The Journey Talk featuring Amani Youssef

Welcome to The Journey Talk with Rafa Uccello! Here we talk to young marketing professionals about their career journey, aspirations and inspirations. Get to know more about the people that are shaping the future of our industry.

This week, we chatted with Amani Youssef, a young marketer who graduated amidst the pandemic—a challenging feat! However, it gave her time to reflect and understand more about what she wants for her future.

 

Profile Section

Name: Amani Youssef

Pronouns: She/her

Education: Advertising and Marketing Communications Diploma, Humber College

Favourite Quote: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it” —Albert Einstein

Guilty Pleasure: Music

Q: How did you decide what you wanted to study in college?

A: First, I wanted to get into fashion, then acting, then signing. However, with time, I started to understand what really could work for me. Or not. In grade 12, I was stuck. And while talking to my dad, I mentioned how all of my hobbies didn’t feel viable as a successful career path; they did not align with my future goals in life.

My dad then suggested going the marketing route. He introduced me to the Marketing Communications & Advertising Diploma program at Humber. I was a bit hesitant; however, my family motivated me to give it a shot. I didn’t want to take a break after high school, so I started my program when I was seventeen. It was only two years, so I felt if I didn’t like it, I could still switch direction, and I would have my first diploma by 19. I started enjoying the program mostly after my first year; I’m so grateful I made that choice.

Q: Now that you have finished school, do you still want to pursue marketing?

A: I do! Right now, I’m leaning more toward advertising. I also really enjoy the social media aspect of marketing. While I was in school, I had a lot of interest in copywriting until I started visiting agencies and got a better understanding of that role or function. It didn’t fit my every-day work goals and personality; it was way more complicated than I thought.

Q: What is something you would like to achieve in your career?

A: Right now, I don’t have a clear idea of what my dream career would look like. I consider this more of a personal goal; I just want to be content with whatever I am doing. I don’t necessarily believe everyone has to have a dream goal or career; those are just materialistic goals, and we’ll always want more, anyway. I’d love to have the opportunity to work with brands and agencies I admire, but I will never accomplish these goals if I’m not content with myself, and with what I am doing.

Q: What is something that you learned that has been impactful for you?

A: I’m a very bubbly person, and with COVID, I lost a lot of my motivation—I was struggling to be active. While on a drive with my 16-year-old brother, I told him how I didn’t feel motivated, and I didn’t know what to do next. He then told me, “Amani, you shouldn’t depend on motivation to do things, otherwise you will never get anything done. It’s about the discipline you have on yourself.” This happened recently, but left a significant impact on me. Every time I feel stuck, I remember his advice, and it pushes me to be productive.

Q: What is one thing you wish you knew when starting your career in marketing?

A: To take things more seriously, and be patient. When I first started school, I was young, and I thought I was prepared for college life. But I wasn’t. I learned the importance of being present in class, developing a relationship with your professors, and being patient. “You are going to get through it”, I would say to myself.

Q: What keeps you motivated and inspired in your professional life?

A: Many people say social media can be toxic for many reasons, which I agree with—to a certain extent.

I also believe it’s about how you use it to your benefit. TikTok, for example, has been helpful. I follow many young entrepreneurs; it’s fascinating to see how they are building their careers and success. This motivates me to see that it really is possible to get where I aspire to be one day, and keeping up with many different examples online—and drawing inspiration from it.

25th Century Magazine: Heading toward the future, by boat

25th Century Magazine was created by Midierson Maia and it is focused on long-term impacts of disruptive technology. It seeks to bring the reader a debate about the impact and consequences of disruptive innovation. Check out more at https://25thcenturymag.com/

 

By Midierson Maia and Fabiano Ormaneze

 

Brazilian artist Mariak, based in the United Arab Emirates, creates a worldwide network of connections focused on sustainability, innovation and social impact.

 

It is late afternoon and the starlings—small birds that live in flocks in the north of England— organize themselves into their so-called murmuration. It goes beyond a song, or the characteristic noise of synchronized wings flapping. It’s more than that; like a dance, before resting after a full day of hunting for food in the winter days, they connect together in light, choreographed movements. It is also unclear what causes these birds to initiate such a dance. However, physicists and biologists believe that each one, when moving, stimulates seven others to do the same around them, in a continuous progression. Soon, the seven become forty-nine, forty-nine become thousands, and a spectacle is created in the skies. They also become stronger and easily scare off hawks, the main predators of the species, fast in flight and up to four times larger.

