Designing for growth pdf free download

Through ten stories of struggles and successes in fields such as health care, education, agriculture, transportation, social services, and security, the authors show how collaborative creativity can shake up even the most entrenched bureaucracies—and provide a practical roadmap for readers to implement these tools. In each case, these groups have used the tools of design thinking to reduce risk, manage change, use resources more effectively, bridge the communication gap between parties, and manage the competing demands of diverse stakeholders.

Along the way, they have improved the quality of their products and enhanced the experiences of those they serve. These strategies are accessible to analytical and creative types alike, and their benefits extend throughout an organization. This book will help today's leaders and thinkers implement these practices in their own pursuit of creative solutions that are both innovative and achievable.

Design-oriented firms such as Apple and IDEO have demonstrated how design thinking can directly affect business results. Yet most managers lack a real sense of how to put this new approach to use for issues other than product development and sales growth. Using design skills such as ethnography, visualization, storytelling, and experimentation, these managers produced innovative solutions to problems concerning strategy implementation, sales force support, internal process redesign, feeding the elderly, engaging citizens, and the trade show experience.

In daylong hackathons, design thinking seems deceptively easy. On the surface, it involves a set of seemingly simple activities such as gathering data, identifying insights, generating ideas, prototyping, and experimentation.

Going deep with design requires more than changing the activities of innovators; it involves creating the conditions that shape who they become.

Individuals become design thinkers by experiencing design. Author : Colorado. General Assembly. Author : Lyle E. Author : Bryan R. Rill,Matti M. Author : Susan M. Gordon insisted that I accept. A few months into the project, my father fell ill. I decided to drop out; it was only fair to Jeanne and Amy. My father recovered, and so did the book. Jeneanne Rae, my other business partner and cofounder of our firm, did not bear the same burden of prodding me.

She just had to keep the business afloat. During a global recession. Nearly a decade ago, Jeneanne uttered, in a Graduate-style aside, her advice for my future: service innovation.

Little did she know I would embrace her advice—and her—so wholeheartedly. Many other members of our firm chipped in, mostly by teaching me lessons on their projects but also by providing a key story, reading early chapters, and digging up obscure facts and sources.

How did I learn what I wrote about? It was on the backs of a short list of courageous clients over the past eight years who shared their hopes and challenges and invited me to partner with them.

In less than a decade, I went from wide-eyed adventurer to aspiring sage. These are people of uncommon courage and generosity. I am deeply in their debt. The cool thing about the innovation field is that everybody talks to one another unlike strategy consulting, the world I came from.

I must acknowledge a small group of professional collaborators who shared their wisdom along the way. I learned a lot at their respective knees. Stan is one of the most gifted mentors one will ever meet.

In addition to mentors, one needs inspiration to stick with a challenging project. Carter Griffin convinced me that writing a book is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And his contributions go deeper: Just over a decade ago, Carter taught me how to collaborate. Mark is one of the most amazing, talented, daring, and caring people I can imagine. Court Ogilvie helped me re- energize during runs along the Potomac and generously offered editorial advice.

My climbing partner of 25 years—and brother for a bit longer—was a constant source of laughter and inspiration. If you recall, I mention that I moonlight as a husband? Well, the woman upon whom that pale light occasionally falls, Caroline Altmann, is the quintessential hybrid thinker: a Columbia MBA who has had a solo show of her art.

When I took on this project, she understood the to-1 ratio of effort to finished product, which was an abstraction to me. Artist-Caroline was always there to nurture my inner design thinker, helping to explore new solutions to an awkward section. MBA- Caroline would then offer insightful criticism. By reflecting against her expansive, whole-minded energy, I saw our topic of design thinking as a world of infinite possibility.

I hope those possibilities shine through in this book. Every manager needs design. But what is it? It mocks any idea that a formal process could exist for navigating those many hairpin turns. But mere mortals—especially business types—are out of their league when it comes to unleashing that kind of innovation and growth.

