Design Management

Design-oriented firms such as Apple and IDEO have demonstrated how design thinking can directly affect business results. Yet most managers lack a real sense of how to put this new approach to use for issues other than product development and sales growth. Solving Problems with Design Thinking details 10 real-world examples of managers who successfully applied design methods at 3M, Toyota, IBM, Intuit, and SAP; entrepreneurial start-ups such as MeYou Health; and government and social sector organizations.

Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie educate listeners on one of the hottest trends in business development: "design thinking", or the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications for maximal business growth. Jeanne Liedtka's recent book, The Catalyst: How YOU Can Lead Extraordinary Growth, was named a Top Innovation and Design Thinking Book by Business Week. Tim Ogilvie has been hailed as a visionary for his pioneering contributions to service innovation, business model innovation, and customer experience design.

RAISE Your Value is the ultimate guide to elevating Architecture and Engineering firms out of the trap of commoditization. Learn how to Uncover Hidden Value, Design a Winning Advantage, and Charge More. As your firm pursues business, your staff must navigate difficult conversations around fees and pricing every day. Pressures from existing and potential new clients to lower fees often force your team to give away profits and avoid asking for change orders to get the work and “be competitive.”

We are oddly paradoxical creatures who long to be happy while creating our own suffering. We replay past anguish, anticipate future distress, and stew in self-righteous anger. In Hard to Be Human, Ted Cadsby focuses on five cognitive design flaws that foster underthinking and overreacting, and reveals powerful strategies to overcome them.

In The Leader Within Us, business leader and experienced mentor Warren Rustand finally puts in writing the basic principles of what he calls a life by design--that is, a life that, through deliberate choice and hard work, reflects the vision and aspirations of the person living it. These are the same principles that Rustand has enacted in his own life and has taught to many other adults who have come to him for guidance. You will find his story, and some of their stories, in this book.

How often do you walk away from a conversation feeling really heard? That it moved the people in it forward in some important way? You’re not alone. In his practice as a designer, Fred Dust began to approach conversations differently. After years of trying to broker communication between colleagues and clients, he came to believe there had to a way to design the art of conversation itself with intention and purpose, but still artful and playful.

Habits are a complex sum of our past, often unintentionally learned behaviors. Experts estimate that 40 percent of our daily actions are unconsciously performed by these habits. Which means you spend 576 minutes or 9.6 hours doing things you are not aware of. How can you change something if you don´t know how it works and what triggers it? When you have no clue why your car isn’t starting, how can you fix it? Before you can start changing, you need to understand the roots of your bad habits.

Do you hope to be coached or be a great coach? Or wish that your organization could execute its coaching mandate? Mark Colgate's 8 Moments of Power is the missing piece for those hoping to orchestrate a coaching change. In this engaging book, Colgate takes us on a journey with humorous stories, case studies, and pragmatic frameworks, while examining how organizations can create a coaching system that designs for, and delivers, continuous feedback that simultaneously increases employee and customer engagement.

In this book, you'll learn how to put the thinking-based framework popularized by the Stanford d.school into practice so you can take on challenges in your organization and reach insightful solutions.

As a workplace strategist and business coach, Erica Keswin has spent over 20 years working with top business leaders and executives to build successful organizations that honor relationships. Featuring case studies from top brands such as, Lyft, Starbucks, Mogul, and SoulCycle, to name a few, Bring Your Human to Work distills the key practices of the most human companies into applicable advice that any business leader can use to build a “human workplace”. 

Evidence shows culture drives fiscal performance. It's no secret that a toxic work culture can drive away employees and drive down profits. Creating a dynamic work culture that promotes both employee and business growth is key to ensuring an organization's success. However, culture is a moving target and hard to get right. In Great Mondays, brand strategist Josh Levine introduces a proven formula for building and managing a workplace culture that maximizes employee engagement, performance, and retention for long-term business success.

Need to design training in a flash? This step-by-step guide to designing training will help you on your way in record time!

In the course of my more than 15 years of experience as an attorney, I’ve worked on billions of dollars’ worth of public construction projects, and I’ve seen them succeed and fail. The general lack of prior experience that many public officials have, when properly acknowledged, can be a great asset, rather than a significant detriment. How is that so? When you come into a project without the burden of prior assumptions based on previous project experience, you can reenvision what a successful project should be, and what your goals should be.

Combined with the power of design thinking, these extensively researched best practices from some of the world's best design teams will help you nail the fundamentals of product design and do great work. This book includes: learn what the best teams know - that customer research is the base of successful products and companies; how product stories, journey maps, storyboards, and personas can build empathy and understanding; and more.

In a series of fascinating tales, Gene Kohn explains how he helped build one of the most successful architecture firms in the world, offering inspiring lessons on business leadership and design innovation that can be applied to many fields.

Forthright and engaging, Kohn examines both award-winning achievements and missteps in his 50-year career in architecture. In the process, he shows how his firm, KPF, has helped change the buildings and cities where we live, work, learn, and play.

As a leader, you've heard that design is important, and you believe it. But you may not know what you need to know about it, how to buy it, and how to manage it. This is the book for you.

You might've talked about innovation with your IT department or software development agency lately and the words "design thinking" were surely mentioned. So what is it? Just another piece of business jargon to add to your arsenal or a useful tool? Or maybe even an overestimated hype? Nowadays every organization or business runs into a myriad of problems as business models become increasingly more complex. Globalization and advances in communication and technology, all add up to creating unique opportunities but also new challenges that are not easy to solve applying the old tested methods.

Get your bearings as a leader, gain confidence, and learn tactical approaches from experts who have been in your shoes so you can support your team and advance your career. This book includes: how to become a design leader with insights from Netflix's Andy Law; learn how to hire people with the right balance of skills and find the best structure for your team; evaluating team members' performances, coaching to help them grow, and minimizing conflicts; and more.

Design sprints provide a problem-solving framework to get answers quickly and effectively. Learn to run sprints in any organization to reduce politics, increase collaboration, and put the focus on outcomes.

We are trapped by a plethora of expectations that we define for ourselves and others, as well as those that others define for us. They are ingrained in us, and we behave and act every day without realizing the impact they have on all aspects of our lives, including relationships, physical health, finances, and so on, resulting in frustration, sacrifice, anxiety, and even depression.