Asian Companies able to Embrace design as a business strategy? (Part 2)

Can Asian countries make better brands in the future? Our resident contributor, Brian Ling aka Design Translator, continues his exposition on the need to incorporate design as a business strategy for Asian companies. Here is the conclusion of the two-part series.

Please do read Part 1 first.

Here are some strategies I have found useful and successful in managing and fostering design as a business strategy in an organisation. It should not matter if you are an in-house employee or an external design consultant the processes and thinking are the same.

Designer as the lead
This is an interesting one. No matter what they tell you, unless you are reporting to a designer, you will need to take the lead. This is simply because no one understands the design process better than you. Convincing them to listen to you is the problem.

Really there are a lot of fly by night managers who think they know how it is to be a product designer or design strategist, after creating (I would not even say designing) a few products. Personally the smart ones I respect actually hire trained designers to help them.

It’s similar to the perennial problem in Asia in that every body thinks they are an Interior Designer. Building contractors, furniture retailers, real interior designers, and architects all seem to be able to do Interior design. Some more qualified than others.

This means if you take the lead you will have certain responsibilities outside your general designing job. So you will need to ask yourself if you want to do this. On the upside, you will start to understand the bigger picture, become and overall better designer and you will find you will actually stop complaining about the management’s lack of understanding or respect for a designer!

Reporting to the top
In all the most successful design strategies I have heard or read about, the implementation of it always came directly from the top. This also almost always applies to getting strategies to work in any form.

Either as an in-house designer or a design consultant you will need to always report to the top or to at least the decision maker. Even better is for a senior designer to be part of the board of directors and thus really be able to spear head a design strategy within an organisation.

The reason behind this is the nature of innovation and creative thinking. Innovation is about a phase change, a different mindset and a different way to do things. This will invariable rub people the wrong way, thus to implement innovative design strategies it needs to be commanded from the top. It’s the only way.

A consultative product development style never creates revolutionary products only evolutionarily ones.

Do you think the iMac or iPod would have found its foot hold if Steve Jobs was not the CEO? Do you think the design of the iMac would have been approved if Jonathan Ives did not report directly to Steve?

Designers communicating the value of design better
If there is one and only one skill a great designer needs out off school, is the ability to communicate the value of design better.

There is a lot of focus in schools on the hard skills like drawing, computer skills and to a certain extent form development. Though this is important, it is also important to develop a design sense and the ability to turn this design sense into a language people can understand. The training the soft skills should also be a requirement.