Bob Baxley: evaluation

Transcript context

…Along those lines, a lot of people imagine every founder, every product builder is just, yes, I'd love amazing design. I'd love our products to be incredibly beautiful, intuitive, so easy for everyone to use and understand, but they don't actually invest in these areas and they don't put a lot of resources into the designing process. What's the best pitch you can make and that you do make to companies to help them see the strategic value of design and the bottom of the value of design. Let me back up and just dissect a little bit the way you described design, you described it in really tactical terms. You said beautiful, intuitive products that make sense. I think it was something like that. What you were describing was you were describing the part of the iceberg that sits above the water line, which is the result. That's one of the outcomes of design, but that's not the real heavy lifting of design. Design is more like liberal arts or philosophy or something. It's like what do we try to achieve at a much lower level? And so what I talk to founders and people about the value of design, what I'm pushing them on is when we can get organizational alignment around what we want to do philosophically, why do we exist? What's the vision for the company? How do all these things ladder up through vision, through mission, through specific tenets, design strategies. And then into actual execution. How do we ladder that whole thing up so it makes sense as a whole? That's the magic of design. The difference is when you design things, you end up with a bunch of bricks that are piled into a beautiful impenetrable wall. If you don't do that, you end up with a bunch of bricks scattered across the backyard and they don't really add up to anything. I think that's one of the things, if you look, again to go back to Apple, but we could also talk about Lego Lyca, Porsche, Airbnb, Patagonia, there's other companies that make sense as a design centered organization. If you think about everything they do, it all ladders together into one cohesive sensical thing. It's integrated. Makes sense as a unit. I think that's a huge difference and an incredible strategic advantage because the company can operate with much greater efficiency. They can onboard new people and get them in line. Even Apple, for example, the team that designed the online store, we had six designers for a store that ran in 30 some odd countries, 12 and a half thousand instances of the store doing billions of dollars of revenue. We had six designers. Any other company would've had 60 or more. Apple's able to operate with much smaller staff because they have real clarity of vision of what they're doing. And the benefit of operating with a smaller staff is not just that it saves money on payroll, it's that you have... The way the minds come together to create something that feels like a single whole is a much higher chance when you have fewer people involved. I joke about The Beatles. You get The Beatles with four people, you don't get The Beatles with eight people and you certainly don't get it with 24 people. The teams get too big and you can't get that what Brian Eno calls scenius. Brian Eno has this great word that he uses, scenius is the genius that comes when you have a group together. Scenius is the collective idea of genius and I think that's something that's really magical that I've experienced in my career, but usually in smaller groups. It's hard to do with a giant group. I love this metaphor of The Beatles as the way most people describe this is designed by committee never works. I love that the way you describe it is the Beatles is like the ideal size a small group versus a committee.…

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