Posted 5 months ago
The Excel Crowd: Where’s The Money in Eiffel?
I’m reading Designful Company by Marty Neumeier. Here is a section from the book that reveals a big shortcoming in today’s businesses. It also happens to be a subject I’m quite passionate about.
Unfortunately, most business managers are deaf, dumb and blind when i comes to creative process. They learned their chops by rote, through a bounded tradition of spreadsheet-based theory. As one MBA joked, in his world the language of design is a sound only dogs can hear.
This is illustrated by a story about railroad baron Collis P. Huntington, who visited Eiffel Tower just after its completion. When an interviewer for a Paris newspaper asked him for a critique, he said: “Your Eiffel Tower is all very well, but where’s the money in it?”
It’s not that spreadsheet thinking is wrong. It’s just in inadequate. A designer might have offered a completely different critique of the tower: “What a stirring symbol of achievement! From now on people will never forget their visit to Paris.” According to one estimate, more than $120 billion worth of Eiffel Tower souvenirs has been sold since 1897. The trinket business alone has been worth the investment.
The lesson of Paris has not been lost on cities like London, with its majestic London Eye, or Bilbao with its shimmering Guggenheim Museum. Frank Gehry’s design has not only captivated the world’s imagination, but has catalyzed an economic turnaround for a whole region.
I call people like Huntington, “The Excel Crowd”. These are the people who only value analytical thinking based on financial models and don’t see the value in designing the customer experience to be a contributor to business success. I also observe a bandwagon syndrome right now and going forward.
Apple’s success with well designed products is resulting in the Excel crowd to jump on the design bandwagon but it’s not enough to hire just designers and expect magic to happen. Like Neumeier says “They’ll need to BE the designers. They’ll need to think like designers, feel like designers and work like designers.”
This is a huge shift in thinking. I feel bad for the poor, out of touch Excel crowd as they continue deducting cost from revenue to calculate profit…
