In the Q&A below, Mauricio shares thoughts on the biggest challenges facing brands today, leadership lessons, and a look into his life outside the office. 

What are you most excited about as you take on your role on Vivaldi’s leadership team?  

Vivaldi has been an agile leader in growth strategy and innovation for over two decades, and ambidexterity is needed now more than ever. Organizations that are able to effectively tackle fast-paced digital strategies as part of the core business strategy, while pursuing other opportunities and rethinking its business model, will be the ones that thrive in this era of digital disruption. 

I am very excited to deepen our current service offerings, bring brand and business strategies to life, work with top notch talent across the globe, and launch new services, products and ventures that contribute to a more humanized world. 

What is the most valuable lesson you’ve taken from your previous endeavor as the founder and CEO of LIQUID,  a digital-centric innovation and transformation hub?

I truly believe that team building, capabilities, and organizational design are iterative and must evolve as the company evolves in terms of its value proposition and service offerings. As a company re-defines / defines its winning aspiration and where to play choices, we must learn to understand our team’s motivations and capabilities. Moreover, I am a strong believer of the T-shaped capability model, as an organization grows, talent needs to have both range and specialization. Range provides a common domain to better understand the process and what each person provides of value throughout, and specialization provides real technical capabilities that are needed when building products and services and launching them to the market. 

What do you think is the biggest challenge facing every company today? 

Defending and growing your core business while pursuing other growth opportunities in the adjacent and transformational spaces. Ambidextrous organizations will be the only ones that will survive the disruption. I believe this is something that every executive knows conceptually and theoretically, but the complexity lies in how to organize (purpose, structure, processes, talent, openness to collaborate with multi stakeholders in an ecosystem) a company in order to do both things right at the same time. Moreover, you don’t know who you actually compete with today and where disruption will come from; we have to evolve from understanding “industries” to understanding the “problems and opportunities” we face as humans. We all have to look and think beyond our core business to create options for the future, today. 

What are some industry trends and/or challenges that you’re paying attention to right now? 

• The biggest challenge I observe today for “traditional” companies is competing with new and upcoming startups (and venture capital money). Take a look at venture capital investment. It’s growing at tremendous rates. In LATAM, Nu Bank is an excellent example, reaching its IPO in +- 5 years and becoming the most valued bank in the region.
• Health/Wellness. We are what we eat, mental wellness, work/life balance, the transformation of the healthcare industry and the new products and services around wellness. It’s impressive how many habits have changed around the way we take care of ourselves, the pandemic has dramatically accelerated this.
• Remote Work is here to stay. Remote work is not the same thing as “home office”, organizations that master working remotely with global and diverse teams will truly develop a competitive advantage.
• Purpose Driven organizations; organizations that operate with an ample but specific winning aspiration will be more attractive to the best talent (especially new generations) in the world as well as give space for disruptive innovation to happen.
• Open Innovation and ecosystem building are key to discovering and amplifying growth domains. All companies and organizations must look beyond their own talent and capabilities and explore new ways to co-create new options for the future. If we believe we are the center of the universe and we can create everything we need to succeed on our own, we are doomed for failure.
• “New technologies” such as AI, machine learning are no longer “new”, these technologies are transforming how companies generate value, create high growth and scalable solutions. Not all companies can and should create disruptive technology, but all companies should understand how these can bring about new value to their current and future business models.

What are the most important questions that companies need to be asking themselves?

All companies must ask themselves: What is my winning aspiration? Why do I exist? What is my role in society? If we have a clear understanding of what our role in society is, what problems and opportunities we are willing to undertake, then it is much easier to attract the best talent around the globe, and explore new growth domains. 

What’s a book worth reading?

Redesigning Leadership by John Maeda. This short memoir brings forth insights on leadership and  vulnerability. The key takeaway: the more truthful you are to yourself and others, the easier it is for people to connect and follow your lead. Another book I really enjoyed was Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows and Diana Wright. Some of the biggest problems facing the world such as war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation are essentially system failures and cannot be solved by fixing one piece/problem in isolation of others. These concepts can also be used to design new businesses that cross industries. 

What’s a passion of yours outside of work? 

I am a soccer fan, I love playing and watching the games, I am a FC Barcelona fan as well as the Peruvian National Soccer Team. Fortunately, I have had the chance to attend the last 4 world cups and it was a dream come true when I watched Peru play in the Russia 2018 World Cup (vs Denmark, France and Australia). I enjoy all aspects of the game, but if i had to choose one, it would be the coach’s role and its mixture of both strategy and team building. 

The post On Thinking Beyond Your Core Business, with Vivaldi Partner Mauricio Andujar appeared first on Vivaldi.

Below Lee shares his thoughts on challenges facing business and brands today, celebrating failure, and how we can get to disruptive ideas.   

What do you think is the biggest challenge facing every company today?   

