Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
Interviewer: Ekrem Dupanović
Translated in English by: Johannah Maurer
This is the continuation of an interview with Miša Lukić, the CEO of New Startegy. The first part was published yesterday and can be accessed here: PART 1
Media Marketing: You brought a lot of experience in the communications industry into New Startegy. Has anything managed to surprise you at work? And what has happened exactly as you expected?
Miša Lukić: The thing that has surprised me most is that many companies, even in developed markets, still consider innovation a necessary evil, a sort of distraction from existing business, and not a major opportunity to tackle major business challenges and bring transformative positive change to how they work. It surprised me there are still so many companies that view innovation as a luxury or an attractive PR activity for shareholders and clients, or sometimes even as team building for employees. Luckily, this is changing by the day and things are a lot better than they were two years ago when we first started.
What has, to my great satisfaction, turned out just as we expected, is that Business Sapiens has proven a superior business model in practice. All our clients and partners who’ve had contact with it say it’s very intuitive and is a revelation compared to other globally recognised models. The Business Sapiens model allows us to analyse and understand each client’s existing business as quickly as possible, and, even more importantly, significantly speeds up the process of creating new business models and innovation in every business segment.
Media Marketing: The business magazine Nedeljnik has recognised your achievements and included you among its “New Business Elite.” In fact, you’ve received a lot of recognition for your work. Does that always feel good?
Miša Lukić: I believe those who live off the applause of others have their destiny in the hands of others, but must admit that this accolade from Nedeljnik did make me happy, more than it perhaps should have, given I have picked up quite a few major awards during my long career.
I am probably more sensitive to praise at the moment because of having just embarked on a new business venture and left my comfort zone in the marketing industry, where I had proven myself long ago. It also left an impression on me to be included amongst the “new elite” at 56, alongside much younger colleagues, who have proven themselves on the global scene, primarily in the new digital technologies.
Media Marketing: You once said to me that you were planning to develop a New Startegy academy. How far along are you with this project?
Miša Lukić: We’ve been planning the academy from the outset but decided to postpone it a little, because of how many projects we were doing and because we wanted to gain practical experience with the Business Sapiens model before adapting it for programmes and courses. We are now ready, and the first courses start in Autumn.
The academy will be called the Business Sapiens Academy and it will have four certified programmes, in the fields of Business Design, Brand Design, Creative Leadership, and Innovative Organisational Culture. We are also planning eight individual courses to include, among other things, mastering the newest Business Sapiens tools for faster and more effective business innovation (know-wow) and tools for creating business innovation in particular business segments (WOW Generator). We will hold the classes in person for the first six months, and then, starting next year, most of the Academy will transition to an online platform.
I am delighted the Academy will be opening soon and I see it as accomplishing part of my mission, because sharing knowledge is something that makes me happy and fulfilled.
Media Marketing: You also have plans to cook up new companies in the New Strategy kitchen. What’s have you got on the boil in there? Will we soon be seeing the first unicorn company in the region?
Miša Lukić: New Startegy is developing in three fields. One is business design, the second is the Academy, and the third is New Ventures, which is creating new companies based on innovative ideas cooked up in our kitchen.
We are currently working on two potentially global projects, but they are still in the early stages. Knowing me, it’s not hard to guess our goal is to create a unicorn and achieve something no one else has been able to in the region. My team and I will be working on that all our lives, but I certainly won’t be unhappy if we never fully get there, because as Leo Burnett once said: “When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.”
Media Marketing: You are constantly working to improve your Business Sapiens model. What’s new? Have you developed new methodologies or tools?
Dejan Bojović Bojke
Miša Lukić: Business Sapiens is a new platform for innovation, a new business philosophy, and a new business model all at once. This is enough to understand that it’s a very broad and complex project that could easily become your life’s work and still never be completed.
My partner Dejan Bojović Bojke and I have been working on the Business Sapiens model for about 10 years and we’ll probably never stop developing it. For us, working on Business Sapiens is like working on a temple. We build the temple, and the temple builds us. Your own self-development is never over, and similarly there will always be room for improvement of the Business Sapiens model as a human perspective on business. Our plan for the future is to open up the model to the wider business community and call people from the wider business world to work on developing the model.
Over the past two years we’ve created a lot of original tools, that help us come up with transformative innovations in every area of business more effectively and quickly (the WOW Generator), and assess more precisely our clients’ business models and find appropriate opportunities for exponential growth with more precision (GROWTH Analysis), determine long-term innovative strategy more effectively (GO Strategy / Greatness – Opportunity Strategy), and find out what set our client apart (Know-Wow).
As well as working on the tools, we still have to refine the terminology in the model itself to make it clearer and more directly descriptive of each individual segment.
