Samsung Chief Design Officer Mauro Porcini: Human-centric design ignites user experiences

Samsung Chief Design Officer Mauro Porcini: Human-centric design ignites user experiences

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, our global content resource examining big themes that will impact the C-Suite and executive boardrooms worldwide. Today, we’re exploring the future of customer experience, and we’re thrilled to be joined by Mauro Porcini, President and Chief Design Officer at Samsung, where he oversees a global team of 1,500 designers. Mauro hosts the “In Your Shoes with Mauro Porcini” podcast and has been a presenter and judge on the TV show “New York by Design” and “America by Design” airing on CBS and Amazon Prime. His most recent book is “The Human side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People,” published in 2022. Prior to joining Samsung, Mauro was Chief Design Officer at PepsiCo and 3M. Today, Mauro will be speaking with my Protiviti colleague, Managing Director Alex Weishaupl. Alex, I’ll turn it over to you to begin.

Alex Weishaupl: Thanks, Joe and hi, Mauro. Thank you so much for being here today.

Mauro Porcini: It’s really a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Weishaupl: Absolutely. So, one of the things that digital, in particular, I think, has done over the last decade or two has really, absolutely proliferated the number of touchpoints and surfaces people interact with regularly. So, I’m going to start with a softball question. As people interact with brands across an increasing number of touchpoints, how are you seeing the role of brand identity, user experience, and ultimately, product innovation evolving or maybe more specifically, what is the role that you’re seeing that design plays in that emerging future?

Porcini: Well, very interesting question in this specific moment in time. It’s more important than ever. The role of design today is more important than ever for a variety of different reasons. First of all, the way we build brands today is so different than just 10, 20 years ago. You mentioned it earlier. We’re moving from a world where brands were communicating top down, one direction, with specific messages to people that were passively receiving this information, to a world where instead there is a dialogue. So, these brands are moving from being actors of the conversation most of the time to becoming just topic of the conversation happening amongst people. Because of this, they’re also moving from the ability to buy the right to talk to people, to the need of earning the right to be talked about. So, from buying, the more money you have the more presence you can buy in the media, to earning. Eventually, you don’t even need huge amounts of money, big budgets to be relevant in the conversation amongst people. You need meaningful content.

So, this is changing the way you interact with people and therefore, first of all, the way you build experiences — and design has a very, very important role in this — needs to change. It’s becoming more and more relevant. For instance, you go to a store. In the past, you were just going there for a financial transaction, to acquire, to buy a product, a brand, a service. Today, you can build those brands in those stores. People, if they are excited about what happened, their experience, their living, they can take out their cell phones, take a picture, take a video, share it with the rest of the world, become your ambassadors. It’s user-generated content. In a world where communication moves at the speed of light in social media, you need to be very impactful in delivering the message, and we study in semantic that the message itself is not enough to define the meaning of your communication or what you’re trying to say with your products and your brand. There is another element that is called “the code” in semantic that is the visual element that is super important. So, you’re scrolling your images and the different brands and products and services in your digital platforms. If you have the right aesthetic, if you have the right identity, the right visual language, you’re going to grab the attention of these people, you’re going to be impactful, you’re going to be meaningful. If you don’t, even if you have the right message, the right proposition, the right service, you’re going to be neglected by people. 

Then last but not least, you need to keep innovating. The world is moving at the speed of light, so you need to keep creating something meaningful for these people. And so the only, the strongest competitive advantage you can build for your company — I say the only because it should be the primary competitive advantage — is human centricity: care, love for people. I call these innovators the real innovators, people in love with people. That’s the driver. Everything else follows that kind drive and is not something you create through a project. It’s something you need to drive through the entire culture of the organization. 

Design is a community that embodies that idea of caring for people, love for people. This is what they teach in school, to care for people. In business school they teach you to grow a business, a brand. You can be an amazing business leader if you are able to grow the business and the brand. In design school, they teach you to care, and then they tell you, “By the way, you also need to make money for your company.” So, you need to understand other variables, the three lenses of design thinking, the business world, the technology manufacturing world on top of the first world that is the world of people. Today, we need that kind of culture in these companies. It’s design culture, but it’s a culture of human centricity that needs to be spread to every single function, vertically from the CEO to the entry-level employee, and transversely, across every capability of the company.

