Dr. James Moore, corporate strategist, CEO of GeoPartners Research and author of the critically acclaimed The Death of Competition, talks with Peter Lawrence, chairman of the Corporate Design Foundation, about the role design can play in bridging different interests in today's business ecosystem.

How do you view the relationship between design and business?

I see it in two ways. Like most people, I think of this relationship in terms of product design a business creates a physical product that needs to be designed for effective use, or it develops a service, which is essentially a process relationship, that also needs to be designed. But a deeper way that design is important to business is through the process of designing itself, which good designers embody in their work. It has a lot to teach business people, who more and more are designing and redesigning their products, businesses and industries. In my management consulting practice, design is a way of thinking about human and material resources, and how they interact to improve functionality in a specific domain.

Can designers serve as model makers for the future of an organization?

Yes. One of my mentors, Don Schön at MIT, sees all professional practices from architecture to psychology to management as designing and defines design as "an iterative conversation with materials." It's a process where you engage a set of materials, reflect on these materials from different points of view to understand how they might fit various criteria, and think about how they might go together to make something. If it's a building, does it fit the site, is it interesting sculpturally, does it function for the particular needs of the people using it. Based on these reflections, the designer considers iterations, new interpretations, new combinations. This process is what design is all about. Business is very much a language of putting activities together. At GeoPartners Research, we urge clients to think about designing future industries and future businesses for themselves within those industries by examining business from different dimensions. We have clients think about how the customer interacts with the product, or interacts with the company and its business. We have them design the market, including the marketing channels, design the product itself, the processes to make the product, the organizational architecture for these processes and how to manage them, and so forth.

How can designers support non-design business objectives?

Let's take Hewlett-Packard, for example. A key design feature of its ink-jet printers is the single disposable cartridge that houses both the ink-jet nozzle assembly and the ink. If you think about it, H-P could have easily made a printer with a separate permanent ink-jet and a disposable ink cartridge. The problem was that the ink-jets tend to clog after not very much use, and someone would have had to come out and clean it. By making both components disposable, H-P designers eliminated this service need.

Business seems to grasp the concept of "form follows function," but what about the emotional value of design?

That is important in and of itself. A physical product is a very subtle thing, with emotional dimensions that often represent considerable value to the user. A well-designed pen, car, computer or software has immense emotional appeal. It enriches your life in a wider way than the single function that caused you to buy it in the first place. It may help provide sensual pleasure, enhance your identity, make your life cognitively less complex because it is obvious how the product works. These intangible values are really fundamental.

Why should design be used to communicate the brand message?

Today you need to distinguish your product. You need to be co-evolving with the customer. Customers want to experience that they're getting a new way to live, enhancing their quality of life, their beings. That's what customers get when they buy Nike shoes. Nike has learned to sell a lot of identity and a little bit of shoe. Design plays a profound role in what Nike is accomplishing. It is used not only to address the function of the product and the development of new materials, but to think through a statement that plays in the market. There's a clear performance side to Nike's message. Nike's distinction comes from identifying the brand with people who really need that high performance. In fact, most people don't need that level of performance but they like to think they do. In today's economy, you have to become a leader at selling and producing those intangible aspects of value, along with whatever your core offering is. If you don't, you'll end up commoditized, with low gross margins. It translates to very clear bottom line terms. Design provides the process and the expertise for doing that.

How can a commoditized product begin to communicate brand distinction?

I recently had an interesting conversation with John Davies, Intel's marketing director of consumer desktops, about how PC vendors are fighting among themselves to be at the core of an undifferentiated market segment for PCs. These vendors are producing the same kind of value for the customer and have poor gross margins. We talked about how each company could add distinction by taking advantage of opportunities to focus on various intangible aspects of value and designing PCs that go after different parts of the market. These PC makers need to become more like Nike, creating sub-markets out of the whole. Instead of banging heads, each needs to provide enough distinction so customers are willing to pay more than what they would for a PC clone to get that special value. Designers and the process of design provide the ability to make that happen.

Does design always have to start with the customer?

If you want to differentiate your product, the answer is to look at what customers need and the kind of life you can build for them. When you go back to the lab, you'll find lots of technology you can use to do that. The wrong way to do it is to go to the lab and take things your lab guys think would be great, and then see if you can market it so that people will buy it. That doesn't work. But let me take it from the other standpoint, which is the enormous opportunity to design new products, new services, new businesses out of the parts that are available today. A business "artist" has a very broad palette of paints and astounding possibilities to work with customers to create new realities. The most interesting companies are the ones doing that. They don't see themselves embedded in the past, but see themselves as engaged in a dialogue with the rest of the world about what life can be like.

How can Web producers use design?

Passively downloading information is not what you want to do. What you're really trying to create with a Website is a community of return visitors. You want to be bookmarked on their browsers. You want to create pportunities for users to interact. For that, you need a design that's visually and interactively appealing so people will want to spend time in your world. Then you need to find a way to introduce visitors to each other.

How important is the design of the work environment itself to business?

It's fundamentally important, and it has so many dimensions I'm almost not sure where to start. The design of your space helps to shape the community that you live in. Before we moved into our current space, we had an office in Harvard Square that had what I called a "piazza," an open space with individual offices surrounding it. I loved that office because each person had a "cave" to go back to, to be solitary and think things through. A lot of management consulting is thinking through a client problem by yourself, or being on the phone with a client. But then, the piazza gave us a place to come together, which is also really important. As we grew, we expanded into adjacent parts of the building, which made us feel chopped up in dis-continuous spaces. Recently we moved. Now, we again have a nice space with a lot of peripheral offices and some central places where we can come together.

Is effective design more important in a global economy?

A fundamental problem that businesses face in the global economy today is that their products can be copied or cloned very quickly. Whatever core value the products provide, someone somewhere will make them more cheaply and manage to get them into markets rapidly. As a result, businesses are constantly thinking about how to innovate and how to differentiate their product or service. But the real road to innovation for business must start with understanding what needs are unmet at the customer level. Selling the next wave of PCs, for instance, demands working with people who aren't currently using a computer, understanding how it can be of value to them in their life, thinking about the physical design of the product, what it does for consumers, what role it plays. I think that design professionals are uniquely qualified to think through these issues of use and functionality and to stay engaged enough in what is a very subtle process of iteratively designing something. In a sense, inventing new kinds of utility. That is often underestimated. The really good consumer products companies are very good at doing that subtly.

At GeoPartners, how do you make use of design in your consulting work?

We have used graphics people to help us find ways to represent fairly abstract concepts of industry and business. We have employed various people who have an interest in visualization and have hired outside design consultants, including Chris Pullman, vice president of design at WGBH. Chris helped me understand some fundamental things about visual presentation, such as the black-white relationships, the density of the text things that I wouldn't have come up with on my own, but are very important in taking the "noise" out of presentations. Chris also suggested more clever ways to visualize key concepts to make them immediately graspable.

We are currently hiring an information design firm to help us think about our exhibits how clients react to them, the kind of information we have, and the best way to visually display it. Our exhibits are about strategic ideas. Let's say we want to help a client understand that a particular industry has certain dynamics that they need to pay attention to. We can give them charts of numbers, but that's not really very powerful. We're looking for ways to help clients visualize economic and technical dynamics, customer dynamics in their particular industries and particular markets. The best way we can help our clients is by taking the ideas they need and making them more manageable. That is very much the core part of our business. We're trying to come up with standard templates for our core ideas, so we can teach people to use the power of visual language.