Tim Kastelle

Tag: Charles and Ray Eames

  • The Power of Purposeful Innovation

    The Power of Purposeful Innovation

    The Herman Miller company became one of the world’s first manufacturers of sustainably-produced furniture almost by accident. Back in the 1950s, as the company became one of the biggest furniture manufacturers in the US selling now iconic designs from Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, and Alexander Girard. At the time, DJ de Pree, the founder of the company, made a couple of key decisions that still influence the way the firm operates today.

    The first is that he believed that the company should make the most of the unique talents held by each of their employees. This is embodied today in their value for inclusion and diversity, which says “We’re all extraordinary.” In practical terms, this value led de Pree and subsequent CEOs to implement a participative management structure within the firm. This meant distributing decision-making authority much further down the corporate power hierarchy than normal. It also involved giving all employees an ownership stake in the company.

    These moves support a second company value – ensuring quality. This is done through a unique decision-making structure where many important actions and strategies are initiated by teams of ordinary workers and mid-level managers, who DJ’s son Hugh referred to as Roving Leaders.

    The final two company values at Herman Miller are Doing Good Well, which sets corporate targets for community service from the firm’s employees, and We’re All in This Together, which includes a pledge that the company will be an environmental sustainability leader. DJ de Pree said in the 1950s that the company “will be a good corporate neighbor by being a good steward of the environment.” Today, the actions that the firm takes to act on this value are impressive.

    It started in the late 1980s, when a small group of Roving Leaders formed to support their shared commitment to environmental sustainability. The group quickly ended up playing a bigger role in the firm than they expected when they discovered a very unsustainable process in building one of their most popular products. Bill Birchard tells the story in his book Merchants of Virtue: Herman Miller and the Making of a Sustainable Company:

    Charles and Ray Eames sitting on their classic Lounge Chair & Ottoman

    “Rosewood was the object of particular reverence. It adorned the celebrated Eames Lounge Chair a product so loved by designers and high-end furniture buyers that it still sold steadily after 45 years. A cradle of molded rosewood lined with irresistibly soft calfskin cushions, the chair was the company’s signature product. Though [expensive], its appeal luxuriousness, and iconic status – synonymous with Herman Miller – made changing its wood almost unthinkable.”

    But the team of Roving Leaders did have to think about it. The rosewood came from trees that were becoming critically endangered in the rapidly dwindling Brazilian rainforest. It took several years, but the Roving Leaders Environmental team convinced first the CEO, then the Board, then the rest of the company that sourcing something other than rosewood was the right thing to do – even if it wasn’t required by legislation or a ban. If you buy an Eames Lounge Chair today from Herman Miller, or any of the other classic Eames designs that use wood, your choices in wood veneer are sustainably harvested cherry or walnut.

    When the firm made the switch, they were concerned that it could kill the market for the Eames products. After all, they had been protecting these designs and manufacturing to them faithfully for more than 50 years – authenticity was a big part of what they were selling. The commercial results ended up surprising Herman Miller. Sales went up. A lot.

    It turns out that a lot of their customers also care for the environment, and many of them will go out of their way to make sure that their purchases reflect not just style, and comfort, but the value of sustainability as well.

    Over the next 25 years, Herman Miller continued to move towards more sustainable manufacturing. The first version of their famous Aeron Office Chair was made from 2/3 recycled materials. The proportion went up substantially in the second version of the Aeron, and this version was also 90% recyclable at the end of its lifespan – Herman Miller had instituted cradle to cradle manufacturing. Other environmental initiatives included eliminating solvent emissions, converting to 100% renewable energy, and the implementation of the Design for the Environment scorecard used to evaluate the sustainability of all of their products.

    The drivers of this change were unusual, as Birchard points out:

    “Surprisingly, the journey to sustainability at Herman Miller did not take root because a single top manager or the CEO demanded it. At Herman Miller, people like [the Roving Leaders], who worked deep within the organization, desired it. Because the company had a culture of giving its employees the power to make change – an approach it called “participative management” – the change emerged all over. Mid-level leaders, not just hot-shot bosses, led the campaign to bridge the sustainability gap.”

    As they’ve done this, this devotion to their organizational values has led to great financial reward for Herman Miller. The company has continued to grow, even surviving the Global Financial Crisis more effectively than their competitors, in large part because they defend their values even more fiercely than the defend the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames.

    Mary Parker Follett was one of the world’s first organizational theorists in a business school, and back in the 1920s she wrote:

    “Leader and followers are both following the invisible leader – the common purpose. The best executives put this common purpose clearly before their group. While leadership depends on depth of conviction and the power coming therefrom, there must also be the ability to share that conviction with others, the ability to make purpose articulate. And then that common purpose becomes the leader. And I believe that we are coming more and more to act, whatever our theories, on our faith in the power of this invisible leader. Loyalty to the invisible leader gives us the strongest possible bond of union, establishes a sympathy which is not a sentimental but a dynamic sympathy.”