Weishaupl: It’s funny, I recently returned to your book, “The Human Side of Innovation,” and that notion of people in love with people or that — I’d say my read of the theme was almost impactful innovation really comes from people who care deeply, who design with human needs at the forefront. How do you get or help an organization’s culture and values align better with a brand’s external customer promise, and as part of that, maybe specifically, what kind of challenges have you seen where there’s a disconnect between the two, where that obsession just isn’t fully there?

Porcini: Look, I think it depends on the industry. In some industries, this is pretty obvious. This alignment is there to see. As an example, in the fashion industry, you see the employees of fashion, luxury brands embodying exactly what the consumers, the customers are looking for. You see that also in sport. If you work in Nike, in Adidas, even in products that are not related, belonging to the apparel world, like in PepsiCo, the Gatorade brand, that is brand really focus on the world of sport and that kind of customer. In those worlds, the people who work in those companies reflect the values, the behaviors, even the look and feel of those customers and consumers.

In many other industries, they don’t, and they don’t need to, but they need something very important, and this is true for both industries: they need to care. They need to care for real. Once again, we call it “human centricity,” “people in love with people.” What does it mean? Look at the customers in front of you as you will look at your daughter or son, your children, your parents, your friends, people you care about. If you do that, the first thing you try to do is to put yourself in their shoes. We call it “empathy,” right? I mean, from the Greek “empathos,” you put yourself inside the pathos, the soul of these people. So, it starts with this care and that ability to really understand deeply what drives these individuals. So, you need to build that kind of culture inside the organization. 

Now, what are the biggest challenges? Often, companies talk about human centricity. Sometimes they use the word “consumer centricity” as an example, and they confuse these two approaches with what consumer insights function does. So, they start to collect a lot of data. Now we live in the world of data. We have really the ability to dissect the customer base with the capillarity, with the precision, with the focus that we never had before. That’s great. That’s great. But a lot of people think that consumer centricity, human centricity is just knowledge, insights, data about the people we serve, and that’s the problem. It’s not. It’s the beginning. You need that, but then you need to care. You may have a lot of information about your customers, but you’re like, “You know what? I don’t care. Our brand is so strong. It’s very profitable. We are the leader in the market,” and this is the biggest mistake you do often. When you are successful, you are paralyzed by the success, and you stop caring, observing and caring. And that observation and care push you to innovate even when you are successful, especially when you are successful because you have eventually more resources to do it with and you have less pressure. So, you need to care. 

Now, even that is not enough. You may understand what you need to do. You may care about this, but then as a leader in the organization, you may eventually not have the courage to act on it because innovating, changing, especially if things are working well, is risky. So, you need also that. This is what you must be intuitive about. Then finally, well, let’s say you have it all. You have the courage, you act, and then you screw up. You need two things. First, try not to screw up, so you need knowledge, skills. You need leaders with specific kind of skills that make the difference. Then the third thing is, if you do screw up — and you will screw up sooner or later — I mean, this is statistically certain, we will make mistakes in the future. I learned that in design school, in the study of ergonomics where when you design the cockpit of a plane, of a train, they take into account that there will be a human mistake for sure. There is no doubt. It’s going to happen sooner or later, so you have a series of backup systems to manage all of this. So, companies should understand that if you invest in change, transformation, innovation, you’re going to screw it up in multiple instances, and therefore you need a culture that protects the ability to make mistakes, that doesn’t crucify the people making these mistakes. They learn out of those mistakes. So, all of these create the right culture that is really human centric and is really in sync with the values of the customers and the consumers that we serve every day.

Weishaupl: I love this idea of failing of really figuring out how to fail gracefully, both at the organization and at the individual level because you’re absolutely right, that risk is going to have failure. It’s almost a given after a certain point in time, but how you recover, again, both as an organization and as a set of individuals who work together is absolutely massive.

Porcini: Now you learn out of it. I mean, failure has been celebrated by many platforms. I remember multiple articles in our business review just to mention one of many. Everybody understands by now that you need to fail here and there to succeed. I come from a science company. Many years ago, I used to work at 3M. Scientists know very well that to arrive to one innovation, one patent, they need to do thousands of experiments. What scientists call “experiments,” the business world calls “failures.” You need a company with the right culture, the right financial algorithm, the right organization to embrace experimentation. By the way, if we start to call them “experiments” instead of “failures” and we manage them in the right way internally, but also externally, when we face customers, shareholders, the media, then we’ll be able to build the culture that foster innovation in a much more powerful and effective way.

