Redefining “Good design
is good business”
By Michael McPherson, Partner & Creative Director, Corey
McPherson Nash
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| Michael McPherson |
For designers there is nothing like a recession to stimulate thinking
about the value of design. If IBM legend Thomas Watson, Jr. is right
that “good design is good business,” why aren’t
clients lining up for our services? Designers have practically deified
Watson for entitling his 1975 Wharton School of Business lecture
with these five words, and we would love to believe they are true.
(Or rather we would love it if our clients believed they are true.)
That the man who transformed his father’s comparatively modest
business into an industrial behemoth could at least partially attribute
his success to design should be a boon to our profession. And Watson’s
credibility is enhanced by the fact that under his reign IBM hired
a pantheon of great designers—Charles and Ray Eames, Eero
Saarenin, and Paul Rand among them. But if only designers are reciting
this mantra, it is not doing us a lot of good—and it could
be clouding our view of where the value of design actually rests.
If we look at good design from the perspective of someone leading
an enterprise, “good design is good business” is not
an easy statement to support. It is clear from Watson’s lecture
that what he means by “design” is essentially making
things look good. He wanted the world to regard him and his
company as a leader in good taste as well as good products. In his
own account, Watson’s epiphany occurred when he noticed the
colorful displays and coordinated color palette of an Olivetti typewriter
store on Fifth Avenue. So his subsequent commitment to “good
design” was not based on some deep understanding of its value
in growing profits. It was essentially Olivetti-envy.
Designers hate it when business people regard design as “aesthetics”
or “styling.” We like to think we offer services more
strategic and profound than just prettying things up. We learned
in school that we are “problem solvers,” and that we
should be regarded with the same degree of respect that is accorded
to any business consultant. It is true that designers have to learn
a great deal about a client’s business in order to craft thoughtful
and effective communications and products, but are we getting a
bit carried away? The AIGA is now supplying us with phrases like
the “Power of Design” and “Design with a capital
D” to signal the profound insights we have to offer to managers
as designers. To my ears there is something a bit overblown
about this rhetoric, as if we are trying to reassure ourselves that
we are still relevant—or at least should be—to the people
who control the budgets. But if we are going to make a case for
the “Power of Design” we have to show why good
design is good business. It is a difficult case to make using the
metrics of return on investment.
I believe that business leaders invest in design because they do
believe it is good business—but not good business in ways
that can be entered on a balance sheet. Most business leaders invest
in good design for the same reasons that Thomas Watson, Jr. invested
in good design: it is part of the theater of how they present themselves
to their employees, their shareholders, their competitors, their
professional peers, their customers, and their community. They want
to “look good” within some more or less well-defined
formal vocabulary or style that characterizes their industry. It
is partly “branding” or being identifiable in some distinctive
way, and it is partly credibility, looking like the organization
is substantial enough to invest in quality design. In his lecture
Watson mentions that for his father “. . . growth alone was
far from his top objective. What he wanted was to win a place for
IBM in the estimation of people, and he realized we had to earn
it not only by what we did, but also how we looked.”
We designers often denigrate “mere styling,” because
we assume that it is not important to our clients. But style and
facility with form and color is precisely the thing that designers
are good at and the reason most clients hire us. If clients are
not hiring us, it is not because they don’t value what we
do. It is because they understand that design is not the most important
investment for them to make in tough economic times. Generally,
it is only when business is growing and profits are up that organizations
invest in non-mission-critical activities like design. In these
times, businesses need to show short-term ROI, and “ROD”—if
it can be demonstrated at all—is a long-term investment. Again,
Watson is clear about how he regards IBM’s investment in design:
“Long before we had enough money to launch a design program,
we tried to look more successful than we really were.”
Good design is good business at some level, but I am skeptical
of the notion that if business people just could understand the
value of design, our services would be in high demand and we would
thrive. I’m not saying that design can never make a measurable
difference in the bottom line, but only that the situations where
design can be isolated from all other factors that effect profits
are rare. If designers were never hired except in such cases, there
would be significantly fewer opportunities than there are now.
Thomas Watson, Jr. was a brilliant business leader who also happened
to take an interest in sophisticated European-style design, but
it is naïve to believe in a direct causal relationship between
these two aspects of his personality—or between good design
and good business. If the relationship between good design and good
business is not always the simple relationship of investment and
return, we need to redefine the terms of the discussion. Either
the values of business and the values of design are “two cultures”
contingently overlapping, or their respective values are shared
in ways we have yet to define.
(I will essay a definition in my presentation at the 28th
International Design Management Conference in October.)
Editor’s note: The article by Michael McPherson on Redefining
‘Good Design is Good Business’ in the September issue
of the eBulletin sparked a good deal of response. Here’s
a followup from one reader.
This article appeared in the September 2003 eBulletin.
Feedback on DMI Viewpoints and article proposals
are always welcome! Please email jtobin@dmi.org.
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