How's that working out for you? Being clever.

Hi, it’s me. I know you’ve been really busy lately but it’s time we have “the talk”. There has been a lot of discussion lately about the state of the economy and the struggles within the tech and design industries. I hear things like “it’s just another bubble”, “design thinking is dead”, “[we’re] fine. Assets are fine”, etc. Confident assurance in equal measure that this is the end of the tech and design industries, and that the tech and design industries have never been stronger. It’s time to accept the harsh reality that tech and design as they’re regarded today aren’t differentiators anymore, and they aren’t even industries.

Tech and design are vital disciplines for any product or service produced today. They once were truly revolutionary, but so was electricity. It’s time for tech and design to take their rightful place alongside other such luminous elders that have brought humanity this far; to make space for new discoveries to build on your legacy and take us even farther. The true pioneers and phenomenal talents in these fields have been overshadowed of late by the snake oil hawkers who have poisoned the reputation of some truly enlightening capabilities. It’s sad to see people turn their back on such valuable skill and knowledge because they’ve been sold a knock off version of reality. Accept no substitutions.

I mentioned before that tech and design aren’t even “industries”, which I think warrants some clarification. In 1899 my favorite economist (yes, I’m that much of a nerd) Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, which was equally powerful and important as it was poorly received. Veblen coined terms we all know such as “status symbol”, and “conspicuous consumption”. More important to this discussion, he defined a boundary between business and industry. I’ll paraphrase by saying that business exists for the sole purpose of generating profits for the purpose of funding the pleasure of the leisure class (see 1%ers, etc), whereas the purpose of industry is to produce goods and services for the benefit of society. That doesn’t mean it’s not ok to make money or even get wealthy, but there’s a fine line. And considering that 50% of the world’s wealth is owned by just EIGHTY ONE people, and just the top ten richest people in the world includes five current or former leaders of renowned tech and design firms, it’s very hard to argue that this is an industry. It is, by Veblen’s definition, business, and that leaves the remaining 7.8+ billion humans on earth fighting over the Leisure Class’ table scraps. There is a moral and ethical imperative to separate the business and industrial activities within tech and design, but I digress. That’s a story for another day.

So far I’ve made some pretty bold statements, and at this point you might be wondering how the hell do I have the nerve to make such such audacious claims? Or at least I hope you’re not just taking my word for it; my opinions are nothing if not worthy of scrutiny. I owe you some background about myself, my career, and my experiences so far in life.

I have a B.S. in Business Economics, and I was awarded multiple honors in the course of my study. Frankly, that shouldn’t mean anything to you. Titles and awards don’t equal capability. Honestly I despise both the words “business” and “economics” as they are commonly misused in society today. I didn’t choose this course of study until I considered that economics is much more a study of systems and how their components interact with each other, money being just one of several variables that define what may or may not be possible. And I learned that by improving my understanding of economics, I might be able to influence businesses to make decisions that have the potential to benefit humanity while also satisfying shareholders and board members. Something like a “spoonful of sugar” if you know what I mean.

On face value, my cv looks like complete chaos and makes no sense. If you’ll indulge my vanity for a moment, I’m more of a Richard Feynman or Snoop Dogg, than I am a Bill Gates or Tim Kobe type, when in comes to the trajectory of my work and interests.

I’m a respected Surgical Technologist with more than 24,000 hours in surgery. I’m a musician who’s performed live with acts like the Doobie Brothers and Pam Tillis. I’m an experienced executive leader of tech and design firms. And I’m an economist, but I'm not like a regular economist, I'm a cool economist. I want to share a little secret with you. None of those things are who I am, or what I do. Am I special? No. Am I insatiably curious to a fault? Probably. Am I a problem solver with a creative spirit, and maybe more than a little bit of a masochist? Definitely! But I haven’t done anything that anyone else isn’t capable of doing. It’s just that I’m most comfortable being uncomfortable, because I’m addicted to the rush of challenging myself to constantly adapt and learn new things. I adhere to the belief that evolution favors the generalist, and I do my best to let that guide my work and personal development.

