Nathan Shedroff is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and educator. Like me, he teaches at the graduate interaction design program of the California College of the Arts. This conversation focuses on his new book, A Whole New Strategy, which teaches strategic thinking.

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Transcript

Jorge: Nathan, welcome to the show.

Nathan: I am glad to be here. Thank you for having me back.

Jorge: Yeah, I’m excited to have you back. As you’re implying there, this is your second time on the show. And I reached out because you’ve written a new book about strategy, and I want to talk about it.

About Nathan

Jorge: You introduced yourself in our previous conversation together, but why don’t you give folks a brief overview of your career? I’m especially interested in knowing how someone with a background in design got into strategy.

Nathan: I think that designers are always touching upon strategy one way or another in the work that they do — if only to compensate for what might not be the right project, brief, or creative brief in the first place. One of the things that I find with lots of designers is that when they get hired — especially if they’re in-house, but also sometimes if they’re being hired by a client — once they dive into the creative brief, the project brief, there’s a lot of questions that arise and the feeling starts to emerge that this isn’t the right thing to make. Like, “We shouldn’t be making this. Why aren’t we making that? Who decided that?” That’s all the result usually at some level of strategy, either product strategy or corporate strategy. And, of course, by that time, it’s too late, right? Like, it’s been decided: that’s what we’re making.

I’ve worked on many projects in my life where I got hired to make X, and after doing some initial design research, we realized X wasn’t a really good idea. Certainly, it wasn’t the best idea. And the hardest conversation I think we have as designers is to go back to your client, internal or not, and say, “I know you hired me to do this, but this isn’t gonna work very well. I have something better.” Like, “I found something better for us to be doing, but it’s not what you originally hired me for.”

There are a lot of business people out there who aren’t very facile with their business concerns, so they just hold fast: “No, we decided we’re gonna do this. It has to be an app, it has to be a website or this kind of website.” And you know that’s not gonna appeal to the customers. It’s not gonna serve their needs, but it’s too late, and they don’t want to change because they have a contract. So, you go ahead dutifully and make it as well as you could. It’s doomed to fail or not succeed in the way that everyone around you wants to.

And that’s strategy, right? You see something in the market or in relationship with customers that they don’t and they didn’t when they made that decision. But they won’t change the decision. They’re stuck on it. And so, you just have to do it anyway. I think all designers have somewhat of that experience in their careers. And I wanted to understand that more deeply what we could do about it. So, that’s in my background.

And then, of course, I got myself, and then I started this MBA program at CCA, and that has been a focused part of my journey for that entire time. Ten years ago, I was struggling to put these into better tools so that designers understood strategy better and could participate better, but also so that it’s not just designers. One thing you learn at business school, if your eyes are open, is that they are taught a lot of misconceptions about the world, even the world of business, and that most — and I really truly mean this; 95% of strategy that’s done out there is so incredibly sloppy — that it may as well not be done at all. Because the answers that come back through sloppy work — garbage in, garbage out — they’re sloppy strategy.

Jorge: The phrase that came to mind — and I don’t remember who to attribute this to — but this phrase is that there’s a difference between designing the right thing and designing the thing right.

Nathan: Yeah.

Jorge: And part of what I heard there is that a lot of time, designers are focused on designing the thing right when they might be designing the wrong thing, to begin with.

Nathan: Yep.

Jorge: Now, I don’t want to give people the impression that this is a book aimed solely at designers. You’re talking about business strategy in general, right? Like, it’s not design strategy.

Nathan: Yeah, exactly. And I think that designers also believe mainly, or often, that we deserve to be involved with certain kinds of conversations. You know, we deserve a “seat at the table.” And I don’t dispute that at all. I think there are lots of designers who aren’t ready to have those conversations, and that’s a whole nother thing. But, yes, designers are naturally attuned to facilitating strategy and are great contributors to strategy. There’s an incredible opportunity for designers to get involved with strategy, but to your point, I think business strategy needs to be rethought and practiced differently, period, whether you’re a designer or not and whether you’re getting involved as a designer or not. And yes, that’s really what this book is about: how do we do better strategy? Because that’s where all the good ideas start. That’s where all the bad ideas start, as well.

Misconceptions About Strategy

Jorge: In your experience, what is the biggest misconception that people have about strategy?

