Doing Business by Design
Alex Wright
The New York Times | alex@agwright.com
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.”