#45 Eric Quint @3M - The role of a Chief Design Officer in a large compay
Eric Quint is a Vice President, a Chief Brand and Design Officer at 3M, a Fortune 500 company with over $30B in revenue and over 90.000 employees. An industrial designer by training, Eric joined 3M in 2013 to “design the design function” in the company. He grew the design team substantially, built revolutionary 3M Design Center (an incubator for Collaborative Creativity), and helped build the brand platform that catapulted 3M’s brand value among world’s top 100 brands.
In this episode, we talked about:
why designers should stop measuring the value of design (and how we can show our worth),
what it takes to become a Chief Designer Officer (and what does one do as a CDO),
and why designers need studios as much as scientists need laboratories.
You can listen and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Overcast, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and CastBox.
You can download the mp3 file by right-clicking here.
Transcript
Alen
Hi, my name is Alen. I'm a business designer, and welcome to the d.MBA podcast, where we learn about business to become better designers. In this very special episode, I spoke with Eric Quint who is the Vice President Chief Brand and Design Officer at 3M, a fortune 500 company with over $30 billion in revenue and 90,000 employees. So 3M is a company that is very famous for its creativity, coming up with great products. And I think most of us know it, maybe because of the postage, or adhesive tapes, but they do much more. They have a safety business, they create safety products, electronics, healthcare products, etc. So it's a huge conglomerate creating many different products in many different verticals, and many different industries.
Eric is an industrial designer by training, and he joined 3M in 2013, to basically design the design function. So he grew the design team substantially, and built the revolutionary 3M Design Center, which basically acts like an incubator for collaborative creativity. And he also helped build the brand platform that catapulted 3M's brand value among the world's top 100 brands. In this episode, we talked about why designers should stop measuring the value of design. And this is something we talk about a lot. So how can we show our worth? Eric actually shows us an alternative path to showing our value.
We also talk about what it takes to become a Chief Design Officer. And what does one do when they become a Chief Design Officer, and why designers need to do as much as scientists need laboratories. If you also want to become a Chief Design Officer one day, one thing you will need is business literacy, the fundamental understanding of how businesses work. So if you want to get that one way to do it, is to join us in the d.MBA. So the next d.MBA cohort is actually starting on February 24. And we opened applications just a few weeks back. So if you're interested in raising your business literacy, you can check out at d.mba/course and apply at d.mba/apply. So that's everything in the introduction, and now enjoy this super interesting conversation with Eric Quint. Cool.
So Eric, first of all, thanks for taking the time. There's a lot of buzz around designers having a seat at the table and you being achieved Designer Officer at 3am is a very rare opportunity to speak to someone who has this proverbial seat at the table. Can you share with us a little bit more about what a Chief Design Officer does in a company?
Eric Quint
Yeah, it's a pleasure to be at the podcast, and I'm happy to share some of my experiences. In your question, there's actually two questions in there. One is about the seat at the table. And the other one is about being a design leader. In a big enterprise, I think a seat at the table is maybe not enough, you can have a seat at the table. But if you are not, you know, taking the opportunity to drive with passion and influence, then maybe that seat at the table is not very effective. So I think you need to be equipped to have a seat at the table, that is effective. And the other one is you need to be invited at the table in many cases, or invite yourself. So in that sense, I refer to adding design to a big company as an inclusion challenge.
So we talk a lot about diversity and inclusion. And I think in many cases, big companies talk about this in the context of what I call diversity and inclusion in appearance. And I like to open up this in the context of diversity and inclusion and thought. And so what designers bring to many companies, and particularly if it is a technology company, you see that we bring another outside and thinking and anyhow, another kind of thinking that is very much driven by empathy, and by the stakeholders that we work for. And so in that sense, we bring in a new perspective, hopefully to the table. And there needs to be space at the table as well. To speak up and to be influential.
The other side of the question was about what does it mean to be a Chief Design Officer at a big company? And if you think about that, I will always refer to a few things. First of all, a design leader and the way I describe my design officer's role is that I have to design the function of design. What does that mean? That means that I have to make sure that like any other function like HR or legal or r&d, you have to define that function in terms of taxonomy in terms of process methods and tools, in terms of your strategic growth, ambitions, and in terms of integration. So, that means that that function needs to be designed.
