Editor George Gendron has played a key role in developing Inc. magazine into the preeminent source of information about starting and managing a growing business. A strong proponent of good design in business, he is interviewed here by Peter Lawrence, chairman of the Corporate Design Foundation.

Why do you consider design important to business?

If you look at any business as a huge inverted pyramid, it rests on one fundamental proposition - differentiation. That is, each company claims to offer a product or service that's better, faster, cheaper. To me, the way in which you broadcast that to the world, day in and day out, is through your design. It's the most consistent, dramatic statement of intent and differentiation that a company has access to.

Does business understand how to use design for competitive advantage?

In an age where companies, large and small, are desperately looking for any possible source of competitive advantage, it's astonishing to me that design is still as misunderstood and overlooked as it is. Even more baffling is that, as consumers, successful CEOs love good design. They talk about it. At Inc. conferences, one guy will pull out a beautifully designed datebook organizer, and these CEOs will get into long conversations about it - "That looks beautiful. I love the size of it. The way it's organized inside." They get it as consumers. You can hear the pull that good design has on them when they go out to buy their own business tools, talk about their homes, their cars. They are passionate about them. My question is, why then do they walk inside the four walls of their own company and leave that connection outside. I think it has to do with the lack of comfort that business people often feel with the issue of design and with designers.

Is corporate understanding of design changing?

I wouldn't say I'm seeing a revolution, but younger CEOs seem more comfortable with the design issues. When I first started with Inc., the young entrepreneurial company that understood design on any level was a rarity. It's become less rare. It may have to do with the extent to which questions of design have surfaced in other arenas. Now in almost every automotive magazine there are interesting and relatively sophisticated discussions about design. That wasn't the case 15 years ago. You pick up home design magazines - 10, 15 years ago, they were decorating magazines. They were about curtains, rugs and furniture. Now, as often as not, they're about design. Cultural changes seem to be making new generations of business people more sensitive to design.

What are some of the problems in advancing an understanding of design?

When I look at the Inc. landscape, I see total ignorance and neglect of design at one extreme and a lot of design as ornament at the other. There's the age-old problem of business people and designers having a completely different vocabulary, which prevents them from describing the process in ways that are mutually understandable. That, I think, is endemic in organizations, large and small. CEOs sit there and think, "This poor designer doesn't have a clue about running a business, or return on equity, or shareholder value. He just wants to make things look pretty." The designer meanwhile is thinking, "This poor soul doesn't give a damn about real design issues. He only cares about making a profit at any cost." Also, often entrepreneurs don't have a technical vocabulary, so they're ill-at-ease around people with specialized knowledge. They can be as uncomfortable around someone they're interviewing for a chief financial officer as they are when interviewing a designer.

Is this situation changing?

Yes, I believe it's because more company founders are better educated. A greater percentage have advanced degrees. A lot has to do with the confidence of an entrepreneur to sit down and talk to someone who has specialized technical knowledge - albeit, design or finance or marketing - and feel comfortable in evaluating first, the candidate, and second, the product. That's changing gradually, and may be contributing to why people are becoming more design literate.

Why do you think that company founders and CEOs are often skeptical of designers?

I think that skepticism emerges from the belief that designers seem overly interested in "innovation" for its own sake. I have spoken with a lot of company founders who, when talking about design, say that when innovation becomes the focus, attention is shifted away from the customer. If a designer says, "What we're going to do is produce an award-winning design," the entrepreneur's red flag goes up and he says to himself, "What that really says is look at me, look at the designer." In fact, really good entrepreneurs have a relentless focus on what's in the best interest of the customer. If along the way you innovate, that's great, but it's a byproduct of serving your customer well. Founders are usually skeptical of designers who talk and act as if the project is an opportunity to add to their portfolio.

How can designers communicate more effectively with clients?

I think designers need to focus more attention on understanding the problem they're being asked to solve. It starts with the selling process itself. Let me give you an example. One day, by coincidence, I had two appointments with two designers. I go see the first and we have a cup of coffee, and before I know it, the designer has launched into a two-hour slide-based presentation of his work, and we're getting into intricate discussions about typefaces and how for our particular publication he went out and found an old foundry face. At the end of two hours, he looks at his watch and says, "I really hope we get the business." Then I walk down the street and meet with another design firm. For two hours, they ask me questions about the business. How is the magazine doing? Who reads it? What are the characteristics of the readership? Never a word about design. And you say to yourself, who are you going to work with? This is not subtle. The second group gets it, that in order for them to accomplish my goals, they have to understand my business, as a business. The first appointment leaves you with the impression that here's this guy who's got this bag of tricks and he'll apply them in any situation. Whereas, in the second one, you feel like you're signing up a business partner. He wants to understand what you're trying to do, what are your goals, who are your competitors, what effect you want to have on your customers, what's the gap between the effect you're having now and what you'd like to have. And then, by the way, at the end of the conversation, what would you like to know about my studio.

