Past book review (i.e. posted prior to starting this blog) for The Designful Company: How to Build a Culture of Nonstop Innovation, by Marty Neumeier, Peachpit Press, 2008, reposted here:
A beautifully designed text. The author's description of this work as an "airplane book", compressed into a size readable during a single flight, is accurate, as this reviewer read the less than 200 pages of heavily white-spaced content during just a couple train rides of a Chicagoland work commute. That this book has a lot of white space plays to its advantage, because of the topic, which is well suited to what the author also calls a "whiteboard book" (often called a white paper in business) on how to build a culture of nonstop innovation.
According to Neumeier (this reviewer is not familiar with the author's previous books), this book follows his first two books in this series, "The Brand Gap" and "Zag". While the first of these showed "how to bridge the distance between business strategy and customer experience with five interconnected disciplines", and the second drilled "down into the first and most strategic of these five disciplines, radical differentiation", this third book shows "how to transform your company by unleashing the full potential of creative collaboration".
The introduction discusses "wicked problems", traditional business and management, design, branding, and agility. During this initial discussion, which sets the stage for successive chapters on design, aesthetics, and change, explains that the solutions to some business problems are never right or wrong, just better or worse, and that measurable quality has been so successful that it has become a commodity.
Neumeier indicates that "the management innovation that is destined to kick Six Sigma off its throne is design thinking", because "in an era of Six Sigma sameness, it's no longer enough to get better. We have to get different. Not just different, but REALLY different". And while the phrase "innovative design" often brings to mind technology products, "design is rapidly moving from 'posters and toasters' to include processes, systems, and organizations". The author proposes a new definition for design: "change". Anyone who improves a situation is a designer.
Even leaders can be designers, since leading is "the act of moving people from an existing situation to an improved one". The author explains that everyone uses design thinking to some extent, but certain people are more well suited to it, tending to be empathetic, intuitive, imaginative, and idealistic, and he explains why these traits do not translate into soft-hearted, illogical, scatterbrained, and mulish. The second chapter explains that beauty, aesthetics, requires integrity, harmony, and radiance. "Aesthetics gives us a toolbox for beautiful execution."
The third chapter, the heart of the book, shares 16 of the leverage points that Neumeier and his firm, Neutron, have used with their clients to launch them on a trajectory of change: taking on wicked problems, weaving a rich story, establishing an innovation center, bringing design management inside, assembling a metateam, collaborating concertina-style, introducing parallel thinking, banning PowerPoint, sanctioning spitballing, thinking big and spending small, designing new metrics, instituting branded training, learning through acquisition, adding a seat to the table, recognizing talent, and rewarding with wicked problems.
If the reader does not have the time to read the entire book, which is highly unlikely in the opinion of this reviewer, reading the last two pages of the third chapter is a must for anyone in business, which summarizes the emotional benefits of working in a designful company. In addition, some readers might be interested to know that the author provides a 13-page summary of the book following this third chapter, and actually welcomes the reader to use exact quotes from this summary to use in their own presentations, permission this reviewer rarely sees. Also, the book provides 9 pages of abstracts for 34 recommended books.