e Design of Business: Why Design inking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

A conversation between Roger Martin & Moe Abdou

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

About Roger Martin & Moe Abdou Roger Martin

Roger Martin was named one of the top 50 management thinkers in the world by The Times of London in 2009. He has served as Dean of the Rotman School of Management since September, 1998. Roger is an advisor on strategy to the CEO's of several major global corporations. He writes extensivelyh on design and is a regular columnist for BusinessWeek. com's Innovation and Design Channel. Moe Abdou Moe Abdou is the creator of 33voices a global conversation about things that matter in business and in life. moe@33voices.com

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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

Dean Roger Martin, it is a pleasure for me to spend some time with you. As I mentioned to you briefly that your work has been top of mind specifically for me personally for quite some time. I shared with you a quote that has been sitting on my desk for years. I think the quote goes back to 94-95, somewhere around there, when you were part of a Mastermind with Bill Taylor and Alan Webber as they were starting Fast Company. The quote was something like this, The role of big companies is to turn great people into mediocre organizations. Id like to start by just asking you if you still believe that? Sometimes I guess I wouldnt concur entirely with the quote, which suggests that its the proper role -- I dont think its ever been or should be the proper role of a company but I do think that many do. I should say that that idea was planted in my head by a wonderful man at Procter & Gamble named Tom Laco who, after a long successful career there, he ended up as vice chairman under John Smale in the 80s. This would have been the mid to late 80s. When he retired he wrote a little memo to file, as senior people at Procter are inclined to do, thinking wistfully about the company and saying, we hire absolutely the best and brightest. There are days when I wonder whether we kind of turned them into something less than that rather than something more than that. It was actually Tom Lacos thinking that was on my mind I suspect when I had that quote because I then observed out in many companies that arent good as Procter & Gamble. I do think that big companies have to really think long and hard about how they can encourage the kind of thinking and work from their people that enable them to be fantastic rather than be mediocre. I think many of them dont and arent changing fast enough. As somebody who has spent 25 years of his professional career recruiting and developing individuals in senior level management, that to me was a wakeup call because I didnt want to be part of that. Yet, as I continually work with organizations primarily more on the financial side -- it was important for us to find out what was happening in the company -- you still discover that there were a lot of individuals and corporations even in high level positions that werent very happy. As a result, theyre probably not growing.

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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

I think its true. I think its kind of a love-hate thing that happens. I guess it would be my cut on it or diagnosis, which is these big companies like to hire talented people for their capability to handle complicated and difficult situations and come up with clever solutions to them. So thats why they like to hire them but then they inadvertently operate in ways that they get hired for those same people to do the thing they are particularly peculiarly good at. I think its inadvertent for the most part. In my last book I talk about The Design of Business where there is sort of a culture or ethic in the modern corporation especially big ones where you have to be quantitative, analytical, scientific and you have to prove things in order to do them. What these big companies tend to do is hire highly analytical quantitative people because they think of them as the smartest. And then when they are given a complicated challenge or its unclear what the answer is and you actually have to do something new and different -- and you cannot prove new and different things in advance -- they get told prove it, crunch the number, show me the analysis. What the person in question then says, I really cant. So that person gets trained only to think about things that are analyzable and to not think about things that do not subject themselves easily to analysis. That I think takes a part of their being, their brain, who they are, their soul away. Thats why they are unhappy in the ways you described Moe. I tell you, you are probably in one of the most important positions I think today in the world as the opportunity to be able to impact the next generation specifically the next generation of leaders. The more that I learn about your program, the more that I see that one of your overarching goals is to produce not only successful people but creative people who you want and hope to see make the world a better place specifically through business. Tell me a little bit about how youre preparing your students there. If you want to think about it in the most simple way - it is. We want to have our students, not just think but think about how they think - if you will. To be able to go meta on how they are thinking and say to themselves, Is the way Im thinking about this the best way to think about it or is there another way to think about it? Unfortunately, most professional schools I think -- lets just say business schools to be more narrow but I think its a professional school thing -- have focused to too great an extent, at least for my liking, on teaching analytical
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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

