Kevin McCullagh
I am the third one off the subs bench this morning. Just when I am not organising conferences my day job is actually running a design strategy consultancy, and at my previous job at Seymour Powell I was also a strategist there, so I do have some creds for the job.
So we had a bit of a warm up this morning on the idea of strategy, and that was very much a top-level case for why designers should be getting involved in strategy. I think in this session we want to kind of get beyond the normal blah that is talked about strategy, because let’s face it, when people want to sound expensive or important, or just generally feel good about themselves, it is one of the first words that they pull out the bag. What I think we really want to do in this session is basically hear from the speakers here and what they understand design strategy needs to be, what kind of natural talents designers have to bring to strategy and also maybe look at some of the gaps that designers have in their normal education and background and what extra kind of skills they need to work on to become better strategists.
So if I could just introduce the speakers briefly here, on my immediate left is Jonathan Sands and he is chair of Elmwood, a brand consultancy and he also sits on the board of the Design Council and on the strategy board of WalMart in the Americas. Richard Eisermann in the middle, a product designer by training, worked in America and Italy in various jobs in consultancies like IDEO and in-house at places like Whirlpool. He came to London to take a position at the Design Council and has now set up his own service agency called Prospect. Ed Silk is a creative strategist at Interbrand the brand consultancy. Ed does not come from a design background but works day to day with designers, so Ed is working in design strategy but not from a design background. Richard is a design strategist that has moved up from a design background and Jonathan actually comes from an advertising agency background and it is kind of a business strategy within the design industry. So we have got different perspectives on the question. And I think I will leave it there and ask Jonathan to pitch in with his first ideas.
Jonathan Sands
Well actually Andrea stole all my ideas...
I think the first presentation this morning for everybody in the audience thought ‘Wow that was fantastic’. It was one of the best presentations I have seen in seminars for many years and my reaction to it was not a rational reaction, it was an emotional reaction and I bet for most people the reaction was emotional, it was ‘Wow that was fantastic!’ and not ‘Well, that building was made of such and such gauge of steel…’ and rational.
The thing about strategy and why design is a difficult thing for most businesses is that most businesses tend to be heavily loaded with rational people, accountants. In fact quite a lot of my clients are so rational that their logical right brain is like that, in fact I sometimes wonder how they keep a straight line when walking out of the corridor, they have to keep re-calibrating. I always think that designers are probably a bit like that, especially student designers and you think it is the hallucinogenic drugs or the drink that makes them walk lazily, but it is not it is the fact that designers are very heavily kiltered to one side of the brain. I think Andrea’s comment that ‘only one brand can be the cheapest’ is a fundamental truth and therefore design is about how for all the other brands in business you create an emotional reason to buy, so a purpose beyond price, a purpose beyond a rational performance.
I remember being in an audience where a guy from Saatchi and Saatchi was talking about how you measure love, and I thought well how do you measure love. I dearly love my wife but I don’t know whether I am more in love with my wife than Richard is in love with his partner – assuming he has got one. Sometimes I think my wife is more in love with our Labradors than she is with me but the truth is it is an emotional connection and I actually believe that great design forges a fantastic emotional connection, so how does that emotional strategy work? Well, first of all I think that the most powerful thing that designers can do for design strategy is just spend time looking at what is going on in the world - and if there is one thing that I see at the moment it is that we live in a world of anxiety, we are worried about global warming, we are worried about bird flu, we are worried about terrorism. Very sadly one of my clients was actually killed in the London bombings in the tube two years ago and as a result I am terrified of going on a tube and I have not been since.
So we have this anxiety, we are worried about our kids. In Japan now you can have GPS wired in to school blazers so that parents know that their kids have gone to school OK, or at least the blazer has. So great brands are those therefore that make you smile, make you feel comfortable, make you feel safe. I don’t think it is any surprise that the Mini is very successful because as well as being very contemporary it is sort of contemporary nostalgia, it reminds us of a time when things were safer back then.
