Innovative Trailblazers

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we have a very special guest and we're delighted to have Sean Pillot de Chenecey. And he has over 20 years of experience as a brand expert combining marketing consultancy with ethnographic activity and trend research around the world with clients like Unilever, Heineken, General Motors and Visa, among others.

He is a university lecturer and has written for Admap, Brand Strategy, Contagious, Dazed and Marketing. A public speaker, he has given speeches for over a decade in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and North America. Today, our focus is on innovation. Innovator Trailblazers. Thank you so much, John, for writing the book. I really, really enjoyed reading Influencers and Revolutionaries. Thank you so much for making the time.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: Not at all. Nice to talk with you.

Anita Brick: I love having our definition, so we're all in the kind of the same proverbial page. If you could very briefly share with us, how would you define innovation today?

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: Insight plus ideas plus impact, equal innovation and what I mean by that staggeringly obvious point of view, is that a common problem with businesses? People comment with endless amounts of ideas and concepts and all the rest of it, and generally speaking, nothing ever happens, which is basically pointless. We've got to make it stick. It's got to be out there and enabled and put into market. Or quite frankly, you're wasting your time.

Anita Brick: I would agree. A student had an interesting take on this. He said, “Hi Sean, I've been seeing innovative actions emerge from standard concepts and create innovation by taking them to a new audience, whether it's a function and industry or even a geography. What advice would you have to take something that already exists? Build on it and create something cool and useful.”

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: Come back slightly from that. Where we are today, as in right now, is a completely new world or a very, very different environment for us all. We haven't been here before, and quite frankly, in terms of the lives that you and the students and alumni and their colleagues and families, and in many ways incredibly unsettling because there's, in social terms, no one ready to go for advice.

Our leaders are clearly making it up as they go along, and some of them are doing it well, some aren't. Businesses are having a huge problem there. Obviously not everything will change, but many things will change forever. This impacts innovation as much as it does any other part of business. What do we actually know? What we know is that whether you are talking about a North American consumer or a consumer of Europe, parts of Asia, etc., North Africa, tomorrow's customer is going to be clearly poorer, nervous, obsessed with social distancing and also with hygiene.

Those issues that are the very basics of living, of existing, are going to be absolutely key in terms of where businesses go and what tension points they try to answer. In order to provide something useful for consumers. You have to take a fundamental look what it is that you do, why you're here, if there's a future for your business, or indeed the sector within which you exist, and what are you going to do about it? So I think again, a purely business dynamic, leaving the social and cultural to one side couldn't be more interesting times. Inverted commas.

Anita Brick: I would agree with you. Back to the student’s question for a second. Even within the context of the environment that we're in right now, other opportunities to take existing or maybe even home because it's become standard and repurpose it for a new function, industry geography, where the innovation that is no longer innovation in one sector could be innovation in another.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: Oh, completely. I mean, someone who's actually superb on this is [inaudible]. So he would say that, you know, one of the key things there is you can just basically leap across markets. Quote him. He says, you know, succeeding in today's marketplace isn't just about mastering copycat tactics. It's also about, you know, leaping across knowledge disciplines and reimagining how products are made or services are delivered.

The great thinker, Arthur Schopenhauer, he always had a great point on this. The problem is not so much to see. What nobody has yet seen is to think what nobody's yet thought concerning that which everybody sees. So to put that in everyday language, it's not as though you're going to walk down the street and come up with this staggering new thing that hasn't occurred to anyone. You just basically think about, okay, so, you know, if we're all existing side by side, then again, in this new environment that we're in, what are the new tension points? And so the opportunities for innovation across an astonishing array of sectors, I think, are genuinely more dynamic than they've been for a good couple of decades.

Anita Brick: If you think about to delve a little bit deeper into that original question, do you think that those things that even if they are not new anymore from Silicon Valley, that could be mapped on to, say, health care because they're just not done in that particular sector? Or do you see that you can't do that any longer, that you can't take something that was innovative and that is now new to a different sector, and repurpose and reapply it?