Using the birds as a metaphor for life, artist Maria Luiza Knoblauch—or simply Mariak, the name she goes by—was inspired to create the Torus Legacy holding company. The goal is to connect people around the world on the improvements that can be achieved through technology associated with human potential. The idea is that, just like a flock of starlings, together, people can do better and have more social impact. “All the businesses linked to Torus are products, projects, and services related to people who use skills to build their own legacy in the areas of sustainability, innovation, arts, science, and smart technology. All this, together with the happiness of being who they are, as people and as professionals,” explains Mariak. Therefore, the goal is to share experiences and services, and offer participants connections; this way, those involved could grow exponentially based on a large ecosystem with participants from all over the world.

Torus is headquartered in one of the most prosperous places on the planet, Masdar City (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates). Torus has a branch in Dubai, which Mariak fell in love with on her very first visit. This year, coincidentally, is the 100th anniversary of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s birth, considered the father and founder of the Emirates. The idea is that by 2071, when the country’s centenary will be celebrated (Area 2071), the focus will be on creating positive proposals, which will include social transformation, sustainability, and technology, all with global impact.

One of the main Torus Legacy projects is the Legacy Ministry, which connects government, society, and companies that want their activities to support people, promote evolution, and protect the planet. As Mariak says, “you have to merge everyone’s dreams with government needs.” To shape this connection, she designed projects such as the Artificial Intelligence Forest Heritage and Artificial Intelligence Legacy Tree.

Through them, Torus provides an artificial intelligence tree that crosses supply with demand. “The idea is that people can have these trees and put whatever information they wish in there so that we have a large social network.” In the future, the goal is for these people to become like godmothers and godfathers to trees in a real forest. “It will be a great connection for people who make a difference in the Emirates. We will have artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality glasses enabling an immersive experience inside the forest and the possibility to get to know the legacy of people all at the same time,” says the artist. With this, the natural space becomes a great immersive experience, a theme park with the existing technologies. Among them, Mariak cites the possibility of changing the colour of trees through LED lamps according to people’s reactions, and even making plants play music using electromagnetic waves. In addition, these projects are related to issues of great environmental importance, such as global warming, research on the impact of innovation on the environment, concern for water, and research and development on medicinal herbs.

In order to bring the interested parties together, Mariak decided to open the doors of her own home, which can also be used as an office and, in the future, will be a recording studio for materials that can expand Torus’ ideas and proposals. Her way of life is in itself an example of innovation, inventiveness and sustainability; she lives on a boat, where she can meet those in need to make connections based on the holding company proposal. “I have a project to sail around the world one day. But I wanted to have a home where I could, at the same time, talk about my work, use sustainable materials and relate it all to design. In addition, the boat allows me to be closer to the place I love the most, which is nature.” To facilitate access to those who need connections and those who identify with her work, Mariak has other offices in strategic areas of the Emirates.

Another important segment of the work concerns adapting what she has studied and what she is qualified in. She works with concept design projects, interior design, landscaping, and sustainable business models. Therefore, based on what she knows and her desire to strengthen human potential, she has become a source of inspiration for architects, entrepreneurs, suppliers, businesses, and investors in creating sustainable initiatives for the future. With this activity and proposal, Mariak has also been able to implement projects in the Emirates involving partnerships with Brazilian companies.

With activities gradually becoming global, Torus Legacy proofs that the future will not be a dystopia if human potential is worked on and if technologies are used within purposes that consider the characteristics of life in society; all of this while connecting people, knowledge, and geographically distant regions. The year 2071 and even the next century are closer than we think, and the pillars of this future were already raised.

 

Talk to Mariak: malu.projeto@gmail.com

 

25th Century Magazine: Forget about dystopia, the future is exponential!

Forget about dystopia, the future is exponential!

Voicers’ goals merge education and human potential to promote an inclusive society.

