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Design to Grow

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Design to Grow

How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility (and How You Can Too)

Simon & Schuster,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

More than just a pretty logo or a catchy look, good design should permeate every aspect of your company.

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Design is crucial to every aspect of your operation and should be everyone’s responsibility, say Coca-Cola vice president David Butler and Fast Company editor Linda Tischler. They define design as “intentionally connecting things to solve problems.” The pivotal problem for businesses, they say, is balancing scale and agility. The solution is to design all the parts of your business – your manufacturing process, distribution system, marketing, and all – to support your brand and work together fluidly. Following their advice, you can turn your business into a giant Lego set – a collection of interlocking modules you can reconfigure quickly to adapt to changing conditions. Butler and Tischler serve up a lot of theory and illustrate their concepts with concrete stories of pivotal design initiatives at Coca-Cola. Their conversational style is free of design jargon, if somewhat hampered by a tendency to bounce unpredictably among topics. getAbstract recommends their intriguing, practical insiders’ tour of Coke’s design world to entrepreneurs, marketers and operations managers who want to grow by design.

Summary

Design Thinking

Design solves problems by making things less complicated and easier to use. Design can help your firm grow and adapt. To tap its power, expand your concept of what design encompasses. Most people think of design as aesthetics, but design embraces far more than the look of products, logos or packaging. The art of design calls for connecting all the elements of a system for increased efficiency. Apply this principle of connection and the elements of good design to every part of your operation, including branding, packaging, manufacturing and distribution.

Encourage everyone in your firm to think like a designer. Enable their participation in the process. Set up your internal design effort as an “open system.” Provide simple formats, templates and software tools so anyone will be able to create designs that harmonize with your brand. “The way you design your products, your relationships, your operations and your organization can help you learn and adapt.”

“Scale and Agility”

In today’s marketplace, you must grow while remaining flexible enough to respond quickly to changing conditions. Design can help you balance these sometimes conflicting...

About the Authors

David Butler, vice president of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Coca-Cola Company and its former VP of global design, leads the Coca-Cola Founders initiative, which helps start-up entrepreneurs. Linda Tischler is an editor at Fast Company magazine.

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