Emilie Sydney-Smith Creating the post-COVID future you want to live in


Video Transcription

It's my pleasure to announce our next speaker, Emily Sidney Smith Ceo of exo works.She will explain the trends and how they are seen around the world, which emerging technologies are expected to hit a tipping point because of the global crisis and how their clients are working to become leaders in those new industries. Hi Emily and welcome.

Thank you so much

to you. Enjoy, have fun

and Joanna, so I want to talk today about what we should be creating after COVID. Can we actually change the world together? This world is going through such enormous changes. And the other thing that I want to really leave you with is a sense that this is an exponential crisis and that absolutely needs exponential solutions to get through it. We women can really design what to do around this. We can create whole new industries, we can truly change the world. And yet I think we all feel like Wiley Coyote right now flying off that cliff trying to work out what to do on the way down. And yet we actually have seen so many companies going through that feeling in the last few years, these companies that are getting disrupted, sidelined because they were so focused on products and services that will soon be obsolete or thinking that it would be great to do things 10% better.

And yet there's this entirely new breed of companies out there that have been doing things 10 times better. How do you compete with that if you only want 10% better? And those companies have been creating the best selling products and services of the future. But they've also been asking very different questions. And so we've seen so many of those old industries think that they can just stay where they are. They're only iterating on their existing core products and services that are soon going to be obsolete. It's like throwing dynamite on a ticking time bomb. And so we see so many of those companies getting disrupted and it gives us a method to actually think about how to pivot during these very difficult times as well. So I said that there are these companies that are doing things 10 times better. Amazon Google. We see that they're doing incredible things and every decision that they make, they make sure that it's gonna be at least 10 times better in any measure of that word. And so we also looked at those fastest growing companies in the world and said, well, what is shared between them? And it turns out that there are these 11 attributes, these things that help them scale faster than we've ever seen companies scale before. So if you're building a business or if you're working in a business and you're trying to do growth in the old way. Well, that's the hard way. If you want to do it, the easy way you do, you use these kinds of attributes.

And so we've been working with some pretty big companies around the world to actually bring these ideas in. And so I also want to leave the message that if you're in a small company, it absolutely works. But you can actually go into these very traditional large companies as well and get them to start moving and growing um again. And so just one example that I want to share of working with a large company. This was in Mexico City, the um largest Mexican insurance broker and they had been working through a number of different initiatives. And one of the initiatives was to move from a paper sign up for new policies which could take weeks and was really laborious to a five m five minute automated sign up process. And just as they were about to release that this horrible huge earthquake hit Mexico City now. They had never been in home insurance, but they could see that people were just petrified about aftershocks and yet 95% of homes in Mexico City were not insured for earthquakes. So they actually managed to really think audaciously decide to do things 10 times better. And they actually released an entirely new product for home insurance into the market in 72 hours.

We usually don't see that kind of thing to do it so fast and yet their competitors were not offering new policies for two whole weeks. So they just swept the market, but they also knew that the fastest growing companies in the world have one thing definitely in common and that is that they have a massive transformative purpose. They define how they want to improve the world for millions or billions of people.

And there's a social impact built into that as well as profitability. And so they said, well, instead of just offering this new product, why don't we offer it to people for free for three months with no obligation to sign up at the end? And in fact, they had 36% of people sign up um to the paid policies after that. And so they realized that they could both expand the business enormously fast while doing something really good for people. In fact, it was so profitable that they've actually doubled revenue and tripled profits in three years and say it's that 10 X kind of thing that got them there. So we can still keep thinking what we can be doing coming out of this COVID crisis. Now, every 25 years, the global GDP roughly doubles, it's about 90 trillion at the moment, which means that in 25 years, it's gonna be 100 and 80 trillion probably. And yet, if we look at most of the industries that make up the current 90 trillion, a lot of those are going to decrease in value dramatically in our view. And the others are going to be unrecognizable new companies, new processes, new products and services will come in and actually uh fill the needs of customers for those various different industries.

And so we think that more than 90% 90 trillion of new value will be created in entirely new industries. And if we're not thinking about being part of them, we'd lose so much opportunity. So what will they be? Well, we've been tracking these 15 technologies that we thought would become ubiquitous part of our everyday lives in 3 to 5 years time. And yet for all, but three of them, we actually think that they are hitting a tipping point this year because of COVID. So we're having much faster uh um application of all of these technologies. Why? Well, first of all, we've got that localization of production because our supply chains around the world have been breaking down. So 3d printing. So manufacturing things very close to where they're being consumed, vertical farming and lab grown meat so that we can actually produce what we consume. Very close solar energy means that we're not shipping fuel all around the world. This huge move to automation with robots and um drones so that we don't have that human interaction. We see so many um manufacturing plants, um picking of fruit and vegetables, this huge rush automation when people actually um can't go and do it themselves and so many other aspects.

And so we've been working with companies in all of these areas to try and um help them create these new industries that $90 trillion worth of new industries. And so we women should not think that we're not allowed to play in this. We should be looking at these industries and going and creating them together. And in fact, most of those industries, when there's a digital component, create monopolies. And so it maybe that those monopolies are created this year that tipping point is forcing um some very interesting things.