The other thing is another big topic, which is what I refer to as designing the company. As a design leader, you are in charge of influencing the brand and the customer experience. I will say that great brands are never made by coincidence, they are carefully curated and created. And that means if you think about a brand, all the touch points, that will interact with customers and stakeholders, in general, they need to be designed one way or another. And you want to make sure that this is done in an orchestrated way. So that is where the role of designing the company comes in. And then the third part is you need to educate a lot about design. So you cannot assume that people who've never been exposed to design and creativity know about the added value of it.
And so I always use your concept that I refer to as the three A's. And first of all, you need to create awareness about what we do, in order to create appreciation for what we do. And then in order to create ambassadors that are going to help us to, to create enabling conditions for design to do the best job they can do. So education about design is a never ending story, particularly where you have a lot of turnover in senior leaders in big companies. That will always be on your charter. And then the last one that I always refer to is being a corporate rival. And I had that with purpose. Designers, I think, and my designers are tasked to really think outside of the box and bring thinking that is going beyond the obvious, it's going into not the 100%, but the 150%. And if we're not stretching our thinking, and bringing the unexpected, we will never have a discussion about where the future could go. And so I think that is one of the roles that I like to challenge the status quo. And the way I look at it is that if we go into a meeting and offer a new creative directions or solutions, then you want to have somewhat of a kind of an resistance and feel of discomfort with your business partners, because then you know, you have stretched far enough to have at least a discussion of where you want to be on the scale of disruption. And so, that is a summary of my role.
And then I would say, I focus on three areas. Of course, if you want to put design at the heart of the company, and elevate design in a company, you have to do a lot of things organizationally, where you have to think about the governance and creative leadership and talent management, you have to do a lot of operational thing, the way you have an accountability and you have to drive efficiency and quality of the work that you deliver. And then of course, culturally, there's a lot of things to do there as well. And so you have the diversity challenges that I just mentioned, but also the way we apply empathy and, and the value systems that we have as a creative organization is extremely important to be successful in scaling creativity in an enterprise.
Alen
So there is a lot to unpack here, let's maybe start by just seeing what is your favorite part of this job?
Eric Quint
Well, at the most favorable is building my team and managing and coaching and, and guiding my team to another level. And so that is actually what I would summarize as driving design excellence. And the excellence of design and creativity can only be happening by the people that are a part of your team. And so you need to create a culture of learning and allowing making mistakes. And and and I say experimentation and exploration. That I think the most fun part of the job is getting your vision out of your brain and making it very actionable and amplifying it through a larger team.
Alen
Can you give us some concrete examples of how you do that at 3am?
Eric Quint
Well, there's all kinds of different ways we do it but one of the ways we do it is we have all kinds of platforms where we share new thinking, or where we align with our leadership team on vision and strategy. So this is all about engagement across all the levels of your organization. The other one is that we have platforms where we share best practices, but also learn from projects, in order to make sure that we give everybody the opportunity to share, which is important, I think. And then, what I do a lot as well is I'm coaching not only design leaders, but also business leaders, on just leadership, because my vast experience in many different roles in business, as well as in design is pretty unique and outside in for the company. And therefore I enjoy a lot to mentor people which is a great opportunity for myself to learn as well.
Alen
Yeah, you mentioned educating even when I first asked you about your role as a Chief Design Officer, so educating is a really important part of your role. So what are the specific things that you teach to business leaders versus the design leaders, you know, what's lacking in the business community versus design community?
Eric Quint
Well, if you think about the business leaders to start first, you continuously educate what design is about, that it is not about engineering, that it is linked to engineering and that it is linked to marketing. But that the best work comes from a collaboration across the different functions. And then you have to educate about how to work together.
Then, another thing, I think, which is extremely important is I see many big companies have a difficulty in managing creativity at large. And how does that work? It works that if we need to come up with a solution, or a new product or a new service, we go and use workshops to come up with a lot of ideas. And then I always ask myself and the team the question, what are we going to do with all these ideas? And so you apply creativity and design thinking to come up with great ideas. But how to select the idea is what is important and can only be done if you have a strong strategy and a vision and your insights, research and customer knowledge available on the table to use as criteria to select the best idea. And I still see many companies where the best idea is selected by the highest in hierarchy. And based on personal interest. And that's not good enough anymore, in my opinion, because we're not making what the designers like, or what the business leaders like we need to make, what we have found out that is appreciated by our customers and our stakeholders. And therefore, we're not making things that fit personal opinions and flavor and appreciation. And I think the management of a creative process is a capability. And I think that is very misunderstood. Because in many cases, you know, creativity is with all I agree with that it's not solely owned by designers. But you know, to manage the process to come to a good solution, there's a lot of craftsmanship and knowledge and experience needed in order to guide the process like that in the right way. So that's one of the things I think is important to educate.
