[00:00:10] Ray Latif: Hey, folks, I'm Ray Latif, and you're listening to the number one podcast for the food and beverage industry, Taste Radio. This episode features an interview with Mauro Porcini, the visionary Chief Design officer of PepsiCo. Just a reminder to our listeners, if you like what you hear on Taste Radio, please share the podcast with friends and colleagues. And of course, we would love it if you could review us on the Apple Podcast app or your listening platform of choice. In the business of CPG, there is an often asked question. How do you measure, in financial terms, the value of design? PepsiCo Chief Design Officer Mauro Porcini has been on the receiving end of that query dozens of times throughout his career. While he does employ metrics to appraise the cost and impact of a particular product label, promotion, or installation, his typical answer is more simple. Great design inherently creates great value. Now in his 11th year at PepsiCo, Mauro is the creator of the company's award-winning Design and Innovation Center, which touches nearly every aspect of the drink and snack giant. The center holds sway in everything from new product development and experiential marketing campaigns to brand revamps and fashion collaborations. Mauro's perspective that design should strive to address real and useful human needs is a core tenet of his business philosophy and highlighted throughout his book, The Human Side of Innovation The Power of People in Love with People, which draws upon his experience at PepsiCo and in prior roles, including as the head of global design at 3M. As part of an expansive interview featured in this episode of Taste Radio, Mauro discussed his definition of design, both in the abstract and specific to his work in consumer products, how he convinced colleagues to align with his vision for design in business, and where he takes his cues as a designer and leader. He also explained his hiring process and the value of technical expertise versus personality or cultural savvy. how social media influences his perspective on design. Hey folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio. Right now, I'm honored to be sitting down with Mauro Porcini, the Chief Design Officer of PepsiCo. Mauro, so great to see you.
[00:02:42] Mauro Porcini: It's such a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:02:45] Ray Latif: Yeah, I assume you're quite busy over there at one of the largest beverage companies in the world, food and beverage companies in the world, that is. So I really appreciate you taking the time.
[00:02:55] Mauro Porcini: Busy is the right word, even though I like to use a different word. It's an exciting time. There is so much, so much going on. We live in a society that is rapidly changing in so many different ways. And to be working on imagining what is the future and how we can evolve our portfolio and build our brands in this changing scenario for sure is making us all very busy, but it's also super, super, super exciting.
[00:03:23] Ray Latif: Yeah, you know, it's funny you say that because I always assume that designers like yourself never sleep because you're always thinking about the next thing. You're always thinking about what can we do differently? What can we do better? And I wonder how much rest you're even getting these days given that you have a relatively new addition to your family.
[00:03:42] Mauro Porcini: Yes, actually, I have a six months old daughter and for sure she's helping me sleeping a little bit less. But I don't know how productive I'm going to be at night when I sleep less. But talking about not sleeping, I always keep a post-it note close to my bed because you're right. I mean, maybe you wake up and you have an idea that was inspired by a dream or by the moment of relaxation. And I love to capture it right away on a post-it note. Today, you can use also your phone, but I still love the beauty of the pen or the pencil that touch the paper. It's very romantic. It's very design. It's what you study at school, you know, the designers of the past were doing on a napkin, on a post-it note.
[00:04:31] Ray Latif: Where do the post-it notes go, though?
[00:04:33] Mauro Porcini: At the end, they all go on my phone in a way or the other. They will find their way there because I love to take notes. You know, I wrote a book at the beginning of this book. I talked about the fact that I always knew that sooner or later I was going to write a book and over the journey of my life, I started to take notes and then I put them there in the recent years in the phone. In the past, it was in a file in a computer, but I was accumulating information, observation, things that I was looking, that I was encountering in that journey that, you know, both the professional one and then my personal one, my life. And it's so interesting because the moment you capture what you're feeling in a piece of paper or in a digital file, you are interpreting that thing in a certain way. But then if you let time pass and you look back at what you've wrote or what you sketch, there is a different perspective. And that's so powerful because you blend the excitement of the moment and the inspiration of the moment with time and reflection that you have over time. And you can elevate that idea and put it in context and it become very powerful. Taking notes is something that somebody suggested to me many, many, many years ago. And I suggest to everybody out there, you have an idea, Put it somewhere and don't look at it. Look at it a month later, one year later, three years later, and it could spark new ideas and new projects. I grew up observing my parents doing something similar in different ways. My father was an architect, a high school professor, but he had this passion for painting and drawing. So every day, inspired by something, he would sketch, he would paint all his life, still today in his eighties. My mom was working in finance. She didn't like finance at all. She left her job when she was 38 to be close to her kids. And I remember since I was a child, writing. writing poems, writing thoughts, having a diary, writing everywhere. Over the years, they self-published together eight books, and they did it just for passion, just for love, for what they were doing, just for sharing those ideas with people close to them, their families, their friends. They're not interested to sell those books in any formal way. Why I'm mentioning this? Because there are two interesting things. One was observing people totally in love with something and spending time doing what they really, really love. In their case, it was not overlapping with their job. In my case, my love is also my job. And that I think is the biggest privilege and fortune you may have in life. One of the biggest privileges and fortunes you can have in life. But then the other thing is I learned The Power of taking those notes. And those notes, again, could be something you write or something you draw as well. And yeah, it's really, really powerful.
