CHAPTER 11

INSPIRED BY UNEXPECTED MENTORS

Up to this point, we have spoken about people in two particular roles: first, as objects of the innovation process and, second, as drivers of that process—the unicorns. There is, however, a third category of people who have another, fundamental role in the life of any unicorn. It’s a democratic role that any individual can decide to take on in daily interactions with other people. And it’s role that you can decide to assign to someone in your orbit. It’s a formative role that can exponentially amplify the number of unicorns in your organization and in the world. And it’s an extremely important role, because it has incredible potential for increasing the levels of knowledge, inspiration, and success of every unicorn on the planet. I’m talking about the role of the mentors.

The Ideal Metamentor

Personally, I’ve never had an official mentor. And yet, throughout my life, I’ve had dozens of prodigious mentors, although they were often unaware that they were performing this function for me. Some of them have been bosses, others have been friends and loved ones; some have been colleagues, others far-off figures, both in space and time. What I’ve always done—first unconsciously and then in an increasingly strategic way—is to identify the superpowers of particularly inspiring people and absorb their essence in every possible way, through watching them, listening to them, studying them, reading them, and talking to them, when feasible. For example, if someone was particularly strong in navigating corporate politics, I’d try to understand the person’s strategies and behaviors—whether indirectly or through direct questions and discussion. If another person proved to be brilliant in the world of communication and storytelling, I would do the same with that individual. If another was a charismatic leader, that person would become my mentor in this aspect of my life. If yet another was an extraordinary graphic designer and typography expert, I would transform the person into my mentor in that dimension.

The synthesis of these exceptional qualities made these mentors into my supreme mentor, the metamentor, the ideal mentor, one to whom I could try to aspire. The great difference between a perfect, entirely fantastical mentor and the metamentor is that the latter—even if still a chimera—represents a figure nevertheless composed of aspects of real people who are approachable and available, to whom you can reach out, with whom you can interact in a concrete way in the world in which we actually live and work.

Many of the mentors who contribute to defining my personal meta-mentor are individuals I have met along the way, friends and acquaintances who are unknown to the masses of people. Other mentors, however, are very well known, because along my path I have had the privilege and pleasure to befriend some people who have made great achievements in their lives, redesigning their industries with extraordinary success, making history in different and unique ways, and consequently earning visibility and fame.

From Stefan Sagmeister to Karim Rashid, from Michel Rojkind to Bjarke Ingels, from Tiësto to Kanye West, from Indra Nooyi to Ramon Laguarta, from Silvio Scaglia to Laxman Narasimhan, from Jenke Ahmed Tailly to Paola Antonelli, from Francesco Carrozzini to Fabio Novembre, from Stefano Domenicali to Anjula Acharia, from Fabio Volo to Jovanotti, from Benny Benassi to Joe Gebbia, from Davide Oldani to Franca Sozzani, from Marco Mazzoli to Denis Dekovic, from Stefano Giovannoni to Job Smeets—all these people, in their own ways, have inspired me over the years as a creative, as an innovator, as an entrepreneur. These individuals, together with a series of other, less widely known people, have become integral parts of my personal metamentor.

They are people with whom I interact and I converse, who have left something deep within my spirit. Some of them are the humblest persons I know, some are the kindest; some are extreme experimenters, some are incredibly generous; some have found the perfect balance between art and business, some are profound critical thinkers; some are wonderfully curious, some are uniquely optimistic. Collectively, the people that compose my metamentor embody every single skill of the unicorns.

Now imagine someone who has all of these characteristics—all of these gifts developed to the extreme in one single human being. It would be very difficult, probably impossible, to find such a person. But it’s much more likely that you might find some of these single gifts in people close to you, in the friends and acquaintances who surround you. Anyone around you might have one or more of these traits, with peaks of individual excellence. It’s enough just to open your eyes, focus your heart, and prepare your mind, and you’ll begin to find them.

Look for these superpowers in the people you interact with every day, or in others with whom you come into contact over the span of your life, identify them, become aware of the luminous glow that surrounds these people, and absorb their positive energy. The union of all these figures creates what I call the ideal metamentor. These people don’t realize it, but I constantly study them. I watch them and absorb and learn from them; I am inspired by them. I have identified at least one characteristic in each of them that is developed to the extreme and that has become my reference point for that gift, a kind of constant point of comparison to measure myself by. In my dialogue with each of these people, my questions and their answers have become acts of constant mentoring.

