Reciprocity

In 1966 Thomas Watson, the legendary CEO of IBM, wrote a memo that opened with the sentence: “Good design is good business”.  Fortune 1000 companies represent nearly 60% of the US economy, and $2 trillion in profit, and yet only 5% of those companies have a senior design executive. Even though McKinsey, Forrester, Harvard, and others have shown repeatedly over and over that companies who place design on par with engineering and marketing outperform their competition by 200-224% (depending on the study). That means companies that invest in design have higher ROIs, greater market share, increased competitive advantage, and stronger brand recognition & loyalty—proving Thomas Watson was right.

Yet the majority of companies still hesitate when it comes to investing in design. Some leaders I have spoken with say its because they don’t understand design. But I am not sure I agree. A great example is generative AI–whose long-term value is still very much speculative, yet every one of those F1000 companies are making massive investments in generative AI. And I would bet you none of their CEO’s fully understand how it works, or what exactly it will contribute to their business. So again I ask, why are they not investing in design? 

Design is the intentional arrangement of elements to create a desired outcome, it is intrinsic to how a thing is conceived and constructed. Technology is a frequent constituent, AI being the most prominent of late. Admittedly given its prolific and evolving nature, generative AI in particular requires something more like orchestration than mere arrangement to ensure its participation is predictable and transparent: Allowing trust not to be excluded from the desired outcomes. Design provides the means of achieving reciprocity between revolutionary technologies and the evolution of desirability.