I’d say understanding the mid and long-term consequences of COVID-19 and how it will re-shape demand for a given category or indeed open up new ones should be paramount. A company cannot continue assuming that the terms of competition within its categories will remain stable— they need to be re-evaluated. Every business must have its critical planning assumptions defined and consequences and opportunities understood.      

Equally, it’s not new news to say that COVID has sped up the adoption of digital into more areas of our lives, proving the parity or indeed superiority of digital services over physical in many cases. Many companies should no longer be thinking digital transformation so much as business model transformation, embracing an ecosystem of multiple parties adding value into and extracting value from the brand system.   

Given your experience, how can businesses reach and get to disruptive ideas?   

Do you mean ‘disruptive’ in its truest Clayton Christensen sense, or do you mean ‘ambitious non-incremental ideas’? You have to calibrate the project’s ambition early on. But on the issue of generating ideas, firstly, the hard bit is getting ideas which an organization can actually exploit. You often find the signifier of success for idea generation workshops is the number of ideas generated. Everyone has had a great time, lots of Post-It notes over the walls, and tons of ideas that never see the light of day again. I’d rather sweat over articulating a much better definition of the problem for innovation to solve and get fewer but more relevant ideas generated. Innovation is a rigorous discipline, not a theatre show. Creativity happens when you give it a place to stand, but you’ve got to find that place first.  

There are two organizational blocks to great ideas, the misuse of consumer insights and experimentation failure. With regard to the misuse of consumer insights, much work needs to be done to educate organizations on research methods— reliability vs. validity if you like. If your innovation effort is calibrated to operate within the field of reference and experience of a consumer, asking them for their opinion and following it is a reasonable input. However, there is just one little hiccup with this neat and convenient approach— it’s not the consumer’s job to know what they will think and feel in five years. If you’re looking for ambitious non-incremental ideas, I’d say this isn’t a great platform for innovation. I once worked on a project for an Airline creating a future experience for their First and Business class lounges. The global insights team had diligently run a global (and expensive) survey presenting management with a beautifully elegant 2+2 matrix detailing all possible features of the lounge experience on ‘valued most’ and ‘used most’ axes. Guess what? People valued and used ‘free food’ and ‘free Wi-Fi’ the most. How much free food and how much free Wi-Fi can you really give? “But we’re now offering round the clock food service and extended free Wi-Fi to non-loyalty cardholders.” Yes, but it still looks, feels, and smells like a dentist’s waiting room in the 1980s. What about the guy over there curled up trying to get sleep, the woman over there covering her mouth on the phone because there is no privacy?   

Ok, so I’m being a little unfair, but asking the consumer to recall and reflect on their subconscious feelings and behaviors at different moments and situations is bizarre enough, but following this path means you’re going to quantify yourself into a dead end. It’s this type of project where observing consumer behaviors in the context of their experience and understanding how key cultural trends will shape expectations becomes critical. You have to embrace evidence that pushes thinking beyond the ‘now’ and into ‘tomorrow.’ We should seek to ‘design for tomorrow’s customer today.’    

The second block is creating the organizational processes, culture, and KPIs to embrace experimentation within the innovation process. [More on this below.]

How do we celebrate failure?   

Experimentation should be a baked-in element of the innovation process. Much work still needs to be done to educate executives on Lean Start-up and design thinking methods. There are many teams in organizations who are innovating but are not considered an innovation function and are encumbered by outmoded KPI’s that do nothing to embrace experimentation. Test & learn as a key managerial competence is key. Celebrate the capacity to execute experiments and share the knowledge gained.   

What is the most important question that companies need to be asking themselves?  

What are my planning assumptions about how COVID will change my current categories of operation and open up new ones?   

Is there a company that you could point to as a recently successful model of reinvention?  

I’m a hopeless petrol head— cars and bikes. I adore Bentleys, despite years of under-investment. VWs acquisition of Bentley has dragged the products into the 21st century. However, what I admire most is that Bentley’s essence has been maintained with great discipline and vision. The cars feel ‘inevitable,’ logical evolutions of the lineage, and you can trace key signatures of the experience back 90 years to the ‘Blowers’ that took on the Le Mans 24 hours. There is an ‘evolving permanence’ baked into each new model. This is a result of a beautiful integration and translation of the brand DNA with its design language. As a result, a brand with enviable lineage and pedigree feels as authentic today as it did 50 years ago. The secret here is to define the character of the brand, the way it always must feel, and the key points of difference it should always own but should constantly innovate upon. In other words, if you’ve got lineage and pedigree, don’t zig and zag— evolve.   

The post The Rigorous Discipline of Innovation: A Q&A with Senior Partner Lee Powney    appeared first on Vivaldi.

