Differentiate and Lead with Design

Shaping our behavior to excel has been at the core since early ‘self-help’ writers like Dale Carnegie proved self-improvement a key driver to success. And Carnegie brought us to think about what Freud said was one of the main motivators for every human being: to feel important. Success, money and power appear to be key words in this equation.

Yet, investigate how leaders think, and you’ll find chasing big bucks is not their goal. Even a mega investor like Warren Buffet has an original piece of advice. “Be willing to be different. Don’t base your decisions upon what everyone is saying or doing.”

Forbes’ list of Secrets of Success, a compilation of quotes by billionaires and world class leaders opens with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s maxim. “You need new concepts with new innovation, and you have to have new capability and culture to go after those new concepts. Your existing success kind of fights those things, so you have to overamplify the new concept and the culture required for it.”

The reality for every leader of an organization, is that the construct of departments, the demands of the market, reaching the internal employee base and projecting the desired brand to stakeholders is a complex amalgam. This often makes truth-finding hard, and to genuinely interpret what exactly the change must be. How can we be different? What makes us unique? And how do we find that differentiator? All this is tied to who we really are, a puzzle we have to deep dive and find, like a pearl in an oyster, over and over again.

Apple put it easily and succinctly for time immemorial with Think Different as did Nike with Just do it. The spirited slogans reach for the unique thing that is you, your business, your activity, and finding the key to that door. In his 6 Top Motivations that Drive the Best Entrepreneurs, Martin Zwilling writes:

“In my experience mentoring new entrepreneurs and aspiring business leaders, I see far too many who seem to be driven by all the wrong reasons. Everyone seems to espouse extrinsic motivations, such as getting rich, having power, and fulfilling parent dreams, when in fact a focus on satisfying internal interests and desires will likely lead to more success, as well as satisfaction.”

Quite often, these true internal desires and dreams are buried in a network of systems we build up over the years — as individuals or organizations — to deliver many pressing ongoing needs, and therefore, are hard to untangle. Designers are trained to research, question, study, analyze and come up with findings and unique insights that can lead to targeted propositions to unleash your true potential by getting to the core of your organization, the key difference of who you are, and giving that purpose an outward shape to deal with the world. This ‘mind-body’ connection is what we deal with in re-branding, to find the intangible and unknown and then make it into a communication system. Further, in today’s complex multidimensional environment, design for brands, systems, communications and experiences all have to render seamless experiences across all touchpoints.

Written by Sujatha Shankar Kumar

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