Design Leadership

Talking to people about your designs might seem like a basic skill, but it can be difficult to do well. In many cases, how you communicate with stakeholders, clients, and other non-designers may be more important than the designs themselves. Because if you can't get their support, your work will never see the light of day - no matter how good it is. This practical guide focuses on principles, tactics, and actionable methods for presenting your designs.

Get your bearings as a leader, gain confidence, and learn tactical approaches from experts who have been in your shoes so you can support your team and advance your career. This book includes: how to become a design leader with insights from Netflix's Andy Law; learn how to hire people with the right balance of skills and find the best structure for your team; evaluating team members' performances, coaching to help them grow, and minimizing conflicts; and more.

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.

Real critique has become a lost skill among collaborative teams today. Critique is intended to help teams strengthen their designs, products, and services, rather than be used to assert authority or push agendas under the guise of "feedback". In this practical guide, authors Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry teach you techniques, tools, and a framework for helping members of your design team give and receive critique.

While writers, designers, editors, and other creative professionals spend years learning and refining creative craft skills, those skills do nothing to prepare us for the human, organizational, and operational challenges that come with promotions to leadership. And as your responsibility grows, it’s those organizational and leadership skills that will hold you and your team back.

As a leader, you've heard that design is important, and you believe it. But you may not know what you need to know about it, how to buy it, and how to manage it. This is the book for you.

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.

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.

The number of new ideas your organization can produce is a metric for its ability to generate novel solutions to any given problem. This ideaflow is the most crucial business metric that you've never considered. Every business problem is an idea problem. How well you can solve those problems is how well you and your business can perform, navigate uncertainty, and develop innovations.

Creative confidence sounds like some type of a fancy term for something, but in reality, it is a reference to the level of confidence that a person has when it comes to their own creativity. For example, if you have a lot of confidence when it comes to your creative abilities, then you have a lot of creative confidence. On the other hand, if you are someone that believes that you have no artistic ability, no musical ability, and no ability to think outside the box, then your creative confidence is probably very low.

Frugal Value contests the notion that companies can rise to the great challenges of our time by adopting so-called "sustainable business" practices. Instead, the acute ecological crisis requires an all-round rethink of what business does and how it does it. This book explores what business responsibility looks like today and how it could be put into practice through far-reaching changes to companies, ranging from new approaches to product design and business models to reconfiguration of operations and innovative ownership structures. 

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.

Emotion by Design reveals how leaders can harness the creative potential of any team, and so resonate with their audience like never before. Reflecting on his time working on Nike campaigns for Ronaldo and LeBron, the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, Greg Hoffman reveals how any business can unlock its creativity: whether by seeking out the daydreamers (and taking them seriously), or recognising that visionary ideas come not only from ingenious individuals but from whole cultures of innovation or understanding how to turn a mere campaign into a global movement.

Whether you're rolling out a new product from a city-view office or rolling up your sleeves to deliver a social service in the field, learning why and how to embrace failure can help you do better faster. Smart leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents design their innovation projects with a key idea in mind: ensure that every failure is maximally useful. In Fail Better, Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn show how to create the conditions, culture, and habits to systematically, ruthlessly, and quickly figure out what works in three steps.

Hartmut Esslinger, internationally acclaimed designer and founder of frog design, inc., reveals the secrets to better business through better design. Having spent 40 years helping build the world's most recognizable brands, Esslinger shows how business leaders and designers can join forces to build creative strategies that will ensure a more profitable and sustainable future.  

Human Design is the next evolution after Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, and other innovative profiling systems. Whether your field is psychotherapy, recovery, coaching, or healing arts, and whether your clients are individuals, couples, families, or business teams, Understanding Your Clients through Human Design will empower your work and call you to reconsider how you approach people. Inspire your practice with this groundbreaking and accessible approach and take your work to the next level!  

The subject of “design thinking” is the rage at business schools, throughout corporations, and increasingly in the popular press - due in large part to work of IDEO, a leading design firm, and its celebrated CEO, Tim Brown, who uses this audiobook to reveal how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is an audiobook for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society. 

Maybe you know a little about human design, but have not considered its impact on your role as a leader. You’re drawn to leadership. People recognize you as a leader at work, but there are times you doubt yourself, especially when it comes to your personal life.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you use design thinking to produce breakthrough innovations and transform your organization. This book will inspire you to: understand the transformative potential of design thinking; proceed from idea to product at lightning speed; iterate with rapid customer feedback; fail small and win big; create new products people love; lead design thinking teams more effectively; and open new paths to innovation at your company.

UX Management Methods is a guide for how to lead your UX team to greatness. Learn proven methods for hiring, managing, motivating, and aligning your UX team. Use these insights to focus your team with a road map of key deliverables, present actionable findings to stakeholders, and measure your team's success and return on investment with analytics. If you want to sharpen your user experience leadership skills and build a strong team of talented experts, then you can begin learning UX management methods today.