[Sigia-l] "Does Good Design Equal Dollars and Sense?"

[Listera]

"Boniface Lau" wrote:

> Hiring good people is very important.

Not just very important, it's the single most important thing, by far.

> However, the larger is a company, the more important is the role of corporate
> culture in determining whether the company will produce good design.

Corporate culture is not an abstraction, it is set by people and carried out
by people. In fact, during large scale layoffs or mergers when key trend
setters/culture makers leave or are replaced, the prevailing culture is
often lost.

Take the quintessential example of a company that lives by its design
acumen, Apple. When the "master designer" Steve Jobs left the organization
and was replaced by the likes of Sculley, Spindler and Amelio, who didn't
have a "designer" bone in their bodies, the organization went into a deep
coma that nearly killed it. Jobs is back and so is the gushing of design
innovation.

Very large organization, with few exceptions, almost always produce bad
design. The backbone of large organizations is (somewhat understandably)
bureaucracy, which happens to be the antithesis of good design.

Now, I've had the good luck of working with a very large company (>150,000
people) that paid enormous attention to good design in just about everything
they do over a number of decades and it was easy for people to sense that
and for employees to take pride in it.

----
Ziya

Only the mediocre are always at their best.