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This post is the last stop on the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour for the book The Designful Company by Martin Neumier, who is also author of The Brand Gap and Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands. I'm glad I had the opportunity to read this book and talk with the author, because I have to admit to some skepticism about the entire design-thinking movement and the effort to make all innovation be about design. However, after reading this book and engaging in the following email dialogue with Marty Neumier, I now understand more about the entire point of design thinking than I did before. It all hinges on how you are defining design and how much latitude can be given to using that broader description to drive corporate innovation.

Here's the interview:

R: Clearly when you talk about “design” as a way of apprehending and seeing the world, you are not talking about the design of room décor. For those not already on the “design thinking” bandwagon (and not already designers), what is the working definition of “design” that makes it appropriate as a system and not an action?


M: In my view, design can be a system, an action, or the outcome of an action. For example, I work in design (the system of thought), I design things (the action), and the results are various designs (the deliverables). I especially like Herbert Simon's definition of a designer. Simon was a Nobel-winning social scientist who helped pioneer artificial intelligence. He said: "Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."

My purpose in writing The Designful Company was to show that the discipline and the activity of design can be applied to more than "posters and toasters," or communications and products. It can also be applied to higher order challenges such as brand-building, decision-making, organizational structure, and management models.

R: You say that you can apply the principles of aesthetics to strategy and organizational change. How can aesthetics work for these things in a prescriptive way, rather than a descriptive — i.e., how can aesthetics be used to drive and guide strategy and organizational change, as opposed to being used to looking backward at those things and assign aesthetic principles to the results after the fact?

M: Nice observation. We normally "ascribe" aesthetic qualities to things we already believe are beautiful, don't we? But that's because most of us don't think like designers. We think like audiences who have little control over our experiences, except the control that comes from choosing. We've become a culture of shoppers. We expect to choose our solutions off the "solutions rack," instead of creating new solutions that weren't there before. When you start "designing" solutions, you bring along the need for aesthetics — concepts like contrast, rhythm, pattern, scale, simplicity, and efficiency — to inform your solutions, instead of noticing them after the fact. You become a maker instead of an audience member.

R: I'm particularly interested in the concepts of simplicity and efficiency. How can these be used to drive innovation at the organizational level?

M: It's easy to be innovative once. Most great businesses are founded on one great innovation. It's much harder to be innovative time and time again. To do that, you need a culture of innovation.

But what happens is that companies start building on their first successful innovation by adding more complexity — extra processes, controls, brand extensions, and so on — to bolster and commercialize what's working. This added complexity makes it more difficult to recreate the conditions that gave rise to the original innovation.

So what they need to do is to break down the silos, the complexity, and the rigid thinking so that they reclaim the simplicity that first allowed them to innovate. They need to become "designful" again.

R: There’s an ongoing debate as to whether a company culture must be innovative in order for the company to be innovative, or whether putting one innovation foot ahead of the other and pushing forward anyway can lead a company to develop an innovation culture. You seem to be in the first group here. Please talk about why you feel it’s important for a company to develop an innovation culture *before* trying to innovate, and talk about how they might go about doing that.

M: I'm actually in the second group. Realistically, a company can't wait until its culture has been fully transformed before starting to innovate. In my book I outline 16 "levers of change" that can be used separately or in concert to move the organization from a spreadsheet-driven company to a design-driven company. Of course, the further along the transformation curve, the easier it is to innovate.

R: I sense a tension in your book between asserting that everyone can be trained in design thinking and that you need real designers to be able to innovate. Are you saying that there’s a class of people who are designers and therefore able to do this, and another set of people who don’t have this talent and therefore are doomed to always need a designer to turn to for creative thinking?

M: No. I've found that most people are already design thinkers — they're just unaware of it. If designing is about changing an existing situation into a preferred one, then we're all designers. The only question is whether we can martial the principles and processes of design to apply them deliberately and effectively.

People don't easily acquire new skills, much less a new way of thinking. So the best way for a company to jumpstart a culture of innovation — at least in my experience — is to build a strong internal brand department that can work across silos to influence the rest of the company. The process starts with hiring the right people.

R: How would you go about training non-designers to think more like designers?

M: I'd use a "branded training program." I'd start a company-wide educational program that teaches rarefied skills in the areas of innovation, collaboration, communication, brand strategy, and brand behavior. I say "branded training" because the skills shouldn't generic — they should be aligned with the unique purpose and strategy of the business. The fact is, company can't out-innovate the competition unless it can first out-learn it.