What's your advice to a small company who sees design as a large-company luxury?

You'd think that entrepreneurs would be more aggressive in the use of design than large companies, which have bureaucracies and committees. So it's very surprising and counterintuitive that they haven't seized on design to gain a competitive advantage. But they haven't. There's a widespread perception that either design is a luxury that only large companies can afford, or not a necessity at all. They'll say, "The truth is, FedEx would have succeeded with or without real sensitivity to design." When I hear people talk like that, I realize the education program has a way to go. To say something like that is willful ignorance.

How will the Internet affect the print media?

The Internet is forcing those of us who work primarily in print to ask ourselves, "What is it that we can do in print that can't be done elsewhere?" In Harvard Business School parlance, what is our "core competence." That, to me, is very beneficial. It's really challenging to be clear about why magazines exist in the first place, why people pick them up and read them, what we've got to offer that can't be replicated elsewhere. While there's no doubt that the Internet is going to have an adverse effect on marginal magazines, I think it's going to have a beneficial effect on good magazines, making them better.

Do you think consumer magazines reflect innovative design?

Magazines are nothing but ideas, so you'd think that they would be a hotbed of innovative design. Most mainstream magazines are not. Most are safe, very predictable visually. For example, you take five business magazines and pull them apart and begin to realize that we're all the same size, printed on virtually the same stock, share a lot of the same advertising, so we start off with 60-70% of the visual characteristics being identical. What's interesting is how poorly magazines have used design, recently in particular. I can talk glibly about how business leaders often display ignorance or lack of sensitivity, but I'm not so sure that we in the magazine industry aren't as guilty of this as everybody else. I think it offers incredible opportunities for start-ups like Wired to come along and say, "We're not Inc., not Business Week, and not Fortune. We're not Computer World." Wired's design broadcasts loudly and dramatically, "This is a different magazine." It has a very distinctive personality, style, sensibility and take on the world that are broadcast in a much more consistent way visually than editorially. You can say what you want about Wired. Some people love it, some hate it. But the one thing that has been true about Wired from day one is that it looked different.

You're in the process of redesigning Inc. What factors led to this decision?

First, the magazine hadn't done a serious redesign since its birth in 1979. It had changed as different designers came and went, but its personality grew by accretion, which is not a smart way to maintain control over your visual personality. Second, I looked at the environment into which we put the magazine every month and found it had changed in two dramatic ways. One, in 1979 there was very little good, reliable information available to people who were trying to build a company. Today there's a lot of good information. Two, in the past 15 years, it has become unbelievably simple to start a business, mostly because capital barriers have fallen by the wayside. For many people in many industries, you can leave a job on Friday and set up your own company on Monday without formal venture capital. An important reason is the availability of personal computers. At the same time, it's never been more complex to run even a simple business because of technological changes, global competition, government regulations and the intervention of court systems. Running even a very small company today is more complex than it was 15 years ago. So I asked myself, "Does Inc. look like a magazine that broadcasts an awareness that our readers are suffering from information overload and complexity overload?" The answer was no. So I decided it was time for a redesign. By that I don't mean just graphics. We are trying to figure out: If we were launching Inc. in 1996, what does the magazine look like? That's the goal - to achieve, editorially and visually, a kind of clarity and simplicity that I think this environment demands.

As a magazine editor, any comments about @Issue?

When I got it, I thought, well, I'll analyze it as an editor and found that the next thing I knew I had read it from cover to cover as a reader - what it does is create this common vocabulary that says that good design and good business are synonymous, they're not at odds with one another. And it does it in a way that has a very motivating effect. You read the FedEx piece, you read the Starbucks piece and think, "I can do this. This is a process. It's another business process. I can do this." Not that I am going to be dealing with design and image issues on a global scale, like FedEx is, but it demystifies the process. There's a lot of information presented in a way that's coherent, yet stylish. The design doesn't draw attention to itself, but gets the job done beautifully in terms of driving the reader through. Now the question is, how do you keep it up?