And finally two brands that really make me smile and therefore I think one will be successful and the other one is already successful. One is called The Boring Store and it’s in Chicago and they say ‘Don’t come in to this store because it is really boring, it fact it is so boring that we have not had a visitor or anybody in our store for twenty four years…’, and actually it is a store for spies, a store for selling security cameras and it says even on the packaging what is not in the box, rather than what is in it. So it says ‘in this box isn’t a 30 feet piece of rope and a grappling iron’, and it just makes you smile.
The other one for those of you that have not seen it yet it is in London and it is extremely successful in the US, it is a brand called The Geek Squad. Now if you wanted people to come and wire up your television or your computer wouldn’t it be great to see somebody who is agent 391 and he has got a badge like the FBI, he has got black trousers that are deliberately short so you see his white socks, and their tag line is ‘You never saw us, we were never here’. Because they know that guys do not want to admit that they can not wire these things up, so they say ‘Call us when your wife or girlfriend is out, we will come and sort it out and you never saw us, we were never here’.
So for me design strategy is about making people smile, feel safe, is having a purpose beyond price which is an emotional connection and not a rational one.
Richard Eisermann
Jonathan is speaking from his background which is brand-centric and I can only speak from mine which is much more product-centric and unfortunately I have to tell you that product design is dead, for me it is absolutely dead.
That is not to say that products won’t be designed, they will continue to be designed, but they are not going to be designed in isolation as they have been in years past. Products these days have got to have connections into the business, they have to be supported by services, they are really just ways of getting services out into the business and getting custom through those devices and through those elements. So you can’t just conceive of something in isolation on a pedestal in a beautiful Alias rendering any more, you’ve got to see how that product connects to people’s lives, connects to your business and how it sits in the marketplace, and that is where you start to think about strategy. You can’t just focus on form, you have to think about the implications of that form, what is it going to say about the brand, what is it going to say to people who you are trying to excite and entice and get to love you, essentially.
That doesn’t mean that product designers are going to be dead soon either: yes, we are going to be around and there is a need for stuff, because that is one of the only ways we are going to be able to deliver services: services still have to come through some kind of medium.
When I was a kid I used to watch this programme on public television in the United States and it was about how to paint, how to be an artist. There was a mad Austrian guy with wild hair and a moustache and a painting palette, painting landscapes - beautiful mountain landscapes from Austria, from where he was from - and his mantra was ‘You are the mighty creator’. I would sit in front of the television, I was eight or nine years old and I would go ‘I am the mighty creator’ and that is something that has stuck with me for years and I thought ‘I am the mighty creator, I am the fucking mighty creator’ – and that’s not the case any more.
Yes, as Peter Higgins’ presentation showed this morning, it was visionary, it was fantastic, it left me breathless. A lot of the projects were just – interestingly he called them pieces which made them much more artistic in that sense, but they were incredibly visionary. I wanted to ask a question about how that visionary capability sit with these ideas that we are discussing here about co-creation. How can people get involved in developing that kind of vision? That is a fundamental question that I think we have to, as designers, understand: people out there, how are we going to get them involved in our processes, how are we going to step back from being mighty creators and allow everybody to become creators? That is a fundamental question I think we have to try and answer.
The other thing is that a little strategy goes a long way; we shouldn’t have strategy reviews and be doing incredible investigations about strategies. Strategy is a sheet of A4 paper that says who you want to be and the rest is all getting there, the rest is all saying that ‘I want to be this’ and ‘How am I going to get there?’ Blue ocean, red ocean - it doesn’t matter, you have to decide who you are and that is the essence of developing a brand basically, just decide it and work on getting there. It seems fundamental to me - and yet so many people do not do that at all, working with SMEs often times as was mentioned this morning. You know, Australia: 36% rate of business plan in their SMEs and in the UK it is probably a lot lower than that. There is very few companies that I have encountered that do have a clear sense of who they are and who they want to be, they are just running after it all the time and I think we as designers can start to introduce ideas about who it is that you are going to be and how are we going to help you get there, I think it is right for all this.
Ed Silk
From my perspective, going back to obviously a strategic angle, I think design can actually bring in an incredible amount to the strategic process and what Jonathan was talking about, the left brain and right brain, the IQ versus the EQ and I think the element of intuition, imagination that designers are able to bring to the table, the way that they actually approach things, the way they think things, the sense of energy and bringing new approaches and fresh thinking, that they have gone off and discovered from looking at things around product design, things around architecture, things around fashion and they kind of bring it all together.