Nathan: I think the biggest one is that it’s done well. And I think that lots of people — not just designers and especially people who aren’t invited into the strategic process in an organization — have an uneasy feeling always about whatever comes out it of the strategic process, that it’s not quite right. There are so many problems with corporate strategy as it’s done around the world. I’m not sure exactly where to start, but it’s not usually communicated well. It doesn’t include qualitative customer insight. It doesn’t usually involve the right people or enough people around the organization. And I don’t think it prioritizes the most important information about markets and customers. So, you can start wherever you want, but there are so many things wrong with strategy that we almost need to throw it out and start all over again.

Jorge: There’s a workshop that I do that is about approaching information architecture as a strategic practice. I believe it’s one of those practices that does some of the things that you’re talking about here, starting with, with research and then thinking through the underlying structures that are going to underlie an application or a website or what have you. So you get into these strategic conversations. And one of the things that I ask people when I’m doing this workshop is, what, in your mind, is a strategy? And invariably, I get folks saying things like, “It’s a plan for how to move forward.” Or it’s some kind of vision. Or they end up talking about either plans or aspirations. But strategy is not exactly that, is it?

Nathan: Yeah. On one level, of course, it is. It’s still a plan, right? It’s not a report. And you’re right that there are some complex and maybe even confusing Definitions of strategy out there in the world. Henry Mintzberg at McGill is famous for saying that strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions, which it is, but that’s not super helpful in explaining what strategy is. A high-level plan for action is probably the best definition I’ve seen. And I like that one because, of course, if you know anything about Charles Eames, he described design as a plan for action. That also speaks to the relationship of design to strategy, which is that look, strategy is the highest-level plan you could have in your organization and should have in your organization, and it has to be a plan for action.

I think one of the many problems with strategy often in companies is it’s done as this external process on the side. It’s fun: the executives get together, and they go on offsites. Or it’s this six-month process of looking at high-level things, and then you create this three- to five-year strategic plan, and then you put it on the shelf and never look at it again. So, it has to be a plan for action. Design is a plan for action. This is a high-level plan for action. It just really speaks to: strategy has always been a very designerly process, just missing the designers.

Jorge: That’s really intriguing. There are two key phrases in that definition you put there. You’ve called out the fact that it has to have a plan for action, meaning there’s this operational component to it. It’s not just aspirational. You have to make it real. But then I think that the key phrase there, though, for me, is high-level. And I bring it back to the fact that your book is organized in the different areas that you have to consider when crafting a strategy.

And I’ll just read them out: it’s the market that you’re operating in, the operational components of the organization, the context of the world around you, the organization itself, and then the vision for the future. And when I see these things, I think, “Wow, this is a) very high level, and b) very comprehensive. It also requires this systemic approach to understanding what the organization is doing.

The Role of Systems Thinking in Strategy

Jorge: So I was hoping that you could tell us a bit about the relationship between strategic thinking and systems thinking if there is something to call out there.

Nathan: Oh, very much. And they’re both, I think, part of this set of critical skills. Everyone really needs to understand and be able to use it to some extent in the future, especially in a post-AI and machine-learning world; you can’t do strategy well without systems thinking. That’s another one of the problems with how it’s been done in the past and how it’s done today. Because your organization is a system, and it exists in a much bigger system, right? So, if you can’t traverse and view that system, you have really no idea of the context in which you’re operating.

Part of my exploration in the last ten years in the DMBA program was how do we create better systems tools so that we can teach systems thinking to people better? And so, a good component of this is, there’s the whole sort of stakeholder system and the world around you in that chapter, which is really just systems thinking, right? How do you map all the key stakeholders around you that you should or need to have a relationship with? Which ones can you ignore? Which ones are critical? That’s a systems thinking tool, and that’s a big part of the basis of how you understand the world so that you can operate within it. It’s a very deliberate step in strategy or should be. And this is one of those things that’s always done sloppily.

In business schools, they’ve taught Porter’s Five Forces for decades, which is essentially a set of five stakeholders that you should have your eye on. And I have this dashboard or this enhanced model of strategy that I described in the book and in my workshops. But you quickly see that “Oh, Porter’s five forces only touch about three of these modules. What about all the rest?” And it turns out it’s not five forces; it’s thirty-five forces. And if you have a systems view of those things, then you are looking at all of them. And that’s a more complete view of the world, of the system, than you would have otherwise. And if you’ve seen more, you can do more, and you can have a better strategy.