The Mentor by Osmosis

With their unique gifts, the people that compose the metamentors inspire us from a distance; proximity, physical or emotional, makes the dialogue possible, but we don’t have the privilege of an intense and daily interaction with each one of them. There are other individuals instead with whom we have the opportunity to spend much more time. Usually these are family members, close friends, or coworkers. With them, we have daily exchanges and deeper connections. With their thinking and behaviors, they can inspire us organically, constantly, permeating our souls day after day, without even realizing it. Sometimes these people evolve into traditional mentors, taking on a formal role. Other times they become what I love to call mentors by osmosis.

My first mentors by osmosis, without any doubt, were my parents. And the same is probably true for everyone, albeit in different ways. My mom and dad taught me the essential values of culture and kindness. And they inspired me with their creativity, applied to the world of art and writing. The gods of money and success weren’t icons for my parents. They neither celebrated nor denigrated wealth and fame; my parents simply didn’t take these into account. Perhaps my parents feared the pursuit of money and success, somehow seeing in it a potential threat to their sons. In my parents’ minds, wealth and fame came with a risk—the risk of losing your moral compass. My parents have been my mentors by osmosis through their behavior, their convictions, and their passions, but without ever applying any pressure, simply by handing down lessons from their own lived experiences.

My wife, Carlotta, is another mentor of these pure, traditional, and traditionalist values. Held by our grandparents and in eras long past, these values are difficult to find today and represent a breath of fresh air and an anchor in the storms of my life.

My brother, Stefano, reminds me every day about the importance of humility and creativity. His is the humility of an extraordinary designer, among the most extraordinary I have ever met, who never stops being grateful for the universe of possibilities in creation, experimentation, and invention, always combining agility, pragmatism, and fantasy.

But in the context of this book, one of the most important mentors by osmosis that I ever had in the world of innovation was the great Claudio Cecchetto. I want to pause a moment to talk about Claudio because of his deep meaning in my life. Let me take you by the hand as we take a journey into my past—one that I hope will help you to better understand the importance of this kind of person, the impact such individuals’ teachings can have on you, and the conditions necessary for those teachings to take root.

A Turning Point

Claudio Cecchetto is an Italian celebrity: a DJ, a singer, a producer, the founder and creator of two extremely famous radio channels (Radio Deejay and Radio Capital), a presenter of TV festivals, and a discoverer and producer of an infinite list of stars—TV and radio hosts, singers and musicians.

I met him in the iconic year of 2000, at a turning point for me—I was fresh out of university with dreams in my pocket and atomic energy in my heart, in transition between the worlds of study and work. One day, a day like any other, I got an unexpected call from my friend Filippo. A former colleague of his was working as Claudio’s assistant, and she could organize a meeting for us.

As enthusiastic twenty-somethings, we could have gone to this meeting with the simple idea of getting an autograph and sharing a drink with a star, someone until then we would only ever have seen on our TV screens. Many people probably would have done just that. But instead, we decided to do something different. We were going to propose a project to him. Filippo was an engineer. We decided to bring on board two more friends, designers as well, to cover all the different skills necessary for our project.

Claudio was investing in the digital world at that time—he’s always been a pioneer—and had just created a partnership with Renato Soru, the founder and owner of Tiscali, which back then was one of the most important internet providers in Europe. We were young and very skilled in the most advanced software for 3D modeling and digital design. We went to Claudio’s dream home on Via Meda, in Milan, with an idea that was simple and powerful for those times: applying 3D modeling to web navigation, changing completely the user experience on Claudio’s websites. And we shared that idea through a presentation that spoke for itself, full of renderings and animations.

I remember entering the main hall in his house: there was a huge screen that covered the central wall, flanked by two towering speakers, while a long glass table took up most of the space in the room. Claudio was seated at the center, and we spread ourselves out around him: four young men at the court of the king of Italian entertainment. But Claudio, an experienced and brilliant talent scout, didn’t see just four young men; he didn’t make a snap judgment about us four youngsters without experience or look down on us with that cultural snobbery that so many successful people have. Instead he viewed us with the curiosity of the innovator, with the intelligent eye of the explorer.

Claudio had a unique awareness of the magic role of talented people, those human beings who roam free in the prairies of society, people who are invisible to the majority until the moment that an enlightened individual uncovers them, identifies their superpowers, and then gives them the platform to express themselves, transforming them into a precious resource—including for their discoverer. That day, Claudio didn’t just look at the project that we were presenting to him—the project itself, probably, interested him very little. Instead, he saw four young individuals full of enthusiasm, rich in ideas, able to utilize the most advanced tools of this new digital world that he was beginning to explore.

As Aristotle would have said, Claudio saw potentiality, which he could transform into actuality. Claudio wasn’t interested in finding the action—he was on the hunt for potential.