And I think the one thing that, having worked closely with designers and creatives, is the sense that they have the ability to take that plan on that piece of paper and make it come alive and it is a very real and tangible product that they are able to produce, and I think that taking that to a client and saying ‘Here is your strategy and this is what it means for you,’ is a very powerful tool and I think that allows us from a strategic perspective to actually sell in a lot more than we would probably be able to without that component added in.
So I think they really have that capability to express an idea in a visual way and I think by having the toolkit that you are all equipped with in terms of... what is the appropriate style in terms of the ways of photography or the use of type or tone, are all components that help make that idea stronger and more robust, and going back to Andrea’s point earlier, it is really about delivering competitive advantage and I think having designers as part of the strategic process allows us to have that advantage over perhaps other people.
In terms of new skills I think designers need to be equipped with in order to progress, actually comes back to the point of what exactly is strategy and the idea is that it is kind of a plan, it is a plan to reach a desired goal that is shared by the business or by the team, or by whoever is involved in the product, but essentially I think strategy is this kind of word that gets bantered around and people think it is being clever and actually all it is, is simply having common sense. I think the skills that we need to encourage designers to be equipped with – and this is coming from a strategic angle – is having much more holistic approach to thinking and as a strategist I will not just go away and draw on a piece of paper and then come back and say well I think it might be this based purely on intuition, I will go out and investigate, I will go out and review, I will look at the competition, I will drive and speak to consumers, I will speak to the business, I will get lots of information, so before I even get on to developing the strategy I will go out and investigate around what it is and I think it is something that is much more considered and I think that’s something that I have learnt, it needs to be much more considered, it cannot be something that’s about what you believe individually, it has got to be a shared agreement: ‘Yes, that is collectively what we agreed to and it is the right and fitting design for our brief’.
I think the other thing that designers need to embrace is a sense of objectivity. I think there is a real danger as designers that sometimes you get overly emotionally involved with a project, I think you get slightly attached to what is your baby in a way, sometimes by having objectivity it allows you to step away from the perspective and actually say that this is the right solution for this audience, it might not be the right solution for me as I see it, but this is actually the right solution for the audience.
And I think that’s my final point and this is something that was mentioned earlier and it is the element of listening and listening to who your audience is and driving an insight and trying to discover what the audience is going to what to be emotionally involved with and that will be the strength of delivering a really good design concept or the answer to a brief and I think it is just coming back to being very focused around needs-based and a consumer insight, and alluding to what Peter was talking about earlier it is about this idea of audience-driven content, the design has got to deliver that content that is going to appeal to the right audience.
Kevin McCullagh
Could I just start off with a question to Jonathan and Richard about this issue of what designers are good at when they’re doing strategy and what they need to work on in terms of rounding strategic abilities?
Richard Eisermann
In terms of abilities I can only speak from my own experience, the main ability is clear communication, simple and direct. It should not be clouded by ideas, dogma, theories, that kind of stuff. People in the boardroom have got to have messages that are simple. They get bombarded by messages all the time and by strategies, by consultancies and it has just got to be very direct and structured and there has got to be some discussion of money involved. That is what they understand: they want to know the implications for their business in terms of money, what is the value that is going to bring the shareholders, what is the value that it is going to bring to the bottom line. Oftentimes that is difficult to quantify for us, but we have got to get better at it, it is kind of the Holy Grail of design management, finding that formula, that justification for design. Design Council has a couple of things, personally I don’t think they are particularly rigorous, I can say that now that I have left the Design Council as I was always a little bit dubious about the whole design index, but that’s for another time. Still we can use that information to make the argument for the bottom line value of design.
