For 10 years, P&G Signal has brought the world’s thought leaders to the stage for inspiration, education and activation. Here are some of their lessons from year’s past. Don’t forget to reserve your spot for Signal 2021 on July 14-15!
2012: Lisa Utzschneider, Amazon – Reject all preconceptions
People say, ‘oh, Amazon, they’re just e-commerce. They’re not building brand.’ I actually challenge that. We are moving further and further up the funnel.
2013: Rishad Tobaccowala, VivaKi – History can and can’t teach us
The biggest problem is using legacy models to try to get into the future. But if you only have the new model, it takes years and years to scale. It’s very, very important to think about it differently.
2014: Nilam, Ganenthiran, Instacart – New models change business relationships
If you think about the old world, it was about the manufacturer, distributor, retailer, consumer. With companies like Instacart, retailers are thinking about our role in the entire value chain quite differently. CPG partners are thinking of us as either a customer or a new trade partner. And those are leading to interesting conversations.
2015: Vanessa Colella, Citi Ventures – The essential role of women
We’re in the center of technology, in banking, and venture capital. If you drew a Venn diagram of those three [areas], you’d find very few people who are women. We view this diverse thinking as absolutely critical to innovation. Critical to discovery.
2016: Daniel Zhang, Alibaba – There is no innovation without failure
Maybe 95% of [ideas] will fail. But if we can get really good results for one of them, this is huge progress. So the most important thing for innovation is that we can afford to let some fail.
2017: Linda A. Hill, Harvard University – The importance of iteration
Leaders understand that when you’re trying to innovate, it’s a process of discovery. It’s a discovery learning process. You cannot really plan your way to an innovation, you have to act your way to an innovation.
2017: Marne Levine, Instacart – Innovation calls for a new lens on old ideas
Just because you adopt something doesn’t mean that it’s going to work. I think that is a central thing as part of innovation, which is that innovation really, unless you’ve created something for the very first time, it’s really about taking old things and putting them together in new ways.
2018: Roger McNamee, Greylock Partners – Always imagine all possibilities
[Facebook] didn’t set out to cause the damage to fact, the damage to democracy and the damage to public health that ensued. But there was a massive failure of imagination. They failed to imagine that people would use their products differently than they intended.
2019: Bozoma Saint Jean, Endeavor – Putting purpose into business
We see the power of our platforms and our storytelling as an opportunity to help bridge gaps: How much more useful are we, how much more purposeful and impactful is our work? Over the course of my career, and I would say definitely in the last few years, I have tried to make sure that the campaigns and the projects that I’m working on — while of course, we all know we have our business targets — is purposeful.
2020: Ugonna Palaoka, Filmmaker – Creating opportunity for women of color
The only thing separating black women and women of color from others is opportunity. That’s the only thing that’s standing in the way. It’s not that we have less experience. It’s not that we have a lesser skill set. It’s not that we don’t know what we’re doing. But we just need someone to kick open that door and then to hold it open.
