Wanted: VPs of Design

More designers are reaching the executive ranks. But where are they getting the general business knowhow they need?

by Jessie Scanlon

Gap Inc veteran Erin Lowenberg reviews product lines with Timbuk2 designer John McGuire.

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Every Tuesday, John McGuire, the director of product design for the hip San Francisco-based bagmaker Timbuk2 Designs, spends two hours with a tutor, Erin Lowenberg. A veteran merchant at Gap (GAP) under Mickey Drexler, Lowenberg helps the 28-year-old McGuire review developing product lines, prepare for presentations to the management team, align his line planning with revenue goals, and learn other essential business tasks that he wasn't taught in design school.

"School prepared me well for the day-to-day stuff that we do as designers," says McGuire, who joined the bagmaker 18 months ago and now heads a team of five at the 60-person company. "To me the gap is in understanding the bigger picture—how product design merges with branding and revenue planning and so on."

Bringing Designers into Management

McGuire's knowledge gap isn't unusual. "You're not taught about corporate finance or management at design school," echoes Kirt Martin, principal design manager at Turnstone, a subsidiary of furniture giant Steelcase (SCS). While many design schools offer corporate-sponsored courses intended to expose students to how design happens in the real world, and some design schools—such as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford and the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design—are integrating business training into their curricula, the majority of schools still focus on core design skills like drawing and three-dimensional fabrication. Which means most design school grads lack the basic management, finance, and strategy knowhow that will help them be effective in the corporate world.

"There is a shortage of people with management and leadership skills," says Thomas Lockwood, president of the Boston-based Design Management Institute. A decade ago, when few companies gave designers a seat at the executive table, this lack of business training among designers was less of a problem. Lockwood points out that in large corporations, it used to be common for designers to be divided among different departments—graphic designers within corporate communications or marketing, industrial designers as a part of product development or engineering, interior designers within facilities management, etc. There was no centralized design department, and therefore no need for a companywide director of design with a broad set of business skills.

Today more companies are welcoming designers to the executive level. "There's been a big change in the number of VPs of design compared with just three years ago," says Peter Lawrence, director of the Boston-based Corporate Design Foundation. IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) have all appointed vice-presidents of design in the past couple of years; Nike (NKE), Apple (AAPL), and other design-savvy companies have recognized design at the executive level for much longer. Which raises a critical question: Where can designers climbing the corporate ladder get the business training they need to be effective?

Filling the Education Gaps

While there's no standard answer, companies and individual designers alike are taking steps to address the problem.

For a designer in a small business, McGuire is lucky to be getting formal, one-on-one mentoring. "He has a great eye and his products are great for the brand," says Timbuk2 Chief Executive Perry Klebahn, who arranged for the sessions.