Jonathan Sands
I was at a dinner last night and we had a talk about leadership and it was a really fascinating debate, and I was given ten bullet points of leadership by one of our clients - and this guy is one of the biggest business people in the world, not physically but he runs one of the biggest companies in the world - and the one of his ten soundbites that really sunk home to me is that, because he knows he is a very important person, when anybody has a meeting with him he knows that that night his wife is going to say, ‘So how did it go?’, because meeting with the big cheese he is going to be worried about it, so as soon as he walks through the door that night his wife is going to say ‘How did it go?’ and he is going to say ‘Well this is what happened, this is what he said to me and what I am going to do about it…’
And he said that for leadership and leadership re: the designer I think we really have to listen and we have to listen to what our clients are really asking us to do and what the challenge is, and his trick to know that he had been heard and not just – so they are being listened to as well as just heard was to ask them, ‘So when you go home tonight after what we have talked about, what are you going to tell your wife?’ and I thought that was a really fantastic idea to make sure that what you have said is actually what has been heard by the designer, so we are encouraging all of our designers to really ask the questions of the client so that they really understand what the needs are.
And secondly I think design should make the most boring sober individual smile like it is Christmas morning when they see a concept and so when we have listened and we have really put pain and angst into our work, if it does not make you giggle when you look at it yourself so that when you go in to the client presentation and you have got something that goes ‘Wow, that is just fantastic!’, then some how we have missed a beat.
So I think that the two things that designers need to do better always are really listen, know what you are going to tell your wife that evening because you have heard everything in crystal clear vision, and secondly have something that just makes you giggle and you are really proud of, because if you have got something – as we did in that architectural presentation this morning, I mean I have written loads of notes on how I would like to re-design our building when we move in two years time, you have got to have that inspiration and wow factor, you have got to make your socks go up and down.
Kevin McCullagh
Right we will open it up to the audience, so can I see some hands please?
Audience member 1
A quick question for the panel, one theme that comes up a lot in design is the notion of designers needing to be leaders at every level, if you are running a project you are a leader and basically lots other people need to deliver your vision. Do you feel that designers that are coming out of college - generally in the industry – that that is a widely understood expectation? Should there be more leadership in education as one of the things to focus on?
Audience member 2
I teach the various students that you are talking about and I am interested because I have heard an awful lot of stuff that I think we do and do pretty damn well and have been doing for a long time, so is the question that we are not articulating very well what it is that our best undergraduates are up to, as graduates when they leave? We work in all sorts of areas to do with different brands, different strategies, thinking about the consequences of what we do in the industry and how we do it, so where is the problem here? Is it just in articulation or is it deeper?
Audience member 3
I think in Kevin’s question about skills, maybe distinguishing a bit more what a designer brings to strategies in specific way as opposed to proving their scope as a designer and one way that I have found that is interesting to explore with the changes now is designers interested in design thinking is how we distinguish what the designer brings to that that is different to a management consultant for example. I think it would be interesting to hear from all of you about that difference.
Kevin McCullagh
So you have three questions there, one on leadership, one on ‘Have we just got a problem with communicating what our skills are?’ and then ‘What is the key distinction between the skills of the management consultant and a designer?’
Jonathan Sands
Shall I kick off because I think all of those questions can be interwoven.
First of all I think leadership is a quality that is quite rare and it doesn’t matter how good the design course is, how good the education is, not all designers will be leaders and nor should they. Can you imagine if the war cabinet was full of Winston Churchills, we would never have had any action, we would have had lots of strategy and lots of ideas but they would never actually got round to doing anything. One of our best designers is actually not very good at as working as part of a team and it drives us all crazy because he has been working with us for twenty years and he always produces award-winning work and we want him to spread his pixie dust across the studio with everybody else. And no matter how we try we cannot make him do it - so we are going to give up, because it is actually us who are wrong and not the designer concerned. He is a fabulous designer, so for me this is about making sure that you have the right people in the right places and if you have got somebody who is just a fantastic designer, do not worry about them becoming a management consultant, just make sure you keep them for ever and a day because great designers are really rare talents and great leaders are really rare as well, so I think sometimes we want everybody to be fantastic at everything, and it is impossible.