techniques. Here is how you do an MTV. Here is how you do an IR. Here is how you do the capital asset pricing model. Here is how you do a Black-Scholes option pricing exercise. Here is how you calculate the economic order quantity. Those are all things that cause you not to have to think if you will or you think in a rogue way. You say, Black-Scholes option pricing theory, here at the variables you got to plug in. You plug them in this way and do it, and out comes the answer rather than asking the question, is this tool applicable in this situation? Is me thinking that Black-Scholes option pricing theory is appropriate for this a good way to think or not such a good way to think? Thats what I want our students to be able to do, is go meta and say, am I thinking about this in the right way. Is there a better way to think about it? Just because everybody has always thought about it this way, does that mean its a good way to think? Thats what I want them to be constantly probing and asking themselves. The big challenge is that they leave the university and get with an institution that has that level of thinking so they can continually keep on that path as opposed to drifting backwards. Yes. This is a challenge although its a challenge that I have only so much sympathy for. One of the things I try to convince students of, is you have either got to be willing to be different and take this thing as an area of being different or accept being the same in which case you will have all the benefits and downsides of being the same. Lots of the organizations they go out into are not going to be totally amenable to that kind of thinking. It will actually be scary for some of these companies. Why are you questioning the way were doing this? My view is that if you actually want to make a difference in the world, guess what, it means being different. The last time I checked, you cant make a difference in the world by being the same as everybody else because you will simply reinforce sameness if youre the same as everybody else. One of the challenges I tell these kids, is that do what I tell you, dont necessarily sort of proselytize what I tell you. People in the business world are going to be interested in better outcomes. If you produce better outcomes by whatever methodology people will be happy and in due course somebody is going to say how the heck do you keep on producing that better outcome? And then tell them.

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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

I tell them, dont say upfront, Guys, Im going to create a better outcome by using this very different methodology for getting it. I like you to buy in to my different methodology upfront. Theyre not going to. If they did buy into your methodology upfront they would be doing it already. You have to be bold to change things and do things differently because people will explain to you in no uncertain terms how youre just wrong and you should figure out how to be right i.e. be the same as all the rest of us are then thats a challenge. I think it makes life fun but its a challenge. What do you look for in an inspiring leader today? I know that you do tremendous amount of work with highly successful leaders around the world and you write about the topic. Whats a profile of an inspiring and empowering leader today? I really am getting more and more to think Moe that they leverage breadth and diversity. Im just not seeing many people who I call inspiring leaders who are narrow and who get to be an inspiring leader on the basis of having knowledge over a single domain and a really deep knowledge of that domain. Ill give you an example, Im quite fond of Michael Lazaridis. To play in fair disclosure, Im on the board of RIM. Hes a fellow board member and CEO of a company that Im on the board of. Lets see what people would think of Mike Lazaridis if they didnt know the kind work he did, most would say, hes a techno geek. He solders things together and he invented the Blackberry. He must be totally obsessed about software and hardware and thats about it. This is not true. Mike is incredibly into the customer. How the customer works and thinks. How he can make that customers life better. What that customer is interested in. I think thats what makes him an inspiring leader. Is that he blends together this kind of knowledge of people and has true belief and care about customers with a deep technical expertise. Dont get me wrong, he is a techno geek in that sense. He has this great and knowledge in things having to do with mobile telephony as anybody in the world. But hes much broader and can fuse together broader perspectives, better than the average bear and I think thats what makes him capable of leading people and have people saying, Wow, Id like to work with this guy. Id like to think with this guy. Its interesting that you bring that up because I want to jump around a little bit now. One of the questions I wanted to ask you before I got into the book, The Design of Business which I think is a brilliant title and just
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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