Here are some key principles from Danny Hest: 

1. It’s about the journey, not the destination. Creating shared value across different points of the customer journey provides opportunities for new entrants and for those who have gone down the path to experiencing what a company has to offer. Being involved in the customers’ lifecycle is more valuable than just being there at a particular moment in their lives.  

Danny shared that TOGO Group ensures they go through their customer’s road-based journey, from considering taking a trip to considering purchasing an RV, ownership, and beyond. Through this experience design, TOGO Group can connect and accompany its customer’s journey along an otherwise lonely road. 

“I think our vision has gone from let’s talk about all people that take road trips to let’s really focus on this narrower segment, and then see how deep we can get in solving problems across a number of different areas.” – Danny Hest

2. Slow and steady wins the race— realistically. Short term transactional relationships will not be sustainable in the long run. It is important to manage the practical balance of profitability and shared value given a certain amount of time and budget constraints. 

Danny believes that if he initially charges too much from the customers for their offerings today, it will eventually lead to the erosion of trust in the company and be difficult to rebuild it over time. The same goes with TOGO Group’s recent partnership with campsites. If it were purely transactional, there will be limitations in shared benefits and growth. 

“We look at trying to make sure that we maintain a balance at all times of the shared value— given that you’re being very realistic, where we’re at, and what our product offering is at the time.” – Danny Hest

3. Listening carefully is the road to social and gravitational pull. Tuning into your customers’ frequently used platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other industry-specific communication platforms will help businesses identify user pain points. Interacting and inserting oneself in the conversation to help solve their problems will provide positive experiences and will naturally make them come back.  

For example, Danny informed us that they heard RV drivers found it difficult to find service centers when they are on the road. Avoiding low bridges while navigating large vehicles is also an obstacle. TOGO Group listened and is now developing features that help customers locate these specific services and information on the map. 

“The trick is to keep that (gravitational pull) going and the way to do that is to make sure people continue to have positive experiences with it.“ – Danny Hest 

Here are three ways to think horizontally and create a gravitational pull: 

• Build a collaborative advantage through horizontal thinking: Know the limitations and constraints of your business to help determine organizational structures that help solve bigger problems in the interaction field. 
• It’s not just about bringing the product to the final destination: A company’s offering should go beyond the sales. Ensuring that the experience is positive and improving upon that experience throughout the customer journey lifecycle will lead to value creation. 
• Constantly challenge your own assumptions: Understanding the ecosystem and evaluating opportunities by testing and conducting research will help bring focus to investments in improvements.  

Conclusion: 

If something has been going wrong in your company for a while, it is time to take a turn in the road. It is easy to keep going down the same path without reevaluating the journey. Danny reminded us to hit the brakes to investigate the new opportunities that these challenging times have presented. Being involved in the customer’s lifecycle and accompanying them throughout their journey by listening will create value and natural gravitational pull. Getting a good grasp of the balance of offerings and constraints will provide focus on the directions to take. Through this route, companies can activate the network of connectivity in the interaction field.  

Watch the full event here:

4:08 – TOGO Group intro
6:39 – How TOGO Group identifies user pain points and opportunities
7:35 – TOGO Group’s vision for the customer’s lifecycle
9:01 – Shared interaction vs. Transactional and being realistic about offerings and constraints
12:13 – How to be a good listener
13:38 – Challenges in the RV industry and what TOGO Group does to address them
15:17 – Building features vs. Partnerships
17:16 – Expectations of RV owners and TOGO Group’s approach
18:58 – Listening to communities and solving their problems to have positive experiences
20:45 – How to determine opportunity focus
22:03 – How Danny Hest’s past experience is pulled into TOGO Group
24:53 – Companies that inspire TOGO Group
26:45 – What TOGO Group is looking for in employees

This segment was part of The Interaction Field Series of our LinkedIn Live Events. Please connect with us on our LinkedIn page to stay updated with our upcoming conversations.

The post On the Road to a New Perspective with Danny Hest appeared first on Vivaldi.

What are some key takeaways from your years working with The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC)?

Alberto Velasco + Luis Gérardin: Working with Coca-Cola was an amazing experience. It gave us the opportunity to work with one of the most valuable brands in the world, plus other iconic, billion-dollar-plus brands and gave us the chance to work and experiment with new, emerging brands.

TCCC is a school of strategy, business and marketing. Not many companies have the depth of thought leadership that this company has. Given its size and budget, we could work with and learn from the best partners in the world, consultants, agencies and suppliers.

With its approach to brand building through its “only Coke can do” way, we got to experience the most formidable events and experiences in the world (such as the Soccer World Cups and the Olympic Games), to have done the first-ever environmentally friendly concert in Antarctica with Metallica, and to build a “Coca-Cola for Me” teens’ connecting platform with a live radio, social networks and a rewards benefit for continued engagement and data collection.