My view is that anyone can think more like a designer by simply making it a priority. Like the zen master says, when the student is ready, the teacher appears

Here are links to the previous reviews, interviews, and podcasts on the tour: 

• Monday, April 20: Brand Autopsy
• Tuesday, April 21: The Marketing Fresh Peel
• Wednesday, April 22: Idea Sandbox
• Thursday, April 23: Principled Innovation
  

The holidays are here. Get within 500 feet of a mall and you will be bombarded with sales signs, overwhelmed with Christmas carols, and swallowed by crowds of seasonal shoppers. While all of this may be overwhelming, there is one very good thing that comes with the hustle and bustle of the holidays – cookies.

I love cookies and there is no time of year more cookie-centric than the holidays. I have many fond memories of baking cookies with my mom, gleefully squishing Hershey’s kisses into the center of peanut-butter cookies and carefully painting icing on sugar cookies. This is why I was so fascinated by Arrowhead Mills’ “Bake with Me,” a line of baking mixes designed to encourage interaction between children and their caregivers. In addition to the baking mix, each box contains a promotional item, such as a cookie cutter or decorating stencil, to carry the interactive element from the box to the baking sheet.

Like most other baking products, there are sumptuous shots of sugar cookies, brownies, or cupcakes on the packaging, but what makes this packaging stand out on the shelf is that it also features a photo of a child in a chef’s hat happily mixing a bowl of batter. “The idea behind the package design was to develop a look that would really stand out on shelf to deliver the unique proposition; a fun activity for mom to do with their kids...,” explains Martha Seidner, a vice president at Smith Design, the agency responsible for design of the “Bake with Me” packaging.

All baking companies target functional jobs around taste, attractiveness of the food, nutritional value, and preparation time required. Arrowhead Mills has nailed the emotional jobs of parents, such as:

• Feel like a good parent
• Establish/reinforce my relationship with my kids
• Create lifelong memories with my kids

By targeting emotional jobs, “Bake with Me” effectively overcomes traditional resistance to baking mixes as less authentic (and lower quality) than baking from scratch by satisfying other (and arguably more important) jobs related to the parent-child relationship.

Well done! Now, let’s gather the family and friends and start baking some cookies.

Rarely have I read a newspaper article peppered with as much clearly disruptive language as “The Tell-All Campus Tour,” by Jonathan Dee in the 9/21/08 New York Times Sunday Magazine’s annual College Issue. The story shines a spotlight on Unigo.com, a new college-search website that allows current students to review their school, posting videos and photos as well as extremely, um, candid opinions.

The site is so new, in fact, that last Friday when I clicked over to it midway through reading the article, I got an error page. But once I successfully accessed the site and poked a round a bit, I found a plethora of information — the kind of nitty-gritty details I would have killed for when I went through my own fraught college search.

About my alma mater, one of the 24 lengthy student reviews opened with: “The best thing about __ is that almost every single good thing you will read about in the recruiting materials is true. The one thing I would change is the level of outrageous unresponsiveness the administration often displays. The __ beurocracy [sic] is probably the one major reason why some people decide to transfer.” (I admit, it pained me to see the typo, but I felt a familiar twinge of Red Tape Angst.)

Unigo’s extremely entrepreneurial 26-year-old founder, Jordan Goldman, also co-founded one of the first college review books to include quotes from students, rather than being written exclusively by professional reviewers. But he still saw a huge gap between the needs of high school students and their families as they seek the perfect school, and the standard offerings from companies like Princeton Review and U.S. News and World Report.

“My whole family chipped in for me to go to college,” Goldman said in the Times. “They were saving from when I was 2 or 3 years old. That the best resource for a four-year, $200,000 decision are these books — with no photos, no videos, no interactivity, only three to five pages per school on average, fully updated usually once every several years — just doesn’t make the grade. This is the most important decision people that age have ever made, and the information is just not there.”

OK, so we have a clear unsatisfied need. What’s the disruptive angle? Let’s let some denial do the talking. The Times contacted Christopher Gruber, who heads admissions for Davidson College in North Carolina, one of the 268 colleges currently covered by Unigo. His reply when asked if he’d looked at the site (the company sent letters to the admissions offices of all the reviewed schools, granting them early access before Unigo went live): “I’ve got to be honest with you, I’m not spending a ton of time navigating those student-driven sites. My sense is that the traditional big players, like Princeton Review, are the major sources for online information too, in part because those are the names that parents still recognize... The ones that we supply information to are the ones that we spend the most time on.”

If the Unigo model works, it will likely disrupt the typical college guidebook business, giving free, ad-supported content in far greater detail than the average Princeton Review manual can provide. But it will also shake up how college PR and admissions teams have to do their jobs. Challenged by a well-organized, extremely comprehensive resource that gives students a warts-and-all view of the school, official viewbooks and campus tours won’t seem as convincing. (Dee, the writer of the Times story, mentions one video posted about Notre Dame, in which an official tour guide goes around the campus with a friend, giving the official spiel and then letting her friend tell the left-out bits.)

