Business: Culture Change

Because the screen has become the primary touchpoint between companies and their customers, more organizations are ratcheting up their spending on design and bolstering their design teams. Recent years have seen a flurry of design M&A (Mergers and Acquisitions) activity, with companies such as Salesforce, Verizon, Capital One, and many major consulting firms making a land grab for design talent. IBM has hired thousands of designers in its quest to become the world’s largest design company and reduce its designer to developer ratio from 1:72 to 1:8. Perhaps most telling of all, UX design is now the fifth most in-demand hard skill, according to recent LinkedIn data.

As someone who has worked in the design industry for nearly 20 years, I welcome these incredibly positive developments. However, it’s critical for both companies and design leaders to keep in mind that increasing headcount is not the only way to advance one’s design prowess. Read More

In this article, we’ll examine the environments in which we live and work, taking a moment to reflect on how they make us feel. We’ll also consider how to create explicit moments for practicing reflection and helping us make meaningful work. This need not be work that is saving-the-world meaningful, but simply work that is personally meaningful.

Consider meaningfulness in connection with this definition of behavior: “The way in which one acts or conducts oneself, especially toward others.”

• Who makes us feel the way we feel and why?
• How does the environment play a role?
• Do we have an explicit role to play in our environment?
• How can we create an environment that thrives, and why is this important?

This article builds on the ideas in our earlier article “Fostering Learning Environments to Generate Sparkle.” Read More

Having to deal with a lot of information from different fields gives us an overview of where we stand in the big picture, but at the same time, it can restrict and sometimes confuse or shift our way of thinking. When there’s too much information, making decisions becomes more and more difficult. To think clearly, without undue influence from one perspective or another, we need to focus our thoughts rather than trust everything we know equally. Clarity comes with less information.

While learning new things often delivers higher performance and greater opportunities, it can be quite challenging. But it’s definitely not limiting. Although learning new things is hard, what’s even more difficult is trying to unlearn our existing mindsets, methods, and behaviors. We should never let them limit our success. Read More