Claudio was an actualizer of potential: this has been his whole life, the foundation on which he has built his fortune. First by working on himself, and then by working with a whole set of people who have had a positive collision with his sphere of influence. And so—as he had probably done over the course of his life for many individuals whom he has found and launched—he asked us a question and made us a proposal. The question was simple: “What do you do?” Stefano and I were working at Philips Design; Filippo was working in a health care company; Mariano was a consultant. We told him instead that we were about to start a studio together. I don’t remember who said those words, but I imagine that none of us was surprised by them: it was a dream that probably leaped out of all of our hearts, even if we still hadn’t formalized it through a proper discussion. Claudio’s reply was even simpler, quick and intentional. But this time it had the flavor of something incredible, at least for us four young men: “Let’s make this studio together.”

A month later we signed a contract that saw the birth of Wisemad, our agency with Claudio Cecchetto, in a dream house with a swimming pool, a garden, and a music studio right in the heart of Milan. I remember my boundless enthusiasm when I went home to tell my family. It was a complete dream for four kids from an Italian suburb. The business lasted only a couple of years, the length of time we were able to support ourselves financially without big investors behind us. We were flying prematurely in the completely unstable universe of the internet in its pioneering phase. We were cowboys in the Wild West, with horses, a wagon, and few provisions, out to explore the immense prairies of the digital world. These were the years of the big storms and tornadoes on those lonely prairies. It was too soon—far too soon for most people.

Nevertheless, those couple of years represented for me an exceptional schooling in life and business, and Claudio became one of the most important mentors I have ever met. Without those years, I wouldn’t be where I am today. One lesson in particular became a mantra of my existence from that time on. As young men from the suburbs, out to discover the world, my friends and I were more than satisfied with the opportunity to work with a bunch of celebrities—indeed, we were in seventh heaven. From the digital content for an album by the pop group 883 to the design of Jovanotti’s website, the projects were stimulating, fun, prestigious, and exciting.

But for Claudio, the projects weren’t any of these things. Claudio saw these jobs simply as services necessary to generate revenue that would allow us to do something else—something that could be truly stimulating, fun, prestigious, and exciting for him, too. For Claudio, those jobs weren’t the dream that we thought they were; they were simply financial enablers of another, much bigger, more ambitious dream. We met him every day in that office house. Every day we worked, interacted, and dreamed with him; and every day, in one way or another, he repeated the same thing over and again: “We need to create something that no one else has done before. I don’t want Wisemad to just offer design services. I don’t care about that. Wisemad needs to generate new ideas that can change the world!”

Someone could easily have interpreted his behavior as a delusion of grandeur and could simply have continued to enjoy the satisfaction of the existing projects. I saw the light instead. Claudio’s way of thinking and acting opened up a new world for me. And the door to that world would never close again. Without once using the word “innovation”—not even accidentally, not even in passing, not on a single day during those two years—Claudio was teaching me the purest essence of innovation. He was acting as a model and influence in a way that only rarely has anyone else been able to replicate over the course of my life.

He did so through his behavior, his way of thinking, his way of working—by osmosis, a process of transfer through exposure and contact. Claudio had caught the innovation bug; he was obsessed by innovation, and this was—and still remains—one of his most beautiful traits. From big projects to small daily activities, he always thought about how to do things in a way that was different—different from how it was done in the past and from how others would think to do it in the present. As soon as he built something, he thought about the next step. It was a constant tension. He always lived in the mood of a “Saturday evening in a village,” to use once again the words of the great Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi.¹⁶ Claudio enjoyed the preparations for the Sunday feast more than the feast itself. The journey of innovation excited and stimulated him; it was his raison d’être. He hadn’t been designed by God to manage the results of his innovation, to extract efficiency from the systems that he created. He had been created to continue to create, to constantly live in that Saturday of construction, always heading for a new Sunday. When Sunday arrived, he had already started to think about next week, next Saturday, and next Sunday.

Innovation Is a Mindset

One of the most important concepts that I learned from Claudio is that innovation is first and foremost a mindset. Before innovation takes the form of a strategy, a project, or a process, it’s something that you have in your mind, a way of reasoning and acting that becomes part of your DNA. You just do it, in every moment of your existence, in the personal day-to-day as much as in your professional life—and the surprising discovery is that the simple effort of asking yourself to think in a different way doesn’t require more energy than doing what everyone else is doing. It requires only a different way of looking at things.

Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve listened to experts talk about innovation in an erudite and sophisticated way; I’ve read dozens upon dozens of books on the topic, full of ideas and tools; I’ve collaborated with consultants who were paid millions and were able to hold forth about strategies and processes better than anyone. But the problem with a great many of these experts and theorists—along with their carefully tailored language and quick wordsmithery—is that very few of them have ever actually innovated in their lives; very few of them had innovation in their blood, in their guts, in their eyes, in their bones. They spoke about innovation, but they didn’t actually do it. And when they tried to, they often failed. Over the years, I’ve become terribly allergic to these nonpracticing orators: people who speak about things without having done very much at all, who hide behind processes, frameworks, numbers, and statistics—and then grind to a halt when they have to actually innovate on a daily basis.