Bringing this back to the point; the tech and design industries do not exist, and they are not failing. Their leaders are failing by resisting the privilege of being accepted as exalted icons for adding substantively to the canon of best practices for business and industry. They’re a shining example, slowly flickering out in real-time, that things are not always what they appear to be; and I’m assuming that I’m not the only person who can relate to that.

Some of the best known and most respected brands today who defined the standards that others have tried to turn into easy to follow recipes, are the direct result of people who didn’t fit into the boxes available to them at the time. Boxes are for things. Things to be stored or moved when not in use. Boxes are NOT for people or ideas. Let’s look at a couple cases where “different” and “difficult” people with conviction for their beliefs chose to embrace discomfort and the unknown, risking everything to test a belief that their crazy idea might not be so crazy after all.

Adobe is arguably one of the most influential and ubiquitous firms in tech and design today, not to mention the consumer market. Since 2023 happens to be the 30th anniversary of their founding let's start with them. Adobe has a market cap of approximately $256.6B, annual gross revenue of $17.61B, and an EBITDA of $6.72B as of 2022… if you care about those sorts of things. The only reason that Adobe exists is because in the late 1990s two Xerox employees, John Warnock and Charles Geschke, pitched an idea for a universal form of digital document to Xerox execs and got rejected. So they left, and founded Adobe to create the PDF. I’ll spare you the specifics about the financial health of Xerox, you can look it up if you like, but Xerox is barely hanging on with two years of net losses and a cringeworthy net income for the three years prior. How sublimely ironic would it be if Adobe were to acquire Xerox?

Everyone knows McDonald’s and what they sell. With 40,275 locations worldwide as of 2022, almost literally everyone knows McDonald’s. It may be well known to many people reading this, but it bears repeating that McDonald’s is not in the foodservice business. That’s secondary to their primary business, which is real-estate portfolio management. With over $30B in real-estate holdings, McDonald’s is one of the largest land owners in the world, eclipsing several firms whose core mission is real-estate portfolio management. As of 2021, approximately 93% of all McDonald’s locations were owned and operated by franchisees who are bound to operate at McDonald’s direction and purchase all supplies from McDonald’s. Only 7% of McDonald’s locations are owned and operated directly by the company, and the company is actively working to reduce that even further. Why? McDonald’s keeps approximately 82% of revenue generated by franchise locations, compared to just 16% of revenue from stores they own and operate themselves. McDonald’s as we know it today exists only because in 1956 Harry Sonneborn approached Ray Kroc with this proposed operating model. Kroc promptly hired Sonneborn as CFO of McDonald’s, and it turned out his crazy idea wasn’t so crazy after all.

These two examples share many similarities. Leaders of an organization were approached with a potentially revolutionary idea that stepped outside the lines of what the company thought they did, and required a humbling leap of faith. In one case they rejected the notion that such an unconventional concept could possibly be viable, leading to the birth of one of the most valuable and influential companies in the modern era, to the detriment of their own relevance and survival. In the other case a company struggling to sell 15¢ hamburgers took a stab at real-estate portfolio management and invented an entirely new business sector called “fast food”, that as of 2021 represents a global market of approximately $647.7B that is poised to push $1T by 2030.

The list of failures goes on and on and on. You could fill a museum of hubris with brands that shot themselves in the foot. For all I know there might be one. I think that’s the only assumption I haven’t researched in this article, and about as much blind risk as I’m willing to take. I can think of a few exhibits that would probably be there though. Names like Kodak, Juul, FTX, Alameda Research, MedMen, Fyre Fest, Blockbuster, Yahoo, Blackberry, MySpace, Quibi, Theranos, Juicero… and that barely scratches the surface. I’d love to hear your favorite self destructive brand stories so please share in the comments! Not only is it a great entertainment value to learn about firms who blew a commanding lead, as my high school music teacher put it, “you can learn just as much from a bad performance as you can a good one.” Thanks Tom!

