Our mission is to help client companies build sustainable advantage by finding proven, as well as up-and-coming, design leaders who can demonstrate design’s potential impact on their business or their clients’ businesses. Design leaders’ abilities and performance can have a disproportionate influence on and add significant substance to a CEO’s plan to transform and reposition an organization, and profoundly affect its profitability and position in its marketplace.

To identify high potential design leaders for senior positions in visual brand design/architecture, user interface/interaction design, product innovation/industrial design and environmental design, we look for individuals who have passion and contagious enthusiasm for what they do, are willing to step up to the plate and take responsibility for their performance and are comfortable using business vocabulary.

They tell us stories and show examples of their achievements in making complex design and business decisions that have powerfully affected product, communications, systems, services and/or customer experiences using their unique experience, knowledge, insight, judgment, instinct and desire to “make things beautiful.” We ask about how their collaborative and relationship building skills with colleagues (steeped in other bodies of knowledge, understanding and know-how), and with customers, consumers, suppliers and consultants, contributed to the results.

What attracts the aristocracy of design leaders are companies building organizations with integrated business and design strategies, ethical, positive and forward-thinking behavior patterns, top-of-their-game individuals throughout and a design talent-based competitive advantage that competitors cannot easily duplicate. This can be very compelling to potential candidates for new design leadership roles, provided location, title, position description, level of responsibility, career path and compensation are in line with what they intend to do with their lives.

Our business’s growth comes from requests for design leaders who create or direct the creation of real, intangible or virtual design accomplishments that capture attention, make emotional connections, stimulate and enable ease of use, understanding, pleasure, confidence, efficiency and originality, to attract new customers and keep existing ones for their “sponsors,” aka their employers.

They must excel at analyzing information, grappling with ambiguity, solving complex problems, and doing so by joining together with others. As demand for high-value design decision-makers grows, there are fewer individuals to select from who are willing and able to undertake these complex, highly-collaborative jobs. Sometimes an organization in the virgin territory of hiring their first design leader is surprised by their expectations of higher than anticipated salary, bonus plans, stock options and grants. We educate and negotiate them through that.

Any company can cut costs and boost productivity by reengineering, automating or outsourcing, but any advantages they gain don’t last very long because competitors can adopt similar technology and process improvements. The achievements of organizations bringing in and achieving design leadership are hard to copy. Some companies are in the process of assessing their designers, working on ways to improve the quality of their work, and restructuring their relationships within the organization to increase their productivity and impact on profitability and competitive advantage.

Design leaders participate in advancing new ways to speed innovations to market, discovering what customers need and/or want and developing new ways to carry messages to consumers who have migrated away from traditional media to make sales more effective. Gearing up for systemic changes like these can take several years, at minimum, so it is never too soon to start searching for or training future design leaders.

Today’s businesses are looking for more problem solvers and fewer doers. Technology can replace a check-out clerk in a supermarket, but not a design leader who can proselytize design thinking to people throughout a company. Machines can log deposits and dispense cash, but cannot conceive of a brand identity or design an easy-to-understand way to enable consumers to manage their finances online. Technology also relieves a retail clerk from making transactions to making interactions by helping customers on the floor, becoming a critical element of experiential branding.

As Richard Florida wrote in his article, “Managing for Creativity” (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2005), “A company’s most important asset isn’t raw materials, transportation systems or political influence. It’s creative capital—simply put, an arsenal of creative thinkers whose ideas can be turned into valuable products and services.” (I don’t agree with many of his conclusions, but this one is a no-brainer.)