[00:07:46] Ray Latif: I wonder, did your parents instill a love for soccer in your life?
[00:07:50] Mauro Porcini: They were not soccer fan, but I love, love playing soccer. And actually I was playing semi-pro before starting to work. I was paid to play soccer. I would go four days a week training the game. As a child, I would play in the national league. So I would play against AC Milan, Inter, Juventus, you know, with a team of my city. So soccer has been always, always, always a big passion of mine.
[00:08:18] Ray Latif: So I'm asking because we're on the cusp of the World Cup. I'm sorry. I know it's probably a sore subject. Italy is regrettably not part of the World Cup this year. They did win the Euros last year. So, you know, that was, that was impressive, but unfortunately they didn't make it. That being said, are you rooting for any country in particular?
[00:08:41] Mauro Porcini: I will for sure, because the World Cup for me, I think for an Italian and for many other people all around the world is such a moment of fun and you're there in front of the television. But usually what happens when Italy doesn't qualify is not the first time, unfortunately, is that I just pick a team during the games that inspire me for some reason. often are the small teams that you don't expect that they could, you know, proceed in the World Cup. And at a certain point, it's a surprise for everybody. So we'll see, we'll see. For now, no preferences, but there will be a preference soon.
[00:09:17] Ray Latif: Yeah, well, PepsiCo has a pretty big presence, or they'll be having a pretty big presence via the Frito-Lay division. I was pretty impressed to see some of the things that the company's rolling out. Do you have a big hand? Does your team have a big hand in some of the activations that we're seeing?
[00:09:33] Mauro Porcini: Yeah, my team is involved in a variety of different ways, both on packaging, experiencing retail, digital assets. The application of Pass the Ball was totally an idea of our team in Plano, Texas. So it's always a great connection, integration, and synergy of design with marketing, eventually with R&D, depending on the initiatives. They're all part of one team. They work together hand in hand. And I think this is something very important to keep in mind for any company out there interested to embrace design. Design is not something that marketing commission to an agency, to a project. Design is culture, is thinking, is strategy and design therefore needs to be totally integrated inside the organization. Designers need to work end in end with all the other functions every day to shape really the strategy and the vision for the company in the future. And then to identify opportunities in the day to day that are opportunities that you want to execute in market in real time. And so then you still work with external agencies. You still work with external partners. We have hundreds of them all around the world that we work with, but it's important to understand that before anything else, anything, anything else, there is this culture, Chief Design culture, and it needs to be integrated inside the DNA of the organization. Sorry, I just diverged in a different direction, but your question inspired that idea.
[00:11:08] Ray Latif: No, it's a perfect answer because it leads right into my next question. You know, I do want to talk about your book, which is called The Human Side of Innovation The Power of People in Love with People. You know, you said design is culture, but culture is people, right?