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: The classic example in terms of putting in this in absolutely today's context is I wrote about several years ago in my first book, Post-truth Business, and that was surveillance. Capitalism is something that perhaps we tend to associate more with Asian markets, particularly China, and the classic sort of Western inverted commas thought process then, is that we have an obsession.

I say we generally it goes to the heart of classic Western thinking, which also links into the power struggle between the individual and the state. The individual is at the top, the state as opposed at the bottom, and that is inverted in certain autocratic countries, something that we in many cases have looked at the last couple of years with a degree of horror, which is surveillance culture.

What we're now seeing is the adoption of that technology from Silicon Valley right now, today, as we all know, which is linking into the healthcare sector. And so we're certainly where I am in the UK. Our National Health Service is not going to be taking on board, and everyone's going to be very strongly encouraged to have apps, but on to their smartphones so that we can be tracked constantly. Six months ago, the idea that we would happily allow ourselves to be tracked constantly would be horrendous. And in terms of the innovation from Silicon Valley, in terms of surveillance, tracking technology being put into the healthcare sector, here we are. So that's a classic example of, if you like, the how would you point, which is, you know, leaping across sectors to combine and collaborate and to cooperate to bring something which is very standard in one sector but new for another.

So that is a classic example. And it's happening as we speak.

Anita Brick: So along those lines, another student said: “You talk about innovation in a lot of areas in your book. I am part of an innovation group, a large global company. How can we create innovation that is adding to social good and helping solve societal problems in addition to increasing shareholder value?”

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: It's such a good question, you know, and it goes to the core of what businesses are about. Most businesses tend to believe and like to believe that they are authentic. Everyone bangs on about authenticity and then they move straight on from it is that they almost don't need to consider what it actually means everyone uses, but they don't pause to think, what do we all agree this stands for?

So that is of businesses. Pausing to consider is what they're thinking about doing the right thing to do. What should businesses be doing? Should they consider doing this as a question, say adding to social good and helping to solve social problems? Absolutely 100% yes. Now key thing here is that again, perhaps a couple of decades ago, quite frankly, most businesses just gave a minimal amount of attention to sort of corporate social responsibility, which was effectively make loads of money at the end of the year.

But a few dollars or pounds or cents to the local charity, then we'll put that on the front cover of our annual report will feel good about it. That doesn't wash anymore. And I think one of the key reasons why doing things for the social good actually matters. Now on a bottom line point of view, leaving anything altruistic to one side purely in terms of how can brand A be more successful than brand B?

In virtually every single sector, there is virtually no real differentiation. You know, we all know this. The difference between brand A and brand B, C, D and E and F, and all the rest of them in virtually every sector is minimal. Most differentiation takes place in communication and in branding. And most of that effectively is, to put it politely, bending the truth or based on wild exaggeration. If people are going to be buying less new stuff in future, if they're going to be sharing more, if they're going to be considering purchases in more detail because the issue of price will become even more important then this point of view of okay, when choice is available, and in virtually, but not every in virtually every sector, there's multiple choice.

I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that people want to buy things from companies they like. So what are we seeing today? We're seeing in this time of enormous social tension and worry? Businesses across multiple categories are standing up to be counted. They're either helping public services, they're giving things to society, they are literally giving something back. They're charging less now. It just means everything from banks, you know, not charging fees or insurance companies not charging premiums or soft drinks companies giving drinks to healthcare workers. Whatever it is, the issue of we want to be seen as being a nice company, inverted commas, that gives something that plays a part in society is now, if nothing else, hard headed business sense.

Anita Brick: Okay, so how do you differentiate the genuine from the superficial? It's nice, I see tons of ads and they're all really nice, and you can see all the good. If you were inside the company, how would you use innovation to make sure that you're building a genuine message that is also built on and will help expand trust?

