Next, very important one, this idea of Craig the Theatre not the Play. So you're going to think I'm totally nuts for this one. Beck, musician Beck, created an online portal called the Record Club, where in a week he recorded an album and he asked people to vote on the songs that he was going to make and he made them with other artists and he put the whole thing out there for free and everybody thought that he was absolutely nuts.
This chart here is the important piece. These two red circles are the big idea. Every time he releases a track for free, O-Delay, which is his first album and which is available to be paid for on iTunes, it sails Spike.
So every time he gives stuff away, he gets something else back, so people rediscover back in a way that they never had before.
So Mr Hansen has said that Beck Hansen has said he had conceived of Record Club to inject spontaneity and collaboration into the recording process and by the way, he's selling more because of it.
So, the era of the brand that's centrally constructed is over, that notion is really dead, says Grant McCracken, so brands like Nike, like Lego, like Live 365, avidly co-creating with their consumers.
Again, not new news to this room and everybody knows this, so we firmly believe that co-creation is the only way forward.
But it's hard because this is a control issue and are you okay with relinquishing control and having others not just create your brand for us, sorry, not just with you, but actually for you in many cases.
So this is a tough one. People love to control or to orchestrate.
Next one, last two. This big idea of selling versus informing. You look at a brand like Ted, E.J. and I, both part of the Ted world.
Fantastic, all of its content, ideas worth spreading, stuff out there for free, multiple platforms, multiple channels, very, very successful.
One much loved aspect of Ted and the Ted Talks is the concept of immersion, the idea of devoting your intention to one thing for 18 minutes.
And these things are growing in popularity and again, the whole business model around this, which is one of the things that guys at the back are going to talk about later, is this whole idea of generosity.
How do you start to disrupt yourself through generosity, which is a very interesting idea, giving stuff away, what can you get back?
Or monocle, where they've actually created a really interesting media brand, they're actually selling products through that, they're actually selling information, it's highly curated.
Tyler Brule, the founder says getting information first is becoming one of the biggest luxuries of all.
So again, we heard this morning we're in the information era firmly. So how do we start to play into that space?
So, do you create monologue or dialogue with your consumers?
And then the last one, one of my favourites of all time is this idea of trust, and this is a really important one.
This is one of the best examples that have ever come across.
Flickr, as in download your images site, decided that they were going to trust their consumers to not put huge amounts of pornography on Flickr, because why would you?
So their community guidelines say, don't be creepy, you know the guy, don't be that guy. Period.
Don't, doesn't need to give you some huge paragraph about blah, because they assume that you're intelligent and that you want to do the right thing.
So I think it's really fantastic. I mean Wikipedia, the whole assume good faith principle that they have, they said Wikipedia wouldn't exist if people were out to kill it.
People want to build. Jonathan's a train, I don't know if anybody have ever seen this guy's TED talk, it's awesome, you should really download it.
He said the internet, he's an internet lawyer, and he said he was hired into the internet legal space thinking he was going to spend his entire life legislating.
He said, I actually have one of the most boring jobs in the world, I do nothing, because most people just want to do the right thing.
And he said the internet has single-handedly restored my faith in the power of human kindness, which is always great.
Seven more minutes, good time. So can we assume that people are fundamentally good and that they want to do the right thing?
So I can see the speech bubble over the room.
We're just out of recession, we need to stay alive, blah blah blah, this guy's showing me back, he's completely mad, he's missed the plot, this is nuts, this isn't me, this doesn't affect me.
I actually think this is a really interesting time to, again we've heard this many times, this is a time for bravery and this is a time for disruption, this is not the time to look down the tunnel.
This is the time where peripheral vision actually is really exciting to explore and to really explore where the new ideas are coming from.
So one of my clients actually came up with this, I wish this was my idea but it isn't, it was one of our clients said, I have these two businesses in my head, he said I have the now business and I have the now what business.
So I'll go through and explain what both of those mean in a second.
So I'm not suggesting that you throw your entire business model out of the window and suddenly do everything else differently on Monday morning, I still think you need to keep that.
But this is about looking to the future, I think this is about looking, about building upon, about framing and about sort of focusing the now what.
And if I had to categorise what these two sort of modes are, I think the now business is about having the right answers for today and I think the now what business is about asking the right questions for tomorrow.
And I think that we firmly believe that future growth comes from bringing these two things together about having a sort of dynamic loop between the now and the now what and bringing the now what into the now and vice versa.
So what we're going to do for the rest of the afternoon and I'm going to take you through the logistics in a second is we're going to discuss the sort of now and now what implications of four questions.
Question one is the one of purpose, how do we give our organisation purpose and meaning first to us and then to our consumers.
Number two, talent, how do we motivate, inspire, attract and most critically retain our best talent.
Number three, loyalty, how do we shift people's behaviours and motivations, retain advocacy and create loyalty.
And number four, new business models, how can we be inspired by industry disruptors.
I think many of you signed up for a lot of these so I'm going to ask you in a second to go to those four rooms and 12 of my very esteemed colleagues are going to take you through a series of exercises that are going to help generate some ideas around that.