the material is fantastic. One of the questions I wanted to ask you is, where does the customer fit in the design thinking process? I know that you answered that a little bit by talking about RIM. Yeah, you know, right at the center when we teach design thinking to students and the business design process it starts with deep holistic consumer-usercustomer understanding. We say, its holistic in that it means not just thinking about the functional needs, you know, I need to get this email from my device to your device but also the emotional and psychological needs. Its deep in the sense that it doesnt ask shallow questions about the consumer but goes and watches the consumer so that you really understand what they do, how they do and how your product or service can interact with them. Its interesting how much fun it can be when people kind of get used to it. There are a lot of people who are scared of the customers because they dont hang out with them enough. A lot of engineers I think are scared of customers and so they dont hangout with them. And when you hangout with them I think you help but empathize with them, get to really understand them and then think theyre fun and interesting. You say that design thinking is the DNA of most innovative companies. In order for them to grow and innovate and win today they have to incorporate design thinking. Explain that design thinking advantage Roger. Well,ab what I think in design thinking is this fusion between analytical thinking which uses inductive and deductive logic and intuitive thinking that uses abductive logic. Why I focus on the fusion of the two is because neither of them separately get you what you need to be a great company. I am not advocating, some people think Im advocating, is that you kind of turnover your company to kind of a bunch of designers. No, I dont. Lots of designers, Im afraid, are purely intuitive and will create great things from time to time but if theyre actually running a company, the company will expire between great things that they come up with. So you have to have this blend of the analytical thinking that gets you a certain level of reliability so that it keeps you on a path and not up and down so much that you die on the downs but the intuitive and the abductive logic, the imagining what might be is necessary to keep you from stultifying. Its the combination, the appreciation of both that is relatively rare and is what defines, in my view, a design thinker. You know, one of my favorite

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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

design thinkers in the world is A.G. Lafley from Procter & Gamble who just recently retired as CEO of Procter & Gamble. His reputation within Procter was he was a real numbers jockey. He could crunch the numbers with the best of them and at airtight logic. Hes also somebody who dreamed big dreams of things that didnt currently exist and went out and made them happened. You could say, How could that be? The answer is because of respect. He both respected the traditions of analytical thinking and respected the traditions of intuitive thinking and realized that you need both to make the world go round rather than being kind of defensive and saying, Im an analyst. Im very analytical and anybody who does this intuitive crap is the enemy and theyre dangerous and they are a threat to what I do. I will not listen to them. I will demean them. I will not agree with them whatever. Hes the opposite of that. Thats what design thinking is about is being able to operate in the realm of analytical thinking and intuitive thinking and understand the intersection of those two. We have some very well documented illustrations of design driven organizations like P&G and Herman Miller in the book. Talk to me a little bit about the cultures inside these companies and inside these boardrooms. How is the culture inside a true design thinking innovator like P&G or Herman Miller? I think the very central part of the key is that they do not believe that new ideas can be proven in advance in the typical way we think about proof. They are willing to try things that are unproven. Does that mean theyve got the entire company on things that are improving? Does that mean there will be no logic, no doubt and no analysis? No. But they realize that there are limits to that. That there is nothing new that you can prove absolutely in advance and theyre comfortable with that. You know the great thing for me is the Aeron Chair. The market research for the Aeron Chair right at the end when they had focus groups with the final product was mixed. Some people were in love with it. Its not like it was all like a bust. Some people were in love with it but some people really didnt like it. In fact, some were outraged by it they said, this is outrageous, youre calling me to a focus group and then having me sit on a partially finished chair when youve got the thing stuffed and padded. Thats when you should be bringing

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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

