My boss for the past eight years, Phil Gilbert, announced recently that he’s stepping down as General Manager of Design at IBM. That position has now be filled by Katrina Alcorn, the former head of design at Autodesk. I’ve read her book Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink which I thought was powerful, insightful, and moving and I’ve been impressed with her early days of being at the helm of IBM Design.
I’d like to reflect in this post on Phil Gilbert, the leader, the transformation of IBM that he led, our journey together, and the lessons I learned from him. I’ve so appreciated Phil’s support of what I’ve been able to do over the past eight years, the guidance he’s provided, and the freedom he afforded me in doing what I thought was the right thing to do.
Phil Gilbert in front of the IBM Design sign in the IBM Austin Studio.
Phil joins IBM
Phil is a serial entrepreneur and IBM bought the company he led, Lombardi Software, in 2010. His company had no new technology per se that IBM didn’t already have. His company had just done a great job of designing an exemplary user experience for their products. And they did that by using a version of design thinking that Phil innovated. Phil was asked to lead the IBM business unit that his company had been acquired into. He got to work to introduce design thinking and to simplify the portfolio of 44 products. Within a year, Phil had introduced his version of design thinking and reduced the products from 44 to 4 while also increasing revenue.
IBM gets a new CEO
In 2012, IBM announced a new CEO in the person of Ginni Rometty. I was in a meeting with Ginni on her second day on the job. She started off her talk by saying that the client experience would be the most important strategic area of focus during her leadership. I was delighted. And I knew that the group of design managers that I led across the company should provide some input to her to realize her vision. We pulled together the best practices that we saw inside the company which had Phil’s organization’s design thinking in the top spot. We also determined that we would have to hire a lot more designers and researchers given her focus. I put a presentation together recommending the practices and staffing and together with fellow executive Sal Vella presented it on a conference call to Robert LeBlanc, our Senior Vice President. He asked me to gather some more data on the current population. I collected that information—230 designers and researchers with most of them assigned to more than one product and on average three products. I thought it was so important to get this information to Robert that I flew on my own dime to New York to share it with him in person. He was shocked at how few designers and researchers we had and even more so the fact that they were typically working on more than one product. Given the recommendation from our previous presentation coupled with these cold hard facts about our population, he immediately contacted Ginni. Robert also had conversations in parallel with Phil and then more between Robert, Phil, and Ginni. Ginni then had a call with Phil and asked him whether he could achieve what he accomplished with his business unit for all of IBM. Phil answered “I don’t know but I’m willing to try”. Phil was then asked to take on the role of General Manager of Design for IBM.
Developing the Framework
Phil, together with my long-time colleague Charlie Hill (now an IBM Fellow), announced our new IBM Design initiative at a meeting of all the software technical leaders at the end of 2012. Phil also pulled a small group of us, some existing design leaders at IBM like Charlie and me and members of the team that he brought with him from Lombardy and his first IBM business unit. Joining Phil, Charlie, and me were Adam Cutler, Fahad Osmani, Pierre Henri Clouin, and Melissa Sader.
Adam Cutler, Phil Gilbert, Fahad Osmani, Charlie Hill, Karel Vredenburg, Melissa Sader, and Pierre-Henri Clouin.
This small team developed the approach we would take and the framework we would use. We purposely referred to it as a framework because it was multi-faceted due to the bold and ambitious remit we received from CEO Ginni Rometti to “create a global, sustainable culture of design and design thinking at IBM.” The initial framework focussed on the people, places, and practices required to achieve that bold vision. We hired a massive number of staff which took our number designers and researchers from the original 230 to now over 3,000. We built design studios and now have close to a hundred. And the foundation of our practices was what started out as IBM Design Thinking and eventually renamed to Enterprise Design Thinking when we started helping other companies adopt it.
The Transformation
Product Labs: In one of the first meetings I had with Phil he said “you know this company well and many people know you so would you like to communicate and share our new IBM Design framework in person to each of the product development labs around the world?” I said “absolutely” and put an overview deck together and started to rack up frequent flyer miles as I traveled the world visiting the labs and presenting my New Era in IBM Design message at all employee town halls and having meetings with location executives and design teams. People still mention to me that they remember hearing me speak at their location and being inspired by our new direction and being committed to our program. Our core team, now including Doug Powell, continued its focus on hiring designers and researchers for product teams, onboarding them in a three month long bootcamp we now call Patterns, activating existing product teams in the practice of Enterprise Design Thinking in week-long bootcamps, building out studios around the world, and supporting the early teams onboarded to use our new framework.
