Good
design is good business
Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers design partner John Maeda talks to McKinsey’s Hugo
Sarrazin about why today’s senior executives must understand design.
Design was once largely about making products more
attractive. Today, it’s a way of thinking: a creative process that spans entire
organizations, driven by the desire to better understand and meet consumer
needs. In this conversation, McKinsey director Hugo Sarrazin and Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers design partner and former president of the Rhode
Island School of Design, John Maeda, discuss how design has moved from the
drafting table to the boardroom—and all functions in between. An edited
transcript of their remarks follows.
Interview transcript
Hugo Sarrazin: You have been around design for a long
time, and it means so many things for so many different folks. You looked at it
from different angles—from the technical, from the arts, and from leading a
great design school, the Rhode Island School of Design. How do you define what
design is today? And what should executives think about?
John Maeda: The word “design” has a very simple
definition: good design is good business. This came from T. J.
Watson Jr., in a 1966 memo to all of IBM.1 Certain kinds of design have strategic value. It has a
multiplier effect. It is design that can be instrumented, and then design where
the process is changing because you are now saving time. And saving time is
saving money.
Hugo Sarrazin: A question I get a lot is, Why now? Why
is design so important now? And why is it a C-suite type of topic?
John Maeda: Moore’s law’s efficacy is dwindling. We
have enough processing power, therefore we aren’t driven to buy it because it’s
faster or has more memory. So now we have to buy it because of how it makes us
feel. But not only that—Steve Jobs died. And that was a big deal.
I remember the day he
died, I got an email from John Hockenberry of [New York public-radio station]
WNYC at 4:00 AM: “Steve Jobs died. People want to know what this design thing
he did was.” I remember that moment. I was on the radio at 5:00 AM on NPR.2 I realized no one really knew what this thing was that
Jobs had marketed as being “magical design,” and they wanted to understand it.
So Moore’s law is dwindling—and that big moment. That’s what’s catapulted all
this here.
Hugo Sarrazin: And I’d add a few other things. One is
that the advent of mobile is fundamentally changing the need to think about
design, the interaction, and the experience in a substantive way. The last one
is that we just have a new generation of folks who are being trained on this.
And I think that’s good.
It doesn’t mean that immediately the C-suite
people are going to wake up and say, “This is important.” It’s just that you
now have expectations of solving problems differently, and that is now embedded
in both how they got educated and also what they’re using in terms of products
out there.
Great expectations for design
Hugo Sarrazin: I do think we have a danger. The
expectations are that the only way to create value is a Steve Jobs–type of
moment.
John Maeda: Whenever someone has come to me asking
for the silver bullet, I say, “There’s only a silver ray. And you have to know
where to point it. And you might get lucky.”
Hugo Sarrazin: Well, the other thing, too, that we
often get is impatience: “sprinkle that design dust and magic will happen.”
It’s just the wrong way to think about the problem. I think design is a
mind-set. It’s a set of capabilities and skills. It does require an environment
to flourish. It requires people to work in a collaborative way that is
different than it’s been historically. So just thinking that sprinkling a bunch
of magic design dust—and you’re quickly going to get to a new product, a new
experience—is a bit naive.
John Maeda: I talk to a lot of start-ups. And I was
talking to a CEO who was formerly a doctor. I love CEOs who come up a weird
path. He was a medical professional doctor—a real doctor—but he’s very curious
about design. So he retained some design firm early on; he’s very curious about
how it all works.
Now he’s about to release his product—and
everyone’s telling him to gamify, to social, this, that, whatever. He asked me
what I thought. I usually do not offer my opinion, because I’m always concerned
that it will cause the wrong effect. But in this case, I had to offer my
opinion, which was, “Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it.”
If you think about design adding value, a lot of what people don’t understand
is that sometimes the best design consultants will tell you not to design it.
Measuring design’s worth
John Maeda: One thing I’ve noticed is that—so now we
assume that because usage patterns have changed design is important because it
can’t be bad anymore—that funny word “measurement” comes in. How do I measure
if it’s good or not? How do you approach that?
Hugo Sarrazin: I’m going to make the question even
broader. We’ve forever questioned, “What’s the return on investment on design?”
That is an incredibly, incredibly difficult question, and it’s not unlike, “How
do you measure the value of a brand?” So I’m going to give you two things.
One is you can instrument your design more so
today. And because you have more ability to measure, you can see if it’s being
used. You can receive feedback on what is being used, how it’s being used, and
that kind of stuff. So that’s one dimension that is very, very, very different.
And in a world where we’re going to have so much data, it’s going to allow you
to measure good design versus bad design.
The second is I think we’re changing the way
to even land on the design. You can do a whole lot more rapid prototyping
iteration at a scale that is very different.
Connecting design to the business
Hugo Sarrazin: As a large company, you think about
applying design principles, design thinking. What do you see as some of the
challenges and some of the ways that seem to work better?
John Maeda: Well, I had the good luck of getting to
work with John Donahoe on the eBay companies,3 through Brian Chesky.4 He wanted to find someone who could help him as CEO, to
get his design function working at a different rate and scale. And so I showed
up, and the first thing I did was I didn’t overpromise. I said, “I don’t think
I’m going to be able to do anything. OK, let’s set expectations low.”
What I did is, I
understood that the only challenge you have, for organizations at scale, is
that culture is hard to create because you’re busy. What I observed is that the
designers were all spread out, and they couldn’t see each other. So I connected
all of them together, all 380-something of them, into one community that could
see each other. And the CEO could see them. I remember John saying, “Oh, so
design isn’t about this pixels thing. It’s about systems thinking.” I’m a
systems thinker. “Oh, so it isn’t just about the appearance.” He totally got
it, and all the designers would see him get it. It’s that moment where a leader
gets to lead. So I saw that happen. It took a year. It’s not going to be a GSB5 case study. But if you can just get that to happen in an
authentic way—
Hugo Sarrazin: So it’s getting the right people
together, creating the sense of community. It’s also reframing what it is.
John Maeda: Reframing, exactly.
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