Systems at Work
Rob Pew | October 2007
The chairman of the board of Steelcase Inc., Robert C. Pew III has a lifelong appreciation of the value of design for strategy. He spoke with us about introducing design to the top ranks of a global Fortune 500 company, and the importance of interconnected systems of solutions.
(Vincent LaConte:) What is the history of your interest in "design + strategy"?
(Rob Pew:) That one's actually pretty easy; I've told this story many times. I was recruited back to Steelcase [in 1989] to be president, from being a Steelcase dealer. When I got back there, Larry Keeley [and Doblin Group] had already been hired by the then-CEO, Frank Merlotti, Sr., to look at what the next steps needed to be for Steelcase.
The work Doblin did was brilliant, and I was blown away by the way Larry and his group tied together all these disparate facts to look at our industry and where we needed to go. Embedded in their "gong show," as Larry called their final presentation, was a new furniture system designed by Institute of Design students. It was brilliant; I can't even begin to tell you. So Larry and I started working together, and he started teaching me that it was really design and design planning that made this all come about. Then he introduced me to Pat [Whitney, the Institute of Design's director] and I became the first chair of the Institute of Design's new board of overseers.
What was the strategic context at Steelcase when you took over as president?
Being a dealer, I had a pretty different perspective than the people who had worked inside the company. I'd worked at the company at first, and then left to become a dealer. Without being negative, I'd say there were a lot of opportunities we were giving up on, in markets adjacent to our core market – that being, Fortune 500 companies' cubicles. There are tons of markets adjacent to that, and as you've seen since then, we've developed those. We started Details, partly inspired by Doblin's work, as a company in the "work tools" market. As a dealer, I was aware we were selling these kinds of products [from other manufacturers] to customers all the time, so I knew there was an opportunity in that area. That was also the beginning of Turnstone, design partnerships, Workstage, and our global reach.
If there was any one notion that Doblin brought to it, it was that if you take a close look at your customer and what they need, there may be other ways of satisfying them, other niches to play in. But in the end, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts was the goal. At that time, Steelcase was one big, monolithic entity, whereas today it's a system, and it's greater than the sum of its parts, in terms of what we can bring to our largest customers. If we're dealing with GE, for instance, we can not only [supply them with furniture] around the world, we can build a building for them; or let them buy a Turnstone product off the net; or, for their healthcare business, we'd have Nurture. That's kind of what design thinking and systems design did for me – recognize you could play in all these niche markets, but still weave them together, in many different ways.
Do you remember anything specific about that student project from the Institute of Design that Larry presented?
They'd used Chuck Owen's Structured Planning process, and taken a look at all the people who would touch the system; not only the end user, but – again I'm thinking of this like a dealer – they also made it easy to install, easy to ship, and easy to maintain. They collected all this data, whereas before we'd focused only on the user, or only on manufacturing. The students' system really touched on all the stakeholders' different needs.
You're sometimes known as the person who "brought design to Steelcase". Do you think that's true? How (and why) did that happen?
I struggle with this question because to answer it, I would have to agree "design has come to Steelcase", and I don't think it's there yet. We may have come a long way, but I see many areas for improvement.
In some ways, design was already at Steelcase. When I came back there was a fellow named Terry West who was head of the industrial design department, and Jack Tannis, who was in marketing, and those two guys really had a pretty good understanding of design the way we think of it, before I ever came on the scene. You know, they were sort of mid-level guys, and maybe top management didn't know about it, but that's a whole other story.
Plus, Steelcase kind of accidentally was already pretty good at design. The Series 9000 cubicle system, which was the largest-selling cubicle system in the history of the world at one time, did more things for more people, was easy to ship, easy to manufacture – it did a lot of the right stuff, maybe by accident. But I think there was already a notion that design was about more than just pretty objects.
What about at the top management level?
Well, the idea that design is more than a pretty object, my dad, who was president and CEO of Steelcase [from 1966 to 1989] understood that pretty well. He was almost unwilling to buckle to making things look good for the sake of looking good. Maybe we received a little criticism in that regard, but he always wanted things to be functional first. So that part wasn't new.
The part that maybe I did bring (and really it wasn't me, it was more Larry, channeled through me) was the idea that there are many elements you could look at to make a successful design. Like maybe in a product you needed to think about its communication design before you started to develop it, or the packaging of it, or how it would go on a truck, or of course today what kind of environmental impact it would have. And all this has to occur in the early stages of the design, not as after-thoughts.
So I guess the answer to your question is, I was just Larry's channel [laughs]. But he had a way of explaining things that was very real and understandable and made sense.
We did a lot of things during my tenure at Steelcase, like have design training courses for senior management. Michael McCoy came in and spoke, and Bob Blaich, and of course Larry, just to raise the overall sensitivity to design. In the realm of design management, actually, Bob Blaich has been as influential on me as anyone. His knowledge of how design fits organizationally into a company is probably unmatched. Jim Hackett [the current president] was one of the executives I put through design training and he picked it up pretty well.