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: To me, it's all about behavior, not about sort of promotional activity. Yesterday, Coca-Cola announced they are pulling all of their advertising spend globally, and they're using the money they would have spent on advertising instead to put it into society and supporting the societies around them, as in the societies whereby their consumers exist. The key point to make there is that innovation comes in many forms. That is an innovative management decision. They're not making anything new in that context. Whereas many other businesses physically, you know, making face masks, you know, repurposing factories, linking up with competitors to do something for the public good, that the point of what you're doing in many instances is innovative actions. The Coca-Cola angle is absolutely how to do it.

Key to this, all this I say is, again, to finish off answering your question, whether or not the brand is actually doing it on a management decision behind the scenes, because they just want to be seen to be nice is, I think, actually irrelevant. You know, I don't care, quite honestly, whether Coca-Cola are pulling that advertising spend and putting that money to do good things just because they want to seem to be nice and thought to be nice in a year or so, or whether they genuinely are run by a bunch of nice people. I mean, I've no idea. I think, quite frankly, who cares as long as the end result from the public's point of view is that a brand has done good things, and quite frankly, that's where it begins and ends.

Anita Brick: What you're saying or what you've been saying during our conversation is that innovation can cause many different areas. So it certainly could be product, it could be distribution, it could be the communication. But I've never heard anyone say that the innovation came from management thinking, which is what you were just talking about with regard to Coca-Cola. So even in times of contraction, innovation doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to cost a lot of money for an organization. But what I'm curious about, and it goes back to being genuine and having trust when one is thinking about one's career in this time where, as you said, people are furloughed, people are being laid off, some of the jobs will come back, some of them won't. How could you apply innovation to someone's career so that there is that genuine trust, but they also are able to differentiate themselves positively?

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: Great question. Comes back to the reality of where we find ourselves right now in 2020. In terms of work, if you're looking at issues around the future of work and the skills that are needed and where that is going to, we know that all those things that are really prized issues now, the world of work is all about issues that basically enable people to take a more humanistic mindset. People effectively have people skills is where it's all going. When you're talking to anyone who's senior in HR, the wonderful Vlatko Lipsitch, who's a globally famous HR specialist, she will talk about future workplaces that are going to be exchange spaces, horizontal management, all about wellness and flexibility, virtuality, lifelong learning. The universities themselves are really having big thoughts now about where is education going.

The reality of work, which is one whereby we often describe it, is just software in your laptop or your phone when you're constantly updating the software. That's what you and I have done though, down through our working careers. You know, we're all constantly learning and relearning. And so when you're going into the world of work, no matter who you are, what age you are, what background you are, the problem, the technical skills that one needs to have to do the job. It is absolutely all about humanistic, warm, cooperative decency skills that are actually the ones that are needed.

Anita Brick: Well, okay, so how do you move from someone who may be very analytical and they're working on those? You know, I went to a conference last September and the person was like, I don't like the phrase soft skills. I think of them as power skills. And I would agree with that. Yeah. What if you don't have those? What would you say to someone like that? Well, I'm just not warm. I don't like all that engagement. I was chatting with someone last week who said, you know, I'm actually totally fine with working remotely and seeing people almost never, because that's how I am. How does someone broaden their perspective enough to incorporate or to experiment so that they can build some of those soft power skills?

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: There is plenty of scope for bugs, so there are lots and lots of jobs out there that are suited totally to people who are working by themselves from home and only connecting. As you and I are now, several thousand miles apart, you know, vulnerable laptops. There's nothing wrong with that at all. However, there will still be and always will be an absolute need to meet face to face, to have physical human contact.

And when one is doing that, then those soft skills, cognitive social skills that we do so connect with others and communicate effectively are even more important. So that's why teaching kids to have the confidence to get up on stage or stand in front of the class and give at all the ability to look someone in the eye, to be empathetic, to care about others, to work as a team all sound very, very, or would have sounded only a year or so ago. Fairly dated and a bit bland, but wow, I think they are again, ever more important.