Media Marketing: What is different about your Business Sapiens model?
Miša Lukić: A few key features distinguish the Business Sapiens model from all the other global business models.
The first and most important one is that it puts the human side of business first. It moves away from the standard mechanical way of looking at business, which dates back to the industrial revolution, but from the software and pure systems perspectives on business that have developed during the information age. Just like people, businesses have four basic dimensions: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Translated into business terms, those four dimensions are: cost-effectiveness, desirability, feasibility, and sustainability. In future, the rules that apply to our lives will become more relevant in business. The Business Sapiens model is for business what the Life-Wheel is for people. Every aspect of business is important individually, but in everyday interaction they all affect each other and that is what makes each business unique, just like every person is unique. In future every individual part of business will require a human symbol to be accepted by the people it is made up of and it depends on. The time has already come when products without an aesthetic aren’t irresistible, services without emotion aren’t memorable, a lack of trust between employees means they aren’t productive, brands with no purpose aren’t attractive, businesses with no ethics aren’t sustainable. Another important feature is that Business Sapiens is founded on the fact that, in addition to being an act of human originality, every business is a unique human story. For that story to be accepted and developed it has to be clear and motivating to everyone involved, now and in the future. The Business Sapiens model asks questions and then gives answers that are crucial to making a business a success story, like: Know-Where & Know-When (Peripheral forces), Know-Who (key stakeholders), Know-Wow (a place where the exceptional and opportunity meet), Know-What (demand for what we are doing), Know-How (execution), Know-HowMuch (profitability) and Know-Why (sustainability). The thing that really sets Business Sapiens apart from most other business models is that customers are not at its core or any other stakeholder. The model is set up to be relevant at the same time to every one involved in the business. The Business Sapiens model has Know-Wow at its heart, and that is what discovers and highlights what is exceptional about every business in its own special way, and it does it in a way that is relevant to all the stakeholders and not just one. Know-Wow combines the uniqueness of a specific business with the requirements of key stakeholders and opportunities as they come up, like new technology and changes in how customers, employees, investors, suppliers and all the other key participants in a business think and act.
Another key feature of the Business Sapiens model is that it is an excellent platform, not just for creating strategies for future development, but for innovation. The various segments of our business model activate platforms for innovation in the segments of the business, using transformational questions and the specially created WOW Generator. Our business model offers systematic support to creation and innovation across the entire business model and in each individual business segment.
Media Marketing: What is the difference between New Startegy Business Design Consulting and other consulting companies?
Miša Lukić: Business consultants usually work like doctors. The first thing they do is look for what wrong with your organism. Why are your doctor’s results “positive” if they find that you are sick? That always puzzled me until I realised that the entire health system is reactive and it’s their job to find that fault and remove it. The point of the doctor’s approach is to bring you back to your original state, to remove the fault. Of course, that can restore you either partially or fully to what you were before, but the concept isn’t proactive and it doesn’t focus on what is best in you, it focuses on what’s worst. Medicine, like many consultants, often solves one problem just to cause another, because of looking at the problem through the lens of the narrow specialty and not in a holistic way. It’s the same with business. We are witness to the fact that business consultants often focus on optimising processes and costs and boosting profits in the short-term. This may work, but it also weakens or undermines relations with employees, suppliers, and even the clients they depend on. This concept treats people, or businesses, like patients.
The goal of business design is not to focus on the problem but to look for the best opportunities, taking into account each organisation’s uniqueness and any new opportunities, which appear every day with new technologies and changes in the environment. We call that process GO Startegy, where the G is Greatness, and the O is Opportunity.
It’s not our main goal to manage your symptoms or even solve your problems and bring you back to your starting condition. Today that would count as stagnation or even regression. New Startegy sees the opportunity in every problem. Often the solution is not to solve all the problems you have now, especially if we are dealing with symptoms. It’s to create new business opportunities that make your current problems irrelevant.
New Startegy doesn’t see its clients as sick patients but as people who have something exception that we have to find and maximise. Also, New Startegy doesn’t view changes in the environment as dangerous. They are opportunities to be exploited.
New Startegy doesn’t think it needs to teach our clients about their own business. We believe that working together with our clients creates a new future for the company by using a creative thinking method that isn’t inherent to the business.
With classic business consulting you get experts who developed their craft in an age that doesn’t exist any more. Business design is different because it focuses on creating a future from a combination of what you already are, what you could be, and any opportunities that arise.
The words: “You can’t decide the future, you have to design it,” are written across all of one of the walls in our conference room, a room we call the New World. Those are the words that best describe our mindset.
Miša Lukić (3): Business design will soon represent for business what architecture represents for the construction industry.
