Adaptive Path Blog

Recently I had a chance to chat with Marty Neumeier, President of Neutron LLC and author of the recently published book The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation. Marty will be speaking at MX 2009, March 1-3 in San Francisco.

[Kumi Akiyoshi] How did you become a brand expert?

[Marty Neumeier] I went to Art Center in advertising and illustration. They didn’t have design back in, this is prehistoric days, in the sixties, there was no design major so I took advertising and illustration and if you kind of put those things together you get design. Then I went out on my own and just started doing all kinds of design- advertising, some copy writing, illustration, whatever I could get work doing and as I worked on all those things, I realized that none of it matters unless there is strategy behind it. You have to know what you’re applying it to. So I started to see a disconnect between what designers wanted to do and what the marketplace really needed – what businesses needed.

I started learning more about the real uses of design. I started reading books by Trout and Reese. They had a book called “Positioning” that was very enlightening. Then from there I just started learning more about business strategy and working my way through all the literature on business strategy. And then I was able to say, “Ok, if that’s what you’re trying to do, if that’s what you need to do, I know how design can help.” So that’s how I got into doing that. I don’t know if you know my history but in the late nineties, from ‘96 to 2001, I published a magazine called Critique.

[KA] Yes, that was brilliant.

[MN] Thank you. The idea of Critique was to help designers understand how to apply their work more closely to the real needs of culture and the real needs of business. I found it difficult because designers don’t always want to think about what they’re doing. They just love doing it. So I had to find enough people who wanted to think about design to build the magazine on. And after 5 years of trying, there just weren’t enough traditional designers that wanted to think about strategy and so I basically closed the magazine and closed my design business and I just sat down and thought about it for a while.

I realized there is a gap between creativity and strategy that is very wide and that nothing good is going to happen for designers or for business until we close that gap. So that’s when I started Neutron to start to solve this problem. Neutron, instead of going to designers to try to get them to understand more about how business works, goes to business people to try to get them to understand how design works and how design can help them. I think they’re more open to it than designers are open to business. And it’s proved to be true. We’ve been able to make a living just working with corporations to get them to embrace branding and designing and innovation.

[KA] So when you talk about designers, are you talking about traditional graphic designers?

[MN] Yes, traditional graphic designers.

[KA] I would have thought that designers working in digital media would be slightly more open minded about these things.

[MN] Yes, they are. They’re starting from a different position than traditional designers. The tradition of design really comes from Bauhaus. And the Bauhaus was really about trying to apply art principles, aesthetic principles, to industry and so it really embraced art. I think that’s what’s holding back traditional design – the feeling that we’re all artists. And I think interactive designers, for example, start from a different place. They don’t learn about the Bauhaus. They don’t care about that. They’re coming from technology. So their challenge is to add the aesthetic qualities that traditional design has. So that’s usually what is missing there, the traditional aesthetic qualities.

[KA] In your book, the Designful Company, which is a great book, you mention, “The central problem with brand building is getting complex organizations to execute simple ideas”. Are there examples of companies doing this successfully and if so, how?

[MN] It’s very difficult to do that because being creative within a corporate structure is not like playing classical music. It’s like playing jazz. There’s no music that everyone is playing. You have to respond to what others are doing. So that really puts a lot of pressure on the skills that are inside the company. We find that there aren’t enough design skills in most corporations – far from it. So how do they increase their ability to embrace design and use design in a more holistic way? In a more consistent, coherent way, and they need help doing that. They not only need to bring better design people who are sort of systems thinkers into the corporations, they need help on the outside too. That’s one of the roles Neutron plays. We help the people inside the companies deal with this confusion of work and all the disconnects, or silos inside which they work where they can’t or won’t talk to each other so how do you cross all those silos? So the Designful Company is all about addressing that situation for any company that wants to really win through innovation.

[KA] Do you have examples of companies that are successfully doing that?

[MN] No, because none of them do it perfectly across the board. There are historically some very good companies. IBM has done an amazing job over the years organizing all their design to look like it came from the same company. HP, one of our clients is doing a pretty good job right now, very much better than they used to do. We have a system for helping them do that. As I recall a few years ago, I don’t know how it is now, but Autodesk had a really good, consistent design program. So there are a few and usually it just comes and goes. So the challenge is to get the whole company working together against a common shared vision.

[KA] I guess I would think of Apple immediately.