If you want to be part of the dominant count companies that actually create that $90 trillion worth of industries, think about it this year. But this is also the first time that most people in the world have really understood exponentials. What a horrible way to learn that lesson with the deaths that are coming through COVID. We see that horrible exponential curve happening. And it just strikes me as so amazing to see that lockdown that happened in most places in the world on the 23rd of March. And then about a month later, you see that curve start to change, we see that huge lag time that's actually happening in the world. And when we actually look at the death rates. We're actually still seeing deaths from people who would have caught COVID back in early April. So a crazy thing when we start to see the, the lag time that's going on with these. But we should be thinking about exponentials right through our entire lives. So we're tracking, for instance, these exponentials, these doubling patterns that we're seeing in so many technologies around us.

And if we forget to watch them all the time, we'll be blindsided and we'll miss out on some of the biggest opportunities coming at us. And so how do we think about what might play out with some of these amazing opportunities? So, for instance, we looked at drones and said, well, it's about six years from the point where drone lifting capacity will be enough that four could actually sit on to the corners of a container and pick it up. And at that point, you just need to sail a ship that's got containers on it anywhere along the coast and fly off the containers. And so we're talking with port operators around the world, many of whom are about to spend billions of dollars to uh expand their port facilities that will take many years to be put in place and saying, what are you doing? These are obsolete, you're gonna be blindsided by drones just doing this job for you. And so if you're not looking at how these exponentials are changing the world, it's very easy to get blindsided. Let me take you through an example of a company that really thought very differently about how to build in those lessons from the fastest growing companies in the world. And so let me talk about a really boring usually physical piece of equipment, an exercise bike.

How do you do something cool with that? I mean, the innovation that happened in the last 20 years was to put that little digital display on it. And yet this other company looked at these ideas and said, what can we do that will be uh really taking these into their advantage. And so Peloton, Peloton is now an $11 billion company and it has an absolute cult like following. And so founded eight years ago, they had about a billion dollars worth of funding now that 11 billion uh evaluation. So a 10 X return there and they have an almost perfect customer retention rate because people love being part of this. So how did they do that? Well, first of all, I talked about the fact that all the fastest growing companies in the world have a massive transformative purpose for them. It's allowing people to be the best version of themselves. It's audacious, it could be anyone in the world. Um I love that they're not talking about exercise bikes. It could be any path to actually get to that betterment and it's not body shaming. It's saying be the best that you can be so a very clever massive transformative purpose there. Now they created this passionate community and in fact, they have almost no marketing spend, they certainly don't spend anything on Instagram influences. People just put photos of themselves enjoying being on a Peloton machine, their customers do the marketing for them. So they've created that loyalty around them.

That is really quite spectacular. They also thought about leveraged assets. So you can go and buy one of their bikes for between two and $4000. But they said, hm, a lot of people actually have exercise bikes. I mean, remember, you know, a lot of us had that New Year's resolution. We went and bought a bike, we, you know, used it twice and then it's been sitting in the garage ever since. So they said, well, people don't necessarily need to buy a new bike and they usually have a laptop or a, um, some sort of digital device that they could put on that bike. So they could just get a subscription to be able to see what's going on with Peloton and follow those classes and engage with that community through it. So it was a way to quickly scale up to a million different users. That wouldn't have happened if they were just selling those bikes. And so they have also this engagement. So people want to get up to the next level, have those milestones. And it's been a really great way to drive that um community engagement. They've had dashboards way beyond those little uh digital uh dashboards that are usually on bikes. It's very, very interactive. People love being part of that, but they also experimented and certainly within their sales channels.

At first, they tried with Kickstarter, it didn't really work, opened some stores, tried it with hotels. It was not until they realized that they could do those digital subscriptions that their sales really skyrocketed. But that experimentation and asking customers what they wanted was so important.

And so how are they doing now? Well, their sales are going through the roof. You can hardly actually get one of these bikes. They've almost doubled in size during COVID. And so a real success story where they really built in those attributes. Now, what should we be thinking about as we change the world and get to the that post COVID world? Well, as I said, let's stop thinking about 10% improvements on obsolete products and actually do 10 X improvements and create those new um uh products of the future. Why are we only focusing on shareholder returns? Shouldn't we be like those fastest growing companies in the world and actually focus on a massive transformative purpose? How we want to improve the lives of millions or billions of people? Why do we only think about dividing up the pie of the existing market? Why can't we actually expand that pie and say there are $90 trillion worth of industries to create, let's go and do that. But we also think about that resilience that we really didn't see. Right now, most of us couldn't have rejected COVID and the shutdowns and the um supply chains that haven't worked if we can actually get data from across our companies in real time and really be able to use that in, in, in an interesting way, we might be able to move to a point where we have adaptive multi factor resilience.

Wouldn't that be wonderful? And so some questions that we're working through with our clients are, what if you only ever approved projects that had a 10 fold outcome? If you relaunched your company today, how would it differ? What would you do differently? And we're seeing some companies actually truly relaunch uh with our help. What constraints have been removed that let you do things better? What are the underlying talents and resources of your company that could be used in a whole different way? And if you were tasked with improving the lives of millions of people, what would you do? And so think big, we women can go change the world. We can think about those exponentials. We can create those new industries. It's all there for the taking. Thank you very much.