Peter Fisk
Growth is getting harder in the markets most companies were built for. The instinct is to optimise what already works, sharpening the brand and pushing harder on the existing playbook. The more difficult question is what to build instead, and most leadership teams lack a shared framework for answering it.
Peter Fisk helps senior leaders reinvent how their business grows when the existing strategy, innovation and marketing playbook is no longer enough.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Peter Fisk
- He brings a structured framework for business reinvention. Business Recoded sets out seven mindset shifts and 49 codes drawn from deep work with senior leaders at companies including Microsoft, Adidas and Patagonia. Senior teams leave with a shared model to argue from.
- He sits in the rare overlap between marketer and strategist. As former CEO of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and now Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IE Business School in Madrid, he treats marketing, customer thinking and innovation as parts of one growth discipline. Most organisations still split them across separate functions and budgets.
- He has worked with senior leaders across more than 300 companies in over 55 countries, with particular depth in Asian innovation and emerging-market growth. The case material is current and varied, not the same handful of examples a leadership team has already seen.
- As former Thinkers50 Global Director and founder of the annual European Business Forum, he has unusual curatorial access to the leading management thinkers in the world. Sessions draw on what is actually moving across the field.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of GeniusWorks, a London-based strategy and innovation consultancy
- Professor of Leadership, Strategy and Innovation at IE Business School, Madrid; academic director of the Global Advanced Management Program
- Former Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Marketing
- Former Thinkers50 Global Director; founder of the annual Thinkers50 European Business Forum
- Author of nine business books, including Business Recoded, Gamechangers, and the Genius series, translated into 35 languages; Business Recoded shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year
- Earlier commercial career at British Airways, including responsibility for the Concorde brand
Biography
The Chartered Institute of Marketing is the world’s largest professional marketing organisation. Peter Fisk ran it before founding GeniusWorks. He used the role to argue that marketing, customer and innovation belong inside growth strategy, where most organisations still treat them as separate functions. That argument has shaped his work since.
His career started in physics, in a superconductivity lab. He moved into commercial roles at British Airways, including managing the Concorde brand, before consulting work at PA Consulting Group and Brand Finance. After CIM he founded GeniusWorks, a London consultancy, and joined IE Business School in Madrid as Professor of Strategy and Innovation.
His 2020 book Business Recoded sets out seven mindset shifts and 49 codes for reinventing how a business creates value. It is built on deep interviews with leaders at companies including Microsoft, Adidas, Patagonia and Spotify. The Financial Times reviewed it as “the book you have to read now”. It was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year.
Through the Thinkers50 European Business Forum, which he founded in 2017 as Thinkers50 Global Director, he convenes the world’s leading management thinkers each year. Recent stages have brought together Michael Porter, Rita McGrath, Erin Meyer and Alex Osterwalder. That curatorial position is unusual for a working consultant. The frameworks in his sessions are continually refreshed by direct contact with the academics and practitioners writing the next generation of management ideas.
Key speaking topics
- Growth strategy in fast-changing markets
- Business model reinvention
- Innovation strategy and execution
- Customer strategy and brand growth
- The Business Recoded framework: seven shifts for reinventing the business
- Asian innovation and emerging-market growth
- Sustainable growth and purposeful business
Ideal for
- CEOs and boards facing slowing growth in mature markets
- Strategy and innovation leaders responsible for new business models or category growth
- CMOs and customer experience leaders rethinking how marketing connects to commercial strategy
- Executive leadership teams running annual strategy or transformation offsites
Audience outcomes
- A shared vocabulary for the seven shifts that separate business reinvention from incremental change
- Case material from Asian innovators and global category leaders that most leadership teams will not have seen
- A connected view of innovation, customer and marketing strategy as one growth discipline
- Specific direction on where to stop investing, alongside where to grow
Talks
A read on the megatrends, technologies and emerging markets shaping the next decade, and what that means for strategy choices today.
Key takeaways:
- Where growth is genuinely shifting, separate from where the headlines say it is
- A method for working “future back” instead of “present forward”
- Signals for which megatrends to act on now, and which to monitor
Built on the research behind Gamechangers, this session draws lessons from 100 of the world’s most innovative companies, from Patagonia and Pixar to PingAn and Tesla.
Key takeaways:
- How disruptive companies build new categories rather than better products
- Where established businesses can adopt gamechanger logic without becoming startups
- The mindset shifts that separate innovators from optimisers
A view on how customer thinking has moved from satisfaction surveys to strategy input, and how leading companies are using customer experience as a primary growth lever.
Key takeaways:
- The distinction between customer satisfaction, experience and impact
- How leading brands build customer agendas that shape business strategy
- What CMOs and CX leaders need from their CEOs to make the model work
Drawing on People Planet Profit, this session sets out how serious companies are turning sustainability from a compliance overhead into a source of growth and brand strength.
Key takeaways:
- Why purpose-driven companies outperform on growth and recruitment
- How to bring sustainability into core strategy instead of CSR
- Case studies of business models built on positive impact
A leadership keynote on how senior leaders shift from optimising the existing business to building the next one, drawing on interviews with leaders at companies including Microsoft, Adidas and Patagonia.
Key takeaways:
- The behaviours that distinguish reinventors from optimisers
- How to make courage operational in leadership teams
- Models for leading in conditions of high uncertainty
The flagship keynote based on Business Recoded, walking through the seven mindset shifts and 49 codes that define how leading organisations are rebuilding their model for the next decade.
Key takeaways:
- The seven shifts that distinguish reinvention from incremental change
- 49 specific codes that operationalise the framework in practice
- Direct case material from leaders at Microsoft, Adidas, Patagonia and Spotify