Design Services: After my first year of evangelizing our new design program to the product development labs around the world, Phil and I had another conversation, actually during my first performance review with him. After we quickly dispensed with the performance evaluation part of the meeting, I said, “do you think our services teams should be using our framework too with their work with clients?” Phil answered and asked me another question, “yes they should and do you want to do it?” I said “absolutely”. Phil’s trust in me taking on the transformation of our entire design services organization single-handedly empowered me to quickly write an email with my proposal to the executive responsible for IBM’s Global Business Services iX organization, Paul Papas. I got an answer back almost immediately saying simply, “YES, how soon can you get to New York?”. After that meeting, I worked closely with Matt Candy who headed up the design services iX organization across Europe for Paul at that time and who shared my vision of infusing design thinking into the practices of his teams. I spent the next year developing a services version of Enterprise Design Thinking and again flying around the world starting for the first few months in Europe with Matt’s teams activating our services designers. I taught a four-day bootcamp for services designers and a one day activation for the people charged with selling design services engagements, the associate partners, partners, and other executives. I also used an apprentice approach having two or three apprentices joining me in order to learn how to do what I did for themselves. Phil commented, “but, Karel, that approach won’t scale”. So I pivoted to teaching train-the-trainer classes so as to expedite and widen the reach of our program. Those leaders continued to activate the rest of the staff and new hires in our services organization.
Clients and Sales Teams: After I activated the GBS iX teams and enabled them to train themselves, the next conversation with Phil went something like this, “Phil, our Enterprise Design Thinking approaches are clearly powerful for our design services teams, I think they’ll also be powerful in sales situations with clients”. Having been a serial entrepreneur and still thinking like one, Phil has always had a maniacal focus on clients. In fact, I’ve seen him in situations with clients were I could see that he’s a natural salesman while appearing to not be one overtly. Phil again supported my desire to pursue the use of EDT for sales. I had already run some client workshops during my time working with GBS iX including ones with my colleagues Rich Berkman and Doug Powell. I continued to hone these workshops and worked with hundreds of clients using them often with their most senior executives, c-suites, and even boards of directors. The success of these sessions and the value they provided to both the clients and to our sales teams led me to start developing an EDT for Sales approach. I initially worked with our technology services organization and had them hire dedicated design staff whom I activated in the use EDT for Sales on sales pursuits. After that, Phil helped me staffed up an absolutely stellar A-team in our Design Program Office to work with me to further hone our EDT for Sales approach and to pilot test it with four of our top sales teams. The approach yielded impressive results so the subsequent year Phil supported me in building out the team even further and also added a co-leader, Nigel Prentice, to work with me in activating each of our top account teams globally. That work was also successful and, in part, inspired our current go to market approach called Experiential Selling.
Academic Programs: As we were wrapping up that work with the sales teams, Phil said, “you’ve been teaching at and working with universities all these years, please schedule a meeting with the two of us to take me through all of that”. I had been an industry professor for about five years at that point having been recruited for the part-time position after being vocal in the press about the gaps in education of the staff we were hiring and why we needed to develop our own three month bootcamp. I told Phil about my having co-developed with Michael Hartmann new curricula for an EMBA program with a business school, an emerging health leaders program with a medical school, and a pan-university innovation by design program for students of any faculty. I also told him about being a judge in design competitions, doing guest lectures and keynotes at universities, and other interactions I’d had with universities. After the presentation, Phil said that he’d like me to develop a new global academic program that would involve working with the top design schools and universities around the world and with the historically black colleges and universities in the US.
I loved the challenge and immediately turned to the university rankings to select the top schools, then selected with Phil the senior design leaders and executives from IBM to serve as academic focals for each school, developed a menu of ways we could collaborate with the schools, and met with design school presidents and university deans together with the assigned academic focals to work out our mutual collaboration plans. Most of those have turned into long-terms relationships with our focals being sought out to teach courses, give guest lectures, conduct workshops, host panel discussions, provide and coach capstone projects, etc. Just to give a few examples of those collaborations, IBM academic focal Adam Cutler is now a SCAD Fellow at the Savanna College of Art and Design, focal Charlie Hill worked with Harvard Business School leading to their writing of a Harvard Business School Case on our IBM design program, focal Hal Wuertz co-developed and is teaching in a new Masters of Arts in Design Engineering program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Brown University, we held an IBM Day at the ArtCenter School of Design (see pic below), we worked with MIT Solve on a design challenge to tackle job insecurity among vulnerable populations with Phil serving as a judge and me helping to facilitate the use of Enterprise Design Thinking by the startups. I’ve also personally taught our Enterprise Design Thinking framework to students at Stanford’s d.school, University of Pennsylvania’s Integrated Product Development program, and worked with Don Norman at the University of California San Diego on his cross-disciplinary Design.a.thons. Over a weekend when I was at the University of California at San Diego, Don and I also got talking about our mutual desire to improve design education and that led to the Future of Design Education initiative. There again, an early call with Phil, Don, Don’s colleague at UCSD Michael Meyer, and I helped launch the initiative with Phil giving it his blessing and providing me budget for IBM to become the industry sponsor.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted to bring together designers to do what we could to make a difference. I partnered with the World Design Organization, Design for America, and our IBM Design community to put together the COVID-19 Design Challenge. In addition to about 100 IBM designers, we also had about 150 students, deans, faculty, and professional designers from various industries who all together did user research, workshopped, and developed solutions to seven major challenges with teams from around the world. It was an amazing experience for everyone involved, had an impact, and we also created a website with the results of the work and also a Medium article describing the entire project.