Claudio innovated; he didn’t talk about innovation. Let’s be clear: I think the ability to know how to articulate the value, theory, and praxis of innovation is an extremely important gift, especially in the world of big corporations, because it provides an essential tool for the innovator to communicate with potential partners, sponsors, and investors and to unlock their partnership, sponsorship, and investments. And this ability is fundamental. But these gifts have to be matched by the ability to actually innovate, through instinct and vision, practice and experience, intuition and sensitivity, and amplified through experimentation and learning. Too often, I’ve seen instead the deflationary force of this superficial oratory, lacking any substance but nevertheless putting entire organizations on the wrong track with their business strategies and innovation processes.

Over the years with Claudio, we worked on a great number of unique and interesting projects. One of the most significant was probably Energybank, a virtual bank with its own currency—digital but real—that could be used on the internet. Energybank represented a first intuition about what today we call cryptocurrency, which would be truly invented only some years later. And then there was the power and potential of e-commerce—think of PayPal, Apple Pay, and similar platforms to facilitate online shopping. We were in the year 2000. It was too soon. Innovation is made of good ideas but also good timing. Ideas can’t be launched too soon or too late. Sometimes, timing can be managed by anticipating or slowing down the launch of a given idea. But if the anticipation is by a decade or decades, then there’s little to be done. It was definitely the right idea, but the moment was all wrong.

With Claudio I dreamed, experimented, and grew. I accumulated a lot of practical knowledge. I learned new tools to design websites, to do animation graphics, to code, and to model in 3D. These were all useful technical skills in that moment, but they are of little use over time if you don’t keep practicing them, because the newest software and technologies keep on evolving and mutating at light speed. We should never limit ourselves to learning how to use just one instrument; we need to learn instead the mindset and method for learning that instrument. This is the most precious gift we can give to ourselves: the gift of employability, which is the ability to learn in a constant fashion and to transform ourselves in a flexible way, continually repositioning ourselves in the job market as an important asset, whatever our specific technical experience might be.

In those years I also diversified my experience as a product designer, experimenting in the fields of the internet and digital technologies, learning their cultures, their vernacular and grammar. And in the meantime I was advancing my own projects in wearable technologies, which I had developed for my thesis at the university Politecnico of Milan, in collaboration with fashion brands and tech companies. I collided with the worlds of entertainment, music, and celebrities—which all turned out to be of great use over time. All of these were extremely precious experiences for my journey toward becoming a holistic designer, and I faced them with enthusiasm and an open mind.

But yet again, the greatest gift that Claudio Cecchetto gave me in those years was much bigger than all of this. Claudio taught me to think as an innovator. And since then, every time that a new initiative gets going, someone gives me a new task, or I decide to do something, I always ask myself the same question: “What can I do that no one has ever done before?” Whether it’s a small graphic design project or a breakthrough innovation program, I always ask myself how I can produce something extraordinary that people don’t expect. And by “people,” I mean both the end users and customers and also my superiors, the investors, the sponsors, the media, the world out there, and anyone else around me. This practice also applies to my private life.

This is what Claudio taught me by drawing out, through a maieutic process, something that was already there within me but that I had kept dormant, allowing it to emerge only randomly and occasionally. Claudio, as an unconscious mentor, gave consciousness to his unconscious disciple Mauro. From out of the raw material in front of him, Claudio extracted the mindset of Mauro the innovator. Once extracted, it has remained with me ever since.

The Virtual Mentor

Some years before meeting Claudio, I came across another person who has been essential for my personal growth—another individual who has been a mentor, but in a very different way from Cecchetto. I want to tell you about this man, about his role and his impact on my life. Give me your hand once more, sit comfortably, and—just as you did with Claudio—follow along with me on another intimate dive into my past. This man’s name is Stefano Marzano.

I met him in the summer of 1995. I was twenty years old, and that day I was on a bus, stopped in front of the Pontiggia bookshop in the center of Varese, before setting off again on the route toward the neighborhood of Bustecche, where I lived. A few minutes earlier, I had received a call from Valentina, a friend from back in high school. Valentina knew that I had just begun to study design at Politecnico university and a few months before had told me, by the by, that her father knew a well-known designer who was working on some very interesting projects in the consumer electronic business. She was talking about Stefano Marzano.

