Welcome to Raffles Talk. This year we had the podcast. It's all about being uncomfortable and being comfortable with that. Are you ready for the challenge? Let's have some fun. Welcome Mauro Porcini. It's a pleasure having you with us today.
I'm very comfortable in this uncomfortable situation and can't wait to hear your questions.
Thank you.
Okay, we love to begin with our questions directly. So, you built a career inside which companies? What were you really chasing? Impact, influence or legacy?
A little bit of everything. I was always driven by the sense of purpose. At the beginning I didn't realize it too much and then after a while I realized that design can really have a positive impact in society. It can really change the world for the better. And this is what we learn at school. At school they teach us to observe people, understand their needs, their wants and create a solution for them. It could be a chair, it could be a phone, it could be a brand, it could be a service. But at the end of the day we are driven by creating something positive for the world. In business school you learn something slightly different. They teach you to grow a business, to create financial value through brands and business models. And they tell you, well, the products, the communication, they are levers. You can have an amazing product, amazing communication, but even if you don't, even if it's mediocre, you have so many other levers. So, you can be an incredibly successful business leader with a mediocre product. If you create a mediocre product as a designer, you stay a mediocre designer. And so, by definition, our role is to create something really meaningful for people. Mediocrity means that you may have a product that is functional but is ugly. Or maybe it's functional, it's beautiful, but it's not sustainable. Or maybe it's beautiful, functional, sustainable, but not healthy, or the experience is not inspiring, and so on and so forth. So, the designer is always driven by the creation of something that is really meaningful for people, for society, for the planet. So, that's the purpose that's driving. So, the answer is I was driven by purpose. If you have the right purpose, and you know how to unlock the potential of business and the companies you work for, then you have an impact. If you have an impact, then you build ladders. So, I was driven by all of that, but it all starts with the dream, the purpose, and it needs to be a positive one, and the design community usually is taught to think in a way at school. The problem is that often then we go to companies, we forget about this. Cuz we learn this at school, and then we go to companies, and they label you. You are an industrial designer, you are a graphic designer, you're a fashion designer. And many companies ask you to work on the aesthetic of a product. When you're lucky, it's aesthetic and functionality. And so, we forget that our role is much bigger than that. It's the one of building really value in the life of people.
Thank you for your answer.
You are often being the first design leader in the room. Does that give you excitement more because of the challenge or because of the power to shape the role?
Well, as you say, being the first chief design officer in three different corporations, one in tech with a lot of B2B, like 3M, then food and beverage and consumer goods, like PepsiCo, now Samsung. And, you know, I always looked at what you call power as an enabler of something bigger. So, you do need, ideally, as much visibility as possible, as much access to resources as possible, as much access also to people as possible. So, you may call that power. The more you have that, the more impact you can have at scale, the faster you move, the more agile you are. And so, obviously it's important.
But people that are just driven by power, oh my god, I feel sorry for that. It's such a sad life, right? Because power will never give you happiness. Not give you happiness.
And so, what really drives me is to put the power that over the years I gained, that is, you know, over time, at the service of loving people, caring for people, creating something good and positive for society. You know, my goal, now in Samsung, before Samsung, when you work in a company with hundreds of thousands of people that reach billions of people every day with their products, well, you have a responsibility. You are impacting the world. And so, the goal always started from that. How can I change society? How can I change the world? Then from there, how can I change the industry? Because that's the platform I can play with and within to change the world. And then, you go back and before, how can I change the company and the brand, because that's what somehow I influence on. And then, how can I change what I do and my teams do, because that's what I put. So, it's all linked. But, again, once again, it is driven by this purpose in the beginning.
I like the answer. So, big careers come with sacrifices. What has ambition cost you personally?
Well, first of all, I challenge this sentence that big careers come with sacrifices. We need to change that. And I was privileged and lucky enough essentially not to do sacrifices in my life. You know, I was able to balance all the different things in a variety of different ways. So, the assumption that you need to sacrifice your personal life to do sacrifices is just wrong.