By Midierson Maia and Fabiano Ormaneze

Swimming against the tide, future thinker, Ligia Zotini Mazurkiewicz, believes, “The next great revolution will be a moral one, led by children who are now sitting on our laps.” It was with this strong belief that she created Voicers (www.voicers.com.br), a digital and educational start-up that works toward a noble purpose: to democratize access to technology and unite voices that think about the future. The goal is to portray the future—positively and exponentially—helping to avoid technological dystopias.

Before starting Voicers, Ligia, who obtained a bachelor degree in Business Administration, and a master’s in Marketing, had a twelve-year-long career working in multinational companies. She also worked as a Business and Language professor after participating in a Silicon Valley educational mission in 2016. She went back to Brazil determined to quit her job and search for a new purpose. Her heart was set on the idea that access to technology should not be restricted to small groups.

In 2016, as professor, she undertook an initial experiment which would become a major technology-diffusion project aimed at human education and training. “The years I worked in the corporate world were very important and happy years; but there was something that needed to be aligned. I felt the need to combine three characteristics that have always been with me: concern for education; passion for technology; and interest in a planetary consciousness, without borders,” she says.

She taught a course titled “Technology and Leadership in the 21st Century” for undergraduate students at the Faculdade Paulista de Pesquisa e Ensino Superior (FAPPES) during the one- semester course. “Since I could not tackle all the issues on my own, every week I invited someone— a voice—to talk to students. One would wear virtual reality glasses, another would bring a robot or a drone. In addition to this, the guest speakers had other amazing qualities: they were all fantastic human beings, and they all brought the vision to my classes: that appropriate technological training will prevent us from living in a dystopian future,” she says.

Ligia realized she was headed in the right direction and that a new life project was beginning to emerge when she monitored the success of one of the videos from her classes, which had thousands of reactions, comments and shares on social media. “As much as young people are connected to technology, in general, they are not the creators, inventors of all this. This helped the classes become very successful and reach broader audiences,” she recalls. At the same time, she felt that those activities and understanding of the technology linked to the exponential growth of human beings, could not be restricted to the classroom. This is how Voicers came about: focused on spreading ideas by people who anticipate the future and are experts in the areas of technology, science, innovation and, of course, human development.

To outline the project, she first brought together people with whom she had contact in the corporate world, and who are very knowledgeable in their areas. “But I always bear in mind that these partners of mine must be more than just very knowledgeable. That alone is not enough. They must also be lucid human beings with different qualities, including diversity and plurality.”

That’s how Voicers was born, in opposition to the multiple dystopias, which, especially in the movies and series produced in the US, presenting a devastating future. “I do not believe the future will be what Hollywood cinema has become used to showing us, which is to unite the best of technology with the worst in humans. We need to believe in exponential technology where human beings also use all their capacity for transformation,” argues the entrepreneur.

As a digital platform, Voicers currently brings together around 50 professionals from different areas and backgrounds who believe in technology, and in the potential of human beings, as long as educational work is involved. It’s as if these people already lived in the future and used the platform to amplify their voices, helping society prepare for the upcoming decades.

The platform has professionals from different areas such as Communication, Engineering, Administration and Design, who produce videos and broadcast them on the Internet. In addition, there are technological-experience activities aimed at groups, individuals, colleges or companies, as well as face-to-face meetings in various formats known as Tech Talks. The contents are grouped into three main thematic groups: technology, trends, and people in the 21st Century.

Human x Inhuman

Since there have been many literary and cinematographic dystopian productions over the last 50 years, Voicers’ vision is faced with the great challenge by presenting a new possibility for the world to deal with technological advances and with the relationship between human beings and technology. Ligia argues that it is necessary to rethink the relationship between human beings and technology.

“When a machine does something better than a human being, it is, therefore, an inhuman work. What will be left when machines do the work that people used to do? We need to prepare people to create, care, heal, know, and share. That’s our job and our focus,” she explains. When it comes to human relationships in the future, Voicers’ vision is clear on the need to train people to live with diversity and plurality, constructing their own stories regardless of stereotypes and patterns. In addition, we must prepare for changes in the workplace and in the way we teach and learn.

