Design Transformation
Doug Powell previously served as the national president of AIGA, the largest and most established design organization in the world.
For close to a decade, Doug held several Design leadership roles at IBM, including VP of Design. He left IBM to join the Expedia Group in 2022 as their Vice President of Design Practice Management.
Doug brings a very unique perspective on design organization maturity. His work with IBM was truly transformational.
“ Good design is good business.”
It's a very interesting history (IBM). In fact, the design whisperer for Thomas Watson Jr. in those years in the late 50s through the early to mid 70s was Elliot Noyes, who was an architect from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Noyes was quite a notable architect who was the first Director of Design at IBM. He was a consultant. He was not an employee, but he was close to Watson Jr. and I suspect that he was actually the ghostwriter of that line for Watson Jr.
“Good Design is Good Business.”
Not to say that Watson Jr. didn't really internalize that idea. I think he really did. And he was an important figure.
Elliot Noyes, in this role of Design Director, assembled an ecosystem of design consultants who were some of the most notable designers of the 20th century: Eero Saarinen and Marcel Breuer. Later Richard Sapper, just massive, Paul Rand, of course, who designed the brand and visual identity. These were just towering figures.
Importantly though, they were all consultants. They weren't embedded in the company. Eliot Noyes eventually passed away, he died at a fairly early age. Thomas Watson Jr. eventually retired, of course, and moved on.
That's why design faded at IBM.
So, back to that sustainable piece of the of the Design mission that Phil Gilbert set for us was so important. He saw that design was so impactful to the company in the middle of the 20th century and then it evaporated. So, it was important to Phil to say, no, we've got to make sure that 25 years from now, whatever we're doing right now has roots to last.
“ Measurment.”
The company at the time was in the midst of, I don't know how many quarters, of missed revenue projections and declining earnings.
That's what the company was measuring.
They were obsessed with that and how are we going to climb our way out of this slump?
To be honest, I think that's one of the areas that we weren't sharp enough as we launched the design program. If I had it to do over again, I'm guessing some of my colleagues from that original leadership team would have probably said, yeah, we should have been baselining, we should have been measuring everything in that first year.
Because, even in the first couple of years, we moved the needle. But we couldn't tell that story because we didn't know how much the needle had moved.
“ the business impact of design thinking.”
This was a study that Forrester conducted on the value of IBM’s design thinking practice.
They studied multiple IBM client companies in an array of industries and geos who had adopted and integrated this practice using the IBM Design playbook.
Forrester found that these companies saw a 2x improvement in the velocity of their cross-functional delivery teams moving from idea to market; they found that those teams were 80% more aligned around a common business mission; and they found that those companies saw a 300% ROI on the economic investment they made in design.
There were also some surprising ancillary findings, for instance they found a sharp improvement in employee engagement scores among teams applying this practice.
It’s a fascinating report, and still available online. I’d encourage your readers to check it out.