And so we throw up our hands and go back to poring over spreadsheets and market research reports in our search for the next silver bullet, the next catalyst for growth. Design has a lot of different meanings. You just need to figure out how to use it. Find a leader of innovation in any organization, and he or she has likely been practicing design thinking all along. If you are a manager reading this book, get ready to roll up your sleeves—not throw up your hands.

Because design thinking is actually a systematic approach to problem solving. It starts with customers and the ability to create a better future for them. It does not require supernatural powers. This kind of design is absolutely safe to try at home. We are looking for a new tool kit. Competition has upped the ante: The Internet and the arrival of networking have made knowledge impossible to hoard. Our views of where creativity comes from are expanding: We are learning new things about our brain every day and recognizing different cognitive modes and how they perform in different contexts.

Finally, the tools of design—including Post-it notes and whiteboards—have become simple and ubiquitous. Think CPAs and tax accountants. Are you confused yet? Dave joined Crowe in and spent two decades as an auditor and tax expert. And he knows how you feel. Whether design thinking can—or should—be taught to managers is a hotly debated topic among designers.

How you define design itself lies at the core of the argument. They point to the years of specialized training that designers receive—and worry that unleashing managers to think of themselves as designers will erode the quality of and appreciation for what trained designers do.

We believe that their concerns need to be taken seriously and that the way to do this is to differentiate design from design thinking. Gifted designers combine an aesthetic sensibility with deep capabilities for visualization, ethnography, and pattern recognition that are well beyond the grasp of most of us—managers included. But when it comes to fostering business growth, the talent that we are interested in is not rooted in either natural gifts or studio training—it lies with having a systematic approach to problem solving.

That, to us, defines design thinking, and it can be taught to managers. Like any process, design thinking will be practiced at varying levels by people with different talents and capabilities. No more than your local tennis pro can turn you into Serena Williams. But can you improve your game? And having done that, we can guarantee that your appreciation for what the Jonathan Ives of the world do will have grown rather than diminished.

More important, you will have a new tool kit to approach your growth challenge. People like Christi Zuber, a nurse with a passion for design, and Diane Ty, first a poly sci major, then an MBA on a mission at AARP to encourage young adults to make better financial choices— and help baby boomers get their adult kids off the payroll. All of these managers mastered design thinking. What if Managers Thought Like Designers?

We have three words for you: empathy, invention, and iteration. Design starts with empathy, establishing a deep understanding of those we are designing for. We are human beings; our first responses are dominated not by calculations but by feelings. What Ive and his team understand is that if you have an object in your pocket or hand for hours every day, then your relationship with it is profound, human, and emotional.

One of the saddest facts about the state of business is the extent to which we so often settle for mediocrity.

Yet the difference between great designs and those that are only okay is the way the former call us to something greater. The Bay Bridge offers a route across the water. The Golden Gate 3 Bridge does that, too, but it also sweeps, symbolizes, and enthralls.

It has, like other design icons such as the Sydney Opera House, become a symbol of the land it occupies. How many of our business inventions are that compelling? Too few. Since design is also a process of invention, managers who thought like designers would think of themselves as creators.

Taking design seriously means acknowledging the difference between what scientists do and what designers and growth leaders do. To get to growth, we have to create something in the future that is different from the present. But powerful futures are rarely discovered primarily through analytics. But it matters greatly with which of these you start.

In business, 4 we have tended to start the growth conversation with constraints: the constraints of budgets, of ease of implementation, of the quarterly earnings focus that Wall Street dictates. As a result, we get designs for tomorrow that merely tweak today. Of all the submissions, only one—prepared by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux—fulfilled all of the design requirements.

The most challenging—that crosstown vehicular traffic be permitted without marring the pastoral feel of the park—had been considered impossible to solve by all other entrants to the competition. Olmsted and Vaux succeeded by eliminating the assumption that the park was a two-dimensional space. Instead, they imagined the park in three dimensions and sank four roads eight feet below its surface.

Finally, design insists that we prepare ourselves to iterate our way to a solution, so managers who thought like designers would see themselves as learners. Most managers are taught a straightforward linear problem-solving methodology: define a problem, identify various solutions, analyze each, and choose one—the right one.