If you go to the designers, I think it is in many cases, designers have a tendency to have the most breakthrough ideas that will change the world. But if you think in a company context, you need to be able to identify value in an appropriate way, to develop value in an appropriate way and to deliver that value in an appropriate way. And so in that continuum of the value creation, there's a lot of complexity coming in from manufacturing, from engineering from the business, business case building, that, you know, we have experts as well in the business that we need to know appreciates their knowledge, to help us together to come up with the best solutions that make sense and that are scalable. And so if I sometimes challenge the design world by saying, Well, we're so proud of the fact that we have that we're very empathetic. And that's why we can do great. Come up with great solutions, and suggestions for customers, and users. But if designers will use that same empathy, to better connect to the other functions in the company, I think design will be much more successful. And that's one of the things that I tried to do in my practice is to use my same empathy to, to understand what my fellows in the business need to manage, and what what their, as a main interests and challenges are, in order to work together in a collaborative way to solve these things in an appropriate way. And so when I came into the company and introduced the theme, collaborative creativity, which is telling me everything of what I do from day one, and that is, you know, we were adding creativity to the company, which was pretty new when I started. And hey, we're not going to do it ourselves in an ivory tower, we are going to work across functions very hard to go.
Alen
Speaking specifically about the shape of the team or who is in the team, when you're developing new breakthrough ideas, you were mentioning that for design it is very important to also think about business cases and about engineering and all of that stuff. Does that mean that you work in cross functional teams? How does this whole thing work in terms of the workflow of design teams?
Eric Quint
Yeah, so what I see if functions in general, ask themselves, whether they are effective or not, and how they can drive to another level of excellence, I see a mistake happening that I don't appreciate. And that is they are going to add elements of other functions to their function. So to give you an example to make r&d more effective, maybe you add designers to r&d, or maybe a communicators or marketeers. And so I think, and you see the same and design as well, you have engineers as part of your team. And you can have MBAs as part of your team. And they can help, of course, to liaison, but they should not replace the expertise of the other functions.
And I think what we see happening here is that these functions make one mistake, and that is they try to avoid true collaboration by adding these functions to their own entity, and then they think they can become self foreseeing and all the elements that they need to cover. And I think the simple answer is, hey, you have to, I like to be focusing on driving that design excellence mainly. And then the other thing is, my task is to make sure I interface in an appropriate way with all the other functions to do an excellent job. And so it's not easy to collaborate sometimes across the functions. But in my opinion, that's the only way to drive progress.
Alen
But how does the design team then work with let's say, engineering or other functions?
Eric Quint
While we have an innovation process, and in that innovation process, we will make sure that I'm branding processes, that we are indeed involved in the project at the right moment in time to contribute and work together in a collaborative way to drive this program.
First of all, to identify the value and that means we reran user research we do and take technology trends and customer trends on social cultural trends into account. And then we have great ideas, and then we have to build a value proposition around that. And then when that is done, we need to work with engineering and manufacturing, and our partners in business to make sure that we are able to make the product and get it functional. And then of course, we have to ship it to the marketplace which we have to deliver that that solution where you work with marketing and marketing communications, to make sure that we have a security in terms of the design and an appropriate way and start to deliver that value through a web design is a big component then but not the only one. Where you work together across these functions to successfully deliver the value into the marketplace. That you know designers are very much focused on the front end of the innovation process because that's what they like to do. And then when they have delivered Design, they move on to the next project. But after the delivery of the design, there's so many more things that can make or break the success of a product that designers somewhat need to be involved in. And particularly if it comes down to driving the consistency of a brand. So yeah, in my case, my designers are involved to make sure that until we deliver that value in the marketplace or in the shop, if it comes down to consumer products, we were involved to make sure that the story that we tell to our products and services, and solutions is recognized as one from from 3M.
Alen
Another thing you mentioned previously is that what you try to avoid is when educating business people is you're avoiding decisions based on opinions, or the highest paid person, right, just based on their taste. How do you make sure what kind of data you use for these decisions? What do you develop? What products get to the market? Or based on? What do customers really want? Is it just customer research? Or is it like, you know, qualitative interviews? Or is it more wide market secondary research, certain tests with statistical significance, etc.
