Design Management

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.

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.

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.

This book is a practical guide that explores how startup entrepreneurs and business leaders, who hold no design degrees, can integrate service design into their development cycles to create sustainable, desirable, and profitable new services.

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.

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.

This book debunks the myth that leaders need to be creative like designers to apply design thinking. Applying design approaches and practices to organizational leadership is not just about its leaders becoming more creative. It is definitely not about the person at the top coming up with the grand answer. Design thinking starts with the 'pain point' related to the problem you are trying to solve. You get to the heart of the issue. It is a collaborative effort that neatly leads stakeholders and representatives affected by the problem to design novel leadership solutions that work.

This book guides listeners through best practices around planning, designing, building, and implementing a design system, with insights and first-hand experiences from lead designers at Shopify, Google, Apple, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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”.

Design Like Apple uncovers the lessons from Apple's singular approach to product creation, manufacturing, delivery, and customer experience. Learn how design can create a competitive advantage by delivering beauty, ingenuity, and charisma. Get guidance on how to nurture taste, talent, and a design culture at every level of your organization.

Employees who take care of themselves have the capacity and energy to be high-performance employees. In turn, they help leaders create high-performance companies and thriving workplace cultures. This audiobook reveals how to design a company that makes it easy and natural for employees to care for themselves and perform at the highest level.

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.

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.”

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.

Why are some organizations more innovative than others? How can we tap in to, empower, and leverage the natural innovation within our organizations that is so vital to our future success? Now more than ever, companies and institutions of all types and sizes are determined to create more innovative organizations. In study after study, leaders say that fostering innovation and the need for transformational change are among their top priorities.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Databases are structured collections of data that enable efficient retrieval, insertion, updating, and deletion of information. They serve as the foundation for various applications, from simple contact lists to complex enterprise systems. Key concepts include tables, which organize data into rows and columns; relationships, which define connections between tables; and SQL (Structured Query Language), used to interact with databases by querying and manipulating data.

As companies evolve to adopt, integrate, and leverage software as the defining element of their success in the 21st century, a rash of processes and methodologies are vying for their product teams' attention. In the worst of cases, each discipline on these teams - product management, design, and software engineering - learn a different model.

Like so many, Stephanie Woodward learned young that success in business required major sacrifice. She skipped vacations, worked weekends, and put dating on the back burner all to climb the corporate ladder. But after years of promotions, responsibilities, and garnering a respected industry-wide reputation, her body rebelled from exhaustion and unhappiness.

One of the key insights we have gained is the positive impact of global supply chains on sustainability. By implementing responsible sourcing practices and adopting eco-friendly production methods, clothing designers can contribute to a greener future. From organic cotton farming to recycled fabric manufacturing, these supply chains enable us to make conscious choices that protect our environment for generations to come.