Can we design organizations for
beauty? @joyce_hostyn

orc / mordor/ sarumon’s dark
place

“They could NOT make beautiful
things.”

We aren’t Orcs (even though
sometimes we act like it)

…shareholder value is the dumbest
idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products. Jack Welch

They could NOT make beautiful
things.

we need a new narrative
for business

Why is the language of
business so sterile, so uninspiring and so relentlessly banal?... Customers, investors, taxpayers and policymakers believe there’s a hole in the soul of business. The only way for managers to change this fact, and regain the moral high ground, is to embrace what Socrates called the good, the just and the Gary Hamel beautiful.

“Never has there been a
more exciting time for all of us to explore this next great frontier where the boundaries between work and higher purpose are merging into one, where doing good really is good for business.”

Here's to creating the greatest
car company of the 21st century, and to making a real difference in the world, and to moving us off fucking oil as fast as possible. Elon Musk, Tesla 1. Build sports car 2. Use that money to build an affordable car 3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car 4. While doing above, also provide zeroemission electric-power generation options

When I say ‘fool,’ I
am talking about a company that embraces unconventional wisdom. Tom Gardner

Bridge has the potential to
create a minimum standard of education for every child in the world that is much higher than it is today. Hands-down, it is the most innovative company in the education space at the base of the pyramid and has created a model that will be studied and replicated by organizations across the world. I will be sad to leave, but I am optimistic that the company will change the world. Josh Weinstein

“beautiful, meaningful and humane…” Handmade
School in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, Architects: Anna Heringer, Eike Roswag

the beautiful

places we call beautiful are…
the work of those rare architects with the humility to interrogate themselves adequately about their desires and the tenacity to translate their fleeting apprehensions of joy into logical plans – a combination that enables them to create environments that satisfy needs we never consciously new we even had. Alain de Botton Stefano Boeri’s Urban Vertical Forest: Bosco Verticale

people at the center Procter
& Gamble Olympics Mother's Day Ad

powered by purpose

product of deep integrity

values-centered

elegantly crafted

loving of all stakeholders

sustainably good WikiPearl™ draws inspiration
from the magic of grape skins to eliminate plastic from foods and beverages. Revolutionary and delicious, WikiPearl™ is triply good -- good for the planet, good for you, and just plain good.

community-centric

emotionally resonate Now we look
at prosthetics and don’t think of them just as technology solutions, but think of the problem of a missing limb and whether there is a way to incorporate design and the arts and human emotion into the solution. It invites us to see problems and solutions in an entirely different light. Scott Summit, Bespoke Innovations

empowering heroes

building connection The Born Friends
Family Portrait , by Skype, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nRKyQ11494

delivering a promise of happiness
illustration by Sunni Brown, Delivering Happiness

forging lasting relationships I love
Apple. I use multiple Apple products every day. I get excited to walk into Apple’s candy colored immaculate stores. I walk through the different sections enamored with each product. I could spend hours exploring each product’s nuances. Surprisingly enough though, my love of all things Apple wasn’t love at first sight; it was more like a seed planted that slowly grew… My love of all things Apple will continue to grow. I know this because the company is always reinventing its products in a way that makes the coolest thing you own even cooler! Erin Vogelsanger

turning impossible into possible Mindsets
play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see. Muhammad Yunus

making the world a better
place Question for the Blue Monster Crowd: “Who owns the soul of Microsoft? Hugh McLeod

To call a work of
architecture or design beautiful is to recognize it as a rendition of values critical to our flourishing. Alain de Botton

business can be a terrible
force for evil

The very essence of capitalism
is under threat as business is now seen as a personal wealth accumulator. We have to bring this world back to sanity and put the greater good ahead of self-interest. Paul Polman CEO of Unilever

or an incredible force for
good

We owe our existence to
innovation. We owe our prosperity to innovation… We owe our future to innovation… Innovation isn’t a fad – it’s the real deal, the only deal. our future no less than our past depends on innovation. Gary Hamel

capitalism needs a brain and
a soul Nancy Koehn

for it’s the soul of
business that keeps us moving forward as a society

Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital
is unlike any hospital in the nation. We believe in a comprehensive health care experience that includes mind, body and spirit as essential elements in the healing process.