Richard Eisermann
I think Gus’s point about leadership is really about taking risks and within a company it is often very difficult to take risks, there is a lot of political capital you have to spend and connections you have to make and it is really a question of designers doing what they do best which is making things tangible, Debra’s point, really thinking about how to embody an idea, that is where the real skill lies – as opposed to management consultants – and also synthesising all these different streams of thought. We are very good synthesizers, we sit at the crossroads of technology and users and business, that is where design really comes together, so it’s taking that understanding of those realms, putting it all together, staking out a claim, a point of view, presenting that and taking the risk of saying ‘This is what we believe as designers’, and if you do it outside of a company or within a company it does not matter, once you start getting notoriety and reputation, management will flock to you which is the key, you want to get management excited about working with you, not the other way around.
Ed Silk
In terms of going back and answering your question around structure, I think one of the things is obviously as the way that businesses are structured, I think they can certainly equip themselves to welcome the different skills that are required in order to deliver solutions for their clients. I think the one thing that I always attempt to encourage is this idea of co-creation, so I don’t work in isolation when I think of my strategy, I always work with a creative in order to deliver the right solution and in the same way I would like to think that when they are developing their own concepts they will work with me as a kind of soundboard, so I think the way of actually uniting the skills base and actually recognising that certain people have a natural aptitude to do certain things, you need to encourage that so that they are generating the best solution.
So I think there is an element of internal structure of how we as businesses can make sure we are best fit to allow people to excel at their own chosen profession and I think the other thing is to have working practices that deliver the right kind of solutions, and I think that is through the co-creation and sharing of ideas, the left brain versus the right brain.
Kevin McCullagh
Right, could we have some more questions or comments, I am particularly interested in people picking up on this ‘management consultant versus designer’ question because I think it is an important one.
Audience member 4
I suppose the thing that has been coming to me throughout the day and a half that we have had so far is that in some sense the changing role of the designer and how you need to behave to be accepted in certain businesses who are not used to designers. Again to speak from my personal experience, I am often the first consultant that a business has ever used and certainly the first person they have ever paid at that day rate and you have to behave in a certain way to justify that expenditure – and that is about behaving and talking in their language and adapting yourself to their stories and their view of the world. Actually, of course, as soon as you are there you are able to tell them stories and show them things that actually affect their view of the world and their paradigms, but you really do have to fit into their paradigms when you start: in the same way that not every designer is a leader, not every designer would want to compromise that much, but you need to.
Audience member 5
It is a bit about this management consultant question. First of all I think we must realise that management consultants are widely hated, so for us to want to supplant them raises certain questions. Second of all although we are ambitious in one sense Andrea was right to kind of traduce me from yesterday to say designers can do anything. I think if you actually read the McKinsey Quarterly, it is very obvious we cannot do a lot of what these hated individuals are doing. I mean business plans, are we really good at business plans because a strategy for Walmart - as I am sure Jonathan knows is a global affair over two to five years out maybe, covering all aspect of the dollar exchange rate, energy purchasing and all of these things - so we can be T-shaped in the sense that we understand other disciplines, but we would be hubristic to say we can do them. A division of labour was theorised by Adam Smith in 1776 for good reason and knowing our limits I think is important.
And the final thing to say is, Ed, I think we all need to know a bit more about left brain and right brain, because I think those categories, with respect are easily bandied about. What do we know about neurobiology? Left brain is rational, male and immediately I think I am left wing, I am left brain and that is alright and of course we ought to be the touchy, feely right side of things.
On the categories question, knowing our stuff, I just thought, I wonder how many people know what the origin of the distinction between strategy and tactics is. It is in fact a German enlightenment military thinker by the name of Carl Von Clausevitz and I wonder how many of us read him. So on an academic note I would just like to quote: ‘Tactics is the theory of the use of military forces in combat about winning the battle. Strategy is the theory of the use of combat for the winning of the war’. There is a big difference and you have got to think about it, all of his book on war was devoted to the difference between strategy and tactics. Winning the battle is tactics, deploying the battles all together, is winning the war. So let us do our homework before we overplay what we can do.
Richard Eisermann
I would definitely agree with you James on the idea that we have to be humble to a certain degree.
Audience member 5
I am not saying that.