And then it is apparently my job to synthesise the entire day in 20 minutes at the end of the day, which I'm absolutely shitting myself at the idea of having to do to be honest with you, but I'm going to try.
But I will come back and we will hopefully share some best learnings.
So, I'm going to ask my esteemed colleagues to talk about sort of what came up in each group.
We've tried to sort of synthesise this down to just sort of the top three and then there was lots of discussion in the higher purpose.
Who the hell is Jamie Oliver to tell us blah, you know, we've got it.
So let's talk a little bit about purpose if either Sue or AK feel comfortable about this.
Here you all are brainstorming.
Could I get a microphone here? I've got a microphone here. Could I hand it to somebody?
Or ask Sue and AK. Hey, yeah.
If you wouldn't mind, sorry, this is Sue Siddler and Andrea Corson.
And it's Sue's birthday today, everybody, by the way, and she's come here today on her birthday to deliver this valuable message to you.
So I think that alone is mortally embarrassing.
I think the interesting thing that came out first was that people were questioning whether companies even had a purpose, let alone a higher purpose.
And I thought that was kind of sad actually.
But there was a great discussion about don't companies need a purpose, why do they need a higher purpose, just get a purpose.
So that was kind of a big aha.
I think we looked at higher purposes for a bank, for an energy company, for a network rail, quite difficult, and the post office.
There was a lot of questions around, especially for the bank, how do they have credibility at this moment in time to have any higher purpose.
So what's the first step in that?
And I think one of the other things that came out of it is a lot of the solutions came from actually tapping into the community and people in order to find your purpose going forward.
I don't know if you have anything to add.
Anybody else in that group got anything to add before we go on?
Actually, I thought it might be good to just quickly go through all four and then maybe we can have a sort of open mic about a whole bunch of these issues.
Purpose, never mind, higher purpose.
We haven't even got a purpose in the first place, that's kind of an interesting theme in itself.
Okay, why don't we just keep on going and then I'll come back at the end and hopefully do a little bit more synthesis.
The next group had a sort of the idea of talent.
How do we motivate, inspire, attract, and most critically retain our best talent?
So if I can pass this to Nate here, if you can tell us what kind of some of the things that you heard.
So we were looking at the idea of what is talent in the first place in today's business environment,
but also we're looking at EDF and British Airways trying to create new organisational principles or design principles,
so applying design thinking to the idea of talent.
These are the four highlights from the session.
First one was thinking about ways of making a difference for both staff and customers,
and this kind of connected back to the idea of higher purpose.
So what does that mean for both customers and employees?
The second one was around openness and again this seems to come up time and time again,
but the word transparency came up again and again,
but it was really people were saying believing is not enough,
people want to be complicit in making those big decisions.
And third one I love this one is be obsessive but in a good way.
And lastly the idea of and this kind of comes back to one of the things that came up in the early discussions this morning
around turning talent on its head.
So if the future is about less resource but more people,
maybe it's about democratising opportunities for society more broadly,
so the role of companies in society and embracing something like a 21 hour week.
Kind of controversial but freeing up opportunities for all.
Nice, okay.
Loyalty, so I know James and Georgie and Simon are working on this.
So how do we shift people's behaviours and motivations,
retain advocacy and create loyalty?
Okay, so we were working with a kind of a three way model
and we were thinking about the idea of experience, identity and incentives.
And we used that model and we applied it to the post office.
So how could we drive loyalty for the post office using those three different areas?
And the three ideas that we came up with, the three big ideas,
was the first thing in terms of loyalty, it's about a reciprocal relationship,
it's about kind of giving.
So one of the ideas in one of the groups that I facilitated was kind of well,
how do we start to treat those people behind the counter better to start with?
So what can we give? So it's a transactional piece, it's a two way thing.
It's about us both investing.
The second one was although we're kind of living in a digital age
and there was some discussion in terms of well I never even go to the post office yet
and just give me it through Facebook.
Most of the conversation actually was around the physical environment
and how you build community through kind of physical spaces and places.
And how important those physical spaces and places still are.
The third one was about bringing different services, people and companies together.
So how can you start to mash things up?
So kind of the obvious example was I love going to a coffee shop.
Why can't a post office actually have a coffee shop where you do your kind of waiting
and then the idea was there was something that vibrates on the table
when it's your time to go up to the counter.
So they were our kind of three ideas.
Okay, nice, thank you.
And finally, the busiest group in the room I suspect,
well not surprisingly because this is the one that everybody's trying to understand,
I think is one of the business models of the future.
So Aime, over to you.
How can we be inspired by industry disruptors?
Yeah, so what we did was look at different businesses
and how they have been disrupted or could be disrupted.
And I think there were some fundamental things that came out of this,
first of which was, sorry we're in a different order,
first of which was using what you have to serve us better.
So essentially banks and big companies already have tons of information on all of us,
yet they still seem to not get what we need.
How can we just take what we already have and serve the customer better,
understand them in a micro segmented way,
provide products and services that are more fitting to their needs.
So there were different ideas around that.
The second one was really around trust and I liked this quote.
It was, instead of being used by the bank, how can we use the bank?
And so there were some thoughts inspired by for instance the Apple service model
where you're thinking about Apple helping you to use your computer better.