Eric Quint
It's all in the above, because I think there's not one source that will give you the answer. And also, the risks are too high for a company of our size, that if you rely on one source, maybe that's not good enough. So you want to make sure that you have a variety of insights. But it goes through all the ones that you mentioned, from customer insights, research to observation to data that we get through our customers, in terms of feedback that we get, our customer service - so there's all kinds of elements that you can tap into in order to make a new product or improve a product, but I think it is more important, what kind of process you're in. Because if you make a successor of a successor, you need completely different data. And you can run the show with it with another set of data than if you're talking about creating a vision for the future, where you go five to 10 years out.
I think this was one of my previous roles at my previous company, where I run an agency consultancy. For 10 years, that was mainly focusing on delivering premium design projects, to the fortune top 100; on creating visions of the future. And so there is where you change from customer insights to foresight, which is a completely different activity. And so in that practice, I had a team of 40 people with MBA errs and advanced designers and sociologists and anthropologists to do research in completely different ways. So yeah, it depends on what kind of contribution you are supposed to give to what kind of innovation process from breakthrough from incremental to adjacent to breakthrough innovation.
Alen
So how do you do this research going from just the customer insights to maybe more foresight, 10-20 year out innovation plans?
Eric Quint
Well, what you do is you take trans research. And those trans research are again, linked to different dimensions. It's social, cultural, political, economical, it's not what we do only we work together with our strategy team and the business teams as well. You do market research about market sizing, you have ethnographic research. So there's a lot of research that is available.
That is actually what I refer to very often as you probe the future. Nobody has the fortune telling globe on their tables. We don't know what the future is. But you can extrapolate. And you can do a lot of qualitative research to come up with a hypothesis about scenarios for the future. And so if nobody is grading these scenarios, there's nothing to talk about and to evaluate about. And so I think what design leaders could have a bit more is imagination, because you need imagination to come up with these scenarios, vision and image imagination and creativity. So that's what we use as designers to say, synthesize all of that into a mission, because the reason is research data in itself, there's no value in it, it is how you apply it and how you connect the dots across all of that. And if you do that research in an appropriate way, you come up with a few scenarios.
And then those scenarios you can visualize, or you can create videos around or storytelling around. And you can do that quick and dirty with simple, say, fast prototyping if you need to, say, demonstrate a kind of an experience around a value proposition. And then you can have a dialogue with the main stakeholders in a business or investors and say, Okay, what do we have, what we have proposed, how would we evaluate this into the future, and then you have a dialogue about it. And then you learn that, depending on what kind of organization you work for, or what the ambitions of that organization are, you're able to come to a consensus on certain scenarios that will not work out and are not attractive, and some of them are attractive.
And then I'm a strong believer that if you take ownership of the future, you can make the future. So if you then start to, to work more on these ideas, and iterate with the community about these ideas as well, you can see that you drive progress in a different way. So this is a very advanced way of design. And I have not practiced a lot yet in 3M. Because when I came into 3M, we still had to build the foundation for say, the traditional act of design linked to, say marketing and branding, which we are still sophisticated at the moment.
Alen
Yeah, we mentioned branding a few times. And I've read that once you joined 3M one of the big projects you took on is a rebrand of 3M. So could you expand a little bit on this and explain to us what you did?
Eric Quint
First of all, I collaborated to get this huge project going, and started to talk about it actually, in my first days. So when I came into the company in 2013, my observation was that, you know, the company only entered the top 100 brands two years before. And I asked questions about it with the CEO and the operating committee and said, - hey, why is that? Because we're a more than 100 years old company, and we only entered into the top 100 brands two years ago, I would expect us to be there for many, many more years.
And so I asked the question, - what did you do to get yourself on that list? And then we moved up a few positions in the two years following, which was before I joined, and I asked what you do to get your up to the list. And so the reaction I got was like, we don't know what happened. And so I said, well, maybe follow the leader, because if we have an orchestrated way, in driving this, I think I can double the brand value and the brand equity of the company in five years. And so with that kind of attitude, I started to engage in socializing around that idea. Because one of the ideas that I saw as well, or one of the observations I had was that I think we needed to put more attention on what I would call humanizing technology. So we're a heavy technology company. But in the end, you know, it's not about the technology, the technology is an enabler. In my opinion, it's very much about the impact that we can drive through technology. And so this is about impacts to people, you know.
And so with that in mind, I started to engage with the marketing team and with the design team and with the CMO of the company. And, hey, we were so lucky, that we were finding a kind of a space that we felt we needed to drive both together. And so we started to become partners in crime here. And we're driving all of this in a period of nine months, and came up with a new brand platform, which is called “Science. Applied to Life”, which is very authentic to trim. And then we introduced a new corporate identity, which was for the first time in the history, and we introduced this and it was so very exciting.