Anita Brick: I would agree with you. I think, though, that it is important to keep in mind that constant learning, that development, is really another way of saying innovation in order to be on top of things, in order to stay competitive, whether it's a brand or an individual, you need to keep observing and learning and experimenting and finding both the value and usefulness in things. And as time goes on, it seems that you need to have all of that to be a leader.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: Oh, 100%.

Anita Brick: And to have the courage to do some experiments. If it's really I hate this phrase, but out of your comfort zone.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: Oh completely. So again, it's that combination of the creative, the technical and the social. Most people fall into 1 or 2 categories. Very few fall into having, you know, base skills across all three. It's an issue of just people being aware of their strengths and weaknesses and working on them accordingly.

Anita Brick: It's a good thing. Do you have time for a couple more questions?

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: Yeah, fire away. Totally.

Anita Brick: Okay, cool. There was a question. A Boothie said: “I'm intrigued by the idea of STEM-pathic, I don't know if that's a word that you made up. But it was in the book. How does this apply to my career and life?” And maybe before we go, maybe you can define STEM-pathic for us.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: So STEM–senior science technology engineering and maths–having the ability to link across those four areas. IT comingles tech knowledge and cognitive social skills as in connecting with others and communicating effectively. It is amazing how few people communicate effectively, how few people actually get across what it is they're trying to say in a succinct manner. In terms of leadership, they'd also mentioned leadership is all about being empathetic, and I think that issue about empathy could not be more important. Caring for others, caring for community around you, society around you on either an individual level, a corporate leadership level, a brand level, a business level and organization level is absolutely huge. We're seeing enormous concentrations of attention given to communities everywhere. And so that idea of empathy is huge.

Anita Brick: Along with this, bringing the empathic side and the social skills and trust and genuine nature, where do you see the whole idea of diversity, inclusion, and belonging maybe actually happening in reality because of these changes that are happening really at a societal scale at this point?

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: I'm sure that you and I both totally agree this is the right thing to do. But I think last year, McKinsey, I think McKinsey put out a very good report that just looked into the effectiveness of innovation teams, the effectiveness of leadership teams, the effectiveness of workforces. And they are just making a very, very clear point that inclusion works, that diversity works, and diversity can mean many things.

Diversity doesn't just mean having a workforce that quite frankly, when they all stand up for the company photograph, look as though you're taking photographs at the UN. Diversity can be cognitive diversity. People think differently. So you're not just looking at diversity from an old style, let's say 30 years ago point of view, which was almost a sense of irritation, almost a case of like ticking boxes. You could see things are being done at that point. Nine when one is looking at businesses, we're saying, well, the reason we're doing this, the reason we have a workforce that is multi-generational, that is multi-ethnic, that has people coming from every part of the social spectrum in terms of lifestyles and all the rest of it. Put those people together, and what you're getting as a result is different ways of thinking.

They have different life experiences, different viewpoints on the world. And so then when you're doing something as day to day, as brainstorming whatever, you get great results because you've just thought different minds in the room. What people look like when from on paper isn't the big issue here. That's just ticking boxes to say, yes, we've answered the census and yes, we do have X amount of people from this background. Whatever what you're doing from a business output point of view is enabling yourself to have cognitive diversity. And that is a huge key thing is it makes people feel a lot happier in the business when they look around themselves and see people like them. The modern business looks and feels different because it should.

Anita Brick: Absolutely instinct very deeply. This is very clear and you connect the dots very nicely. So if you think about it, and now we move from the organization to the individual, what are three things you would advise someone who wants to use innovation in the broad and in the narrow sense is that we've been talking about to increase their career, their professional success and longevity.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: To cut to the chase, if you need an easy reference guide, then I talk about, you know, do five things, so I'll do five rather than three. So I say–

Anita Brick: Okay, fair enough.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: Said question and confront. I use the example of René Descartes. And what Descartes did was basically, as I put in the book, to encourage people to challenge established thinking. So you got to be skeptical. This is effectively saying to yourself as a person and as a business, is this really the way it is should be done?