I came across the “legend” of Stefano at school: he was the global head of design for Philips, the renowned Dutch company based out of Eindhoven. Even though I had never met him personally, I knew his work very well. His projects were shared with us by our professors, who presented them as tangible demonstrations of strategic enlightenment and praised his innovative approach. Stefano himself was presented as an exemplary kind of creative leader, one able to wed large-scale business with the most visionary and humanist kind of design, composed of empathy and emotions. During those years, Stefano was a reference point for many designers, a kind of celebrity in our world—a figure who inspired, whose example you could aspire to follow.

When Valentina told me that she knew him, my eyes popped out of my head. I explained to her what he meant for us designers, and her eyes lit up, too. Until that moment, she had only thought of him as of any other interesting family friend; now she was seeing him in a completely different way. It’s fascinating how the perspective of another person can mix into our own to create a third, completely unexpected perspective, which ends up enriching us and providing new ideas. Yet again, you can see the power of diversity of thought in action.

Valentina left me that day with the promise that she would introduce me to Stefano at the first opportunity, when he came back to Italy from Holland and would pass by the family’s home. That day finally came in June. I was on the E line bus just as on any other morning, my hand on the railing and my head in the sky, when Valentina called me to keep her promise. “Mauro, Stefano Marzano’s coming round for lunch! Why don’t you come by for a coffee afterward so you can meet him?”

I stared at my Motorola MicroTAC cell phone, which I still have today along with other souvenirs of that era, and I couldn’t believe my ears. I had the chance to meet the legendary Marzano, the global head of Philips Design.

But it was a complicated day: in the afternoon I had training with the soccer team, and anyone who has ever played soccer at that level knows that training is sacred. You never miss training. I had to pass by my house to eat, and I was already on my way. But besides these other plans, something else contributed to making this meeting somehow difficult. It was much easier to simply stay on the bus, with the excuse that I couldn’t accept the invitation due to my soccer training, rather than getting off the bus and going to meet a grown-up I didn’t know, in the intimacy of a home belonging to other grown-ups I didn’t know.

I would need to leave my comfort zone. I was twenty years old and, just as many people my age would have been, I was intimidated by this successful figure whom I’d seen on recorded interviews so many times and whom I’d read about in books and articles. What could I say to him? What would he ask me? I had just begun to study design, and he was twenty-five years older than me. Twenty-five years of experience, projects, and life! Up until then, the majority of my private and social conversations with strangers had been with people of my own age. I was at ease with them. I was even confident, most of the time. But this was an adult and a stranger, surrounded by other adults and strangers: What could I tell him? Would I seem stupid? Would I simply show myself up for not having interesting content? I could feel my anxiety. I was experiencing all of those emotions that usually we don’t even consciously notice, that fly quietly through our minds, under the radar of conscious thought, and that then make us find understandable excuses to avoid putting ourselves at risk. For many people, this is a constant—a devilish, immaterial constant that forces us to miss an infinite number of opportunities.

Audentes fortuna juvat, as my Latin forefathers put it: “Fortune favors the bold.” I have always found this a saying full of truth. It doesn’t simply and optimistically mean that if we’re more fearless, then we will have more luck, like a sort of divine intervention. I like thinking that the wisdom of this saying resides in the purely statistical fact that if you take a risk and you do so often and intentionally, then sooner or later things will go well. It’s the science of probability. Instead, if you spend your time dreaming and planning better futures but then never trying, never throwing yourself out there with bravery, over and over again, then luck will never have a chance to help you out. If we try and try often enough, luck has more of a chance to meet us halfway. Statistically speaking, our likelihood of being helped by fate will increase. Or better still: the probability increases that our talent—made of courage, intelligence, and creativity—will meet with the right people, in the right place, at the right time, so that the magic can happen.

Fortune favors the bold: I put my Motorola MicroTAC to my ear and told Valentina: “Perfect, I’ve got nothing going on. I’m coming right away!” I got off the bus and looked for the right way to get to her family’s house. And I realized that the best way was probably by foot. To get there on time, I skipped lunch. I walked; I ran. I was happy. I got to the house about an hour later with an empty stomach—but a stomach full of butterflies! I could feel the adrenaline in my limbs, which were sweating with summer heat and emotions. I hugged Valentina, shook hands with her parents—whom I was meeting for the first time—and finally I shook Stefano’s hand. Her parents offered me a coffee that formally justified my presence in their home, and then I began the conversation. A conversation about which I now remember almost nothing.

