Design Success: The Few & the Many

Although the U.S. economy seems to be inching its way out of the Great Recession inch by painful inch, grasping at edges with its figurative fingernails, there are companies that seem to be defying the gloomy gravity and rising with seeming ease. “Seeming,” because as Hamlet once put it, “Things are not what they seem.” It is only through commitment, cleverness and, yes, damned hard work that a few organizations have continued to perform in ways that leave the others who aren’t entirely shell-shocked by the shellacking that they’ve taken in the market envious. And, of course, one of those companies is Apple.

However, it is not alone. As Jay Greene writes in Design Is How It Works: How the Smartest Companies Turn Products into Icons (Portfolio), “As brilliant as Apple is, though, it’s not the only company that’s been able to ride great design to economic heights. And the others have taken entirely different paths from Apple’s.” Among the companies he examines are Porsche, Nike, Lego, and OXO, all companies executing striking, profitable products that aren’t from the mind of Steve Jobs. But there is something Apple and the others share. Greene: “Doing consistently great design requires a commitment to it.”

“Doing consistently great design requires a commitment to it.”
Nine words that pretty much sum up the difference between the Few—the companies that roll out with great design—and the Many—the companies that produce products that are not much more than adequate, possibly good, and often merely derivative. There is a vast gulf between talking about “the importance of design” and the delivery of products that people often pay more to get. Sure, there are executives galore who hold forth about how wonderful their products are as they gesture toward an array of mediocrity. These are the same sorts of people who talked about how “people are our most important asset” prior to slashing their staffs like a Ginzu knife through a cantaloupe.

“Doing consistently great design requires a commitment to it.”
There is an additional factor that has to be taken into account, a purely human factor. In the past few years there have been the proverbial pink slips falling like snow on Mt. Baker (athropolis.com/arctic-facts/fact-baker.htm). Consequently, there are more than a few people—designers among them—who probably think discretion is the better part of valor. And to be discrete means to be careful. To be careful means to keep one’s head down. To keep one’s head down means not to make waves. And that means mediocrity.

So on the one hand there are the executives who may talk a good game, and on the other there are the people who are worried about becoming a statistic. Neither hand is a particularly good one to play (although it should be noted that it seems that executives who make the most egregious errors—assuming these errors aren’t of an illegal nature—tend to end up, for some reason that defies common sense, as executives at other companies (or, at the very least, high-paid consultants) after they’ve taken the companies they’d headed into the morass).

I’m guessing that it’s not easy to work at Apple. And it probably isn’t easy to work at the places that Greene examines, either. Easy isn’t what it is about. For those companies that succeed with great products, there must not only be hard work, but a willingness to do things that others don’t do and to keep trying until it’s right. There are undoubtedly failures along the way. Failures? Yikes! Who wants to risk doing something wrong? Only those who have a shot at succeeding.