Weishaupl: That’s fantastic advice. I do want to shift to one area that you started to bring up around data. I guess one thing I’m curious about is, as data, and AI, and automation, and personalization and ever more kind of data-driven capabilities become more embedded, both in business operations and in customer interactions, how do you balance efficiency and scale that those technologies can provide with, to your point, that ongoing need for empathy and for human connection? How do you get those working together and not in tension? 

Porcini: Well, first of all, you used the keyword that is the most important one is “balance,” right? Let’s start remembering that these are just tools, so the key priority is that these tools are designed to serve us as humans, and they need to be used by humans. Whoever designs those tools, is in charge of those tools, needs to keep that in mind all the time — human centricity, how to frame those tools that are becoming more powerful than ever today, true purpose, true high-tech, true care for the people that they serve, how we design everything, to make sure that they stay at the service of the humans. 

I will divide, especially talking about AI and new technologies, the world in front of us in the coming decades in two phases. One is the transition phase, and the other one is where we land really, these technologies in full maturity. In transition, the role of humans in managing them is huge, is huge because you need critical thinking, you need the ability to interpret information, to build a prompt, to manage all these technologies in ways that are meaningful and relevant to all of us, to companies, to the customers, to the people out there in general. So, this balance is key. What we need to understand, though, in any profession that we have is that our roles will evolve. The way I’m designing today is going to be different than in 10 years. I remember, I studied in the ‘90s design and computers, softwares were arriving. A lot of people were like, “Oh, my God. I’m going to lose my job.” Well, you do lose your job if you don’t upgrade your skills. Typographers that were using the ink or people that were making mockups in a certain way, yes, that job is gone, but you doing that job, you can learn the new tools, and you can be as relevant as ever. 

So, the first thing is, embrace new technologies. As soon as AI started to show up or new technologies in general, instead of rejecting them, I pushed my entire organization to be the pioneers of the use of AI. Now, it’s not easy. We love to stay in our comfort zone. Newness, innovation, different things scare us, so a lot of people won’t do it. So, if you’re the CEO of a company, make sure that you build that kind of culture, make sure you find the right leaders that embody that idea of experimenting with new things so that the entire organization can follow. 

Now, this is true until AI will reach a level — AI robotics, a series of technologies — where they will be able to replace completely humans in their jobs. If they’re able to replace humans in society, that’s another issue that we don’t want to talk about today probably. Now, we shouldn’t be scared about this. It’s a dream. I mean, we invented tools in the prehistoric times because we needed them to be more efficient, more effective to protect ourselves and serve our needs in the best possible way. Imagine a future where we have machines that do our jobs. That’s amazing. Now, the innovation project, though, becomes a different one. We need to start today thinking, what is going to be the society of the future? If we’re going to lose many, many, many jobs around the world and people will be free to invest their time in something even more meaningful to them, something that drives their happiness — at the end of my book, I talked about three dimensions that drive happiness. One is investing in yourself, who you are, your identity. For sure, your job is important. What can you do beyond your job to define yourself so if you lose your job, you don’t lose yourself? Second is, investing in people close to you, your family, your loved ones, your close community, including, by the way, work, your close colleagues. Freeing up time, you will have more time for your family, for your friends, for all of this. Then the third dimension is doing something bigger than you, something that you can use to defeat death, to become immortal. Again, if you don’t have to work from morning to night every day, you will free up time for that. So, for our society, that’s great. We’re going to see the indexes of happiness in society rising. Actually, where countries where the highest level of business effectiveness, countries with that high level of business effectiveness, with index of happiness very, very low. So, AI can do the most human thing of all, giving us back part of the happiness that we lost over time. But to do that, the innovation project is to understand what is going to be the society of the future when there will be less jobs. And this is an innovation project for governments, also for companies, and then for any individual that wants to have a voice, a perspective, a point of view and share it with the world. We talk about social media a lot today. We have a platform. Anybody has a platform. So let’s start to think collectively how to redesign a society where machines will be at our service, and they will drive happiness.

Weishaupl: I look forward very much to that future. I guess to bring this full circle, one last question for you. If you could give one piece of advice to a business leader, what would you tell them to prioritize or cultivate in their teams to have the best chance of staying relevant and successful and ultimately innovative in the marketplace of 2025 and beyond?

