Herman Miller's Creative Network

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Vivo is a recent frame-and-tile office system by Herman Miller.

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Is Herman Miller involved in office equipment technology?

That will be an area of growing connectivity going forward. Certainly as we look at our own research, we're seeing many more opportunities emerging with the advent of new technologies. We're actively developing our own internal capabilities and we're looking externally for both design talent and collaborative resources for new technology.

Herman Miller's commitment to design quality extends to print communications as well. For decades your annual report, designed inhouse by Steve Frykholm, has been an award-winner. How is your report evolving?

We want to make sure that any vision, any product that we produce is relevant to the audience and the times. Annual reports produced before the Web were targeted to investors and analysts who probably don't find printed annuals as relevant today because they can get a lot of that data online. But we believe our customers and employees still read our annual report, so last year we did a summary annual with my letter directed more to customers, employees and other constituents. We would like to do more of an employee annual report talking about things at a level that we probably can't to external audiences, but do so in as creative a way as we have for outside groups. We continue to think there is an audience for printed annual reports, but we have to reorganize the content and reinvent it for the segments we are trying to reach.

What about your SEE magazine, which seems to concentrate less on promoting Herman Miller products than on positioning the company as a thought leader?

You hit the nail on the head with the term "thought leader." We think that is rightly Herman Miller's position because our products and services spring from our focus on problem solving and research. Our SEE magazine is a way to connect with customers, influencers and business leaders by sharing some of the knowledge that we have acquired. SEE, which features articles by our design network, also is meant to convey the energy and focus we put into research. It shows that when you come to Herman Miller as a customer, beyond what you get from the product, you get an experience that will enable you to improve your business.

A few years back when your business was in a downturn, Herman Miller made a bold decision to emphasize research and design. What does this say about the company's evolution?

I give Mike Volkema, now our chairman but who was CEO at the time, a lot of the credit. We had the choice to say, 'We are going to be an office furniture company and jettison everything else,' or to say 'Let's begin to paint a bigger picture for our future.' We chose the latter and elevated research and development funding over other areas of our business. It was a gutsy call. What's phenomenal about this choice is that the path of Herman Miller has always been about evolving to a new place-from what D.J. DePree, our founder, saw in the 1930s, moving from period furniture to a design-driven company, to an office furniture leader in the 1960s, to today saying we can have a broader impact on human habitat. Ultimately, our greatest asset is our ability to create. You can call it innovation, but we call it problem-solving design.

Walker is speaking at the @issue conference April 29, 2008 in New York, information at www.cdf.org.

Provided by Corporate Design Foundation—reprinted from @issue: The Journal of Business & Design