Phil giving a keynote at ArtCenter School of Design
One IBM: While the global academic programs work is still ongoing last year, Phil asked me to take on some additional roles. He asked me to chair the Design Leadership Board which involves governing our senior design technical community and reviewing and appointing our Design Principals and Distinguished Designers, the highest technical positions in IBM’s design career framework. A related role involved being responsible for the design profession and our design career framework. I gladly took on these roles and now work with team member Lauren Swanson on those programs. I also suggested to Phil that we should have a Design Executive Team of the most senior design executive leaders in each of the company’s business units to govern the overall design community. Phil agreed and I set up that team as well. At the beginning of this year, Phil asked me to take on some additional responsibilities including design culture across the company including our focus on racial equity, our external social media presence, and our external engagement. I absolutely love those additional areas of responsibility and thank Phil for them. I also now get to work with Renee Albert on these additional responsibilities. That work has resulted in programs like our Design Mavens Power Hour video and podcast series which has been internal to the company thus far but will soon be available externally as well and our collaboration with the America by Design TV show with whom we’ve produced six episodes of Season 1 and we’re working on Season 2 as I write this.
Lessons Learned
I’ve lived a lot of years and have shared what I’ve learned in this blog, in articles, in my book, and on my podcast. However, I’m always motivated to learn more and while Phil was my manager, he was also an informal mentor whether he knew it or not. I’d like to capture here the lessons I learned from spending eight years working with and for him.
Audacity—Phil thinks big and sees the entire company as the entity to be designed. He makes bold proposals, is extremely effective at selling them, and then delivers on those proposals confidently and effectively exceeding expectations.
Strong Views Loosely Held—When someone first meets Phil, they’re often struck by how strongly he expressed his views but when you get to know him better you realize that he believes in taking a position, arguing it strongly, but then be willing to change his views if someone else comes up with an even stronger argument counter to that view. He actually uses the phrase “strong views loosely held” himself when describing his style.
Understand Strengths—Phil has a real talent for getting to know someone, understanding their strengths, and then aligning their work assignments with those those strengths. He did that with me all the years we worked together and it felt so empowering.
Pick Your Battles—There were numerous times when I was working on an issue or other members of the team were and Phil would question whether it was worth it to address that issue. Some battles aren’t worth fighting. They also can divert attention and resources from the issues that are worth addressing.
Take the Long View—Further to the last point, the lens that Phil uses to determine whether an issue is worth addressing is whether it is key to achieving the long-term goals.
Take a Sales Perspective—Many situations we find ourselves in require convincing people to do something and keeping an eye on what you’d like to achieve in your communication is key. A salesperson does that and Phil showed me in many instances while in meetings with clients or colleagues how that seller’s mindset is crucial to those situations. The best salespeople don’t make it obvious that they’re selling. They understand the other person deeply and then using that knowledge customize their pitch accordingly. Phil is a master at this.
Be Authentic—Some leaders put up a facade but Phil doesn’t. He’s open and honest plus shares emotions that he’s experiencing. Phil’s personal reaction to George Floyd’s murder, his immediate hosting of a companywide town hall with the design community, and his launching of our Racial Equity in Design initiative is a case in point. Phil focuses on doing what’s right authentically.
Don’t be Afraid to Use the Word “Love”—Related to the notion of being authentic, how many times do you ever hear a senior executive say to their team, “I love you”. Well, Phil does. And he means it. His expressions of his emotions like this make him even a better leader that people truly connect with.
The Power of Storytelling—Phil is a master storyteller. He regularly uses stories to provide context for what he’s talking about and it has the effect of not only engaging whom he’s speaking with but it also deepens their understanding.
Take Stock & Pivot—Many people talk about the need to sense and respond but Phil lives it. Likely from his days as a serial entrepreneur, Phil constantly checks to see how things are going and takes action accordingly. As an example, in most of our eight years transforming IBM, Phil held quarterly offsite meetings with his direct report team. I called those pivot meetings although he couldn’t call them that. We would take stock of how our various programs were going and he would take action amping up programs that were going well, cancelling programs that weren’t, and launching new programs if that was required. This was all done very quickly.
I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Phil for his leadership in transforming IBM but also for his collaboration with and support of me and the various programs I was able to launch and lead. I also appreciate what I’ve learned from working with Phil these past eight years. It has made me a better leader and person.