Word: kelleyism
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...like a religious thing," says David Kelley. "I truly believe design thinking will make your life better." Kelley, 54, a professor in the engineering department at Stanford University and the chairman of Palo Alto, Calif., design firm Ideo, is sitting in his cramped third-floor office, surrounded by a blizzard of Post-it notes and foam-cut prototypes. Talking at the speed of a guy on his third espresso, occasionally jumping up to scribble ideas on a whiteboard, Kelley outlines his credo: that practically anyone in the business and academic worlds can and should think like a designer...
...Kelley has possibly done more than anyone to bridge the gap between modern design and modern business. After graduating from Stanford in 1978 (as a self-described "lousy" mechanical engineer), he created--among other things--the very first Apple computer mouse and the light-up LAVATORY OCCUPIED sign used on Boeing 747s. In 1991 his company merged with ID Two, designer of the first laptop, to form Ideo. During the heady high-tech 1990s, the firm became the hottest product-design shop in Silicon Valley, working with the biggest names in business, churning out hundreds of supremely user-friendly designs...
...that was only Stage 1. When the dotcoms started going bust, Ideo adapted its business model. Instead of cool products, Kelley began to focus on processes--like streamlining admission into hospitals or new ways to stock supermarket shelves. Ideo transformed itself into a highly unconventional business consultancy--taking clients on bizarre field trips or making them dress up as customers--that spread the gospel of design thinking to corporate America. The CEO of Procter & Gamble, for instance, was once sent shopping in San Francisco's low-rent Mission District, while top executives from Kraft were taken to the traffic-control...
Most business leaders would have a heart attack if their companies started training clients not to need them, as the Mayo mini-Ideo is meant to do. But Kelley doesn't blink an eye. "We have no trouble giving away this week's ideas because we think we're going to come up with better ones next week," he says. "We're quite happy to see them ride off into the sunset...
...Kelley's outlook on business so different? To hear him tell it, being around academia--Kelley got tenure to teach product design part time at Stanford's engineering school in 1990--gives him the necessary distance and perspective. "If you always stay at a company, this barbaric businessness overtakes you," he says. "You're always in execution mode. Here [at Stanford] you get to think more strategically about your profession." Or, as he tells his students, "enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of flawed intellects...