Sanitary napkins produced in a “Small
is Beautiful” model can deliver livelihood, hygiene and dignity to poor women, and help them strengthen society. A. Muruganandam

…if we put customers first,
other stakeholders will also benefit, as long as they’re willing to take the long-term view. And a long-term approach is essential for invention, because you’re going to have a lot of failures along the way. Jeff Bezos

What is your
organization
saying?

with its public space

with its employee space Wish
You Worked Here: Beautiful, Productive Office Spaces, HBR

with its communications

with its information beautiful information
reduces violence by 50%

with its meetings

with its behaviours

with its employee experience The
world we see around us, countries and continents, have been built on the back of these signatures. The future too will be written on these signatures. Signatures of employees... Truth is, every employee is a hero.

with its language How to
make your business a better version of itself. Hugh McLeod

with its stories The Scarecrow,
Chipolte www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUtnas5ScSE

with its products “Imagine your
organization powered by technology that's beautiful, easy-touse, and designed to speed performance. Beauty as core competence drives Infor's UX”

with its employee apps intranet
can be beautiful … ‘beauty’ is not just about what it looks like, but in how it works, allowing employees to share knowledge… Beautiful Intranets

with its innovations This is
one of the most beautiful things I know. It's a plastic bag. And when I looked at it first, I thought, no, there's no beauty in that. Then I found out… if I put it into a filthy puddle or a stream filled with coliforms and all sorts of disgusting stuff, that that filthy water will migrate through the wall of the bag by osmosis and end up inside it as pure, potable drinking water. And all of a sudden, this plastic bag was extremely beautiful to me. Richard Seymour, How Beauty Feels

with its packaging because the
presentation was so lovely that I felt like I was being sent a gift to say thank you for supporting Who Made Your Pants

with its footprint

with its user experience …
it'll begin "learning" immediately. Over the next seven days, Nest will collect data about the way you adjust your heating or cooling, and only then will it begin giving you smart feedback to help you conserve energy.

through its service with its
service experience

signaling its empathy

Beauty requires us to think
in new ways

It’s impossible to develop new
styles of organization and management while continuing to think in old ways. Gareth Morgan image by Medi Belortaja

Without a deeply felt –
and a powerfully lived – sense of meaning, every business will devolve to what the investment banks became: machines engineered with relentless precision to destroy long-run value, often implosively so. Umair Haque

Always the beautiful answer who
asks a more beautiful question. e.e. cummings

“At our core is the
eternal question— what if? What if business applications were agile? What if users are experiencing a Today’s they were social? What renaissance of user-centric consumer if they were software— beautiful, engaging, and easybeautiful? What if applications such as Flipboard℠, to-use people worked the Instagram℠, Mint.com, and Facebook. With way they live?” in mind, Infor created Hook & Loop, an this internal creative think tank made up of more than 50 designers, information architects, and creative storytellers, all focused on creating the next generation of business applications for the next generation of business application users.

What if you imagined the
kind of city in which you’d like to live, and then designed a car for this ideal place? amorebeautifulquestion.com

Can organizations be beautiful? Can
organizational designs be beautiful? Is there a ‘designerly-ness’ to the process of organizational design? Are there overarching design concepts that can be described as beautiful? I think Shaker communities might be considered beautiful, not just because they created beautiful things but because of the simplicity of structure, clarity of purpose and thoughtfulness for every aspect of the experience. Tim Brown, IDEO

what if? … leaders embraced
truth, beauty and goodness as ideals worth striving for? … organizations mentored employees in designing the story of their life’s work ? … you imagined the kind of business that could win a Noble peace prize, and then designed it? … organizations were designed as epic narratives?

how might we? … design
organizations for beauty? … architect organizations for happiness? … make empathy an organizational core competency? … craft organizations as creative forces for positive change in their communities?

Tomorrow’s management systems must give
as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice, community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit. Gary Hamel The Connected Company, Dave Gray

image by Michael Chimero

is it beautiful?

… if the solution is
not beautiful, I know it is wrong. Buckminster Fuller

And so perhaps that old
trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three. And in that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoyevsky to say that “Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When people talk about new
forms of capitalism, this is what I have in mind: companies that show, in all transparency, that they are contributing to society, now and for many generations to come… Success will require courageous leadership. We will need companies that are prepared to march in the vanguard and pioneer new ways of working and build new business models. By doing so they will rebuild trust in business and, I am sure, grow profitably. Paul Polman, CEO Unilver

Being good in business is
the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. Andy Warhol

what is beautiful
is loved

be an artist, an architect,
a designer of beauty