[00:11:23] Mauro Porcini: Well, let's start from the subtitle, The Power of People in Love with People, because In my mind, that's the title. It didn't become the title because it would have been misleading. People would have thought that maybe it was a romantic book about love. So we decided to be clear in the real title, but people in love with people synthesize essentially everything is in the book. The second Power of People, the people we love, refers to the idea of human centricity refers to an idea of having people inside the company of any kind of background, any function, any capability, sincerely focused on creating extraordinary value for the people we serve. From what, you know, often other people call consumers or customers. These are words that I don't particularly like. I love to call them for who they are, people, human beings. If you look at people as people, you're going to have a certain kind of mindset and culture, going back to culture. If you look at them as consumers, it's completely different. You look at them as consumers, you will think of them as people that are going to buy your products. If you look at them as people, you would try to understand how to create value for them in their life. And the moment, you know, to buy the product is just a fragment of multiple dimensions of the life of these people. So what I'm talking about is a culture transversal to any function of people that put the interest and the care and the love for the people we serve before financial revenue, before gaining market share, before any kind of business KPI environment. It sounds naive. It sounds very romantic. It sounds beautiful to say in a podcast. But the reality is that in this world where the traditional barriers to entry of many of these companies made of scale of production, communication and distribution, are crumbling down under the winds of globalization, new technologies and digitization. In a world where The Human and the woman in the street can decide to go after one of those big Brad Avery established, because they can get access to funding in a much easier way. just by, for instance, crowdfunding that idea in kickstarter.com. They can go straight to the users that they want to serve through e-commerce to sell them products and through social media to build their ecosystem of communication. And the cost, by the way, of manufacturing that idea, that product, that solution is going down, driven by globalization and new technologies. In this kind of world, well, Brands like Pepsi, like Lays and many other brands in other categories out there are competing with the proliferation of new products and new entrants that are arriving. And they're all focused on creating value for people. And so the big and the small, They need to understand if there is any frustration, any unmet need, any desire that we can serve through our products. It's enough that you have a great product, great branding, but maybe the service is not good enough, or maybe the purpose of the brand is not great enough. That's where exactly competition will enter. So people talk about the fact that you need a culture of people in love with the idea of creating amazing value for others. And then everything else will come. And then you will generate financial and business value out of that kind of culture. That kind of culture drives the company in a completely different way. And then the first Power of People, the people loving, refer to the kind of mindset of these leaders, business leaders, designers, R&D leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs, how they need to think, how they need to act. In the book, I talk about 24 different characteristics of these people, from the ability to dream and think big, all the way to the ability to execute and make things happen, all the way to values and attributes that often we don't talk about, and yet have been so It's critical to build design in a company like PepsiCo. Kindness, optimism, curiosity, respect, humbleness combined with confidence, and so on and so forth. These are the people in love. And then love summarizes it all in a way or the other. There are three dimensions of love. It's the love for the people you serve. So it's moving from satisfying a customer to loving people. Is the love for what you do, the love that I was mentioning that I witnessed in my parents when they were doing what they were doing. Is the love that Daniel Goleman in Emotion and Intelligence defined as the greatest driver to really be successful in anything you do. And then finally, the third dimension of love is the love for the people surrounding you. for the people in your teams, for your peers, for your organization, because innovation is not a one woman or one man show. Innovation is a teamwork in this society, so hyper competitive. And so you need to find ways to bring everybody with you in this journey and build things that are seamless and hyper effective in the way they work together.
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[00:17:36] Ray Latif: You reference a word as it relates to those people that you were talking about, that word is unicorn. And I think when people think about a unicorn, they think of something that is so unique and special that it's really hard to replicate or be. Can you elaborate on what you mean by unicorns within the context of the people that are creating this value for their audience?
[00:18:03] Mauro Porcini: Yeah, first of all, the unicorns do not exist. They are an aspiration. They are a compass. They are a collection of different kind of characteristics that you want to attend to for your entire life. Plato would put the unicorns in the world of ideas up there. And then you spend your life trying to become a unicorn without ever becoming unicorn, because the unicorn that has all these attributes to the extreme is, What somebody would call God is the absolute execution of all the characteristics to the extreme. But the beauty of the unicorns is exactly this. They do not exist. Because the unicorns are people that know that life is a never-ending journey to better yourself, to grow. Unicorns know how to be students of life, students for life. That's how I define that journey in the book. They understand that every encounter, every meeting, every project, every book they read, every trip they take, everything they do in life is a potential opportunity to learn and grow. But the most