So. What is a firm to do? Well, let’s start with the talent that make these firms their money. YOU, the talent, are the only important part of this, and your craft is vital to the world. I’ve had the privilege of managing some extraordinary talent, and I don’t recall working with anyone who was explicitly opposed to improving the human condition. Maybe some who were indifferent, but certainly not malicious. Never doubt that it’s only because of you that any of this is possible, and I encourage you to know and defend your worth and ethical imperatives.

I think many of you are sufficiently dissolution by the oasis of the “carefree, chill” tech and design landscape. For those of you who are not, or may just be entering the space, please consider this advice. Red flags to look out for include: lavish toy filled offices, a well stocked bar, business plans that don’t account for everyone taking all the PTO they’re promised, lack of pay transparency, beware when manager use terms like “unlimited PTO”, “love”, and “family”. Pay close attention when faced with discouragement for expressing opinions or concerns because it's not “your discipline, or job”, and among other things, the normalization of vulgar language as part of the company culture. Don’t get me wrong, I adore a well placed F bomb, but there’s a time and a place for that, and like any vice, it’s best used in moderation, or not at all.

Tech and design can definitely be fun and cool work environments, and very rewarding, but they are still professional environments. As the people hard at work in them, keeping the machine running with your finite and infinitely valuable time, you deserve to be treated with dignity and respect on YOUR terms.

Don’t mistake abusive language as someone trying to show you that they’re “cool and laid back”, I promise you the executives are balancing the the books and when their carelessness leads to cutting costs, odds are unlikely that they’ll sacrifice their income for the bad decisions they’ve made. They’ll more likely throw you out with the trash, no matter how “cool and laid back” they seemed to be, how much they “love” you, or what an important part of the “family” they said you were.

It’s ok, even admirable to build close relationships with colleagues, but there’s a nuanced art to defining the boundary between work and personal relationships when they start to overlap. Generally speaking, these people, especially management are not your friends. Even if they are, they have the unenviable task of making difficult decisions about your future. Even the good ones who may be heartbroken to do so, will let you go if it’s what needs to be done for the business. That’s one of the sad realities of their job; sad at least for those who understand or care about the gravity of their actions. It can be hard, but it’s healthy to approach these relationships with caution and always make sure you look out for your own interests first as ethically as you can. Management isn’t going to do that for you, and many of us have been trained to believe that it would be unwise to reveal how much leverage you actually have.

Ok, now back to the firms. To the managers, the directors, the executives, the people with the fancy titles. I’m not mocking you by the way, you’re my peers. I'm not mad, I'm just really disappointed. How could I possibly judge you? My license plate literally is HEFANCY; just a reminder to smile and not take myself too seriously. I know we don’t all share that perspective, so I’m not going to sugar coat this; jokes aside, the decisions we make have enormous consequences for other people’s lives. As one executive I know put it, insisting on conducting layoffs days before Christmas instead of waiting until after, “[you’re] grown-ups, and you can handle it.”

The party is over. The jig is up… Insert old-timey reference of your preference re: being exposed as a bad guy here. It’s long past time for tech and design leaders to grow up and conduct themselves as the professionals they are purported to be. You’ve been at the helm, steering this “industry” into disaster after disaster, for a generation. It is time for you to conduct yourself with dignity fitting of the privilege you have been afforded to alter the course of people’s lives. Or, it’s time for you to make room for a new generation of leaders; qualified professionals who came up watching your every move, with knowledge, training, and experience that didn't exist when your career began.

People who demonstrate, through their actions, a functioning understanding of the economy today, and how business and industry function as a part of it need to be making the crucial decisions. These decisions carry a solemn obligation that they are made with thorough consideration of the human implications, not just the P&L. I don’t care who's calling the shots, but that’s about as low as the bar can be set with all the knowledge we have at our disposal.

Fancy cars, designer bags, and keeping up appearances of a house of cards is not a recipe for success. It doesn’t serve the best interests of the business, its hard working talent, or humanity in general. Especially if it means living well beyond your means.

