Tough Love

In traditional firms, status--the protein that nourishes the ambitious as they claw their way up the corporate org chart--is conferred on those who run brawny organizations with big-time budgets. The relationship between size and status is pretty straightforward: The larger the revenue and the bigger the staff, the higher one's station and the greater the reward. That's why most executives prefer the known to the unknown. It's a lot easier and safer to run a billion-dollar business than it is to invent one.

Among designers, however, the tinder that fuels the creative fire comes from solving wicked problems. The best designers are not necessarily known for the revenues they've generated, but for the challenges they've cracked. In the business world, for instance, Hartmut Esslinger is recognized as the founder and CEO of frog design, an international creative consultancy that counts Hewlett-Packard, Disney, and Nextel among its clients. But in the designer's universe, Esslinger will be forever famous for conceiving the look and feel of the Apple IIc, now in the Whitney Museum of Art.

Companies like P&G have figured out that rank and title alone are less-than-stellar motivators. So, to keep its people priming the growth engine, P&G imported the designer's ethos to "do meaningful work." When the company created its Global Business Services unit in 1999, its new head, Filippo Passerini, moved to a business-by-design model when he essentially challenged his information-technology group to become problem solvers. Having outsourced the bulk of P&G's mundane, day-to-day IT operations to HP and IBM, Passerini freed half of his 2,300 staffers to become high-end matchmakers. As he told CIO magazine, "They match what's needed in the business with what's possible with technology." Today, his supergeeks are experimenting with virtual-reality technology and coding new applications to improve customer- relationship management systems.

By creating a problem-solving culture, Passerini has transformed a workforce of back-office drones into a tribe of intrapreneurs who are creating tremendous value for P&G. This past August, his IT managers won bonuses when the GBS unit met an unprecedented challenge following P&G's acquisition of Gillette: integrate 95% of Gillette's systems capabilities into P&G within 15 months. Marta Foster, a VP who oversees the IT team's business-solutions work, says the project, which required a workforce of 600 coders and engineers, was "incredibly energizing. It's far more meaningful when our work is tightly aligned with the company's strategy. Our people talk about their projects like they're running their own businesses."

Managing the yin and yang of business-as-usual and business-by-design means striking a balance between any number of countervailing impulses: Give people the freedom to follow their nose, but hold them accountable for their performance. Set a high bar, but recognize that failure is an unavoidable consequence of pushing into new territory. Do everything possible not just to thrill your customers but also to wring costs and efficiencies out of vendors and suppliers. The biggest challenge for all of us, designers and businesspeople alike, is to become equally adept at quantifying the now and intuiting what's next. There's simply no other way to win.