Category: Business Design

Strategy + Business is a pretty good quarterly. Free registration allows access to the copious archives. Without reading the About page, you might never know it’s published by a consulting firm, Booz Allen.

Roger Martin and the folks at the Rotman School are helping to popularize a model of Integrative Thinking they see in more successful leaders. Summarized, integrative thinkers consistently consider a broader and more diverse set of inputs to be salient to an issue. They work on all those inputs simultaneously — bringing each into focus in turn — rather than consider them in discrete sequences. They perceive indirect casual links among the inputs. And they work creatively to find new solutions, rejecting the tradeoffs that others accept.

Here’s the slides from my recent talk, Can We Run the Company? (.pdf). You’ll have to imagine me waving my arms wildly as you read.

To summarize, if we got into this business to empower people, we can do even more empowering from higher up in the organization. Our skills as designers can be used not just to create artifacts but to help us perform management functions as well. But, even though we’re still using our design skills, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as designers and start thinking of ourselves as leaders.

While some have read the Gillett-Proctor & Gamble merger as leverage against Wal-Mart, James Surowiecki argues it was all about combining innovative like-minds:

A. G. Lafley, the C.E.O. of Procter & Gamble, denied that the acquisition had anything to do with the power of Wal-Mart. When he was pressed, he said, “The power has shifted to the consumer.” This may not be mere talk. In a world where brand names alone don’t confer power, the only way to prosper is to make products that genuinely improve (even if only marginally) on what came before. This is exactly what Gillette and P. & G. have done. Gillette’s razor line is one of the most lucrative businesses in history, mainly because the company has invested billions in technological innovation. This has allowed it to introduce a new razor every few years that costs considerably more than the one it’s replacing. And while historically P. & G. has focussed more on brand-building and marketing, in recent years it has invested heavily in innovation, too. The Swiffer mop and the SpinBrush electric toothbrush may not quite rank up there with penicillin or the Model T, but in the world of consumer products they count as real breakthroughs.

There doesn’t seem to be many first-person accounts of Rotman’s recent Business Design Conference. Here’s some of the press releases instead:

Shift Needed in Design World, Says Whitney

“The power of design thinking must be freed up to deal
with all sorts of issues on a global scale.”

The Design of Business, Rather Than Designing for Business, Leads to Greater Innovations Says IDEO President & CEO

“Whether you like it or not, the more innovative you try to be, the more you are going to affect the business and the business model.”

Intelligent Design is Key to Our Success Says Four Seasons Hotel President

“…last but not least is our decision to focus all of our energy and expertise on hotel management rather than ownership.”

My business partner John Zapolski will be speaking at The Institute of Design Strategy Conference in May. For a preview of his thoughts, check out the interview with him on the conference website, “Design as a Core Strategy“.

…Companies that are successful exploiting the full potential of design do so because it’s present in all of the decisions the company makes. …these companies aren’t choosing to apply design to their respective business strategies, but have chosen design as the fundamental strategy itself. Design is the philosophical core of the company. Everyone in the company becomes involved in designing, whether that means creating financial plans or selecting casing materials for an industrial product. Design isn’t something that the design department does. It’s a way of operating the company. It’s an ongoing set of choices about how the company is going to exist, to compete, to grow.

Bruce Nussbaum’s Redesigning American Business for Business Week identifies what my company is doing: “Designers are teaching CEOs and managers how to innovate… They pitch themselves to businesses as a resource to help with a broad array of issues that affect strategy and organization — creating new brands, defining customer experiences, understanding user needs, changing business practices.”

It’s interesting that a year ago only a handful of people were talking about applying design thinking to business management, and now the mainstream media has caught up.

Niti Bhan’s While you were out: changes in the global design industry for Core77 is a good overview on the fusion of business and design, including some nice words about my new company.

Niti is from IIT’s Institute of Design who, incidentally, has a newish Master of Design Methods program for those who want a 9 month deep dive into this area.