Free flowing booze, extravagant parties, and the occasional “family vacation” whisking everyone to an exotic destination for a few days sounds fun, but it’s lost on me what positive behavior or values such an exercise reinforces. In my experience, hard partying usually results in some unpleasant outcomes like regret, impaired judgement, and damaging health consequences. Let’s not even get into the potential business liabilities. This article is already long enough, and nothing kills a party like business ethics, risk mitigation, and fiduciary responsibility. Or so I’m told.

At times like this I’m reminded of Chuck Palahniuk’s seminal work, Fight Club, and it’s many pragmatic quotes; presently, “You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're [the] all singing, all dancing crap of the world.’

Now that I’ve gotten all that off my chest, can we please all agree that nobody is buying the illusion that tech and design are magical elixirs of success? Everything we do and see today is measured against products and services produced by the very few firms that have come closest to mastering these skills; and they continue to raise the bar.

It’s been almost five years since InVision published The Design Maturity Report which as of 2019 was the “widest-reaching report on how design affects business”, and it’s overflowing with rich and principled, actionable knowledge. One of my favorite observations being that the firms who get the greatest ROI from their design organizations tend to have the smallest “design” teams, but have learned to integrate the knowledge that design has given us about working successfully into their organizations without relying on, forgive me, “design thinking”, or “xyz design academy”, certificates that are quite frankly so bastardized that they’re the participation trophy of our professional generation.

The most stunning realization about The Design Maturity Report to me, is that of the hundreds of clients and potential clients I’ve interacted with since this has been freely available, shockingly few people in a business or leadership capacity are familiar with it, let alone studied it. Don’t even get me started on the wealth of other literature.

It’s all been sitting there right at your feet this whole time, the beautiful Ruby Slippers that they are. “You've always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.”

The era of “move fast, break things” has been over for a while now, but there are always those last few people who just don’t know when to leave a party that’s already ended. We’re now in the era of “slow down, reflect, and carefully consider what antiquated structures must be demolished to make room for the future.”

I for one look forward to living in the future, rather than dying in the past. And I hope to see you there!

Expectation vs. Reality: Planning for your plan to fail

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plan.”  These wise words were first spoken by the author Allen Saunders, and later popularized by John Lennon, and I can’t think of a more practical piece of advice in life or business.  Planning is an indispensable part of achieving one’s goals, but rarely does anything unfold exactly as intended.  Accepting this as a possibility, if not a certainty, can dramatically increase your chances for success.  Setting out assuming that either your destination or your path will change from your intention can prepare you to overcome far more potential obstacles along the way.

I consider adaptability to be critical to the success of any project, and I often joke that “my contingencies contingencies have contingencies”.  This has been a consistently valuable approach throughout my career, regardless of industry or role.  I’ve had to adapt to kickoff meetings learning that what the client was sold was not the same as what was scoped to deliver, and I’ve pivoted company services to meet market demand that was far from the planned offering.  The reason this topic is top of mind at the moment though is more personal.  A year ago, I embarked on the biggest move of my life to-date.  I packed up my little world and shipped it almost 3,000 miles from San Francisco to New York.

The plan was fairly typical of such a move: I followed a great opportunity for personal and professional growth.  Six months later I faced a very different reality: looking for work, three time zones away from a network I had cultivated for fifteen years, completely isolated from anything familiar in one of the most competitive cities on the planet.  Finding myself in that position was overwhelming, but I also recognized it as an opportunity to grow in new ways.  There would be no place for innovation if not for adversity.

When you’re faced with the need to rebuild, an often overlooked advantage is you can choose exactly what you want to be.  As with any plan, why not be ambitious and work towards that goal, while adjusting your approach as conditions evolve?  Settling for good enough rarely achieves even that goal.  So, as I found myself reconstructing a “new” new life after a false start, I have a fresh perspective and approach to my career objectives.  Launching Design Means Business was a big part of that and it’s helped me in two enormous ways.  First, it’s helped showcase my point of view and experience in a more digestible way for potential clients, and second, it’s a foundation to cultivate a personal brand and goodwill that will transcend my work environments along the arc of my career.  Did I expect to take this path?  No.  Is it good for my well-being in the long run?  Absolutely.  In life, as in business, it’s important to first understand what problems you’re solving to make decisions to your greatest advantage.

