Here’s a quick summary of the ideas covered in The Designful Company. Sprinkle liberally throughout your presentations, or try adding a different one to the bottom of each business e-mail you send—you may be surprised at the conversations you’ll start.

• We’ve been getting better and better at a management model that’s getting wronger and wronger.
• The new management model must replace the win-lose nature of the assembly line with the win-win nature of the network.
• The management innovation that’s destined to kick Six Sigma off its throne is design thinking. It will take over your marketing department, move into your R&D labs, transform your processes, and ignite your culture.
• If you wanna innovate, you gotta design. Design is rapidly spreading from “posters and toasters” to processes, systems, and organizations.
• Design drives innovation; innovation powers brand; brand builds loyalty; and loyalty sustains profits. If you want long-term profits, start with design.
• There are really only two main components for business success: brands and their delivery.
• The central problem of brand-building is getting a complex organization to execute a simple idea.
• Difference plus design equals delight.
• Agility is an emergent property that appears when an organization has the right mindset, the right skills, and the ability to multiply those skills through collaboration.
• It’s one thing to inject a company WITH inventiveness. It’s another thing to build a company ON inventiveness.
• The problem with consumerism isn’t that it creates desire, but that it fails to fully satisfy it. Part of what we desire is to feel good about the things we buy.
• People have more buying choices, so they’re choosing in favor of beauty, simplicity, and the “tribal identity” of their favorite brands.

• For businesses to bottle the kind of experiences that focus minds and intoxicate hearts, they’ll need to do more than HIRE designers. They’ll need to BE designers.
• A designer is anyone who tries to change an existing situation to an improved one.
• The best design thinkers tend to be empathetic, intuitive, imaginative, and idealistic.
• The gap between “what is” and “what could be” is filled with creative tension—a powerful source of energy for creative people.
• Imagine a capitalist society running entirely on “what is” thinking: Nothing would be ventured and nothing gained.
• The traditional management model is a veritable thrift store of hand-me-down concepts, all designed for a previous need and a previous era.
• You can’t DECIDE the way forward. You have to DESIGN the way forward.
• When the left brain and right brain work together, a third brain emerges that can do what neither brain can do alone.
• Third-brain thinkers don’t settle for easy options—they work until they find the win-win ground among seemingly opposing sets of needs.
• Designful leaders reject the tyranny of “or” in favor of the genius of “and.”
• The designful leader and the creative artist are one and the same.
• Rule-busting innovation requires a sense of play—a refusal to be corralled by a strict method.
• Industrial Age companies emphasized two main activities: knowing and doing. The designful company inserts a third activity: making.
• Designers use non-logical processes that are difficult to express in words but easier to express in action.
• In the making mode, designers learn what they’re doing while they’re doing it.
• The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for “thinking wrong.”
• Many times thinking wrong is just wrong, but sometimes it turns out more right than right.
• If you want to drive your stock price higher—and sustain it—you need to first invest in vision, culture, and innovation.
• In a company with an innovative culture, radical ideas are the norm, not the exception.
• The higher design moves up the ladder, the more leverage it delivers.

• Aesthetics gives us a toolbox for beautiful execution. There are shapes, sounds, scents, juxtapositions, and patterns that push our emotional buttons no matter who we are, where we live, or what we believe in.
• The more technological our culture becomes, the more we need the sensual and metaphorical power of beauty.
• We ascribe beauty to the things we admire, then we begin to admire things that exhibit the same beauty.
• We often use beauty as a proxy for quality. Since aesthetics is reinforced by simplicity and efficiency, it offers a powerful tool for thriving in an era of diminishing natural resources.
• Good design does not depend so much on the eye of the beholder, but on a combination of aesthetics and ethics. Good design exhibits virtues. For the first time since the Industrial Age, successful businesses will be designful businesses.

• With the efficiency of a flywheel, a culture of innovation builds momentum with very small inputs, but can release large amounts of stored energy when needed.
• Companies don’t fail because they choose the wrong course—they fail because they can’t imagine a better one.
• While revolution must be led from the top, it rarely starts at the top.
• Stories rise uncontrollably from our desire to explain and share human experience. They can be powerful building blocks for culture.
• The Information Age has been hailed as the successor to the Industrial Age. But the true gift of digital invention is not information but collaboration.
• Before you can build an internal design capability, you need to address the problem of “vanishing respect.”
• If the future of corporate design depends on the metateam, then the critical role of the internal design department is to manage it.
• Like brand management, design management should NEVER be outsourced. Conversely, many of the design skills needed to execute brand-related projects should ALWAYS be outsourced.
• Strong-willed people love to collaborate when there’s a sharp delineation of roles, an unobstructed view of the goal, and a strong commitment to quality.
• Creativity can be exercised in two modes: team creativity and individual creativity. The key is finding a collaborative rhythm that incorporates both modes.
• PowerPoint has become a full-blown epidemic. Tragically, the victims are company values such as collaboration, innovation, passion, vision, and clarity.
• If you want buy-in, give PowerPoint a rest. Substitute more engaging techniques such as stories, demonstrations, drawings, prototypes, and brainstorming exercises.
• If a business is a decision factory, then the presentations that inform those decisions determine their quality: garbage in, garbage out.
• Leaders must lead. But this doesn’t mean they need to come up with all the ideas. In fact, you could argue that they needn’t come up with ANY ideas, as long as good ideas are flowing up smoothly from the bottom.
• Innovation is a numbers game. Winners are the companies that can increase the total number—if not the percentage—of viable options.
• The biggest hurdle to innovation is the corporate longing for certainty about costs, market size, revenues, profits, and other quantities, none of which can be known when an idea is new.
• With stage-gate investing, an idea is vetted stage by stage using a kind of natural selection, so that big bets are only made after the idea has been largely de-risked.
• The journey of the innovator is learning how to “cut cubes out of clouds.”
• In the end, ALL innovations get measured—by the marketplace. The trick is to get a preview of those results before you commit the bulk of your resources.
• If you’re about to embark on a culture-change program, it pays to measure your progress every step of the way, from the original state to the desired state.
• A neglected culture will often start out with very low scores, but the level will climb quickly as you apply the levers of transformation.
• As handy as metrics are for de-risking innovation, they have their limitations. Measurability decreases as importance increases.
• Truly innovative ideas don’t need much help from metrics. If an opportunity is off the charts, there’s no point in saying it’s two times off the charts.
• In an age of accelerating change, HOW you learn is vastly more important than WHAT you learn.
• The ability to acquire new knowledge quickly is the fundamental skill that underpins a culture of innovation.
• Without branded training, one company’s skills and knowledge would look much like another’s, and no company would gain a competitive advantage.
• It’s impossible to force one culture to conform to another. You can’t put braces on people’s brains, nor corrective shoes on their behaviors.
• Instead of viewing an acquired company as an uneducated child, view it as an inspired teacher.
• As we move from the spreadsheet era to the creative era, economic value will come from human networks more than electronic ones.
• Successful companies will create wealth from the conversion of raw intangibles—imagination, empathy, and collaboration—into finished intangibles—patents, brands, and customer tribes.
• How do you measure talent? How do you increase inspiration? How do you crank up creative joy? The answer to all of these is the same: recognition.
• A recognition program creates a perpetualmotion machine for driving higher and higher levels of design and spreading a culture of innovation into every corner of the enterprise.
• While most employees appreciate public acclaim and the occasional monetary award, the highest achievers want something more. They want wicked problems.