Throughout his successful tenure as CEO of Motorola and now Eastman Kodak Company, George M.C. Fisher has championed the importance of design in business. Here he talks to Peter Lawrence of the Corporate Design Foundation about how to make design an integral part of a company's business strategy

How can managers learn more about design?

I'm a great believer in learning by doing. Managers must make design part of their ongoing business process, so it is not something they have to think about; it becomes something they live with naturally. There are tremendous resources in the design communities of all these corporations, but too often, we don't take adequate advantage of what's there. The reason is "out of sight, out of mind."

We have a fast-growing area in Kodak called "single-use cameras." Our most recent design is a stunning hit. It looks like a real camera. It has smooth corners; it doesn't look like a box as the old one did. And its user features are really neat. The leader of that business recognized early on that perhaps the most competitive aspect of the camera was going to be its physical design/human factors interface and gave it a lot of attention. The industrial designers really helped steer the project because the single biggest difference from our previous camera was the look and feel in the consumer's hands, and that had to be driven by our physical design people.

What should MBA programs teach about design?

People need to appreciate at a much younger age that design must be integrated into the business. If it isn't, it will be subservient to the business, and you won't get your money's worth from it. Design is not a service function. It is integral. By the way, I don't think any of the companies I've been associated with have done as good a job as we need to in that respect.

Can you share a few of your design experiences at Motorola?

When we did MicroTac, Rudy Krolopp (director of industrial design) held up a very small phone as a model many, many years before the product came out. Rudy's ability to conceptualize what might be possible really drove some very good circuit designers and mechanical engineers to bring that vision to fruition. Rudy had enough credibility with all of us to gain our support.

In the old days of the paging business, we had an Optrix pager. The first version had many buttons and was so complex none of us could figure out how to use it. Bob Schwendeman (now Motorola's vice president and senior member of the technical staff) decided that we should pay more attention to the industrial and human factors design and get some outside professional help, one of the first times we did that in the non-consumer business at Motorola. Optrix turned into an extremely good product which sells as an alpha-numeric pager today. I'm wearing one right now. Its human factors are superb. Had it gone out in its earliest, more complex form, that product probably would have been a failure.

Can designers provide the prototype vision for the future?

Good design leaders can set an organization's expectation levels. In most organizations, not just Kodak, there is a strong cadre of people who can design the insides of products, the capabilities, whether it is mechanics or electronics. The design community working with the marketing folks need to establish their expectations for the future to challenge these very good people to design within that box. The more traditional approach is saying, "Here's how much room I gotta have, and here's what my circuits will do. Now go package it up." Just the reverse is needed. Electrical engineers and mechanical engineers have to be challenged to produce something that the industrial designers and marketing folks think is needed in the marketplace.

What about graphic design, print collateral and advertising? Do they play a role in Kodak's strategic thinking?

They obviously do. At our last brand management council meeting, a large part of our presentation had to do with the various logos and color schemes we use, and the simplification of our product line from a presentation and graphic standpoint as well as design. Maintaining the integrity of our brands is an important part of the picture at Kodak. The chief marketing officer, a position I just formed, is responsible for that. He is a person who is quite committed to the role of design and keeping up our graphic standards. How do you make sure you're working with good design people? What do you look for?

I let the leaders of our design community make those decisions. I'm more directly involved with knowing what I want from the design community; the leaders of that community pick their own people. They have to have marketing-savvy, as well as design-savvy. Increasingly, designers have to be very adept at using the tools that are now available, whether traditional computer-based design or more subtle expert systems.