important thing is to understand what to grow, what are those very important attributes that we should focus on. And again, I think this is something that probably, you know, is making this book interesting for many people is that some of these attributes are never really talked about when we talk about business growth, innovation. And we focus so much on the tools and the processes and the methodologies and the data actually, you know, we're hearing so much that technology could replace human beings. We're afraid of these artificial intelligence. Why do we need humans? And the reality is that these characteristics, they still make the difference and they will for many years to come. Some of them are more obvious. The ability to dream, to think big. you know, as children, we are born with that kind of ability. We dream as children, we fantasize, and then society tried to normalize us. They tell us that dreaming is not okay. The dreaming indeed is childish. And yet we, we protect that ability and we go to college. We still have, you know, ability to dream, enter companies, still dreaming, thinking we can change the world. And then, and then often in companies, we meet people that tell us, wow, You shouldn't dream. That's naive. Or even worse, why are you dreaming? Why are you so arrogant to think you can change this industry? You can change this company. You can change the world. Why you, if nobody ever did it before? So dreaming is difficult, but it's so important. I mean, I've been dreaming all my life. I've been dreaming for 10 years in PepsiCo. PepsiCo let me do that. And it's been, Fantastic. And I marry people and they tell them, dream, think big. Now, just dreaming is not enough. If you are just there dreaming and in the comfort zone of dreaming, you're not going to create any value for your company, for yourself, for anybody. It's key to find a balance between the ability to think big and the ability to make things happen. And making things happen requires pragmatism and requires the understanding that you need to take trade-offs, that you need to take compromises, that it's okay. But if you have a dream, you understand that those trade-offs and compromises are steps forward towards that dream. And they're not just a waste of time, but they're part of the journey. But you need to continuously balancing the two things. Too many times people either dream and they stay in their dreams and they don't accomplish anything for them and for the company, or they're just there executing, executing, executing and going in directions where You're not changing anything. Now, these two characteristics, though, when you talk about leadership, you talk about Innovation Center're clear. People talk about this. There are others that are less debated. For instance, kindness, optimism, curiosity. Curiosity is what drives you to be the student of life that I was talking about earlier. Curious people love to get out of their comfort zone, even if it's uncomfortable, because they know that out of their comfort zone, they will learn things. Curious people love diversity, for instance, because they know that in people different from them, they will find the precious gift of knowledge, of a different perspective. And innovation is all about looking at things in a certain way for years. And then one day, change a little bit perspective and you see something that nobody ever saw before. To change the perspective, you need to get out of your bias, your background, your history. And so engaging conversation with people different from you, engaging in reading books, out of your field and traveling around the world or in different cities and exploring the cities. All of this is all about you and your personal growth and your ability to drive innovation. Optimism is so important. Every time you try to change things, you will find roadblocks and difficulties. And you need people that see the glass half full. You don't want people that every time somebody proposed something, you are like, well, we can't. No, not because you want people to always think, okay, wow, that's exciting. How can I make it possible? And then finally, kindness. Kindness sounds once again, so romantic, so nice to say in a podcast or in a book, but Really, do we need kindness to drive Design and Innovation? In my experience, this has been so insanely powerful. Kindness drives productivity, efficiency, effectiveness. Imagine a few situations. If you go to work and you are surrounded by people that are not nice and kind to you, what do you do? You do your meetings and then you rush on as fast as possible. But if you're surrounded by nice people, kind people, people that you trust, You're going to spend time with them. You're going to have a meal. You're going to have a drink. In those quality times, you build incredible bonds that make that team so efficient when that team will face a roadblock, a difficulty in a project, in a business, or in the private life of some of the team members, because you're going to take anyway your difficulties and your challenges to work no matter what. If you're surrounded by people you don't trust, you're going to do a series of things to protect yourself. The series of things, of activities, are redundant, are necessary. They are not useful to the company. Multiply that for hundreds of thousands of people in a company, you understand the lack of productivity that you generate by the lack of kindness. And yet, when we talk about productivity in many companies, we talk about optimizing processes, cutting costs. And not often we hear companies talking about investing in productivity by increasing kindness. These are just highlights, but in the book, I talk about many more characteristics and reason why those emotional kind of traits actually produce very tangible business value for organizations of any kind.
[00:25:22] Ray Latif: Now, going back to when you first started at PepsiCo in 2012, and it feels like there was an edict, so to speak, from Indra Nooyi, who was the CEO at the time, to incorporate design and your team in particular into every aspect of PepsiCo. I got to think that that probably didn't endear a lot of friendship. It probably didn't get a Power of People on your side immediately. So how do you elicit kindness when you're in this position of who is this guy and why is he giving me any kind of information or any kind of advice about my department, my plans?