They understand that successful invention takes experimentation and that empathy is hard won. So the task is one of learning. Consider IKEA. But design brings more than just a set of principles; it also brings a methodology and a collection of tools that can help us realize those aspirations. We wrote this book because we each fell in love with the idea of design about a decade ago, coming from very different places: Jeanne after spending most of her life on the business strategy side as a strategy consultant and professor focused on organic growth.

Tim as a systems engineer turned entrepreneur turned cofounder of an innovation firm. Neither of us trained as a designer. We like to say that Thomas Jefferson brought us and design together. Like opposites that attract—or repel—together they may be magic or misery.

Consider a challenge faced by a leading consumer products firm: how to think about and respond to changes in the retail marketplace over the next ten years. Suppose that two student teams—one composed of MBAs and the other of design students—tackle the issue. How might each team approach its study? The MBAs would likely begin by researching trends in the marketplace—social, technological, environmental, and political.

The design students would probably approach the project quite differently. They might begin with a similar trend analysis, but they would use it to develop scenarios of possible futures instead of spreadsheets. They would use the scenarios and personas as a starting point and build on them as a group. And what an introduction it was!

He had a passionate, lifelong dedication to public education and devoted the last decade of his life to creating the University of Virginia. Like all great designs, UVA starts out with both a challenge and a belief. The challenge—one of great concern to Jefferson and all of the founding fathers— was how to preserve a fragile democracy when the first generation of leaders had passed on.

He believed that an educated electorate would make the right choices. For Jefferson, the link between democracy and education was clear— without an educated populace, there was no hope of protecting self- government. His true genius lay with the power of the space that he created—both physical and mental—and its ability to evoke so vividly the purpose for which it was designed.

The architecture—a series of small buildings arrayed around a common— embodied this ambition. What Jefferson designed was much more than a set of buildings; it was an educational experience—of a very particular kind. An education for democracy. Like all great design, our campus inspires students and faculty alike as it puts us to work. These obvious differences in framing, data gathering, and output signal more fundamental differences in the core assumptions and decision drivers underlying each approach.

Business thinking assumes rationality and objectivity. Its decision driver is cold, clean, economic logic. Reality is precise and quantifiable.

Reality, for designers, is always constructed by the people living it. Decisions in this world are seen as driven by emotion more than logic; desire is seen as a more powerful motivator than reason. But the asymmetry goes even deeper. Even the very values on which each approach rests diverge dramatically. And this has a lot to do with messiness versus order. No surprise there— you would, of course, expect this of people who run large organizations and are held accountable for achieving carefully forecasted quarterly performance.

Ambiguity and uncertainty make them uncomfortable; they crave predictability. Innovation is just plain messy and often inefficient—there is no way around that. But ambiguity and uncertainty are like crack cocaine to designers. Not surprisingly, these differences in core values and assumptions translate into very different tools and practices—and people who often make each other nervous.

Design, in contrast, favors trying over extensive planning and is overwhelmingly experimental in its approach. Finally, in business we almost always dwell in the land of either the abstract— producing pro formas and corporate visions at 20, feet—or the very specific did you get that order out? Design, as a practice, iterates not only in time but also across levels. It moves continuously back and forth between levels of abstraction, between the big picture and the concrete—and seeks comfort in the tangible.

Designers produce models and prototypes that make ideas feel real, rather than spreadsheets and mission statements that dwell in abstractions.

So here is where we end up: It seems, then, that business is from Mars and design is from Venus to borrow an oft-used phrase. So why even try to put them together? Because—like most opposites—they have a lot to offer each other. The academics who study these things estimate that only somewhere between 10 percent and 60 percent of the promised returns of new strategies are actually delivered. Not 5 much of a performance, even at the high end of the estimates.

Practices that consume enormous amounts of our time and attention—like writing mission statements— produce discouraging results. One recent global study found that an impressive 82 percent of the plus firms surveyed had mission statements. Unfortunately, less than half the managers interviewed thought that those statements had anything to do with the reality of their day-to-day business.

