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Business Influence Without Losing Your Soul
Summary
To be an effective design leader requires knowing about the business, but does it require an MBA? Maybe it’s more about exerting influence by leveraging simple models of behavioral science and persuasion to achieve outcomes—and doing it without losing your soul. Join us for an enlightening approach to achieving our goals as designers, in a fireside chat with Ryan Rumsey, Chief Executive Officer, Second Wave Dive. He shares his own journey from Apple to Electronic Arts (EA) and beyond as a design leader learning how to gain effective influence with “the business” side of things.
Key Insights
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Designers need to empathize deeply with colleagues, understanding their goals and pressures, not just users.
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Organizational decision making often resembles politics due to differing business unit incentives.
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Large enterprises commonly operate with multiple independent profit and loss centers, complicating collaboration.
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MBAs focus more on networking and broad concepts than daily business decision realities encountered by executives.
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Remixing familiar frameworks like stage gates and storytelling structures makes new ideas more acceptable.
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Influence in organizations depends more on situational savvy and relationship building than formal business training.
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Trust is often built by delivering small, reliable wins on time and budget before attempting radical change.
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Executive audiences prefer concise, rational communication structures like situation-complication-resolution for decisions.
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Risk management language helps de-personalize change and facilitates alignment in organizations.
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Scaled, sustainable design and organizational transformations take multiple years, not quarters.
Notable Quotes
"A profit and loss center is essentially a business unit with its own incentives and goals."
"Designers have to become savvier in understanding the people and the politics to influence effectively."
"Empathy with colleagues means knowing what keeps them up at night, not just their job title."
"MBA programs teach a lot of networking and collaboration but not always the realities of day-to-day decisions."
"Many executives aren’t making decisions based on MBA learnings but on instinct and past experience."
"We have to remix familiar tools and frameworks so people in the organization recognize and trust them."
"Being on time and on budget with your first projects is one of the most powerful trust-building levers."
"The storytelling structure situation-complication-resolution works well for hard trade-off discussions."
"People like innovation but hate change because change feels personal and threatening."
"When you manage a team or become a director, you’re more like a small business owner than a creative."
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