Porcini: Well, first of all would be, focus on your teams. I mean, you mentioned it. That’s the frame of your question, but many business leaders don’t. I mean, yes, people, they have HR, they have values, they have leadership attributes, but they focus on other things. I think that the most important thing to focus on is people. Now, people are — not just the technical and their skills, but the soft skills today are more important than ever. In a world where it’s so difficult to be competitive, where you need extreme efficiency and effectiveness, you need to really understand in-depth what are the characteristics of these individuals so that you can nurture them in the best possible way. 

In my book, I talked about 24 different characteristics. We don’t have the time today to go through all of them, but I will mention a few. Some are more obvious in the world of entrepreneurship and innovation. For instance, the ability to dream. We’re all born with that ability. As kids, we dream, we fantasize, and then society tells us at a certain point that dreaming is not okay, it’s childish actually, but you keep dreaming. You go to school, you get out of school, you go to these companies, and you think that you can change the company, you can change the brand, you can change the industry until sooner or later a manager or multiple managers come to you and tell you, “Stop, stop. That’s so naïve. Actually, it’s even arrogant. Why do you think you can change anything? Nobody was able to do it before?” So, we start to think that dreaming is wrong, that is childish and naïve. Very few people maintain and preserve that ability to dream. They are the real innovators. 

Now, dreaming is not enough. You need to dream, but you need in parallel to be able to execute, to make things happen, and you need to do it fast. So, these three dimensions, dreaming, acting and doing it fast by prototyping, failing, learning, prototyping again is not common in organizations for a variety of different reasons that I’m sure the people listening to us today are very familiar with. Again, when you talk about innovation, entrepreneurship, these are values that are pretty much obvious. 

There are others that people don’t talk too much about — kindness, optimism, curiosity. These three in particular are being really, really important in my professional journey, the curiosity that pushes to learn, to see any interaction as a potential opportunity to grow. Curious people love to read, to travel, to interact with people, to interact especially with strangers, actually, to interact especially with people that are different from them. Curious people love diversity by definition because they know that in diverse people, in people different from them, because they have different political views, different colors of skin, different religious view, in that difference, there is the precious gift of knowledge. There is a perspective that is different than yours. My perspective, combined with your perspective is going to generate a third, original, innovative, new perspective that didn’t exist before, and that’s the real value. 

Curiosity, optimism. If you try to change a company, a brand, society, the world, you’re going to face roadblocks, difficulties all the time. You need people that have the kind of optimism inside, but then you can also amplify that. When you are in a very difficult moment, look back, and enjoy, and celebrate, and appreciate the progress, everything you came from, even the mistakes because you learn so much out of that. That will give you also the awareness that that difficult moment you are in actually a month is going to be a moment of growth. You’re going to learn out of it, and you’re going to project yourself towards the future. 

Now, the second thing you need to do, you need to have the dream because that dream will give you the excitement to go on and the resilience to overcome all kinds of roadblocks. Finally, kindness. We are told often the opposite. Kindness is a weakness, and you need to be tough and mean, a little bit of a jerk to succeed. That’s so wrong. Eventually, it worked better 10, 20 years ago, but in today’s society where you need to be hyper efficient, where competition is extreme, you need every part of the organization to really work in total sync, in full effectiveness, to build the company of the future and the solution for your customers of the future. Kind people drive trust. Often, we talk about trust in companies, but trust comes from people who really care. They are nice to each other. They are kind to each other. They love each other. So, kindness is the foundation of trust and is, at the end of the day, foundation of a new form of productivity. 

When we talk about productivity in these companies, we talk about laying off people, cutting resources, A&M and variety of different investments. We rarely talk about investing in productivity by amplifying the level of kindness and trust in the organization. For me and our design organization over the years across multiple companies, this has been really, really an incredible driver of growth and efficiency.

Weishaupl: Mauro, thank you so much. I could talk for hours but thank you so much for your time today. This has been really, really enlightening for me, and I hope our viewers enjoyed this conversation as well. I’m going to hand it back to you, Joe.

Kornik: Thanks, Alex and Mauro, and thank you for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview. On behalf of Alex and Mauro, I’m Joe Kornik. We’ll see you next time.