That was maybe a bit more than two year later. So exactly after two years in the company, and it took us one year to drive this so it cost me one year to socialize on this. There's a bigger idea and all the rest is history, because since then, if you look now to the Interbrand ranking We are now in position 60, and we are roughly around 9 billion in brand equity. And when I started, the company was at 5 billion. So we almost doubled in five years that brand equity. And so we can still, I think, drive much more there.
I remember when we started to have a dialogue around that, say, brand platform “Science. Applied to Life”, the first thing I mentioned to the team is, let's not use the word innovation in any brand platform, because, you know, innovation is diluted, nobody knows anymore what we mean exactly, it has so many different dimensions. And it was a kind of an easy win for the company to put innovation in there. But I'm happier with what we have now. Because it's so authentic. And we applied science to life already for 100 years. So there's many great stories that you can tap into, on who we are and what our purposes are.
Alen
So you talked about the great results of a rebrand and how much also the value of the 3M brand went up. What's kind of hidden beneath the soul is, you know, how once you define a brand, what does it change for business? Can you share with us after you came up with the results of a brand, what are the effects it had on the business? You know, how did this show in the product solution environment, marketing and other departments?
Eric Quint
Well, the way I refer to it is that the brand is a sort of a lighthouse for our company. So it shows the way that normally we have a vision that is doing all of that. But the brand as well, the brand is more the qualitative way to talk about your company, and the way you emotionally interact and connect with your audiences. And that's different from a vision, which is the way you talk about your company, and the way you rationalize what your company could be into the future or should. And I think that's what the power of a brand is, where you can use a brand as a lighthouse to drive the qualitative relationship with audiences.
And I remember when Interbrand say, started to report their global top 100 brands, ranking in 2015, directly after we introduced a new brand, platform, three, and was one of the top risers, so we were amongst the top 10 risers in that year, and what they wrote an article about it, and they said something like, you know, if you take a glance at the top 10 Best Global Brands, which is where the Amazons and Apples are in, they are all designed by brands. And the same can be said about those top writers as well. And then they continue and say it doesn't mean that those brands are the most stylistically beautiful brands, although many are and it doesn't mean they are brands that care only about design and form factors and technology, what they share is far more fundamental, the elevated role of design and the enterprise.
And I think this, this summarizes it all, design is a big concept. In my opinion, it's not about having a team of creatives in a corner, having a seat at the table, it's actually changing the mindset, and the approach of a company, it is how the company works in the end. And so when I started to add design to the company, that was my philosophy, that if you want to drive innovation and design and customer experience, these are huge concepts for any enterprise and not easy to change if the mindset is not there. And so that's the way I see my role in many cases, is that you are a change agent, to some extent, because it's all about approach and mindset.
Alen
My guess is that as a CDO, you have a few metrics that you have to share or measure about the design team at 3M. You know, one of them was, as you said yourself, the value of brands, etc. So I'm just curious, what are the metrics through which you measure the value of design?
Eric Quint
There's only one and that is progress. And I'm very simple and outspoken on this. I see so many studies about the value of design. And I always have the feeling when I read them that it is starting to talk to ourselves to create more confidence that we should appreciate what we do and that we can talk with more confidence about it. And I think it's not needed.
I get that question when I got in the first couple of weeks all the time. I was a new designer, creative from outside of the company, and even from outside of the US, and new to the company. I had all these big ideas, and then people started to ask me about, yeah, well tell me, how do you measure design? And what is the value of design? And so, you know, what a, what does that put you into justification mode? And so I always had a very straightforward answer. And I say, - well, actually, we measure the value of design the same way you measure the value of your function. How do you measure the value of your function? And then you get a very, you know, wishy washy answer, where they have all kinds of metrics that don't really measure the value of what their function is doing. And so my conclusion was always saying, - guys, you know, we're so busy explaining to each other how important we are for a company, we forget to work together in order to drive progress for the company at large.
And so I see that happening in many different companies, where the r&d guys tried to get access to investments in a better way, and more than maybe the marketeers or the designers. And so that's the kind of us talking to ourselves. And, and so I don't like that so much. So the way I do it is - show, don’t tell. So we have tons of projects, that, of course, we monitor with the business what the impact of those projects are. And then we use these best cases, all over the place to inspire people and I use the principle of design inspires design.
