Doing Business by Design
Alex Wright

The New York Times | [e-mail]

Ever since the Harvard Business Review declared that “the MFA is the new MBA” in 2004, the business press has published a raft of articles testifying to the rise of so-called design thinking among corporate managers. So it should come as no surprise that designers are finally starting to break out of their professional literary ghetto to write books targeted at businesspeople. Building on the tradition of such airport-bookstore staples as Built to Last, In Search of Excellence, and Good to Great, a new crop of books has emerged to offer fresh design-oriented perspectives on modern business problems, while—not to put too fine a point on it— burnishing their authors’ consulting credentials.

The archetypal design book for businesspeople may be Clement Mok’s Designing Business ( published in 1996), a beautifully designed think piece that promoted the value of information design as a business strategy in the emerging Internet age. In the years since, many companies have embraced a user-centered approach to design, especially on the Web. But too often they remain fixated on designing individual “products” ( websites, software applications, or physical devices). Apple notwithstanding, most companies still tend to relegate designers to the status of “exotic menials” (to borrow Ralph Caplan’s term), whose job consists mainly of producing lovely artifacts. As design consciousness starts to penetrate the business mainstream, however, some designers are starting to make the case for a more strategic approach that expands the scope of design thinking beyond the realm of product development.

Ex-Apple industrial designer Robert Brunner and Success Built to Last coauthor Stewart Emery follow standard pop business book convention with a catchy title—Do You Matter?—that serves as a hook for pulling together a series of loosely related case studies that illustrate their central thesis: Companies will “matter” to their customers only if they learn to embrace design thinking at the highest levels of the organization.

Given Brunner’s Cupertino pedigree, it should come as no surprise that Apple occupies center

stage throughout the book (firmly ensconced in a halo that often feels more than a little self-serv-ing). But the authors have done their homework in seeking out other effective exemplars of companies that have built effective design cultures. In the most dramatic case study, they recount the story of how Samsung chairman Lee Kun Hee transformed his company from a second-tier electronics maker into a global design leader. That transformation was thanks to a remarkably brusque internal campaign that at one point involved force-marching factory workers into a yard piled high with Samsung products, where they watched their products smashed to bits with sledgehammers—driving many of the workers to tears. So began Chairman Lee’s “Year of Design Revolution.” Those extreme tactics seem to have paid off. Samsung has learned to embrace design at every level of the company, and in so doing catapulted itself into the top tier of global consumer electronics makers.

Other examples are less dramatic but no less compelling, ranging from the obvious—Nike, IKEA, Virgin Atlantic—to the slightly unexpected, like Cirque du Soleil and Whole Foods. Commendably, the book also delivers a few cautionary tales of companies that failed to realize the difference between a well-designed product and a true design culture: the one-off success of Motorola’s Razr phone; Starbucks’s succumbing to the seductions of efficiency over experience when it junked its old manual espresso makers for the automatic kind; and the story of Polaroid (enough said).

In each case, the authors show how successful design companies move beyond product development to create cultures that drive design thinking across multiple product lines and, even deeper, bring an integrated design approach as many customer touchpoints as possible: customer service, online experiences, and in-person contacts. In the best tradition of pop business books, the authors coin a pithy catchphrase to encapsulate their point: the “customer experience supply chain.”