Jorge: When you say that a lot of strategy is done sloppily, the sense I got from reading about that in the book — and it’s something that I’ve experienced as well — is that when doing strategic thinking, folks will take a few frameworks and models like Porter’s Forces model; another one that you call out in the book is the SWOT.

Nathan: Oh yeah.

Jorge: … matrix, and they’ll do these things in isolation. And I saw your book as a call for taking a more comprehensive look. It’s not that those other models are wrong; it’s that they’re part of a much, much larger picture, and you have to get as complete a picture as possible and have as complete a vision as possible for how those things fit together at the highest level. Is that a fair reflection?

Nathan: I think that’s a really good explanation or summary of it. It’s not that any of these tools or templates are terrible; it’s just we use them poorly, or we use them sloppily because we crowdsourced among a very small number of people in the room the data we put into them, and then we used them haphazardly.

So yeah, it’s amazing that any kind of usable strategy has ever come out of using a tool that way. It’s not that the hammer’s bad; it is that we’re taught to use it poorly. And the SWOT analysis, there’s no better example. Maybe the positioning statement, where someone goes and downloads a template from the internet, or they just… You get up on the whiteboard and draw it, and then you all fill in these four quadrants with whatever’s on top of your mind.

One of the biggest problems with that is you’re mixing operational and market issues together, so they’re getting co-mingled in a way that operational issues almost always crowd out the market issues because people have responsibilities, and that’s what they’re focused on. So, you’re really not getting a good understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, but more importantly, your opportunities and threats in the market.

But the single biggest problem is none of it is validated. It was literally just stuff that came off the top of your head, sitting in a room with a whiteboard. Where’s the customer research? How do you know that item there is your biggest strength? You don’t; you just have this feeling that these things are important. And they may be, but there’s no validation.

And as most designers in our industry know, the executives in our companies, even in startups, they’re not close to the customers. They’re certainly not clamoring to get the research reports from design researchers, so how would they possibly know their customers on the most important levels if all they’re looking at is sales reports or market research reports and quantitative data? So how could they possibly ever make good strategy without knowing that?

There are three sources of customer insight that almost never make it into strategy. That is what comes out of design research, what comes out of customer support, because they know customers on a level that even design researchers don’t, and what salespeople know.

And because business is so quantitatively focused, they’ll get sales data, right? Like, they get the data about the sales. That’s not the problem. What they don’t understand is the decision drivers salespeople are acting upon to make those sales and to make that data. And that’s the crucial part of strategy: you have to understand what’s truly important to making the decision for your customer. And that’s what you build strategy on, not the numbers around things.

Jorge: There’s a garbage in, garbage out problem, right?

Nathan: Oh yeah. Yeah, exactly. And in this case, there are two kinds of garbage. You can have quantitative garbage, and you have qualitative garbage. In this case, it’s usually garbage across the board, but mostly quantitative garbage. There isn’t a lot of qualitative garbage in the world, I will admit, because most design researchers understand how to synthesize insights to something important.

But we do spend a lot of time on the trivia of, let’s say, personas. Emily’s a thirty-five-year-old writer, and she lives in this, and she likes this music. Like, who cares, right? On some level, that helps us empathize with them, Emily, and understand her in a deeper way. But that’s really not identifying anything that affects her behavior in terms of strategy we care about.

What does Emily make her decisions on the basis of what are her decision drivers? If you don’t know that, you’re not even at square one of strategy. And yet, most strategy is done without identifying those things, at least in a deliberate way. Maybe they’re identified in an intuitive way, but man, if you’re just doing intuitive strategy, why bother? Like, just intuit on the fly.

Jorge: Yeah, you’re going by hunches.

Nathan: That’s the whole last seventy years of business, basically: going on hunches.

Design and Strategic Decision-Making

Jorge: What I hear here — and, again, this resonates with me, with this material that I’ve taught in the workshop — is that design can play this role in helping move past hunch-based decision-making to a position where you’re crafting a strategy based on a clearer picture of customer needs, and market conditions. The sort of sensory information that you get when you make things and put them out into the world, right? Which is part of the function that design does.

Nathan: I’m gonna repeat that because that is such a great synthesis and summary of what I’m talking about. Design is a way to move past hunch-based decision-making. I want to put that out into the world because, yeah, that’s exactly what this book is about.