Having said that, we also learned that there is no single way of doing marketing. Not all brands can pretend to have the same logic as the Coca-Cola brand. Each brand must build its own way starting with the definition of its frame of reference, and how it is improving and gaining a portion of the consumers’ lives.

How have you both seen marketing transform over the past few years?

AV + LG: The function has been disrupted. The marketing principles may remain the same, sometimes refined, yet the dramatic changes in terms of consumer behavior, technology, competition, media landscape, availability of data and innovation demanded new marketing functions and specialties, new tools, new agile processes and a change in mindset in terms of openness.

Change has been so fast that organizations are still learning on how to deal with that. We have experienced moving from a world where the brand was a way to insulate and protect your competitiveness, to a world where the brand is part of an ecosystem of participants who add value to each other.

What is one piece of advice you would give to brands today?

AV + LG: Think strategically. Start with the consumer and knowing the business you are in. How are you going to improve their lives and take a share of it? Let him or her participate and co-build your brand with you.

Alberto, you’ve had experience working with brands across various industries (automobile, restaurant, beverage) – what do all of these brands/industries have in common?

AV: It’s amazing that, while the activation efforts are different across industries, the set of questions they need to answer is the same: What business are we in? Who are the people I want to help make their lives better? How do I expand into other segments? What is my portfolio and brand architecture? What does my brand stand for? What is the consumer journey? What are the jobs to be done? What is the best solution I can provide? Why is my brand not growing as it used to?

What brand serves as a role model (either in LATAM or elsewhere) and why?

AV + LG:  Hard question. Change has been so fast that nobody has got it right yet. We could say that brands whose value proposition provides great utility are the hottest and with the biggest potential given the digital environment we live in (ex. Airbnb, Amazon, Uber, Waze, etc.). But even digital-first brands are reconsidering that their performance-driven approach is not enough to continue growing and that they must look back at the principles and some elements of the traditional way of doing marketing, and also, pursue an emotional connection and provide experiences in a complementary way to their utility value.

Amazon is obsessed with the consumer, so in that sense the consumer is a role model. John Deere comes from the industrial world and has managed to successfully turn itself into a platform business. And coming back to Coca-Cola, it’s a brand that builds on strong emotions through messaging and experiences. Many companies still need to design their own way of doing business and marketing, crafting their own recipe that works for them given the consumer, competitive landscape and internal culture.

Luis, you were recognized as “Best Marketing Professional” in Argentina and have led award-winning teams. From your point of view, what does it take to be a qualified marketing professional?

LG: For me, a marketer is a business growth professional that focuses obsessively on the consumer/customer in order to add value for and with him or her and their ecosystem.

Marketers need to have the ambidextrous capability of, on the one hand, to articulate a vision and clear strategies and, on the other, to flawlessly execute actionable plans from which they can learn and inform the process continuously. Being both sophisticated in their thinking and simple in their actions.

As marketers, we need to be passionate and sensitive enough to read and leverage emerging trends to create value before anyone else does. Further, to have the capacity to learn and relearn, especially with the booming digital possibilities available.

And given your experience in managing virtual teams and given the growing trend of remote work, what are some tips for organizations that are either hiring virtual employees or offering employees the choice of remote work?

LG: In my experience, of course there are extreme segments of people that either would only like to work from home or only from the office, but I would provide the guidelines that allows each individual to manage their own schedule. With the behavior usually variable, it guarantees a minimum core interaction space or time for the team or the organization.

I believe in live interaction and the possibilities it opens for natural and spontaneous collaboration and co-creation. Specifically in managing large virtual teams, I would recommend some minimum live interaction activities or forums to connect as people, not as associates, to build and feed a minimum threshold of trust.

Luis, given your experience in successfully leading the growth of Coca-Cola’s South Latin Business Unit, what advice can you give to CPG brands (or brands in general) that are hoping to grow and expand globally?

LG: To me, the key is pretty obvious. The magic happens when planning and execution are aligned. Starting with a common internalized and bought-into mission, vision and values, the different functions can co-develop the strategy in a transversal process and subsequently land into the execution in an integrated fashion.

Alberto, you’ve been responsible for driving cultural change at corporations such as Coca-Cola, what is the most important thing for organizations to keep in mind when trying to create and maintain a healthy culture?

AV: Your team is much more capable of doing things than most many leaders think. Inspire and align them with a simple and single vision, then empower them, facilitate collaboration and reward continuous learning over short-term successes and/or failures.

Lastly, what is one piece of advice for brands that are trying to incorporate digital and e-commerce into their strategy?

AV: Digital is first a mindset. Your efforts won’t be profitable unless you first understand that your customers are part of networks, that competition can come from anywhere, data is an asset, experimentation is a way of doing business and that you should continuously re-evaluate the value you are giving to your consumers.

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Contact us at hello@vivalidgroup.com to learn more about our LATAM presence and offerings. 

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