What has remained impressed on my mind very clearly, instead, is Stefano’s emotional profile, at least as I perceived it in those couple of hours together. I recall his enthusiasm for the world of design, an almost boyish enthusiasm, very similar to what I was used to at home, which I had seen in my father when he painted and in my mom when she wrote. The little I remember of our conversation was when we spoke about the cell phones that Philips had started developing, and how the company was coming up with innovative features including new and unexpected ringtones. In those years, Philips was producing and selling mobile phones, along with hundreds of other products in the consumer electronics business. All the ringtones on the market until then had been a monotone, just like the sounds people were used to hearing from their home phones. Stefano was experimenting with music instead: he whipped out his own cell phone and had me listen to the prototype. It was amazing—or, in the Italian expression I used with my friends that evening, “Che figata!”—so cool. Stefano was probably thinking the same thing about his project, given the pride with which he was sharing it. I could feel his positivity, his passion and farsightedness.

The meeting was extraordinarily inspiring. I had gotten up close to his humanist creativity, and I had felt for the first time where that kind of creativity could take someone like Stefano. I could see a link between his spirit and his results. Up until then, I had seen the successes and results of that renowned person only from afar; that day, I actually shared the physical presence of his soul and drive. So I began to follow him more closely. I didn’t miss an article, I never skipped an interview, and whenever he was in Milan for one of his open talks, I was systematically present. But I went further than this: fresh from studying philosophy, I was fascinated by the exchange of letters between well-known scholars and their young disciples, between mentors and students. It was through those letters that they exchanged theories, deciphered reality, and imagined better worlds. It’s through those correspondences that we know much of what we know about their thought. And so, just as the philosophers once did, I picked up pen and paper and began to write: a correspondence between designers! In truth, I didn’t really expect a reply; maybe I hoped for one, but my spirit as a philosopher-designer was entirely satisfied with the possibility of writing about design, innovation, and society to someone of this caliber. If I remember well, I sent two or three letters over a couple of years—no more. And as I expected, I never received a specific reply to any of them.

At a certain point, though, Stefano decided to give me something with a much richer meaning in return, which had a very important impact on my life. On September 6, 1996, he sent me two books published by Philips, created and produced by him and his team. One was called Vision of the Future and the other New Objects, New Media, Old Walls. In these books, Stefano—along with a hybrid team of designers, sociologists, and scientists—imagined and defined the future of technology, with ideas and concepts that twenty years later have become many of the products and services we are all used to today: from the iPad to the cloud; from dematerialized music, free of any physical support (CD, cassette, or vinyl), to wireless charging stations for any of our electronic devices; from video calls to virtual reality eyewear. In those pages, you can find the design seeds for hundreds of physical objects and immaterial solutions that today surround our whole existence. I adored those books; they bewitched and inspired me, and they made me appreciate more than ever the “profession” of design and the ability of designers to imagine and conceptualize the future. Fundamentally, the books made me fall in love with what many people today call innovation and what we designers have always called design. Those were the years in which I understood that I wanted to practice this kind of design for the rest of my life—design that innovates.

Stefano’s gift had another fundamental role in my life. In the first pages of one of the two books, he wrote me a dedication: “I’m also sending you this ‘project document,’ one of the few bilingual ones, so that you can get English under your belt.” And then, in the following pages, he wrote: “PS Mauro, the text in Italian is full of printing errors!! (I’m driving some of the Dutch guys crazy), but the text in English ISN’T. Practice reading both.” Stefano was pushing me to learn English with those books. Back then, I didn’t speak a single word of this language. I was one of those few Italians who was still “forced” to study French in school. In those years, there were still many French teachers in the Italian system, and even if English was quickly becoming the indispensable language of the new global world, many Italian schools still offered foreign language instruction in French. At the age of ten I had, quite accidentally, been put into one of those classes. And I had never had any other choice. When, years later, I met Stefano Marzano and told him that one day I would like to work with him, he asked me quite rightly if I spoke English. When I told him that I didn’t, he told me that to work on his team at Philips I would have to learn it. And at that point I understood that the English language would be not only the key to entering Philips but also the basic variable to reach the results and impact that Stefano had reached, in whatever company I worked.

It’s Never Too Late—Even When It Seems Too Late

Learning English wasn’t easy, though. I had a very full life already: I was going to university every weekday in Milan, with around four hours of commuting in total from Varese and back; and then there was soccer training four evenings a week, with games on Sundays—often away games—and the summer training camp. And then, of course, I had a social life as well. I didn’t have a spare moment for studying English or for practicing it correctly, above all in a town such as Varese, where there weren’t many foreigners. And then there was the fact that I was already over twenty years old; I was ten years behind in comparison with the majority of my peer group, who had begun studying English at school and by then already spoke it fluently, or at least in a way that sounded fluent to my inexpert ears. I felt it was especially too late to learn the language to the level necessary to use it in the professional world.