[00:26:01] Mauro Porcini: It's a beautiful question because it's the biggest problem when you have a sponsor, a big sponsor, it could be the CEO, and you try to build a function just relying on the sponsor. So you're right, that was the situation. What I always did, you know, with myself, with my life and the advice I give also to my teams all the time is this. Try to understand the person you have in front of you. And that person in that specific case you mentioned, where all the people that I met on the way, my peers in marketing, R&D, finance, in HR, the teams I was hiring, my supervisor, different executive leaders. And so looking at them, try to build a relation. and try to ask yourself one simple question, how can I make you successful? Not me, you successful, leveraging what I can offer you. That means that you will study this person, you will try to understand what drives this person. And there will be variables that are directly connected to the business. For instance, I need to grow Pepsi, I need to grow Lay's, I need to achieve specific business goals. There will be other variables that will be very personal. I am in a certain phase of my career path and I need to move to the next job, or I need to do certain things, or I'm struggling with certain things. So once you understand the full picture, The Human being you have in front of you, start to help that person succeed. The moment you give the person the ability to succeed and therefore the company, the ability or the business units, the ability to succeed, you're going to become indispensable. Not you as a person, the capability and the tools and the culture you are creating. And so this has been the strategy from the very beginning. I knew The Power of a sponsor, but also the threat of having a sponsor. Indra knew that very well as well. She knew how to sponsor, but also step back and empower leaders to take their own decisions. And so, And what happened is that we built the culture, not just as often happens top down with a CEO imposing things. And, and in this case, the Chief Design officer arriving and burning bridges and being like, okay, I have this sponsor. I can do whatever I want. That's the typical mistake that many companies do because the sponsor tell these people, well, You are here to change things. You are here to disrupt. So don't be afraid to disrupt. And that's the biggest mistake these people can make because you do need to disrupt, but in a respectful way, by building bridges instead of burning bridges, by building alliances with others. And so what happened is that on top of that top down push, there was the bottom up growth. And we started to build. connection and alliances, I mapped from the very beginning with the help of HR, we map what we call the co-conspirators inside the organization, the beetle manager that were willing to take a leap of faith and try new things. And with them, we started to build a series of proof points, a series of projects that were showing quickly, speed was key, was super, super important, quickly show some form of value, progress. It doesn't need to be perfect, show progress fast. And give credit to the business leaders, the R&D leaders, the other people that enable you to do that. It's by definition obvious that design was important because it's what they were leveraging. And so together build bottom up that kind of movement. And so that's why I'm still here after 10 years and we have two different CEOs. I had multiple bosses over the years. And Ramon Laguarta actually is a great, great sponsor. Our CEO right now is a great sponsor of design. Under him, we double, double the size of Chief Design organization from, you know, 2018 at the time of Indra. Just in one year, we doubled the organization. It was the sponsorship of Ramon, but it's also the sponsorship of all the different executives. They started to see the value and they started to invest in this. And so I think this is very, very important. I saw so many initiatives failing in companies all around the world over the years when you had big sponsors, disruptors, but they didn't take the organization with them.
[00:30:30] Ray Latif: I know you don't like this question, but it's about return on investment. And I think there are people who will look at the amount of time, resources, money that is invested in Chief Design team and say, okay, well, how do we measure their impact? How do we really get a sense of their value?
[00:30:47] Mauro Porcini: Look, this is a very interesting question. I've been asked this question by executives of corporation for 20 plus years. So it's a question I've been thinking a lot about, and I have multiple answers. First of all, If you deeply understand what design is about, and design is all about understanding deeply needs and wants of people and creating ideal solutions for those needs and wants in the form of products, experiences, brands, and services, Then you can't isolate Chief Design function and define the ROI of that function because it would betray completely the very essence of design. I give a very pragmatic example. If designers have an intuition and they come up with a product that is very cool, inspiring, and meaningful. It's going to be a success in market. When the organization sees that, everybody got excited. They're like, wow, now we're going to invest a lot of money in communication. And all the communication people are super excited. The marketing people, great. The sales organization is ready and they're going to put a lot of money in distribution. So at that point, The role of design was the one of exciting, but the success of that thing in market is because the entire organization started to invest emotional resources and real resources to make that thing happen and be successful. The opposite, you may have an idea that is great, but maybe the company is not really understanding. It's not the right moment. And then it fails the market because you don't have the right support. So in the positive or the negative kind of situation, it's impossible to extract Chief Design function. Now you can measure the impact of the new design culture. You can say, you know what, I've been embracing this idea of design company level. and have been growing the organization. Pepsi has been growing the past 10 years, but how can I define what was the role of design versus the role of many of the initiatives that the company drove to grow is almost impossible. So because of all of this, The best thing to measure the impact of design is to focus on a series of other soft returns. For instance, impact on relation with customers. So how we are changing completely our conversations with the Marriott and Starwood of the world, with the Walmart and the Target and the variety, a variety of other customers we have. how we engage with them in rethinking the experience in retail, how we're helping them succeeding, and we're all succeeding together. We have an entire team that is focused on designing for customers, focusing on that. The second dimension is designed for the consumer, the end user. So how you increase that engagement, and again, you can measure it, but you can also witness it, observing it, how in social media, in a variety of different platforms, People connect with our brands using conversations and words that are really different from the past. So the organization feel it even more before measuring it. Then it's impact on your innovation ability that you can measure with the amount of ideas that get to market in a successful way, the amount of patents. There are a variety of different metrics you can use. That is the impact on corporate reputation, how that kind of new creative culture is reshaping the image of the companies, is enabling you to attract talents, to have a different kind of image in front of shareholders or customers of the media and so on and so forth. Then, of course, is also the impact on the product. You may increase the perceived value of the product, keeping the cost at the same level, or is impact on process. We have been measuring the cost of Chief Design function, both people and facility in the past 10 years. We started from day one, and we have been comparing it with what would have been the cost of doing the same amount of work with external agencies. And the difference is mind blowing, you know, without giving you the specific data, but there is a huge difference. So we've been saving the company a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. And by the way, when I say saving, it doesn't mean we just kept them in our pocket. It means that we reinvested them in doing more design work. So we're able to produce so much more and produce so much more value for the company by investing money in a more responsible way. And so now, instead of just using the perspective of the designers from a shareholder money standpoint, we're being investing the money of our shareholders in a much more responsible way by building a culture of creativity and design and extracting as much financial value as possible. from the creative work of these designers in-house.
