Introducing...
Hi, I'm Jon. I've been PwC's British Entrepreneur of the Year, a serial startup founder & the "secret weapon" powering ideas in The ZOO, Google's skunkworks innovation team (apparently 🤷♂️). I presently have some limited availability for private talks and also designed+run an immersive "futureproofing innovation" program in VR, in partnership with The Leadership Network, for the board leaders of some of the world's largest companies. Calling on my experience in branding, innovation, bootstrapping & venture capital, I advise leaders on the adoption of strategically defensive innovation and to date have worked 1:1 with boards that include: Nike, J&J, Heinz, Tesco, Unilever, AB Inbev, Pfizer & Adidas.
Despite being a product-person to my core, after recognising the changing pace & scale at which the meaningful ⚡fusion of data+innovation is demanded to deliver enduring business transformation, I pivoted my product development career; enrolling in two years of night school to train as a data scientist MSc. I also led the Data for Innovation Team at Google, with a mission to automate creative behavioural research; powering product development by training machines to find drama 💥 in data. As the product owner, I empowered my team to turn designers into analysts, and scientists into inventors. We were responsible for YouTube's go-to internal platform for Creatives, alongside a mountain of project work.
If you see the value in approaching serious things playfully and playful things seriously, or need to meet a creative, technical & commercially trained leader then drop in 30 mins, or DM me on whatever the kids are using nowadays. Otherwise you can hear more about my work on this October 2020 podcast by the fabulous team at TheMeetingRoom:
VR, Zoom & Live Events
I recently had the pleasure to collaborate with the talented team at The Leadership Network; leading a small pilot group to develop & test their custom #vrmasterclass environment. Check out https://t.co/dycr9aSpdD to get a taste of the future of conferencing. pic.twitter.com/sfsmlgsdxq
— Jonathan Francis (@thanfrancis) November 1, 2020
Philosophy
Having worked alongside hundreds of brand owners around the world, helping them tackle their biggest challenges, I believe that Step 🦶 Zero just might be their unifying trait.
Picture the mountain of projects that every company says got off the ground... that teams 🚀 feel they got off the ground... but that, in reality, never made it out of a slide deck. This digital landfill is piled high with projects that fell at "Step Zero" - with no output to show from lifetimes of aggregate human effort.
I drive my team to help clients both target & reach Step 1 - a Prototype. Something that you can touch. Share. Get excited about. Whether it's a Rush, a PoP, a Uizard, a Landbot, a toy model - whatever... just not a powerpoint. We don't need to exhaust ourselves with planning, project rollout, PR, scale, support, resource & comms. 100% of effort and focus is on getting to that first build, and for one simple reason - prototypes can inspire people who weren't there at the start. Decks 🚫 don't.
With a special emphasis on the journey from data to decisions, to achieve this I encourage my team to reinforce:
1) building project momentum, 2) growing decision confidence and 3) maintaining stakeholder alignment - three areas notorious for blocking projects.
Awareness of Step Zero has been helping business leaders to get the things they need done, done - and fail fast when decisions need to change. All starting with one small step.
Ice breakers
I've represented the British Skydiving Team at 2 World Cups.
I played for the British Chess Team at 1 World Championship.
I speak French & Italian well enough to run a project.
German/Spanish well enough to run for a coffee.
And Python/R/SQL well enough to:
theory = ["somewhat", "randomly", "share", "about", "this", \
"new", "secret", "concerning", "string", "theory"]
reality = [x[1] for x in enumerate(theory) if \
x[0]%2==0 and x[0]!=0]
print(' '.join(reality))
