milan as the Piazza of design, a place where people from all around the world, of any age, any kind of design background, come, meet, get together, and talk about design, create design. With the density in terms of creativity and number of creative people that is unique in the world, the Italian design and the success of the Italian design in the past 50 years and more has been based on three different assets: amazing creative people, amazing designers, amazing entrepreneurs, genius, visionary, and then local manufacturing.

American design, Anglo-Saxon design, is a world close to the world of industry, is business-driven, is more strategic, and so the two worlds sometimes have a difficult time to create a dialogue and interact with each other. Something I always remind about the two worlds: when you study design in Italy, the person you design for is called user; when you study design in the United States, the person you design for is called consumer. And these two words to define the people you design for are so different and really are the embodiment of two different philosophies of design. I think the successful product, the successful company, the successful brands are the ones that are able to leverage the two aspects of design.

I'm Italian, as you can hear from my accent, even though I learned English in Dublin in 1998. I don't have a thick Irish accent, but I learned here because I studied French at school. And I'm a designer. I studied design at the Polytechnic of Milan, the University Polytechnic of Milan, and in 1998 I had the opportunity to come here at the NCAD for an exchange program. And again, this is where I learned English, but it's also where I learned the importance of changing perspective and diversity, and where I understood my own country in a completely different way, just by getting out of my own country: the strengths of the culture, the gaps of the culture, therefore my strengths and my gaps in my own culture and myself. And I learned the importance of traveling and connecting with people that are different from ourselves, and again, changing points of view on life in general. So a very, very important year, 1998 for me, a year in Dublin.

I graduated at the Polytechnic the year after in wearable technology, so design applied to the world of wearable technologies. I started to work in Philips, one year there, then I created my own agency, my own company, actually.

You read the book, so there are many different stories, you know, in this journey that have been very important lessons in my life, as I'm sure you know you have many stories in your own journey, in your own life, when you look back. But essentially, wearable technology, Philips, then I created my own agency with an amazing person, a big entrepreneur in the world of music that was intrigued and interested by the world of the internet. And he's a guy that, without ever using the word innovation, taught me what innovation is by just observing him and seeing how he was acting and behaving. And then the internet back then was just totally unstable, so the internet bubble collapsed, burst, and we closed the agency.

Just recently I realized that actually that was a failure. I mean, I opened a company and I closed it, it was a failure. But I never, never saw that as a failure because I learned so much in those years. And then recently somebody, a journalist, was asking me, 'Can you tell us about, you know, failures in life?' And I have answers that I've been giving for many, many years. But then I paused. I was like, wow, that thing that I never saw as a failure, because for me it was like an amazing learning experience, was actually what a lot of people would call failure. For me, it was an experiment.

But long story short, I bumped into 3M, the tech company from Minnesota. I entered the company as a design coordinator at 27, and I left the company 10 years later as Chief Design Officer, the first Chief Design Officer of that corporation. I moved to the United States, and that's when I met PepsiCo.

Well, it's been somehow a theme of my life. Let's take 3M. You know, that specific step, they gave me a job description, they were expecting something from me. And when I entered, instead of just doing that, I started to ask myself, what else can I really do for this company? What does this company need? I did something I know today, back then was totally intuitive, but something that usually the philosophers do: they ask why, and why again, and why again, until they arrive to the root cause. What did the company really need from design? And when you start to ask your questions like this, you realize eventually things that even the company or your business leader, your boss, doesn't understand, simply because you bring in a different perspective. You know what you can offer, you know your background. I knew what design could offer to the company that eventually the company didn't understand yet. And so once you understand that is important, you still deliver on the expectations of the company, else you don't last inside the organization. But then I started to work under the radar screen on the side on what the company really needed.

One thing that I realized, for instance, in the first years, I met a person, a business leader, and he was sitting by me in the office, and we became friends. And the guy was assigned to Six Sigma in that period, so the high potentials of the company for two years were assigned into the Six Sigma training, and then they would go back in the business with higher positions inside the organization. So the guy, his name is Mauro, Mauro, and I became friends. He was witnessing what I was thinking and what I was trying to do, and he would tell me every day, 'I can't wait to go back in a business position and work with you and change this company and leverage design.' And so six months later, he gets back into a business position, he becomes the head of all the office business for Europe, and he doesn't use design at all, he doesn't engage at all.

And in a different situation, before this specific moment, I would have thought like any designer often thinks: these business people don't get it, right? Another business person that doesn't get it. As often business people think about designers: they're just creative and they don't understand, you know, the strategies of the business. There is often that distance between different cultures. It happened in, you know, cultures connected to your profession, but then this is true everywhere. When somebody is different from you, often we think that they just don't get it. But something happened in that occasion that changed completely everything for me. I was respecting that person, I was respecting Mauro not just as a human being, but his ability to understand what I was doing as a designer. So all of a sudden something changed in the way I was looking at him, and instead of saying, 'Well, he doesn't get it,' I started to ask myself, what's going on? Why is he not working with me? There must be something else here. And so the first thing I did, that often we don't do, I talked to him, you know, a respectful dialogue to better understand what was happening. And then I tried to put myself in his shoes. Empathy, another key word, another characteristic of these unicorns, these leaders I talk about in the book. And when you do something like this, two magic things can happen. The first one is that eventually you understand that you had blind spots, that you didn't understand something that by changing perspective all of a sudden you see. And so at that point you better yourself and you find ways to create a dialogue and together work, you know, to succeed in what you are trying to do. The second scenario is that you realize that you are right anyway, but you learn how to talk to the person in a different way, using different kind of language and trying to get access to his mind in, you know, in a different way. Even in that case, you end up creating a partnership and a collaboration.

I read the book, but exactly that. I mean, in that case, I realized that I had blind spots. I realized everything you just described. And therefore the big realization was that my role as a head of design of the company was not the one of driving Mauro crazy because he was not embracing design. It was actually the one of working with HR to change, you know, the way we were measuring performance of these business leaders.