How can the bank help us to use it better?
How can it help us to get to our financial goals that we have, et cetera,
instead of just throwing numbers in our face that are confusing?
Does anybody here, who works in banking here?
Who's from the banking sector? I'm curious to know.
Anybody else?
I was wondering if there were a lot of people from the banking industry in the room.
Sorry Amy, go ahead.
And then the third one I thought was interesting because we put up a model
of basically a business infrastructure from supply chain to the end consumer.
And there was a comment about thinking beyond the business to the system around it.
So what is the total ecosystem that we live in as a business?
And I think if we start to think about this,
it will help us to think about using resources differently, et cetera.
So if we think about all the aspects from government to the people in foreign countries
who are producing our fruit for us, for example, in the winter,
if we think about all of that, it helps us to think differently about what's more important
as a business and provide something different potentially to the consumer.
So that's kind of the end of our session.
I'd love to take questions or hopefully not to just me, but to all of these guys.
Everybody's worked very hard to pull this together.
I mean, that was a very rapid process.
So please don't hold this accountable for the quality of the output.
I mean, that was very, very difficult to do for all of us at an hour, believe me.
But again, you know, I mean, as I said at the very beginning,
I was just actually talking to David Kester from the design council about this outside.
The overlap between design thinking and design doing is very, very important right now.
We are way past the need for a big intellectual debate about the future.
I think that is not going to get us anywhere.
I think we need action and I think we need to start doing stuff.
And I think we're saying to a lot of our clients, experiment, start tomorrow.
What can you do on Monday morning? How do you start small?
You don't have to massively do everything and turn the entire thing upside down overnight.
You can start small with a lot of this stuff.
So I would encourage that to be the case.
You know, for the sort of what do you do on Monday morning? Well, something and small is probably the answer that I would give you.
And to start to sort of experiment with, hopefully, with some of these ideas.
So, huh? Questions, thoughts, reactions.
I'm dying to know about the socks. We're going to get to that.
That's really important. We've got to understand the green and blue sock gentlemen over here.
I've been watching that all day.
But anything else that anybody else would like to reflect on or say or gentlemen here?
I'd like to pick up on your last comment about thinking and doing.
Whenever I speak to a colleague in Mumbai, his comments to me once ring in my ears that UK Europeans are always talking.
While you're talking about the first generation, we're already developing the third.
Bingo.
In your professional experience when you're talking to your clients and would be clients, what sort of tricks would you have up your sleeve to break this impasse between thinking, talking and actually doing?
I mean, again, I think, you know, it's the old adage, if you reach a fork in the road, take it.
You know, I mean, I think again, it's, I was actually with a large technology client on Monday.
And we were having a conversation about how do they kind of move off the starting blocks.
And they're terrified of getting it wrong, but doing nothing is in fact getting it wrong because they're not moving forward.
So, you know, we're saying to them this idea of a portfolio of experiments and starting to think small and starting to evolve different clusters of people inside the organization.
And I think the whole idea of proto, I mean, we talk a lot about prototyping here.
You don't have to spend billions of dollars to create some kind of perfect world.
I think what technology has taught us is that people are consumers are now very okay with beta.
Consumers are very okay with things being iterative and us being included in an iterative build cycle.
So, you don't have to have to get the whole thing right before you launch it.
You can actually work in a very incremental way now.
And I think again, you know, we're big believers in breaking the problem down into small chunks and starting with something and understanding what impact that can have.
And then building the next phase and building the next phase.
So, you know, again, I think any of the idea of guys feel differently, but I think we all very firmly believe that this is about can you start small?
Can you create something that is hopefully, hence we asked the question, keeping somebody in the organization awake at night so that you can demonstrate that change when done positively will actually make an impact?
And can you break it down into some kind of meaningful small bite size chunks?
Yes, gentlemen now with the excellent eye work.
Yes, you've obviously run this many, many times with clients all over the world.
On the disruptor side, what's the most innovative idea you've ever heard?
The most, what's my favorite one is there are two actually.
One is the Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai in India, which I always talk about.
Because if somebody said, we always say in brainstorms, encourage wild ideas, right?
If somebody said, I want to be the McDonald's of eye care, everybody would laugh, right?
So this gentleman in India in his mid ffifties, I think when he created it, created a franchise eye care facility for people, every person who pays pays for two that cannot.
I've been to see this, it's mind blowing.
And the social and economic impact of it is stratospheric, it's amazing.
So, you know, I actually went to Iceland and presented in a conference like this in front of the Icelandic community and I said, this is from a different culture and this is the most powerful idea that I can bring to your culture,
which is have a dream, build it, don't be frightened and run with scissors and it'll actually work.
So I think, you know, people that are very brave like that to me that actually create business value and actually do good in the world and actually teach everybody else in the meantime, that to me is real.
That's real innovation.
And, you know, one could argue that's both incremental evolutionary and disruptive all in one go.
So that's my personal favorite.
I think on that invocation to us to be brave.
Courage.
Go for it.
Courage mon amour.
Courage.
We should give a tremendous round of applause to Paul and the entire team for my dear friends.
Paul, stand up, stand up, stand up.