There are mysteries and there are puzzles. Puzzles are problems where when you have the right level of data disclosure, when you have that absolute number, the problem can be solved. We just have to interpret what we have now and do the best that we can. That may work for incremental improvements, but if you want something more disruptive you have to go into the field and find something proprietary and experience it for yourself.

The old joke is that a lawyer will not ask you a question that he or she does not already know the answer to. Inefficiency and ambiguity are both conditions of the design process. There has to be time for reflection and disagreement. These are core to great, new, big ideas. And they are also what makes processes inefficient. You also need time for disagreement because good design thinking is about bringing together a diverse set of inputs.

And that works 80 percent of the time. We ask them to take risks and then punish them for mistakes. And we give them ambitious growth goals and only Excel spreadsheets to achieve them.

Getting new results requires new tools—and design has real tools to help us move from talk to action. Second, design teaches us how to make things feel real, and most business rhetoric today remains largely irrelevant to the people who are supposed to make things happen. The only people who will care enough to help are those for whom the strategy is real. Things that feel real to people, as psychologist William James pointed out over a century ago, are both interesting and personally significant.

They are experienced, not just pronounced. While managers are showing spreadsheets—the ultimate abstraction— designers are telling stories. We have a lot to learn from design about how to tell a story that engages an audience, captures the experience dimension, and makes the future feel real.

Look at any presentation created by anybody at a design firm and compare it with the PowerPoint dreck you are forced to sit through every day at work. Enough said. The world that used to give us puzzles but now dishes up mysteries. And no amount of data about yesterday will solve the mystery of tomorrow.

Designers have no such expectations. They thrive on it—hence their enthusiasm for experiments and their patience with failure. Design teaches us to let go and allow more chaos into our lives. Designers lean into uncertainty, while managers often deny or fight it. Not all managers, though. When we studied managers who had succeeded at organic growth, we found a distinctly designer-oriented attitude toward uncertainty. It has surprised me many times before.

Designers have developed tools —such as journey mapping and prototyping—to help them actively manage the uncertainty they expect to deal with. Fourth, design understands that products and services are bought by human beings, not target markets segmented into demographic categories. This messy reality—that behavior is driven by more than economic logic—is something that designers understand well.

They master the skills of observation, of understanding human beings and their needs, while managers learn mostly to evaluate, an activity that rarely involves the kind of empathy that produces fresh insights. Professional doubters are much better at judging than creating. They taught us a set of growth lessons. Right under your nose there are opportunities to create better value for existing customers that will enhance your relationships with them.

You just have to know your customers very well to see them. In fact, big bets often cause failure. Place small bets fast, and learn learn learn. Speed thrills. An obsession with speed drives a surprising and powerful array of positive consequences.

Here are six common management myths that will definitely make your life more difficult. This one is borrowed from trial lawyers, and it traveled into mainstream business because it always seems career-enhancing to look smart.

Unfortunately, growth opportunities do not yield easily to leading questions and preconceived solutions. A better maxim for growth leaders is: Start in the unknown. Myth 2: Think big. There are always pressures to be sure an opportunity is big enough, but most really big solutions began small and built momentum.

How seriously would you have taken eBay online auctions? Or PayPal online escrow? In an earlier era, FedEx looked like a niche market. To seize growth opportunities, it is better to start small and find a deep, underlying human need to connect with. A better maxim for growth leaders is: Focus on meeting genuine human needs. Myth 3: If the idea is good, then the money will follow. Managers often look at unfunded ideas with disdain, confident that if the idea were good it would have attracted money on its own merits.

Gmail sounds absurd: free e-mail in exchange for letting a software bot read your personal messages and serve ads tailored to your apparent interests. Who would have put money behind that? The answer, of course, is Google. In that light, a better maxim for growth leaders is: Provide seed funding to the right people and problems, and the growth will follow. Myth 4: Measure twice, cut once. And spending time trying to measure the unmeasurable offers temporary comfort but does little to reduce risk.

