Title: Why Designers Will Become the Next Gen of CEOs
Context: We are no longer the weird guys in the basement. Now we???re the weird guys in the boardroom.
Synopsis: Businesses are increasingly being built and revamped around a core belief in design as customers understand ??? and demand ??? superior user experiences from the products and services they buy. Until recently however, it seemed as though there was a glass ceiling on the design profession keeping us out of the upper echelons of senior management as we were thought to be too strange, too flighty, too arty and certainly not business minded enough. This is changing as the realization dawns that design can impact everything about about a business, not just the things it makes. Design (i.e. the systematic, creative and process oriented search for innovative solutions to everyday problems) succeeds very often not in spite of its outsider status in the business world, but distinctly because of it. The confidence and ability to bring an organization???s most creative problem solvers to bear on rote business questions has the potential to become a core differentiator while the competition happily ossifies under the yoke of tradition and institutionalization. Commitment to ???good design??? does not start and end in the studio, it flows from there, and the smartest businesses are eagerly endowing it with the same authority as its well seasoned and more straight-laced predecessors.
Best Bit: ???Increasingly, design is affecting more than new products or brand strategy and used to better inform, create and/or shape company strategy and their business models.???