This is a time of real reflection. You know, when we're all pausing and we're resetting in our personal lives, our relationships, you know, thoughts about what we're going to do in the future, our thoughts about how brands and corporates are being run, etc. So just consider we have always thought this is how it should be done. Let's just consider the opposite. How about doing something different? So question and confront and think is huge.

The second one is let's look and listen. I talk about the futurist William Gibson Gibson's great in his book Pattern Recognition. He talked about in looking for signs and signals in a sort of cultural sense. So what I talk about there is, you know, it's amazing how people are really concentrating on using just a few things. So be interesting. If you say to people now write, what are the sort of five things you've actually used each day that have made your life easier and it'd be very fun to see you know what? Those few things are the winners and losers. The next one to talk about is like research and develop their reference. The great management thinker, a great marketing thinker, Peter Drucker. So who always talked about, you know, reconsider the needs and desires and the tension points in people's lives, people's viewpoints around what they genuinely me has really altered.

And I talk about, collaborate and utilize. I use the great Don Tapscott as an example. He talked about leveraging all the team's abilities in the organizational assets that you have. Don't just think that an innovation team needs to just be full of young people who just got there. You can have just as clearly Viber and AG, forward thinking, innovative thought processes from someone who's 80 is someone, someone who's 18. Fill your team with different people, different backgrounds that is about collaboration, I think is being shown right now. Lots of companies, lots of competitors are joining together to do stuff for the common good. A lot of things are fundamentally changed. So I would say don't be wary of absolutely challenging leading industry thinking. I may well myself be talking absolute rubbish. That's up to you, yourself and the listeners to decide.

Then finally I say, you know the whole thing about being a good corporate citizen in the first person. I really spoke about the book. There was Tom Siebel, a great guy who I really end up in the book focusing around was wonderful. Greta Thunberg and the most influential protest movement of our time, the glorious Extinction Rebellion. So that issue of just them blasting their way onto the public stage a year ago and just making everyone sit up and take notice, saying, we have got to stop the way that we are existing. The planet is dying. It's not a climate change issue. It's a genuine climate crisis. It's a genuine ecological emergency. We have got to sort this out. So sustainability is moved from being a nice to consider issue to a key must have factor if you want to have a good reputation and long term success. I think that cannot be stressed enough. And again, we've all seen this in all of our social media feeds since the COVID lockdown started and the stories about pollution has gone above Los Angeles. Or we're seeing dolphins swimming around Venice Harbor, or people in India can see the Himalaya is again who couldn't have seen them in the past, etc., etc. and this is a world that we want to keep.

Anita Brick: You're absolutely right when you think about this from an individual point of view, you do need to be skeptical. You do need to challenge thinking in the career that you're in, and maybe the one that you want to be in as a leader, and then look and see how things are changing, not just broadly in terms of market dynamics, but make the assumption that what was true a year ago and this is ongoing, not just because of the crisis right now, but we should be looking at this and looking at ourselves the same way.

And so from there, to be able to do the research, both the self reflection and the market reflection, to then incorporate that and remember that being genuine, being authentic, being warm, and whether that is in a team collaboration, but also realizing that there are bigger market forces and we can go kicking and screaming, or we can be part of a leadership that drives, which goes back to the conversation here, the topic here, innovation actually has to start within our hearts, because without that, then the societal change I don't believe is really possible.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: Completely. The neat one liner is that, you know, what we've got to do is blend innovation with ethics. And then a paradigm shift, ensure that good business is good business.

Anita Brick: Got it. Thank you so much. I love the way you think. I love the fact that you are thinking across sectors and that even since you wrote the book and I read the book recently, your thoughts continue to evolve which show that you, inside your own heart and mind are also continue to innovate. And that's what makes for trailblazers. So thank you again. Thank you for keep pushing yourself because it pushes us too.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey: Well thank you. It's really enjoyable.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with Career Cast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.