Jorge: So, the question for me is: I’ve worked with design teams and organizations, and more often than not, the word that I would describe their mood is beleaguered in that they usually have a lot more to do than they have resources for. They are on the hook for delivering products against oftentimes fairly aggressive deadlines and such. And many of them are not perceived by the leadership of their organizations as the sensory apparatus of the company.

Nathan: Right.

Jorge: And the question is, what can we do as designers to get design to be perceived as a more strategic function of the organization?

Nathan: That’s such a great question. If you look at the sort of design process — and I know the double diamond is super popular, my own version is a little bit more funky — that is all well and good, but there’s this other diamond, the third diamond, in front of all of it and disconnected from it, which is the strategy process.

So, one of the biggest problems from a design perspective — and I imagine this is somewhat similar from an engineering perspective — is that most leadership or executives in a company seem to have a better relationship with the engineering side than with the design side.

Are those the things that we find out in our processes? Namely, the understanding of customers needs to come out of that first diamond and jump into that, the very first diamond, the one that’s missing. We need to get that information into the room, as it were, or into those processes. We probably need to do that well in advance of being invited to discuss it in those rooms because that’s usually not on our responsibility list or on the schedule.

So, we need to figure out how we get our insights in front of the executives in a way that they can digest and understand. And then, if we do that on a consistent basis, maybe they’ll start to invite us in to do those reports or have those conversations in person.

Then the next step might be we’re starting in the strategic process. Maybe you should be there at the beginning rather than the end to make it look nice or to bless some of the sections. I think that there are probably other ways in which designers can get involved with strategy, but I don’t think we can wait to be invited.

To me, what I just described — that sort of “get our insights into the room and into the process first” — I think is going to be a natural first step in most cases. That might be publishing a blog, publishing reports, or getting some sort of cool artifact. You almost have to think about this as sending gifts to the leadership of your company or your client’s company that they unwrap and think are really cool. But in this case, it’s an understanding or an insight into customers that they don’t otherwise have.

Jorge: I love this idea of sending gifts to leadership. My expectation would be that these would have to be gifts whose value is that they invite, perhaps like a reframing of the requirements, somehow. The phrase that came to mind when you were describing this three-diamond model is that in security, there’s this notion of… I don’t know if you’ve heard the phrase “shift left security,” the idea being that you do security as early on in the process as possible.

Nathan: Oh

Jorge: Maybe what we’re talking about here is something like shift left design, where you’re becoming involved… In the architecture world, there’s this notion of writing the program, and it’s something like that, somehow.

Nathan: Yeah, if you don’t get the program right, how’s the building gonna be right? It might be beautiful, but it probably won’t work for the people who inhabit it. Yeah, I like that idea of shift left design because that’s exactly what needs to happen.

The other problem here, and what I just described, is when strategy is being done, we have this notion that you have a strategic plan for three to five years — that’s very common — and you do that every five to ten years, and then it just sits on a shelf somewhere, and it’s not very actionable in that state. But strategy is something we should be doing every day, right? Strategy should be in a format where we can compare it against business data at a moment’s notice if we wanted to see, are we out of strategy? Strategy is like your flight plan. Then, you compare your flight plan to where the plane is actually in position at any moment.

And if it has to deviate because of the weather, great, fine, but you come back to plan. Or, if the plan has to change because it’s turning out that it’s no longer the right conditions, period, great. Change the plan. But to see that difference and see if we’re getting off plan or not would be really critical. But that’s impossible the way we do strategy now.

Jorge: Again, systems thinking comes into it, right? Because what you’re describing is like a classic cybernetic loop, a feedback loop, right? Besides this role in defining the program, perhaps there’s also a role for designers to help determine — or clarify perhaps is a better word — the metrics that are going to be used to determine the degree to which the strategy is actually on track, or whether it’s going off course, to use the airline imagery that, great.

Regis McKenna’s Influence

Jorge: This is all so intriguing, and we have so much more that I would love to ask you about, but I’m curious: in the book, you bring up Regis McKenna. I don’t know if that’s how you pronounce his name.

Nathan: Yep.

Jorge: But, I had read about Regis McKenna in the context of Apple, I think. Wasn’t he involved in helping Apple in its early days?

Nathan: The very early days, yeah.

Jorge: And you talked about having learned from Regis McKenna, and I was hoping that you would tell us a bit about that. Who was Regis McKenna, and how did his work influence your thinking?