me back to test out this chair, which to me is not hilarious given what an icon it has become. They just said, you know what, I know the market research is mixed but here is all the work weve done to understand users needs. Here are all the things. We think that its going to successful. We think the only problem is that people dont think it looks like a chair. But theyll get used to the look of it and theyll enjoy the features that weve put in and well get over that and lets go. Like a real analytical thinking company would have ditched it. In fact, in Procter & Gamble added the worst it would have because it wouldnt have been a blind test, an unequivocal blind test winner. But Procter thankfully doesnt always do that. They say sometimes the end consumer has to get used to it to know that they love it. Thats what happened with Herman Miller. The stunning thing is of course the problem with it was it didnt look like a chair to the people who didnt like it. And then within about five or six years, every chair had to look like an Aeron chair or it didnt look like a chair. Thats whats common. Whats common is an understanding that to do new things, you cannot get proof in advance and you got to figure out how to organize your company, your work, your life so as to be able to give those ideas a chance to prove themselves over time. Is that an expectation that they have of their managers and their employees there to have that thinking process? Increasingly it is. I think at Procter & Gamble -- I think it was much more implicit until AG came along and sort of had the big design initiative with Claudia Kotchka that I helped both of them on. I would say now its much more expected because they kind of understand what it means. How about a company like Apple? When you have heard Steve Jobs in a lot of instances talk about a lot of times the consumer doesnt know what he or she wants. You also have heard people like Malcolm Gladwell talk about, you know, a lot of times very few of us know what we want. Does that reinforce this process to say go with it without having full proof? I think there are times when you simply have to. Put it this way, if you stand by the notion that you have to prove everything in advance you simply wont do new stuff. Its almost as simple as that unless people dont understand that point but I think to me its all the work Ive done on design has brought me to that conclusion.

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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

Will you talk about the way knowledge moves through an organization and really kind of through life? It starts out as a mystery and then it becomes a heuristic and then an algorithm. I find Roger, the mystery part, discovering new opportunities missing a lot in the DNA of a lot of companies. Do you see that? Yes. One of the reasons is, it kind of works against a lot of the systems within companies. You cannot budget for when youll solve a mystery either in money, people, or time. It is hard to tell at the outset of an exploration into a mystery what kind of capabilities you need because you dont yet know kind of what the contours of that mystery are. So in a world in which you got a budget for things and planning for them and the like, it is hard. It is very hard. As you continually research and work in this whole design thinking field, how has your thinking been influenced? Its been a huge and interesting journey for me. I guess what Ive come to believe and understand is that to the degree which organizational structures and processes kind of eliminate innovation. I have also understood how dangerous the words prove it, are. I have kind of understood a lot more about why it is that good intuitive thinkers tend to hide their intuitions because they are fearful that people will think of them as silly, flimsy kind of people. A lot of entrepreneurs who will be listening to this conversation and I know that you have a keen interest now in this whole social entrepreneurship field, where does design thinking fit within the scope of an entrepreneur out there who thinks he or she has got a great idea but just needs to take the next step to make it happen. I do think entrepreneurs are people who are willing to try things that havent been proven. Thats almost the definition. I think they are inherently design thinkers. Its interesting how much they often they get punted out of their companies in due course and the analytical thinkers take over like John Scully coming to Apple who are grown up now enough to have analytical thinkers as if thats a good thing. I think entrepreneurs have this challenge of staying entrepreneurial. Does that mean continually looking for new ways and continually having that first stage of mystery as kind of part of their DNA? Absolutely. I really think that if they dont. Its kind of only a matter of time until they fade in somebody elses doing that work will move ahead of them.

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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

I know you feel that one of the other devotions that you have is this notion of integrative thinking. I know you feel its a skill that can be taught. Yup. Can you walk us through an example? I can walk you through an example of some grade 10 girls at a girl school that we gave a challenge to. We taught them integrative thinking, a 13-week kind of course and gave them an integrative thinking challenge and they came up with great integrative solutions. It was as simple as this. There was an organization of camps in the cottage area thats a couple of hours north of Toronto here. They have four camps. They are for underprivileged kids and underprivileged inner city kids. They are all run by one of umbrella organization but are run kind of completely independently with not the same branding and you wouldnt know it unless you knew the organization that theyre all run by the same organization. The group that ran these camps came with a problem which was, do we standardize and actually make them all one camp, one model, branded the same, or do we leave them independently? What should we do? The girls came up with a better answer than the two. They figured out what things, you know, that it wasnt all or nothing and it wasnt compromised. There were some things where it really made sense to standardize and you could standardize without hurting the feeling of independents and some things that had to stay independent without hurting or detracting from the benefits of standardization. They were 15-year-old girls. It is teachable. The big advantage to that is that people are getting away from the either or solution, correct? Yup. And recognizing that thats what they should be striving for not leaving it in the world of my job is to choose, my job is to come up with the best choice among the either-ors. The whole notion of integrative thinking is to get away from this or that. Yes. I really think the primary reason why people think its this or that is because thats what theyve been taught. They have just been taught you face all these either or situations and thats what you should concentrate on is, you concentrate your energy on coming up with the best of two solutions not dont choose.
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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

