Leading Design
CEOs don't hire design executives to be general managers. They hire a design executive for the same reason they hire a CTO, CFO, or CMO: they want someone who can lead the practice and be an expert in the discipline.
Yet all too often, new design leaders seeking to establish their credibility focus on demonstrating business acumen rather than design leadership. They conform to operational models optimized for other disciplines, governed by other teams. Design leaders who try to back design into existing processes built for engineering or finance are failing in their charter before they have even begun.
Every designer needs business literacy — enough to understand and engage with colleagues across the organization. The same is true for technical literacy and marketing literacy. And those disciplines need to develop design literacy in return. But literacy is not fluency, and fluency is not leadership. Never conflate speaking a language with being a native. I have never met a CEO who expects their CDO to do their CFO's job, or vice versa. The job of a design executive is not to demonstrate that they can operate like everyone else. It is to build an environment where design operates on par with every other discipline: with its own processes, its own timelines, and the organizational respect that comes from being understood rather than merely tolerated.
To do that, many design executives need to refocus on design itself. Not design as process management or design as operational efficiency, but design as the knowledge and skill required to generate novel ideas and transform them into artifacts of genuine quality: clear, elegant, purposeful, and — when the work calls for it — surprising. That capacity is what makes design valuable. It is also what design leaders are increasingly abandoning in the rush to prove their business credibility.
The result is a profession that has begun to hollow itself out. Too much of what passes for design today is the arrangement of prefabricated components using prescribed patterns. The knowledge and skills that made design genuinely valuable; knowing how to actually design, are being deprioritized by the very leaders responsible for championing them. That is a problem that needs correcting before the profession loses the credibility it is working so hard to perform.
The urgency is real. Design is transitioning from functional necessity to strategic differentiator at a growing number of leading companies. The executives running those companies are looking for design leaders who can design differentiation, create customer value, and drive user engagement. They are looking for leaders who can synthesize a design strategy, inspire remarkable work, and raise the design literacy of their entire organization.
Each of those companies deserves its own design. The profession deserves leaders who can deliver it.
Are you that kind of leader?