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[00:36:49] Ray Latif: There's an internal benefit. There's a cost benefit to having Chief Design team as part of PepsiCo. This might be a vulgar question, but is there a direct line between design and sales? You talked about how there's a feeling that you can elicit from consumers based on Chief Design that you create. But at the end of the day, you want them to buy that product. So can you say, you know, design helps sell products?
[00:37:18] Mauro Porcini: It does definitely. And it will be enough to understand behavioral science and the way our brain works, how our brain reacts to beauty, just the aesthetic component, our brain, our brain reacts to functionality to understand that anyway is an important driver of user satisfaction. So there is a connection at psychological level, But then you can see it also in the financial results of what we're doing. The problem, once again, is how do you define what is the role of design versus you know, the way you have been selling stuff, your presence in distribution, the deals you have with your customers. It's almost impossible to detach the components. But again, I've been in so many juries of design awards and especially design awards that recognize the business success of these awards. And every time they try to detach design from other variables, they don't do a service to design because it's a total misunderstanding what design is about. I think a powerful example is the one I mentioned earlier. Chief Design excited the organization to invest three times more and to put more passion in positioning the product, selling the products, Is design that deserve the credit? Or anyway, still the sales organization was so good at what they did to position in a certain way, or is both? Obviously it's both at the end of the day, but then you need, what is the problem? Why we're trying to measure the ROI of design? Well, because it's new to many of these companies. And so these companies, often with positive intent, are telling designers, show us the value so I can go to my shareholders, I can go to the rest of the company, I can tell them, look, this is the value we bring. In my experience, The most powerful way to show value is to remember these different areas of value generation that I mentioned. I decodified them at the time of 3M. I came to PepsiCo with this list of things. And then use them with your teams to remind them. what they need to do when they lead, I don't know, design for Pepsi, design for Lays. Your role is not just to work on the project. Your role is to understand how to leverage design, to engage consumers in a different way, customers in different way, to drive a better Side of Innovation inside the business of Pepsi, how to help through Pepsi the corporate reputation and so on and so forth. That's your role is holistic. And then We use these filters to build stories. So we story tell the value that we bring in a variety of different ways, through case studies that we share with our business partners within the company, with our customers, but then also with stories that are tellable. outside of the walls of the company. And that's why from the very beginning, we created a design, PepsiCo design, Instagram platform, an interest site. We started to publish books every year that we'll send to many stakeholders inside the company and the external world. Essentially, we started to build stories that people can relate with. They show value in multiple dimensions, including ideally, there is a sales component as well. Through that, we build. believe and credibility for the function and believe that this approach made sense for the company. And through that, we build more people that were willing to invest, sponsors, different kinds of stakeholders, co-conspirators, people that have been driving Chief Design culture together. By the way, again, to close, design is not just a designer job. Design is the job of every single function of the company. And it's not just designers' output of what we do, a piece of packaging, a piece of communication or an experience or a product. Design is about the way of thinking of Chief Design world. It's this mix between empathy, understanding what is relevant to people, strategy, understanding what is relevant to the company from a cultural standpoint, process standpoint, a business model standpoint, and then prototyping. So once you have an intuition about what is relevant to people, what is relevant to the company, you start to prototype. In-house all the way to prototype in market, business models, new products. You fail, you learn, you grow and you move on.
[00:42:06] Ray Latif: It feels like you have so much runway. You have so much opportunity to take brands in a direction that is unexpected and is new and fresh. But to do that, I would think that you yourself need to be inspired. What inspires you? Where do you draw your inspiration from? And how do you operate as a leader and designer when it comes to sourcing new ideas?