Back then, social media still didn’t exist, the internet was still little known, and the pressure to learn a language that allowed you to speak with the borderless, globalized world of the web was relatively low; there was still the perception that anyone could start a brilliant career in Italy, in any industry, without necessarily needing to learn the English language. Or at least, this was the perception of people such as my family and me, who had not traveled extensively nor had an international network of friends and colleagues. But Stefano’s words pushed me to persevere; they gave me the inspiration, energy, and drive that I had lacked until then. I wanted to be able to dream as Stefano did at Philips. I wanted to be able to advance similar projects, on that scale, of that magnitude, with that level of global impact. English was an essential tool for reaching this dream.

It was thus that I decided to turn down an Erasmus fund scholarship to study in Paris for a year. I waited another twelve months and reapplied to obtain a new grant for an English-speaking country. It was a risk: I was losing a scholarship for a wonderful experience abroad, in France, and there was no certainty of receiving the funding again to study in another country. There were very few places available. But I tried, nevertheless. And this was how I received the opportunity to go to Dublin. In December 1997, I left Italy for Ireland. And with Italy, I left not only my family and friends, but I abandoned the opportunity to stay with someone for whom I had very strong feelings in those years, as well as the chance to complete the soccer season in a superior category, in a new team I had signed with just that summer. In other words, that move wasn’t a simple one. It implied material and emotional sacrifices. And to make it even more complicated, I was going to Dublin not to study English but to study design. And I had to do so in a language that I didn’t know at all! I couldn’t financially afford to lose a year of university to go and study a new language. A more intense and effective method was simply to combine learning the language with my design studies; within six months, I would need to have mastered English well enough to pass the university-level exams. Good luck!

In brief, it wasn’t a simple decision, whatever way you looked at it. I couldn’t have launched myself further out of my comfort zone.

But today, I know that that was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. The year in Dublin was extraordinary in every way. I have shivers down my spine while I write about it. First of all, I learned English to a level that in the following years even allowed me to become an executive in multinational corporations headquartered in the United States. Beyond that, the city gave me the first taste of life beyond Italy, and this was a unique opportunity for observing my own country—and thus my whole existence in that country as well—from a completely different perspective, appreciating both its infinite worth and also noting its weaknesses. This changed my way of thinking for the rest of my life.

I was twenty-three when I left Italy. It seemed too late to learn English, too difficult to leave behind some passions and ties; but I decided to throw myself in, to try, to experiment. And it was the right choice. Without that decision, I wouldn’t have accomplished what I have today—something that has given me such deep satisfaction and, in the end, such intense happiness. Never say never: it’s never too late! This is what I’ve come to realize; this is my personal mantra. And I never stop repeating it—especially to people who at a certain moment in their lives find themselves faced with a hurdle that seems too high to be overcome, and so they decide not to even try.

When I was faced with the wall of having to learn another language, it was certainly not easy to see over the top. I needed the help of someone else, someone who ran free on the other side, to understand the world of opportunities that was just beyond the horizon, shielded from my view by these virtual bricks. I needed another human being to push me to find the right stimulus to climb that wall and conquer it. And that’s what I did—I climbed, I conquered, and when I got to the top I saw that the world extending out in front of me was much more vast, beautiful, and spectacular than I could ever have imagined.

I didn’t just discover English in those years; I discovered the uniqueness of Italy, as seen from abroad, and at the same time the magic of Ireland, the extraordinary beauty of a place so different from my own country. I discovered new aspects of the supreme virtue of diversity in my small university class made up of students of dozens of different nationalities, and I discovered my ability to go it alone, to support myself far from my family, cleaning dishes in the college’s cafeteria, the only job I could find before learning the language. I tasted the hardship of being less popular than others in my peer group; “exotic” Mauro was good for a few hours but then became tiring, because the Irish students couldn’t easily communicate with this foreigner who couldn’t speak, couldn’t joke, couldn’t entertain or be entertained. This continued until a few months had passed, when I began to express myself correctly and became less exotic in the eyes of my new Irish friends—and more enjoyable to hang out with.

Magic Occurrences: A Successful Leader Gives Back

Stefano Marzano gave me this chance, probably without even realizing it. I’ve often thought over the years about what would have happened if Stefano hadn’t sent me those books. This act of his cast two spells.

First of all, a very busy and successful leader, who knew me by chance, decided to invest the time to get the books, think about a note to write, write it, find my address, and send the books from Holland to a young man in Italy. Was this a huge effort? No, not really. Would many other people have done it? No, probably not. And usually they don’t. The small effort of a big man had a huge impact on the life of that young student. To be quite clear: Stefano didn’t really know me; at that point we’d met only once, and he’d received a couple of my letters. He owed me nothing. I wasn’t from a well-off family, and I did not have the kinds of connections that were relevant to him. He had no aim or personal interest in sending me those books with the dedication. It was an act of simple kindness. I had had coffee with that man a year earlier, and that meeting had transformed him into my mentor, without him knowing, simply because I followed him, studied him, and admired his work from afar.