We don't want that. We need to change the world. If companies ask you to do this kind of sacrifices, it's not okay. It's not correct. And you know, I realized this early on because for me design was my super passion. My life was everything and I put so much into this. And so, I work, work, work at the point of, you know, ending up taking time out of my friends, of my personal life. And then something happened really early on. We talked about decades ago. Where a company I was working for really disappointed me. Something happened. I was about, I was almost to lose my job, but in a very unfair way. Really like, is this really happening? And in those couple of weeks where I was really, you know, struggling, the people close to me, my family, my, you know, my girlfriend back then, my friends, they were my support system. Their love, their care was important. So, I was like, 'Wait a second.'
Sometimes that's what we need.
Yeah, I mean, wait a second. I need to invest in that. I need to find the right balance, what the famous work-life balance. Because job and work and your company cannot be everything. Now, it doesn't mean that I don't put all myself in the company. You know, Samsung is my life. PepsiCo before was my life. It's everything. I have my mind at 24/7, but I learned to find the right balance and to carve out time, carve out time also for my family members, my friends, myself. Now, this gives me perspective.
It gives me motivation. It doesn't burn me out. And so, I give exponentially much more to the company because of this balance that I found versus somebody that is just dedicated exclusively to the company and does nothing else. Cuz because you lose perspective. You lose inspiration. You lose energy. And you become really not valuable to the company at the end. Even if you are extremely valuable, you could be exponentially more valuable if you were having a different kind of approach.
I agree. I totally agree. So, a lot of companies say they are human-centered. How often is that real? And how often is it just a good language?
I think often it's a tagline. It's language created by the marketing organization. Stick to the brand. And it's not difficult to understand when they are authentic and when they are not. First of all, it's consistency over time. If they believe in it, they keep investing in it and they are really serious about that. But also, if you interact with these companies and you interact with the people behind these taglines and claims,
you understand when they are authentic or when they're doing it just because it serves the brand and their business goal.
So, to do it right, you need to believe in it. And you need to build a movement within the organization of people that profoundly believe in it. So, you need the right breed of people. I call these people the unicorns. I talked about them in my book. They have 24 different characteristics. And so, you need even if human-centricity at the beginning is something you identify as a business opportunity. Let's say you are a CEO of a company. You're a business leader. You're, 'You know what? This makes sense. It can help my brand.' Even in the case, even if it starts in a way that you need to figure out a way to really believe in it, and build a team that believe in it, and build a movement in the organization of people that believe in it. Else the people out there,
the users, the consumers, the customers, all of us, we're not stupid. We get it. Sooner or later they will understand. So, it's not going to serve your brand anyway. So, you better be real by your eyes. Often companies use it as a tagline.
Have you ever felt that business goals were stronger than the design values you believed in?
Well, you know, life is a tension between different kind of variables that you need to deal with. The way we design our world, our society, is based on this idea that you have a business, and you create value for the business, and then these different businesses are in competition with one another. So, this is the system you play with, and you need to understand the rules of the game.
Then you need to insert within the game what you believe in, your values, right? So, now, sometimes there is a tension between the human values that you have and the business value and the business goals that try to create financial value more than human value in there. Because anyway, even that is necessary. There may be an ethical value in that as well, you know? Big companies give, they sustain families, thousands and thousands of families. They give the possibility to people to afford products they can buy because of the scale. So, even scale and business goals, be, you know, even if there is a tension to prioritize that, they exist because it's a system that is designed anyway at the end to serve society, to work for our society. So, we need to remind that. But again, often there is that tension. And you need to understand that what we do is a long-term game. Game. So, you can't expect as a designer enter a company you're going to change the world from night to day. It's going to take time. And even, you know, and it's going to be progressive and incremental. And when you arrive to one goal, even if you're happy with that, use that as a platform to improve even more. Because there will be always margin to improve it. So, even if you arrive to convince companies, industries to embrace certain values,
there will be always something more, some new value, something more positive that you can put, you know, as a goal for yourself. But in general, my call to all the designers are listening to us today is to understand that you have two choices. One is that you're outside of the system, of these companies, big or small, and you complain, 'Oh, you should have more values, we should be more sensitive to the planet, well, to health, to wellness, to this and to that.' Maybe you can create that you're some top and you can change things.