A better maxim for growth leaders is: Place small bets fast. Myth 5: Be bold and decisive. In the past, business cultures were dominated by competition metaphors sports and war being the most popular. Organic growth, by contrast, requires a lot of nurturing, intuition, and a tolerance for uncertainty. Placing bold bets falls well short of our proposed maxim: Explore multiple options. Myth 6: Sell your solution. When you are trying to create the future, it is difficult to know when you have it right.

We think it is fine to be skeptical of your solution, but be absolutely certain you have focused on a worthy problem. In this case, we propose two design-based maxims: Choose a worthwhile customer problem. Let others validate. An unavoidable but healthy tension exists between creating the new and preserving the best of the present, between innovating new businesses and maintaining healthy existing ones.

As a manager, you need to learn how to manage that tension, not adopt a wholly new set of techniques and abandon all of the old. For some managers, a design approach seems natural.

Design needs business thinking for good reasons: First, because novelty does not necessarily create value. Profitable growth requires ideas that are not only new but that create value for somebody because of that newness. Second, because even value creation is not enough. Businesses, to survive, must care about more than just creating value for customers.

It is an important, but insufficient, first step. To survive long-term, businesses need to be able to execute and to capture part of that value they create in the form of profits. Understanding the value capture piece is often hard for designers but critical to designing profitable new organizational futures.

And third, because how many more stylish toasters and corkscrews do any of us need? Cool stuff is great, but design has the potential to offer so much more. Design has the power to change the world—not just make it pretty. And businesses are some of the most powerful institutions on earth today.

So—can business and design build a future together? Let us tell you why we are optimistic that they can. First, organizations similar to yours are doing it right now and making it work, with solid results. There is a movement toward convergence around some of the most important questions of all: Why are we here?

What is our purpose? Increasingly, we are recognizing that the fundamental measure of success—in design and business—is whether we are really creating value for somebody out there. Without that, sustainable profitability is a mirage. A lipstick that lasts an entire year it is nearly 1 meter long. A clock that tells time so accurately that it is impossible for the human eye to read the last two digits it comes with an optional camera to capture an image of those two digits so you can know precisely what the time was a few seconds ago.

Our personal favorite, the Moaster, a toaster that launches the toast up to 5 meters in the air. It is just a different kind of data: Good designers take the time to make their ideas concrete and go out and get better data from the real world rather than extrapolating data from the past. In doing so, they belie another popular misconception—that a design approach is riskier than a traditional business approach. Hiding in your office using questionable numbers from the past to predict the future is just about the riskiest thing you can do.

Uncertainty comes with the territory when your goal is growth. Here is ours: We start and end in the same place as Apple's Tim Brennan, but we've untangled the hairball into a manageable process. What if? What wows? The What is stage explores current reality. It will also cause readers to think and reflect on their lives more deeply, become more aware of their own life stories, accept their authentic selves, and become accountable for who they are.

Brendon reaches out to engage hearts and minds in transforming lives with emotional edge and mental clarity. What is this golden ticket? And what kind of life does it really gain us admission to? The chapters are arranged into life lessons around 4 gates to transformation: Awareness, Acceptance, Accountability, and Action. This book is entertaining, provocative and loaded with wisdom. Honestly, this is the most original book I've read in years! Brendon Burchard shows incredible depth, compassion, and wisdom on every page.

He has given us a true gift. How ordinary managers in any economy can do extraordinary things to build sustainable growth engine The Catalyst speaks to all managers who have ever been handed ambitious growth targets but little guidance on how to hit them.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, you spend your time persuading with PowerPoint presentations instead of pursuing opportunities.

What does it take to overcome such seemingly insurmountable roadblocks? How can you crack the code to discover and pursue new opportunities? How can smart organizations recruit growth leaders, train them, and learn from them instead of getting in their way? These are the questions explored in The Catalyst. Based on years of research, this inspiring book reveals that the most potent drivers of growth are unsung heroes who often go unnoticed: ordinary middle managers who do extraordinary things.

Intrigued by how some people were able to consistently deliver the numbers—despite both internal obstacles and highly challenging conditions in the marketplace—the authors discovered not only how they did it, but also the personal and psychological characteristics of those who succeeded. From the Hardcover edition.