[00:42:30] Mauro Porcini: The key, key driver of inspiration is the curiosity I was talking about earlier, is in fact one of the primary, you know, after kindness is one of the primary traits of the people we try to hire inside the company. Curiosity drives you to be in the most uninspiring place of the planet and finding ways to be inspired anyway, because it pushes you to look for something that is exciting, even if the context is not that inspiring. So I mentioned curiosity because I think we can offer our teams as many tools and platforms to inspire them as possible. But if you don't have that inner curiosity, They're not going to really work. And so what inspires me every day, reading books, reading books. I mean, in books, there is the concentration of the wisdom of millions and millions of people without any boundary of geography and time. So from history of humanity, and when you write a book, You try to put everything you learn in your life, you condense it in few pages. And we have access to that kind of wisdom. And in books written around the world, probably there are all the answers about any question you may have. They're already there. It's just up to us to find them. The other is connecting with people, you know, getting out of my comfort zone and talking with them. And, and it's not just the people familiar to me. the designer or, or the Italians, or now the Americans, because I've been living in America for a long time. But actually the more somebody is different from me, the more I'm intrigued and curious. And instead many people are closed in their arrogance. They're like, Oh, I'm a designer. You business leaders don't understand this shit. Or I'm a business leader. You, you know, in, in design, creative, crazy people, or, or, you know, diversity of background of history of religion. So many times we're afraid from people that are different from us. And instead I find so much inspiration from people that think differently from me, not because a specific idea that they have is better than mine, or for sure mine idea is no better than theirs. What I'm excited about is the collision of ideas, is the dialogue, the respectful dialogue that generates new ideas that I didn't expect, she didn't expect, but together because of the dialogue we were able to create. So that's what inspired me, reading, traveling, talking with people and getting out of my comfort zone, diversity.
[00:45:13] Ray Latif: I hate to say it, but I feel like a Power of People would say that they're inspired by social media these days. They see a post and they're moved to do something about it. Does social media influence what you do as a designer? And does the fleeting nature of social posts make it more difficult to connect with consumers in a meaningful way?
[00:45:32] Mauro Porcini: Look, social media is a gate. I didn't mention it, but I should have. But when I was saying reading, I was thinking of books, but then I was thinking also of anything you find in the digital world. It's just a different medium. It's a different code that is used. But when I was at school, I studied semantics, semiotic, and the world of language and communication. And there are a few ingredients that define the ability to generate meaning. Every time you communicate, there is a sender, there is a message, there is a receiver, there is a code, a media, a context, and noises. And the meaning is defined by interaction of all these elements. So in social media, essentially the media is obviously by definition, the digital platform. The code is a code that is all about, first of all, it's very visual. So for us designers, It's great. Actually, the reason why design is becoming so important in companies nowadays is that we live in a world that is very visual because the visual communicating a split second in a moment where we are bombarded by content, we prefer to digest and enjoy a lot of content very rapidly than to spend time imposing and going deep in a specific piece of content. So the beauty of social media is that through visual communication or short communication, if you think of Twitter as an example, you can consume rapidly a lot of content. But then it's up to your curiosity. in your critical mind and critical thinking to understand where to pause. And so this is what I like on social media. They give me highlights of so many different things in so many different areas. And when I see something, I'm like, wow, this is interesting. Well, the first click brings you to more depth. At that point, if it's really interesting, that's when you want to buy a book connected to that. You want to talk to people that are experts of the world. So we go back once again to that curiosity. Social media are wonderful if used in the right way as a way to access information and then go deep in the ones that are the most relevant to you.
[00:47:44] Ray Latif: Yeah, I took a slightly negative view on social media, even though I use it all the time. I'm on Instagram all the time. I was looking at your Instagram page recently, and it's great. I mean, just seeing that content, it does motivate you in some ways. That being said, I think the younger generation, Gen Z folks and millennial consumers, or millennials period, I don't know why I call them consumers, but those generations seem to have a great understanding of how to communicate socially via digital content. And that leads to a question about hiring. When you are trying to reach consumers, you are trying to reach millennials and Gen Z consumers, you have to do it through social media in so many ways. So do you have to hire or are you looking to hire folks that have a great understanding of culture via digital content? Or is it more important to hire people who just have a general expertise when it comes to design that can produce great content regardless of the platform?