“You can review anything online,” Goldman said in the Times. “You can review the most trivial things, but you can’t review your college. There’s no platform for this incredibly important decision that costs so much money.”

In the year preceding its launch, Unigo developed a network of unpaid interns at the colleges it covers, who in turn got fellow students to write about their schools. 100 of the interns were sent Flip video cameras (another disruptive product!) and filmed typical scenes on campus or interviewed fellow students.

From the Times article:

“[Unigo] changes the game from an economic standpoint too: it costs a lot of money to travel far away from home to check out schools, and Unigo offers an unfiltered, detailed, often somewhat eccentric view of campuses all over the country. A 45-second video in which an unseen student pans around the courtyard at Sarah Lawrence on a sunny day and simply describes what she sees (including a student-run barbecue pit called PETA, which stands for “People Eating Tasty Animals”) is so evocative that it makes the one-page U.S. News summary — or the descriptions in Sarah Lawrence’s own admissions catalog, for that matter — read like junk mail.”

And one of the young editors for the site, Max Baumgarten, summed it up nicely in the article: “I don’t think [the colleges] know the numbers. The whole package is something they should be a bit scared of, but they’re not. They don’t really understand the immensity of it.” 

One of the tenets of Innosight's thinking is that organizations need to select managers with the right backgrounds, not just "the right stuff." An organization should look for managers with the right "schools of experience" to deal with situations that may be unfamiliar to the organization as a whole.

Today's Wall Street Journal brings us a story that demonstrates an application of this idea. A nonprofit foundation called the Fritz Institute and companies like DHL are putting together team of experienced logistic professionals who can help solve the logistics problems that come with disaster relief efforts.

Bringing teams of experienced professionals, such as DHL's Airport Emergency Team, into disaster relief operations directly contributes to the ability of governments and NGOs to get supplies to where they are needed. The team has already helped in Iran, Sri Lanka, the post-Katrina American South, and Pakistan. The teams coordinate closely with the authorities responsible for the relief efforts and the organizations--both military and civilian--who do the work. These logistics professionals provide much needed expertise that government, NGO, and military managers do not have.

These teams are a great example of how industry can help provide solutions to public problems. In my personal experience with international relief operations (such as in Central Africa following the Rwanda genocide), I can certify that this kind of expertise is worth hundreds of tons of supplies.

Our hats are off to the companies and individuals doing this work, and to Mr. Lynn Fitz who set up his own foundation to provide this innovative solution.

A terrific article in today's New York Times provided a case study in how to debase a brand. Ironically, the same institution illustrates how to extend one. The institution is one we know well -- Harvard University. The NYT front-page article focuses on Harvard's Extension School, which offers a wideranging courseload accessible without review by an Admissions Department. Fine enough -- the principle of making Harvard open to the broader community is an excellent one. But the University has taken things a step too far, marketing the courses as the Harvard experience, and even going so far as to offer a BA degree from the Extension School. Sure enough, people are obtaining their BAs, which they list as being from Harvard University, at a cost far less than they would pay at Harvard College, and with no screening by Admissions. Harvard has spent over 350 years building its brand, and now it has proceeded to dull it through this short-sighted move. We have seen other organizations follow a sadly similar course. In attempting to disrupt themselves, or simply to extend their reach into the market, they have pushed their brands too far. From Yves San Laurent to Delta Express, firms have misunderstood how easily brand equity can be muddied. A brand is strong if it links tightly with a customer's job to be done, occupying a very distinct piece of mental real estate. YSL could not stretch to encompass high fashion and cheap sunglasses, just as Delta could not extend from a high-service airline to a truly no-frills operation. This is not to say that the firms shouldn't have attempted these efforts, but doing it in a way so tightly linked to their core brand risked equity built up over decades, and also created tensions about just how far the low-cost or mass market approach could be pushed. Harvard seems to be marching down this path. However, the University shows a better way through its Harvard Business School Publishing. HBSP makes the Business School's famous case studies accessible to all. I even used them to teach salespeople in Zambia about some key business principles. As Clayton Christensen and Scott Anthony have described in Seeing What's Next, this model provides a way for HBSP to become an Intel Inside for educational programs around the world. No one confuses a course elsewhere for the HBS experience, even if it is based on HBS cases. HBSP succeeds in linking Harvard's brand equity to the cases, but not to the student. In a different vein, Calvin Klein has extended its brand to CK -- CK conveys a more off-the-cuff, less elegant message than the core Calvin Klein brand, and the price points are in line with this perception. Firms with powerful brands can disrupt themselves, but they must move with care.