Give me your favorite example of a company or project that used design to figure out "where to play" or "how to win". (besides Steelcase)
I'll give you two. One that's been with me almost all my life, and I can't get away from it, is Apple. I know it's obvious and always remarked on, but I've been an Apple user since I took an Apple II out of the box. Right now I'm staring at a giant iMac screen. I've got an iPhone. They think of all the disparate elements that might go into a successful design – the user interface, the way it comes out of the box, the way it looks, the Apple store.
You know, I'd like to think that good design is thinking all these things through in the beginning, and then just unfolding them. But I don't think that actually happens. I don't think anyone's quite that smart. I think good design means focusing on the customer at the beginning, and if you keep focused on them, things will seem to unfold as if they were always meant to be. And I think Apple's done that.
The other company is Philips. At one point in the early ‘90s, I met the man in charge of manufacturing all their branded products – he made the core mechanisms that might end up with a Philips name on it, or Magnavox, or some other brand. The way they organized their manufacturing centrally, but with all these brands managed separately, I always thought was an interesting prospect. And if you look at Steelcase today, we're kind of on that road, developing many different brands, yet organizing our manufacturing centrally to serve those brands.
The way [Bob] Blaich had design at Philips organized, under one big office, with a team built around each brand or project, and designers moving around between teams, that's a model of design management I've always liked. It's tough; companies go through periods of time when they're centralizing everything, and periods of time when they're decentralizing everything. There's never a right answer over the long term, only for a certain period of time. But Philips seemed to handle this well.
What do you think are the one or two biggest obstacles to businesses at large adopting "design thinking" on a strategic level?
The biggest one is just having upper management understand [the value].
Do you think most upper managers would adopt this kind of thinking, if only someone, like a Larry Keeley, would tell them?
I think there are some things that would make them resist. Some of it just requires a little more of a creative bent to understand it. I think as we become more and more cross-disciplinary and combine business and design, then you start to see the business reasons for design a little more clearly. But to start with, I think it's an unusual executive, probably one from the entrepreneurial ranks or who worked close to the customer – I don't think the typical person who's gone from b-school student to consultant to executive would always get it.
What sorts of arguments or stories would change their minds?
Some just never did. There are a few people you can recruit and bring in as guest speakers. And you have to always connect things to actual business results – "See, we did this design, we took a look at it from this standpoint, and this is how it affected our bottom line" – and see it from a kind of prototypical standpoint, then it hits home. When someone comes in and speaks to you about this new gadget they developed, and you hear about all the wows and whiz-bangs but you don't see anything about the financial results of it, it kind of leaves you a little cold.
What kind of education and skill-building (if any) do you think design and innovation leaders should be getting right now?
I really believe strongly that [design education] being tied to a strong MBA program is important. And an engineering program. Any kind of cross-disciplinary education is good. It not only teaches the business students the benefit of systems and design thinking, it also broadens the scope of what a design student looks at. You know, the success of a design project using Structured Planning is in the amount of information gathered in the beginning, and so the more places you're tied into, the more successful it will be.
What's the most important social or technological long-term trend on your radar?
You mean other than pollution, overpopulation, war? (laughs)
We'll just take that as a given.
If I had one word that described the trends I look at, it'd be globalization. How that plays out, how countries do or don't work together, is the biggest issue we're facing.
What does globalization mean to you? How would you define it?
Globalization is the reduction over time of the meaning of borders. For instance, the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico – why can't we make that border go away? I don't understand it. How we deal with that border, whether we build a wall or build a door, that's a microcosm of globalization. To an extent it's about how the world grows to share the same values -- for instance between the United States and China, there are some values we share (some we didn't even know about until recently, like making money!) and some we don't seem to, like the environment, or the value of the individual. Globalization is the extent to which we can come to either share those values, or at least understand and appreciate the differences.
About Rob Pew
Robert C. Pew III is chairman of the board of directors at Steelcase Inc., the global leader in the office furniture industry. Steelcase delivers a better work experience to its customers by providing products, services and insights into the ways people work. Its portfolio includes architecture, furniture and technology products.
Now a private investor, Rob served as president of Steelcase North America from May 1990 to March 1994, and was responsible for all sales, marketing and manufacturing operations involving Steelcase-brand products. He joined Steelcase in Grand Rapids in 1974 as a product standards engineer, and held a variety of management posts at the company until 1984, when he left to become an owner-operator of Steelcase dealerships in Asheville and Charlotte, North Carolina, and in Jacksonville, Florida.
In addition to serving on the board of Steelcase, Rob is also current chair of the board of overseers of the IIT Institute of Design. He lives in Woody Creek, Colorado (near the home of the late Hunter S. Thompson) and spends his spare time skiing and fishing.