In 1994 Amazon.com was incorporated with the plan of selling books online.  In those early days of the internet, much of the technology required for this type of sophisticated online retail business didn’t exist.  The reality faced by Amazon led to the creation of Amazon Web Services, which became a formal service offering of Amazon in 2002. Today AWS is Amazon’s largest source of revenue; in FY 2018 AWS generated a profit of $7.3B.  Imagine the opportunity cost if Amazon had decided to ”stick to the plan” and didn’t realize the opportunity they had to commercialize the solutions they had created to accomplish their primary goals.

As I mentioned before, understanding the problem first before devising the solution is critical to this kind of success.  This is an important characteristic of highly effective design teams as well.  Design teams and organizations that view design as a means of systematically determining what should exist and why continue to produce these types of innovations.  The companies who are defining our future, and setting the bar for every other company out there are using these approaches.  The companies they are overtaking, the monoliths of the past, are typically those who treat design like the “polish applied at the end”, if they give it any consideration at all.  In my last post, Peacock Camouflage, I talked about the design value index as a subset of the S&P 500 that identifies companies who are leading examples of those who leverage design strategically.  It’s worth noting that Amazon is not only on this list, but they also aspire to be the most human centric company on the planet.  As they venture further into non-literary pursuits like drone delivery, groceries, and voice assistant, it’s easy to recognize that their direction is defined by the problems they are solving as they continue to evolve, rather than the plan they assumed to follow from the outset.

From where I sit now, looking back on the events of the past year, and looking forward to the potential of my future, the success of companies like Amazon reminds me that I’m on the right path.  I’m grateful to be in the business of helping my clients make better decisions by understanding human needs.  I’m just as confident that this approach will take me on to bigger and better things, and help fulfill my intention to bring meaningful change to other people’s lives as well.  Looking forward from here I have a direction and a plan, but as always, I fully expect (and frankly hope) that my actual path will lead me somewhere unexpected and exciting.  It feels appropriate to conclude this post with another quote that honors my sentiments, as well as my adoptive home of NYC.  “It ain’t where I been, but where I’m bout to go” -Pharrell and Jay-Z.

Peacock Camouflage: the disguise and cost of bad design

Recently I had a conversation with Lisa Ann Markuson at a networking event, about the brand identity problem that design faces as a business tool.  I had mentioned that design has a limited reputation for being visual, and is synonymous with appearance in many people's understanding. Lisa brought up another interesting point that not only are people misunderstanding design, there are those in business who are taking advantage of this misunderstanding and using the term "design" to conflate their abilities or offering; think Wizard of Oz.  I recognized that in some ways people are using this as camouflage, and she coined the brilliant term of "Peacock Camouflage". In this way that businesses misrepresent design, they're perpetuating the misconception that design=magic, hiding behind its mystique, and they're actually limiting their own business performance by not properly understanding how to use design strategically.

Failing to use design strategically isn't remotely uncommon.  Looking at the Design Value Index, which identifies companies that use design strategically, only 16 of 500 companies in the S&P 500 qualify for inclusion in the DVI, yet they outperform the index as a whole by roughly 200%.  I can only speculate as to why design is so widely underutilized, or ineffective, but in my experience there are two factors that are prevalent, and compounding. First, that people and businesses don't understand what design really is and how to apply it, and second, that design by nature is never fully complete and must be maintained perpetually.

Design is a methodical process for identifying and solving problems, defining what should be done and why; perhaps more importantly, what shouldn't be done and why not.  Fundamentally, it's a way of making decisions that mitigate risk and test hypotheses on smaller scale before significantly investing in a product, service, or transformation.  There's really no magic here, just discipline, training, and hard work to understand the needs of the human beings for whom we are designing. What has a semblance of magic though is when this process identifies better ways of solving known and unknown problems by understanding the needs of the humans at the center of the experience.  Human Centered Design (HCD) requires this kind of involvement, through every stage of the process, and is the best way of ensuring that what you're producing meets the needs of those humans and as a result, advances the goals of the company.