When this is presented to executives, as you present your ideas to executives, and I know that youve had the great Peter Drucker discuss this issue with you. What type of feedback are you getting from leaders when you talk about this? Most of them sort of recognize that. This is one of the things. I think everybody actually is an integrative thinker to a certain extent. I think for certain decisions at certain times, people think integratively. So everybody can recognize this in them especially when I kind of lay it out to say, alright, when I make this kind of decision or when I made that decision in the past, thats the way I think. But now that I know what this is and can identify it and see it as a salient part of my decision making Im going to try and do that more often. I see the job as making this more apparent to people so that they can focus on it and practice on it and get their percentage of integrative thinking up from 5% to 30% or from 50% to 80% or from 80% to 99%. Its the move the needle in the direction of searching for something other than the either or more of the time and more of the time being able to find a much better answer than either or. I assume youre a master at that implementation within your own life and your own business practices. How does that impact the people who work with you? Im not sure Im a master. Im working on it. But, I think when I do it well, it inspires them. They feel more empowered by us coming up with a better answer that we can then go do but I think also they are inspired to try it themselves. Just like anything you practice, a lot of it is just about trying. Its just about trying. Are there particular trends that are going on in social entrepreneurship that had you particularly excited? I guess whats gotten me excited about it, as you probably know Im on the school foundation board. Ive been on that board I think six or seven years now maybe even more. I just think that were understanding the phenomenon more and what are coming out are kind of models that will help people kind of replicate this kind of thing and other domains. If I just take a designer business perspective to it, social entrepreneurship is moving from a mystery to a heuristic. When you get to heuristic you get much more efficient, you have search mechanisms for saying here is how I can think about this problem and apply a social entrepreneurial outcome to it.
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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

So Im very excited. I think the field is going to just continue to blossom and grow and build on the shoulders of the great investments that have been made by the initial social entrepreneurs. When these type of entrepreneurs come to you for advice about growing personally and professionally. What do you tend to tell them? My general advice is to be conscious of how youre thinking. Again, its back to the same advice as the students; think about your thinking. Ask yourself the question after youve thought about something. Was that the only way I can think about it or there is a different way of thinking about it? Why did I think about it this way? Isnt there another way? To just do a lot more of that and theyll be kind of much better off. Everybody whos got the opportunity to work with you, the students who are at Rotman that have the great privilege of your leadership, its a real treat for me to have this conversation with you. Id like you to kind of share with everybody how can people get more familiar with your work? How can they get more familiar with some of the thinking that you are constantly working on? I would say four ways. I would say you could read my book, The Opposable Mind -which is on Integrative Thinking. That is available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, etc easily or The Design of Business which is my book on design thinking. I highly recommend subscribing to Rotman Magazine. You can just go to the Rotman School website and subscribe to it. Three times a year we come up with a brilliant magazine by our brilliant editor Karen Christensen. The latest issue is Thinking About Thinking 2. Our second issue of what Thinking About Thinking. Its terrific. And then lastly if you want to see everything Ive written and things that have been written about what I do, just go to my website which is www.RogerLMartin.com. Its got my middle initial L in because RogerMartin.com is a real estate broker in Houston. Those four are great places to start. It is a real treat for me. I appreciate you making the time. I hope that we can continue this dialog because the work that youre doing I think, I truly believe is certainly at the forefront of everything thats going on in business.

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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Unplugged)

Roger Martin with Moe Abdo

I would be delighted to. I would be remiss of not saying that Ive got a new book coming out in May called Fixing the Game. Around the time that comes out I would be happy to talk to you about it again. Its about our models of how we think about stock based compensation, shareholder value maximization that are getting us into big trouble. Thats what that book is about. I cant wait. May cant come soon enough then. Terrific. Great to talk, Moe.

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