If you do good design, the results can be pretty inspiring. And I have one great example. Last year, we won golden awards for the DMI, the design value awards, and this was about a project we did for healthcare information systems. So 3Mis very big and half healthcare information systems. And what we do is we give actionable insights to healthcare providers for saving time and improving the quality of their patient care. And so this is a software package. And we designed and did a lot in the designing of that to make it more intuitive and more effective. And so what we did is after the study and the design concepts, we went into a pilot study of 10 hospitals with our solution. And our product was able to uncover cost savings opportunities of a totaling of 1 billion in those 10 hospitals. You know, these are numbers that really count and show about the impact of what design can have, together with the other partners, because it is not only design, it is the software engineers, and it is the healthcare experts that we work with and our customers and the hospitals and partners. But these are remarkable results that show the huge impact of these every day. And I have many more examples.
Alen
And then a lot of your job is sharing these stories in your organization, I guess, towards business leaders, interests designers, right? Do you maybe have another story that you could share with us, because that's really fascinating to hear?
Eric Quint
Well, stories are sometimes smaller, but one great story that I like a lot and is very much linked to how we tell our story. So if you think about “Science. Applied to Life”, I started to connect these three things when I was in the process of getting an investment going for our new Design Center here on campus.
And, so I started to connect this and I said, Well, if you think about science, then, you know, this is linked to our r&d capabilities and the facilities that we have, and we have top notch r&d centers around the world. And so I mentioned to the senior management, you know, we are covered on all of that.
And then if you go to apply to life, particularly the life part, we have over 55 innovation centers around the world, where we engage annually with over 350,000 customers to tap into their brains and in their insights that help us to innovate continuously, and to do a good job for them. And so I said well, we covered that one as well.
And then I said “Applied to” and I said, - hey there's something missing here. And this was the Design Center. So I said design is all about making a meaningful and relevant translation of our technologies to our customers. And that's why you need to have designers. And yeah, designers need a Design Center because they have a workplace where creativity and collaboration needs to be enabled. And so that's the way I started to talk about our Design Centers.
And, and then, as part of that, I was also tying in the story on our innovation centers. And so I was traveling around the world and saw these innovation centers and they were all based on a different concept and a different narrative. And the storytelling was different. And I think what we learned by research is they were putting things forward in the storytelling that were not first in minds of the people that, say, visit these innovation centers. And so I started a project that came up with the new narrative and storytelling and a new approach, where we will moving the philosophy around our innovation centers more from sharing the scale of our things, products, to sharing the scale of our thinking as a company, and how we can be a strategic partner to many other companies, because we are 85% and in a b2b business.
And so we created a whole new narrative around it created in the innovation center, the first pilot in Washington, which was very successful. And then I was asked to build a team around the building of our refreshment of our innovation centers around the world. And in the meantime, we have realized a lot of five, six innovation centers, all coming from the same story. And I sometimes say, Well, why can't we have one McDonald's shop around the world, so we're building that as we speak. But the advantage of it is, and here's where you can offer design and design thinking to a company to drive efficiency and consistency, is we use the same assets and reuse a lot of the assets of these innovation centers. And by doing so, we are learning fast. And so we are able to deliver these innovation centers in a shorter time frame. And at dramatically lower costs. And so this is great for our brand, because we create more consistency in our storytelling and the way we manifest ourselves. But we do it in a very efficient way for the company as well. So that's another great story.
Alen
So you mentioned the Design Center that you built in Minneapolis, right? Can you tell us a little bit more about this Design Center? What was the purpose of building it? Is this the place where only designers work and then they cross pollinate with other departments? Or is it the place where the whole company comes together when they need to design something new? And what was the thinking behind this move and this investment?
Eric Quint
Yeah, so when I came on board, we had maybe around 20 designers, and mainly very scattered, and very much focused on one of our businesses, which is the consumer business, which was only 15% of our total size of the company. So I needed to come up with a story on how design is relevant and impactful to the b2b environment. And I always use the example there that, you know, I think even in b2b design is more important and more appropriate, why? Because the complexity goes up, because you have to deal with multiple stakeholders. And I think about a healthcare solution, you need to design for the patient and the family of the patient and the clinician, and the doctor and the nurse and the managing director of a hospital, the hospital that has an interest as well. And so that is complex. And that means you need to use design thinking and creativity to come up with the right solution.
