For bestselling author Tim Sanders, the biggest problem with the game of sales today is that it has become less like playing Pong, and more like a round of Halo. Selling in the 21st century is incredibly challenging. Sales professionals face multiple decision makers, layers of product complexity, and cloud based competitors. For Tim, the key to being a true sales driven organisation, is to build on the innovation that deal-focused teamwork can unlock. In his words, a quality sale is a thousand problems solved. Catching up in Las Vegas, we discussed why creative brainstorming doesn’t work, the essential habit of conscious collaboration, and why leaders need to think like designers when it comes to creating emotional experiences for customers, partners and employees.

Harper Reed is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on data and digital innovation. He served as the CTO of Obama’s re-election campaign and was also one of the founders of Threadless.com. His latest company, Modest, inc, was recently acquired by Paypal, where he is now working to figure out the future of commerce. Over dinner at Soho House in Chicago, we talked about digital bias and the stubborn persistence of paper, why technology is best used as a force multiplier of people power, the quantification of marketing and how smarter tools replace the need for experts, reactionary interfaces and why retailers are afraid of their customers, why iTunes credit is more meaningful to kids than cash, the power of ‘undo’ in e-commerce, and the link between local infrastructure and global innovation.

Technology and science may seem the natural enemies of magic, but for Marco Tempest, who describes himself as a cyber-illusionist, they are his daily tools of trade. Magicians have a long history of deploying advanced technology to be ahead of the reality curve in order to fool their audiences. For Marco, that means experimenting with motion tracking, drones, augmented and virtual reality, projection mapping, gaze tracking, robotics and AI. When I visited him in his New York workshop, we spoke about the art of telling stories about the near future, open source collaboration, sandboxing emerging technologies, engineering interactivity and how the world’s magicians have kept a secret private archive of their tricks and what that might mean for crafting the future of experiences.

Art and fashion maven Hikari Yokoyama, is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the intersection of the art world and technology. A curator and art consultant, she was part of the founding team at online auction house Paddle8, the news platform Art Observed, and in her advisory business, connects artists with brands like Audi and Miu Miu. Over coffee in London, we spoke about the impact of globalisation on collecting, the evolving relationship between art and luxury brands, the death of art movements and how, in a digital age, the way we consume images is changing.

Luke Williams is the Executive Director of Entrepreneurship and the founder of the W.R. Berkley Innovation Lab at NYU Stern. He is also a fellow Australian. We met some years ago when we were both speaking at a digital conference in Norway where he was talking about his book, Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business. Having previous worked at frog design, Luke is also a profilic inventor, with over 30 US patents and more than 100 products to his name. Catching up over coffee in the lobby of the new Edition Hotel in NYC, we chatted about the challenges of leading disruptive innovation, the dangers of aspiring innovators trying to mimic the personality traits of Steve Jobs, and why every company should be building a portfolio of unconventional ideas.