[00:48:46] Mauro Porcini: Well, I really profoundly believe in diversity of background. So we have many people that are more familiar with the digital technologies. Many of them are digital natives, but let's be careful not to fall in the trap of discriminating people by age, just because we assume that young people are more familiar with digital technologies. While I met many people more advanced in their years, that are so curious and know so much about new technologies, more than many other people that are digital natives, but are not that curious and interested. If I think about my nephews, for instance, just to make an example, I have the eight years old one that is, he has his own YouTube channel supervised by his parents. He create content all the time. He started when he was seven and this content is the actor in the content, and then he assemble it, he put the motion graphic, he does everything, he's director, he's actor. That's a beautiful use of social media. And this is a guy that probably will work in that kind of world and will be one of those people that are familiar with those technologies. The other one is five years old. He loves to play soccer outside. He's not that intrigued, you know, in those technologies, you know, he helped the other brother, but he's less about that. And he's going to be, you know, I don't know, he will become what he's supposed to become, but for sure he has different kinds of interests. And so what I'm trying to say is that it's so easy to categorize age groups as experts of something. And it's the typical mistake we often do. So to answer your question, we look for people that have the kind of sensitivity for the digital world and the right kind of knowledge. We look at them across age groups and categories, but then we mix them also with people that are more traditional in the world of design, that bring in different kinds of skills. We try to have the full diversity of skills, and then we try to be the culture that connects them all so that they can help each other. You know, we check and balance this to really understand what direction to take if you're taking something too much to the extreme, if you're not considering other things. So again, diversity of skills is so important in what we're trying to do.
[00:51:13] Ray Latif: I would love to be a fly on the wall in some of your meetings where the recently hired intern from Supreme and the 20-year executive from Nike are in the same room and how they work together.
[00:51:22] Mauro Porcini: It happens all the time, but that's why. That's why it's in the book, but I've been pitching about this for 20 years. That's why for me, the soft skills are so important because for the young guy or girl from Supreme and the 20 years of 30 years, a guy with experience in Nike, to connect with each other, you need those soft skills. You need kindness. You need respect. You need empathy. You need, you know, all these things. Those are the things that make people work together in the most effective way and generating the greatest quality you can imagine.
[00:52:02] Ray Latif: You're 10 years in at PepsiCo. Your playbook, if I can call it a playbook, seems to have worked pretty well. Quite well, actually. You need a new one for the next 10 years, though, don't you?
[00:52:12] Mauro Porcini: No, no, I profoundly believe in consistency of what you do. If you find something that makes sense, keep doing that. But then you need to have the ability to adapt, to flex, to evolve. Again, to understand that you need to keep updating and learning and verifying your beliefs. But what I found out over the years is that once you find certain pillars, certain foundation, that make sense and usually they are the foundation connected to the deepest, The Human nature, to the way we think our brain is wired. For me, one of the most important filters ever in everything I do is the Maslow Pyramid, because we're all driven by those needs. physiological safety, and then, you know, connection with others all the way to something that is bigger than you and trust in yourself. Everything, everything we do from building brands to unfortunately creating wars in the world to anything positive and negative goes back to those kinds of needs. And so if what you do, what you believe in is connected The Human nature, and if you're driven by purpose, if you're driven by creating value for people, then that's the playbook. And then you'll adapt to the context that is a cultural context, is geographical and is defined by time. And so you need that flexibility and that adaptability, but the foundation are there and will be always there. In fact, I love philosophy as a kid. I wanted to be a writer, a philosopher, an author. I think that the answers to all our issues and problems are not, as I said earlier, just in all these books out there. But in the books of philosophy, in the theories of the philosophy over thousands of years, there are really all the answers of all the questions that we ask ourselves, including business, including how to build brands, how to drive business growth. is all there, is all connected The Human nature, is the nature of The Human we serve, so understanding the so-called consumers, is the nature of the entrepreneurs, of the teams, of the hundreds of thousands of people that define a company, that make the success or failure of the company, all the way to the executive team that needs to lead that team. It's really about people. And maybe it's a good way to close this idea of people in love with people. For me, it became these three words that are defining it all. It's really what is the most important. Love the people you serve. It's the people you bring with you in the journey and it's the passion for what you do.
[00:55:01] Ray Latif: Well, I've loved every minute of our conversation, Mauro. Thank you so much. I hate to be partial because I love speaking with people and this is such a great honor for me to be able to sit down with folks like yourself. This has been one of my favorite interviews of 2022 and probably the entire time we've been doing the podcast. You bring so much energy, intelligence, advice, excitement, and just love, passion for what you're doing. And I hope it's infectious for our audience. Thank you so much once again for joining me today.
[00:55:29] Mauro Porcini: Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
[00:55:35] Ray Latif: That brings us to the end of this episode of Taste Radio. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to our guests at Mauro Porcini. Our audio engineer for Taste Radio is Joe Cracci. Our technical director is Joshua Pratt, and our video editor is Ryan Galang. As always, for questions, comments, ideas for future podcasts, please send us an email to askatasteradio.com. On behalf of the entire Taste Radio team, thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