Richard Eisermann
No? OK, less hubristic shall we say. Our strength is in bringing those threads together and telling stories. A management consultancy report can be quite dry and statistical which for certain people in the business world is the way they operate, they need to see spreadsheets, they need to see data, but ultimately they are trying to reach out to partners, to the marketplace and to do that they can’t go with data, they have got to go with stories and we can take that data and translate that effectively into stories, that is the thing we really need to perfect in a way, is our ability to tell stories.
Kevin McCullagh
But that is communicating strategy, that isn’t strategy, so if you are saying that is the designer’s role it is hard to square that with designers and strategies.
Richard Eisermann
Yeah, that could be, but I still think that it is our ability to paint pictures that make a strategy come to life.
Jonathan Sands
Just stand up. He remind me of this thing – ‘I know my place, I look up to him.’ (He is the client): ‘I look down to him’, ‘I know my place’. I absolutely agree with everything that James said but I think it is about knowing our place and what really irritates me is when designers talk as if they are the answer to everything and they are clearly not. So we need to know our place and in order to know our place we have a simple trick, if that is the right word, it is the way we operate as a business and for designers to be taken seriously there is a need to just to one thing, apart from the obvious which is do a great job as a designer. They need to do one thing and that is to earn the trust of their client and to earn the trust of their client we have this little trick which is when we are going into see somebody for the first time, or early on in the relationship, to win trust we always have a bag of stories that they will know about, so we will tell them stuff that they know so they think, ‘Well, they are pretty knowledgeable, they know their subject, they know about my business…’, but the real trick is telling them something they don’t know. So we have another bag of stories that says, did you know about such and such in your market that is happening in Malaysia, and they say ‘No?’, and all of a sudden if you tell them something they know you win their trust, and then if you tell them something they don’t know they think that is why we need these guys, because they are really switched on.
Then you just talk about the stuff that you really know about which is the business of design and you don’t talk about the stuff that James was sort of saying that you need to know if you are a consultant to somebody like WalMart, you don’t talk about things that you don’t know. Actually I knew everything that you did talk about and I have got his book, Mr Strategist’s book. But that is the thing, we only talk about other things that we really know about, but you have to have empathy with the client to understand their business.
Ed Silk
I think it was only about the left brain, right brain aspect. I think because of the roles that we play and the skills we have, I think you naturally get fitted into that box and I think that in today’s dynamic that is just not possible, we have to have much more fluidity and movement between that and I don’t adhere to that kind of thinking that is based around those two ideas, it is actually much more around the movement between that spectrum. I think the co-creation is a strengthening of that and that is why…..
Richard Eisermann
There is just one thing I would add to James’ comments as well. Yes, you need tactics to win the battle and strategy to win the war, but you also need to do research to know your enemy and that is the other place where designers really excel, is in doing that bit of research, because that helps to inform the strategy to understand what the war is you want to fight, and the rest 85 per cent is tactics to win the battles.
Audience member 6
My question is about visual introduction and the role design can play: you were saying things designers excell at are making things tangible, knowing how to make visible an idea and I am wondering precisely, and knowing your place and knowing you cannot do what a design consultant is going to be able to provide, and how are you going to make we have visible, to create vision and introduce that vision. Too many other people that are not the strategy people and help make that vision become a tangible thing to be delivered. I would like to know what you think about that?
Audience member 7
I was going to volunteer some quick thoughts for you to ponder on about the difference between management consultants and designers and I don’t think it is the position of someone who was once president of a management consultants association. My conclusions are these. Consultants are better at marketing, they market their services better and they are better at networking, they court the influences. If you want to exert strategic influence you have to get close to people to exercise that power. They are better at pricing: well, put it this way, they are better at putting the real value on what they offer and I think the design profession falls down, I think you undercharge dreadfully. They are good at listening, a real skill, they come in, they listen and empathise, they are good at analysis in terms of trawling for data and assembling information and they are very good at assembling an argument in business terms.
They are the good things. What they are not good at is lack of breadth of vision and lack of creativity. I have seen some very good consultants’ reports which analyse situations saying ‘Get out of this market, cut this’ and what ever, I have never seen one that you read and thought, ‘I didn’t think to see it that way’. They miss the big picture, they miss the big opportunities, no-one who has broken in to a new field which is popular and has done fantastically well has done so on the basis of a management consultant’s report. So they have their role, but it is very different, you can see what design brings to it because they are not so good at the earlier points I made they are not really influencing that role.