In the future, there will be fewer opportunities for formal employment, which, if properly prepared for, can lead to the surge of great talents. Organized in new forms of employment relationships, the professionals of the future will not seek employment, but rather sources of income, using their talents in a plural form. The group argues that the security of employment contracts and stability can often mask real talents, and in this world, school must never remain centred on the reproduction of content that can be easily accessed. “Skills, in the future, will not be measured by the ability to remember things, but by what people will be able to create,” Ligia says.

Outcomes

After two years into the project, Ligia has already received positive feedback from several technology and automation companies. Despite that, she had to learn to deal with those who only see the negative aspects of technological advances. Some come to ask: “But won’t there be more unemployment?” To these, Ligia generally says: “There will be more people who can become unemployable, that is, they will lose their jobs. These are the people you have to prepare for inventive activities.” And what about fear? How do we deal with it? The answer is similar: The fear we are experiencing is a fear of the unknown, and Voicers’ proposal is to create narratives that would serve as bridges to the future.

 

Talk to Ligia: ligia@voicers.com.br

BRAND>ed Content: Engaging Content and Storytelling

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Planning

“For tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”

African proverb

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly identified a significant gap in management across all sectors; it has revealed that we are far from our ideal standards of planning.

As organizations, we have a set of business processes or routines that we follow year after year. Many of these simply take the previous year’s results and add incremental goals for the next year, which depends on growth objectives and board-level directives and ambitions.

Management is greatly focused on growth but lacks focus on future thinking, particularly crisis management. Firms lack the necessary skills to run the organization in the event something unexpected happens, which may very well threaten the organization’s well-being.

This uncertainty has led to a discussion amongst business leaders about planning for events like this pandemic; the resilience during and after; and the relationship between both planning and resilience.

Crises often lead to diversions from original plans, and create more pressure on senior management. To strengthen resilience and improve the likelihood of success, a clear plan should be in place to follow, irrespective of the situation the firm finds itself facing—whether a pandemic or a market disruption.

While planning is, perhaps, second-nature to humans, the more important question is: Do we plan correctly?

One of the analogies recommended to ensure that planning is simple and understood, is the “GPS analogy”, which clearly defines the three components of planning as:

1) Going to? – Where do we need to be?

2) Positioned where? – Where are we?

3) Search options – What options do we have to get there?

1- Going to? – Where do we need to be? Every good plan starts with the end -point:

– Where we need to be?

– What we want to achieve?

– What is our dream?

Simply stated, we need to clearly articulate our vision.

Vision is The dream of where we need to be. Knowing what you want to achieve, seeing that end-result, and visualizing what it looks like, is essential for success.  One of the most powerful tools is to clearly detail it (i.e. write it down) where it can be seen, discussed, and ultimately realized. By visualizing the dream, it becomes part of your personal motivation, and attracts the positive result you are seeking.

2- Positioned where? – Where are we now? To execute this vision, we need to have a clear perception and knowledge of our current state and position.

– Where are we?

– What is our position?

– What is the cause for the current situation?

– What happened? Why are we in this situation? Are we aware

about the history and background?

It is critical to understand what our strengths are. What did not go as planned, and what could have been done to rectify the situation. It is also important to keep track of the impact of the results in order to build on them. This may be accomplished with a thorough analysis of successes, challenges and results.

3- Search options – What options do we have to get there?

When we know where we are now, and where we want to be, the third stage of planning is to bridge the gap. The most efficient way is by determining the options available and formulating a strategy to achieve it.

We need to determine and develop a strategic road map to provide the direction and maintain a forward focus.  This strategy is a series of measurable actions designed to close the gap, and are subject to change depending on the circumstances.

Building the necessary strategy should recognize the following key points:

  1. Options available
  2. Risk for each option, understanding or awareness of the risks/ issues that could stop you from performing the required task
  3. Key success factors for each option
  4. The human capital needed, roles and responsibilities, based on the actions needed to execute the goal
  5. Key performance indicators (KPI), to determine the progress
  6. Tools and support needed to deliver the plan

In times of uncertainty, it is clarity of purpose and vision, provided through the right plan, that will allow us to face uncertainties and steer in the right direction—for success.

Like any journey, this road map to success should be communicated in such a way that every person in the organization knows the plan; how it is actioned; and what it will ultimately achieve. These components can be brought together to create a common mission statement to explain its purpose, focus and vision for success.