Well, if you think about these designers, I think designers still, in many cases in a vulnerable state, in companies, and so when the company started to, say, discover the value of design and creativity, it was very much used in the traditional way. “We need to have somebody that can add outside of the box thinking, design thinking, and can help us to visualize ideas and make great products and make beautiful products”, - that was a bit like the traditional way of thinking about design. That's very much design as a service, the way I described this, and not so much design as a strategy. And so there is a huge difference between the two. Because in terms of creating value, for instance, you are in a completely different mindset. If you design as a service, it's more cost driven. It's more project than project ad hoc. It's very much focused on the stylistic parts of things and it's very often an afterthought, and it also gives a fragmented market presence in the hands.
If you think about design as a strategy, which we want to do, and you talk about value creation, you talk about portfolio approaches, you talk about the application of strategic design and front end collaboration. And of course, you talk about improved value proposition. So it's more about holistic offerings. Well, you can only do that if you sit together, in my opinion in one space. If you have one designer in an engineering department or a marketing department, I can tell you what is going to happen, I have experienced that, as soon as these designers start to think outside the box, there's always a couple of people that look over your shoulder to tell you that what you do doesn't make sense, they have tried to already before well and all the above.
So it is good to have a space, a safe space, where designers can experiment where you have a lot of cross pollination going on, and why you have the sometimes 10-20 different capabilities of design work together to to prepare concepts and propositions. To present to the business, before you even involve a business. In some cases, sometimes you do. So my Design Center is a space now. We now have roughly 175 designers around the world and five Design Centers around the world. So we built one in India, in China, in Japan, we have a smaller hub in Korea, in Milan. And then we have St. Paul, which is the headquarters of design, because most of the development is happening in our headquarters.
The purpose of that space is, first of all, that we want to have an inspirational workspace that attracts new design talent, I will say, you know, scientists need laboratories, administrative people need offices, and designers needs a design studio and a Design Center, which is based on a different value system and is a bit maybe a bit more playful is open, stimulating collaboration, it's a different way. The way we have designed the design space is very much based on the kind of living room principle - you feel at home. And if you feel at home, you're easier to open up on creativity, and you are easier to use and less vulnerable. To come up with new ideas. By the way, you need to think that the act of design is very vulnerable, you're in a very vulnerable position. Now you come up with these new ideas, and anybody can come along and shoot your ideas down. And these are sometimes like little babies, and you feel personally connected to it. And so we need to have that safe space.
Then, of course it is the collocation of design for cross fertilization. And across the multi disciplines of design. We also have diverse design and brand lab spaces. I started to introduce the concept of a brand lab, because we had all kinds of laboratories in the company. But I wanted to have momentum around some of our iconic brands. Because having a brand up and running is very interesting. But to keep it relevant and meaningful over time is the hard job. And so we have brand labs where we have the look and the feel of that brand in that space. And we work continuously together with all stakeholders to keep that brand updated. And then, of course, it is a creative collaborative space to accommodate also outside innovation engagement. So I have the front of the house and the back of the house. So the back of the house is is protected, you cannot go in if you're not one of the design team. And of course you can come in as collaborators from within the company. And then we have in the front of the space, a creative spaces that is available to anybody, partners, business people, whoever wants to make use of these spaces, and that is to create momentum, and traction to the Design Center to introduce people to the concept of creativity and design.
The great thing is that when I started to work to share my vision about this space, it was not easy to find an interior architect that was able to translate this and so I started to design the whole space by myself with my team. So there's many projects done by my team designed and so I say always, our Design Center is created by our designers for our designers. And so that's the beauty of our space. And the best compliment I got was to actually one was a couple of my designers told me they feel more at home in the Design Center than at home. So I don't know what that sounds a lot of other homes, but at least that's a good place to be. And one of the seniors told me, he said, Well, this place is so authentic, yet innovative for them. They felt that it was a good match. And I'm very proud of this because this was the first floor of a building that we needed to refurbish because it was an older building and we needed to bring this up to coatigan. And, and so the Design Center has inspired the whole building to be in a kind of an same style. Although a bit different. It has a bit more cubicles, but but still the whole style of the way the materials are used. And the philosophy is now to the whole building. And this building is now completed as we speak, the six floors, which is amazing to see this beautiful, new building, fully inspired by the design of the Design Center. And then we have based on the same principles, the Design Centers in several places in the world.
Alen
In preparation for this conversation, I looked up the Design Center, and it looks really amazing. So I’ll put some photos, some images, also on the website for listeners to have a look at. It's really inspiring, just as you said yourself, designers need this studio space to feel at home. It's great what you've done. I know that our time is running up. So I wanted to ask you one last question.