HCD can be applied at any level of product, service, or organizational design, but it's most effective when it can be approached on a holistic level.  User Experience (UX) typically refers to the design of digital products that we're accustomed to interacting with, but that’s really just one element of a larger system.  Service Design (SD) takes into consideration not just what's happening in that UX, but also what processes, systems, people, plant, and equipment are necessary to enable it.  Customer Experience (CX) design takes into consideration all of the elements of how your customers interact with your entire brand, whether it's by way of your marketing, digital products, services, or even in-store experiences and customer support.  To succeed in executing design strategically all of these things must be considered, and more importantly, maintained.

Looking at the history of the DVI, it's notable to recognize that firms identified in this list come and go on occasion (Newell Rubbermaid was removed from the 2015 list, and SAP joined the index in the same period).  This brings us to the second important success factor of leveraging design for business success; design never ends. It's a perpetual process that is constantly identifying opportunities for improvement and uncovering new unmet needs for your business and clients.  In the incredibly competitive and fast paced world of global business this is a critically underutilized tool that's resulted in the some of the largest business collapses and missed opportunities we've seen. Adobe was founded because Xerox failed to see the utility of the PDF in an increasingly digital world.  Kodak collapsed by holding too tightly to film, underestimating the digital photography market. And Blockbuster is now relegated to a single store in Bend, Oregon as they were steamrolled by Netflix and a bevy of streaming media competitors. The common unifying theme in all of these failures is a lack of understanding of the needs of their customers, and a failure to recognize opportunities for innovation beyond the state of the art; both of these are critical functions of good Human Centered Design.

When companies involve their customers throughout the design process, they can use tools like contextual inquiry to observe not just the stated needs of a user and failings of a product, but also the implicit, unknown needs that can only be witnessed in the context of use.  This is often where the most insightful information comes from, and drives meaningful innovation. Continuing to involve the user refines concepts quickly, producing refined concepts that have identified and mitigated potential failures in a low cost, efficient system. This approach is proven to create better products and services, build competitive advantage, and reduce the risk and cost of doing business in the long run.  So why is it so underutilized?

Hubris.  People want to believe that they're the next Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates.  They're most certainly not, and the 97% of the S&P 500 that trails 50% in value behind the companies within the Design Value Index are a pretty good indicator of that.  Jobs and Gates certainly are unique in their capabilities, but neither Apple nor Microsoft would have maintained their relevance today without understanding how to use design to make better decisions.  Apple doesn’t just signify the type of company we typically associate with “genius” visionaries, it’s also one of the best examples of design woven into every aspect of a firm’s culture. Integrating design methods within an organization to this degree is a critical component of adopting design as a holistic strategic tool; this approach of teaching elements of design to non-designers for better decision making has come to be known as Design Thinking.

Companies who integrate Human Centered Design in their UX, SD, CX, and organizationally through Design Thinking will be well prepared to succeed and drive the creation of the best products and services of the future.  They will take their place alongside, and perhaps unseat the Amazons, Netflixes, Starbucks, and Nike's of the world because they will do what's necessary to understand the human needs that drive the best decisions for their businesses.  

The successes of these companies have raised the bar for every interaction that we have with any brand.  Firms that choose not to invest in design as a strategic tool, and those disguised in peacock camouflage, will face an unnecessarily risky future.  Those firms will take their places next to the Kodaks, Blockbusters, and Juiceros, or at best maintain average performance far short of their potential.  Design driven strategy will bring us a future full of more useful and insightful products and services; the best offerings will come from firms who use this approach, and in the long run their competition will not survive.  In either case, it’s a very unique time for the business world, and I’m committed to working with companies to help ensure their longevity by solving real-world human problems.