Magic Occurrences: A Young Man Searches for Inspiration

The second magical spell in this story of my encounter with Stefano was that a young man of twenty put in the effort to find an inspirational model and made the decision to select him as a virtual mentor. I say “virtual” because Stefano wasn’t physically near to me; he wasn’t my boss, a colleague, a teacher—he wasn’t even a friend. I simply began, proactively, to follow him through conferences, publications, and interviews, studying him and learning from a distance. What made him different from a role model was that I had had some interactions with Stefano. He knew he had a fan in Italy somewhere, but he didn’t need to do anything else. He was leading design in a Dutch corporation, and I was simply a young man who had begun my journey in a faraway Italian university.

In those years, I learned so much from him—silently, respectfully, observing the results of his work, the many projects, the impact of his leadership on the company, the encounters and stories of many people who worked directly with him, his words in books and discussions. At the end of my studies, four years after I met him for the first time, Stefano offered me a job at Philips Design in Milan. It was the official beginning of my professional career. I spent only a year at the company, but it was a short period of important learning. A few months later, I met Claudio Cecchetto. And at that point I was ready to fly. I spread my wings and took off. And the rest is history.

Find Your Mentors—There Are No Excuses

When I hear people complain that they haven’t had contact with mentors of a certain caliber, perhaps because they live in remote places or haven’t had a chance to build the right connections, I always tell them my theory about three kinds of mentor: the ideal metamentor, the mentor by osmosis, and the virtual mentor.

Focus on a unique and extraordinary feature of an individual who is near to you; do the same with another person, then another, still another, until you manage to form your ideal metamentor. Ask these people questions, establish a dialogue, make them inspire you.

Sometimes in your life, you’ll come across someone particularly special; statistically there’s a high chance that sooner or later this will happen. When it does, however, you need to be ready, with all of your receptors open, antennae raised, prepared to embrace teachings and inspiration that otherwise might be invisible. You have to be a student for life! Look for your Claudio Cecchetto, and absorb that person’s energy. Make the person your mentor by osmosis.

And finally, today more than ever before, through the internet, we have access to an infinite stock of potential virtual mentors, often with a direct daily connection to them through their social media platforms. We can observe them in their professional lives and often in their private ones, too. We can study them, and sometimes we can even ask them questions. It’s up to us to choose who are the right people to select as our sources of inspiration. It’s up to us to find a Stefano Marzano. If that person then interacts with us, even if only sporadically, then the person begins to become a mentor, with a more or less active role in our existence.

But even if that person has no way of interacting with us, if we pose a whole set of questions and try to respond, inspired by the contents of the person’s mind and experience as shared in books and interviews, articles and talks, then we at least have the opportunity to transform this individual into a role model, benefiting indirectly from the person’s wisdom. Over the past three decades, I have chosen role models among a range of figures: Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Leonardo da Vinci, Blaise Pascal, Nietzsche, Andy Warhol, Steve Jobs. And sometimes I have almost transformed them into metamentors—a little fantasy doesn’t hurt! With a pinch of imagination, I ask them questions and receive answers. What would Andy do in this moment? How would Steve reply to this email? How would Blaise react to this problem? The replies that I give myself are based on their principles, their philosophies, their approaches to life.

Whatever you want to call them, identifying figures who can inspire us, even when they can’t give us replies or meet with us, is a precious art. Over the years I’ve tried to transform some of these individuals into sources of inspiration for my team. I did so with Steve Jobs, for example. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs is one of the most stimulating books that I’ve ever read. I bought a hundred copies a few years ago and gave one to every designer on my team at PepsiCo, hoping that in reading it, they would find the same drive, energy, and excitement that I had felt when I finished the hundreds of pages in that tome. I felt a mix of emotions that is difficult to describe: I closed the book, got up from the couch, and was ready to change the world!

If, instead, you are a successful leader and coming into contact with people inspired by you or simply interested in learning from your experience, don’t be miserly: share with generosity, listen, offer something in return, give back a little of that inspiration that you’ve received, a little of the luck that was given to you. A book dedication changed my life. That’s enough. And today, in the world of social media, this is all simpler than ever before. A well-considered reply to a question received over social media can have a deep impact on the existence of another human being if that person is open to receiving it and appreciates both the act and the message. It doesn’t cost you anything, but it can mean everything to another person. This is what happened to me twenty years ago, and since then I’ve always borne it in mind, every day of my life.