More practical one - if you do have advice for a designer that is kind of running, that is maybe the most senior designer in your company, but your company is not as large as yours. You know, it's maybe like a startup that's growing. And it's maybe 30 people, and it's just one or two designers and advice for them in terms of how they can better show the value of design? How can they speak to business leaders in their company to show more of that value? So we talked about the progress and the stories before? Is there anything specific in terms of their size that they can do if they don't have these stories yet?
Eric Quint
Yeah. So I've learned that many different, say business activities need dedicated design approaches. So when I came from my previous company to here, I didn't just copy the approach, because it was not appropriate, the context and dynamics were different. And the challenges were different than the majority was different. And I also worked a lot for startups. And you know, the challenge you have in a startup is to attract investors. And so you have to go from Stage Gate to Stage Gate and a very efficient way to make sure that you do the right things. And so sometimes it's not appropriate to talk about bigger concepts of brand and brand experience, because you still have to prove the value of technology conversion in medications to the solution that you have in mind. By the way, many of these startups are very much not product oriented, but very much service oriented. And so I think the way to do good design is, you know, design for me is very much about representing the customer in the end and the most appropriate way. And so I think you should talk to customers all the time, because startups, there's a lot of focus on technology. And then I think show your value by thinking outside of the box and bringing in unexpected thinking to drive the progress for a startup or for a smaller company, you know, the scale of impact is of a different nature. But still, I always like to use the progress thing, because we can have very advanced metrics. But sometimes you're not in the position to even get the metrics because it's not relevant in the size you work for, because metrics is in many cases, to mitigate risk as well and enable success. So I think that you can get a lot of inspiration, through looking over your shoulder after a quarter or after a year and showing and being very specific about the progress that is created that that progress is good to call that out.
The other thing is, I think it is the storytelling, the imagination and the creativity that we bring to the table that if it is done in the right way in a collaborative way. Actually the success of design is also its enemy, because you cannot pinpoint to the sole contribution of design and designers anymore, we should realize that. Therefore don't let yourself go into justifying why you're at the table. That's what they tried to do to me as well. And I said to the CEO at a certain moment in time, hey, you hired me to drive design for the company. So I'm not here to justify my existence all the time. And so I think that's what happens in a startup as well, if you're hired as a designer, get over it. And justifying all the time, you're why you're there, you know, just accept it, and start to collaborate to create the best value. And I think, sometimes, you know, what I call fearless leadership is needed with many designers, and I coached many of my designers about that, too, to make sure that you drive design in an appropriate way, and are not put in the position to explain all the time why you are at the table and why people have hired you, because it's their own decision.
Alen
I think maybe the challenge that others have is that they are not hired at the table yet, you know, they need to get there. And that's why I think we as a community feel this pressure to show our value to get there, to get to the table, because once you're there, maybe you don't have this feeling of justifying all the time anymore. But to get there, I think you have this urge to jump
Eric Quint
Maybe we were too eager. And therefore we are creating certain pitfalls to ourselves. And I think running around with an attitude that it isn't obvious that design is at the table will ease up a lot of things and then gives you another confidence in having your dialogue with your installed internal stakeholders. I think that's a philosophy that I use. And by the way, when I was hired in the company, it was totally not a given that I had a seat at the table, I had to re-educate the company on the concept of design, I had to come up with a vision on design going forward. And I was talking about big concepts in relation to innovation and brands, which was totally non obvious for the company, because they were very successful without having designed for many, many years. And so I think, yeah, the fearless leadership thing is important for me. I have confidence in what design is doing. And hey, I have to admit, I had a few years to practice all of this. My experience helped to disagree and say no, in order to drive progress.
Alen
So basically, we should act as we belong there. And then we will belong there. Right?
Eric Quint
Yeah. Let's create your own destiny, by having the confidence that we need to be there.
Alen
Cool. Thanks a lot, Eric, for all of these great stories, the experience you shared with us and the tips you gave us. I think I definitely appreciate it. And I think all of our listeners definitely appreciate the time you took to share all this with us. Thank you.
Eric Quint
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Alen
Cool. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Eric. If you have any comments or questions to this episode, just find me on LinkedIn and we can have a discussion around this too. And again, I want to invite you to join us in the upcoming d.MBA. if you want to raise your business literacy, understand better how businesses work, how you can change business models, how you can use metrics for progress, etc. You can check out the program at d.mba/course and apply at d.mba/apply.