[MN] Oh! How could I forget Apple? Well you know the problem with Apple, I don’t work with Apple so I don’t know for sure, but with Apple it seems like it’s very much CEO driven so that the CEO, Steve Jobs is the designer in chief, so that’s a very rare situation. He does a wonderful job and I’m so happy that Apple exists because it’s a great example and what we tell our clients is “Would you like to be Apple-ized?” because we could help you do that but it’s not going to be hiring a designer to be your CEO, it’s going to be more systemic programmatic way of looking at design where it outlives the CEO. It goes on.

[KA] What impact does design thinking have on the way businesses operate today?

[MN] Well, it doesn’t have enough is my view. But it could because the way traditional business managers think is kind of in a two-step process- knowing and doing. You have to know something, through experience, case studies, or you went to Harvard and you know there are certain solutions to certain kinds of problems. So that’s the knowing part and then you just go from there, right to doing. It’s very fast but it’s not reflective so there’s no one questioning the knowing or the doing. What designers do is they’re put in the middle step called “making.” So what we like to do is create prototypes of new options that weren’t on the table before. So that changes “knowing” because suddenly designers are saying “Well you thought you knew that but maybe you don’t know that. How would you regard this option?” Then changes “doing” because it gives you more options and that’s how you innovate. So that’s what needs to be introduced to the corporate world. It’s the difference between deciding the way forward and designing the way forward. With designing you prototype, you explore, you imagine different outcomes, and then you choose.

[KA] How do you introduce that to a corporation that doesn’t have design thinking?

[MN] Well, first you write a book (laughs). Then you start offering solutions. That’s what Neutron’s niche is. We offer a way to plant that seed within a company so that it will start to grow. And the seed often is the corporate vision. What vision can we embrace that is so bold and so beguiling that everyone will want to follow it and they will know what they need to do to work together. So you need that. The next thing you do is you need to give everyone in the company, especially in communications and marketing the tools to start building communications and products against that vision. Often that can exist on an Internet site and that site should be beautifully designed. It should be so easy to access and so clear, a lot of work should go into that. So that’s a great job for interactive designers to make that just a beautiful, useful place. Then you start to build a team internally whose job it is to collaborate. And they can do a lot to get it started because if they’re good people and they love to collaborate and they know what they’re doing and can cross silos, they can be spread out through the whole company and connect to do this work together and that starts to bridge the gaps.

[KA] In your book, you argue that truly innovative ideas don’t need much help from metrics. It’s often hard to evaluate metrics unless the product gains popularity. For example the Aeron chair, it was very unpopular during the metrics of consumer research but they decided to ship it anyway and it became very successful. Innovation seems to happen when an organization is willing to take risks.

[MN] That’s correct. But there’s a limit to how much of a risk they can take. A couple of things need to happen. They need to understand the nature of the risk, or the nature of innovation. I should say, which often looks riskier than it is. The other thing they can do is to use design and prototyping to de-risk the risk. Take the risk out of innovation. To do that you use a stage gate innovation process where you prototype very quickly a lot of future ideas then you test those with an audience and some of those will look good and you put a little more money into it and build it out a bit more and if that looks good you test it in the market place in a controlled way and if that looks good put a lot of money in and you roll it out. So the risk is broken down into parts. This is exactly how venture capitalist works. They take a lot of risk too. So they de-risk it by breaking it down into stages.

The other thing you can do is teach corporate decision makers what a really big success looks like in its early stages because they get scared when it doesn’t look great right from the beginning. We show them the “good and different chart.” What you want is ideas that are good and good is obvious, something that is more beautiful or more practical, more useful, faster, whatever it needs to be – those things are measurable. And the other thing it should be is different. Those things you can find out by testing prototypes with the intended audience and you’ll get some very interesting responses.

So with the Aeron chair the responses were “Well, it’s pretty comfortable but it’s very weird looking. I don’t think I’d every buy this.” Or, “You call that a chair? I don’t think that looks like a chair. I’d be embarrassed to have that.” Then if they sat in it they’d say, “Yeah, it has some interesting features that I couldn’t get in other chairs.” So if Herman Miller, the company that put that out listened to those responses, they would cancel the project and they would have lost out on the biggest success they ever had. So they were smart enough to realize that something that was very innovative is going to get mixed reviews on the “different” side. It’s going to sound too different to people that doesn’t mean that it’s a failure. It’s actually one of the hallmarks of a future success.

You have to have that if you’re going to try for real innovation. The Prius, the same thing. Who knew that the Prius would be the biggest success in car manufacturing in the last ten years? Well, if you looked at the “good – different” chart, and you looked at the pattern of responses, you would have seen that same pattern. That’s a class we teach in marketing so they can see how good and different relate to each other.

[KA] Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. I’m looking forward to seeing you speak at MX 2009, March 1-3 in San Francisco.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 3:25 pm and is filed under MX: Managing Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.