    If we are trying to make our organizations more creative, and more innovative, shared purpose is essential. It is this that enables us to operate flatter hierarchies – and this empowerment of lower level employees is a key driver of innovation. Along with cognitive diversity, value-driven business isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the best way to excel.

    Purpose-driven Innovation from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo.

    The video is from an online course I made that is currently one of the three that the University of Queensland Business School is offering as close to free as we could make it. I know there’s a lot going on right now, but if you have the bandwidth and desire to build your skills, all three courses are worth checking out.

  • Never Delegate Understanding

    Never Delegate Understanding

    What’s the best way to change something? There’s no easy answer to this question – but if we’re trying to design changes in the way our organisations work, we need to have a deep understanding of what’s going on in them.

    Design thinking in business is a hot topic right now (see the excellent cover story of the current issue of Harvard Business Review by Tim Brown and Roger Martin for an example). And while there is some great work being done on this topic, we can learn a lot from some older examples too.

    In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art wanted to encourage the design of furniture that enhanced the quality of life for people, regardless of wealth or class.  They initiated a design contest called“Organic Design in Home Furnishings,” defined as:

    A design can be called organic if, within the object as a whole, there is a harmonious relationship between the individual elements as regards structure, material, and purpose.

    Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen won the contest with this chair:

    Eames Saarinen Chair

    This was a high-profile contest, and many people asked Eames and Saarinen what their secret to winning was. Years later, Eames gave the secret away:

    This is the trick, I give it to you, you can use it. We looked at the program and divided it into the essential elements, which turned out to be thirty odd. And we proceeded methodically to make one hundred studies of each element. At the end of the hundred studies we tried to get the solution for that element that suited the thing best, and then set that up as a standard below which we would not fall in the final scheme. Then we proceeded to break down all logical combinations of these elements, trying to not erode the quality that we had gained in the best of the hundred single elements; and then we took those elements and began to search for the logical combinations of combinations, and several of such stages before we even began to consider a plan. And at that point, when we felt we’d gone far enough to consider a plan, worked out study after study and on into the other aspects of the detail and the presentation.

    It went on, it was sort of a brutal thing, and at the end of this period, it was a two-stage competition and sure enough we were in the second stage. Now you have to start; what do you do? We reorganized all elements, but this time, with a little bit more experience, chose the elements in a different way, (still had about 26, 28, or 30) and proceeded: we made 100 studies of every element; we took every logical group of elements and studied those together in a way that would not fall below the standard that we had set. And went right on down the procedure. And at the end of that time, before the second competition drawings went in, we really wept, it looked so idiotically simple we thought we’d sort of blown the whole bit. And won the competition. This is the secret and you can apply it.

    So the trick is: work through 3000 studies of the components of your problem, twice. It might be a trick, but it sure isn’t a shortcut!

    Ironically, despite the goals of the contest, the Eames/Saarinen chair couldn’t be successfully manufactured at the time – it was too complex and too expensive. The winning design would have just been a footnote in history, had Eames and Saarinen not both gone on to greater design success.

    Eames found this success designing with his wife Ray. They took the failure of the organic chair and delved even more deeply into the problems of design and manufacture. After thousands more experiments and prototypes, they came out with the DCW Chair – which Time Magazine named the Best Design of the 20th Century.

    Eames DCW Chair

    In Eames: Beautiful Details, their granddaughter Carla Hartman describes the process Eames and Saarinen used, and how Charles and Ray applied it:

    While this process might sound arduous – or even exaggerated – to some, to the Eameses, it was simply part of the process of “learning by doing.” Whether encountering a new technology, a new material, or a new idea, they explored its constraints deeply themselves before bringing it into the Eames Office where others joined in. Throughout their lives, they adhered to what Eames Demetrios has called an Eamesian Parable: “Never delegate understanding.”

    That final point is crucial – never delegate understanding.

    This mistake happens a lot. When we buy tools and expect them to fix our problems, we’re delegating understanding. When we design a strategy and expect others to implement it, we’re delegating understanding. When we ignore experiments, iteration and learning and just expect our first ideas to work, we’re delegating understanding.

    Charles and Ray took the failure of the organic chair and used the lessons to build one of the most successful and iconic design firms in history. To do this, they had to rethink their starting point:

    In our chairs, we have not attempted to solve the problem of how people should sit. Instead, we accept the way people do sit and operate within that framework. – Charles Eames

    When we try to design better organisations and better outcomes for people, there are no shortcuts. We have to start with building a deep understanding of how they are now and operate within that framework. We can’t delegate this work – we have to dig in and do it ourselves.

    The reward, of course, is that eventually we might see the change that we hope for.

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