Audience member 8
I would like to pick up on George’s point also this morning, I am Gillian Crampton Smith. I have spent twenty years trying to persuade companies that design could be valuable and I think that one of the problems is the word design because many people who don’t know about design assume that design is about making things look pretty at the end, and so we could maybe think about either how we explain or to change the word to be used to make it so that people who don’t know about design don’t immediately think that a designer is someone who makes things pretty at the end.
Richard Eisermann
I was just going to comment about the kind of techniques that you might use. There are a lot of terms for it, future casting or what ever you want to call it, but it is a way of developing a scenario of vision for what a company is going to do and you feed it back to the company in terms that they will understand. You give an executive the agenda for the board meeting in the year 2015, you give the executive the newspaper headlines for their company and their stock reports in the year 2013. You just think of all sorts of ways that the company is measuring itself now, project those in to the future and try and develop scenarios of what it is that they are going to be in the future and in your case, I don’t know what that could be, but you have to think about what Nokia would be in ten years time, where are the opportunities and how is that then reflected and things that they are measuring themselves by today, what does that future look like, and in very tangible and exciting ways. If you see a newspaper, an article, whatever, you start to immediately grasp what it is, and it is not abstract, it is something you look at everyday.
Jonathan Sands
I think in terms of the vision theme my favourite quote of all time is Jerry Garcia from The Grateful Dead, and he said something really profound which is, ‘It is no longer good enough to be the best of the best, you have to be the only people who do what you do’. So if you are the best of the best by de facto then you are benchmarking yourself against a like-minded competitor, but if you are the only people who do what you do then you have a future.
In terms of creating a future, I am not sure whether it was the guy from Pepsi or the guy from Coke, but one of them was asked by a journalist, ‘Why are you always at war with the other one?’ and they said, ‘Well if we don’t have a war we can’t have a battle that we can win’. I actually think that one of the successful strategies is to pick a battle with somebody and decide that you are just going to kill them.
I was sat in a room like this almost a year ago at a conference and there was a guy from Heinz in the room. Is there anybody from Heinz in the room today? No? Good. He was basically saying this design stuff is a load of smoke and mirrors, and really what you need is a brand like ours that stands the test of time and we put money on television and it is part of the psyche, nobody will ever come up with a brand that will beat Heinz tomato ketchup for instance, so I said right here is a challenge. I got twenty people in the room to within ten minutes to design a brand of tomato ketchup that would beat Heinz, and I just gave them one simple brief which was design it as if you were Mickey Mouse, and with in ten minutes they came up on stage and they said right, we have got this brand – and this is absolutely true, it was an auditorium as full as this, and one guy came up and said we have got this brand and our idea is that we have tomato ketchup in this squeezy bottle and we have six different nozzles, so when the children squirt it out on the plate in comes out in different shapes, and we are going to have a website which is about art with food and using tomato ketchup art and our brand is called Sketchup. They went for about ten minutes – I got my phone out and said, ‘Is that the Patent Office?’, and the guy from Heinz just went …(sighed), so I think there are just a few simple tricks, but you have to think about how other people would design the futures, create some wars and follow the words of that business guru Jerry Garcia.
Ed Silk
Again going back to the vision idea I think it is a real challenge to allow designers into that creation of what that means for companies. I think it is again going back to what you are good at and your skills that you are equipped with and making that vision come to life, or manufacturing the vision and saying ‘This is what it should be’ and creating it. As has been said it is the idea of actually taking the future to them and designing it and saying ‘This is what your future is going to look like’ and I think that will probably make them sit up and realise that design has a factor in our business and we need to embrace that.
Kevin McCullagh
OK, thank you very much. I am afraid our time is up so I would like to wrap up by thanking our speakers and I will leave you with one more contribution to the strategy and tactics debate. There is an old saying in the city: ‘Strategy - let’s do lunch; tactics - large glasses’.