Nathan: I’m not an expert on his life, so I’m not gonna be able to give you a complete biography or anything. But he was a very influential marketer — he’s still around — in the technology world in Silicon Valley, especially in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. And I actually met him because when we started our company, we were literally just three people in the dining room of the house.

He hired us to help create a software product that would step people through their market strategy. These were the days of CD-ROMs, and we built the entire thing in Director if you could believe it. And it was this amazing product called Crush that came out of a process that he and his team developed for one of their projects. I can’t remember the details. I should try to get a hold of him.

But they were hired by a client, and they literally had sixty days to do this entire market strategy or something incredibly fast. And so, they had to cut away everything to the bone and just get to the — what’s the right word? — get to the basics about what they needed to find out about the market and how to make decisions.

At this time, I’m a young guy out of college, starting a company, and I have a design degree. In fact, I have a degree in transportation — car design. And like many designers, I have a pretty suspicious perspective on marketing because a lot of it just seems like bullshit, right? You’re like, well, how do you know that? That doesn’t sound right; that’s not my experience. How do I integrate these two views of what I’m getting?

After my experiences with Regis, I understood oh, there’s something really important here. This is real stuff. It’s not fluff. And so, in order to make this product for him, my two business partners and I would meet him and another guy every Saturday at his office off of 101 in… I think that would still be Palo Alto; maybe it was Mountain View.

We’d meet at his office for three hours or four hours and get a lecture on marketing. He would step us through his process. And that was my first business education right there. So, after a few months of that, like we understood, “Oh, this is how you step through things!”

And that’s the basis for this process that I described in the book that’s a framework. There are a lot more details I will go into, especially the systems thinking portions that weren’t there in his strategy and his process in Crush. But that was the basis of understanding.

First, you do customer insight. Or we call it customer insight; he called it environmental analysis. You can’t move on to competitive analysis until you’ve done that because the output of environmental analysis is the input. It’s a customer analysis, and that becomes the input to positioning. You can’t do them out of order, or else everything gets fouled up.

You can imagine that we have sixty days to do the strategy for this company, mobilize the whole company, get a bunch of teams, and send them off to do separate things. The problem is when they come together, none of it fits because they all had different assumptions, and they all found different things, and nothing’s connected to the things the other teams were doing. It’s just a mess. And yet, that’s how a lot of strategy is done in companies.

So, the thing I really learned from Regis was that you have to start here. Sorry, it’s gonna take a while, and it has to be done in serial, but there are certain things that can’t be done In parallel. The output of this becomes the input of that. The output of that becomes the input of this other thing. And that fixes a lot of what’s wrong with strategy.

Then, if you separate the marketing sequence from the operational sequence, that fixes a bunch of other things that happen in the strategy. So, really, this process that I described in the book is just, if you apply about four good fixes to how strategy is performed in the world, you have fixed most of strategy right there, even before you get to the systems thinking and this foresight and the best practices on communicating and inside and outside the organization and all the other sort of details.

Following the Steps in Sequence

Jorge: You know, that came across in the book, the fact that these are sequential steps. The book is structured in that order, right? I get the sense that you start with the most important things, and then everything else falls out of that. Is that not right?

Nathan: Yeah, and if you look, the biggest part of the book is the first two sections, which are your market and your operations. I will say there are some things that you can put in parallel. And so, yes, I start at the beginning of the sequence of the steps.

But there are things that can happen in parallel, and that is specifically the systems thinking, systems nature of part of it, which is trends. You can always be, and should always be, understanding trends that are going on. And stakeholders — your stakeholder relationships — which become your partnerships. Those can be going in parallel all the time.

But when you sit down to look at strategy, there are two or three specific points in the process where that information gets integrated. So, in that sense, you have to hold them off to the side until you get there. And then BAM! They come in, and you can understand what impacts they have on your strategy and, therefore, change your strategy.

But you can parallelize them in the same sense that you don’t just do customer research when you start a new project, right? Like, you should always be doing — especially if you’re a larger company — some level of customer research to understand what’s going on in real-time and then integrate it at the right time when you’re designing a new initiative.

Jorge: Yes. And yet, there is so much, right? If you’re doing the research and you’re paying attention to trends and stakeholders and market conditions and what competitors are doing, and there’s all this stuff, right? The phrase that kept sitting there in the back of my mind as I was reading your book is a phrase by Stephen Covey, and I think I’m gonna mangle it, but it’s “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

Nathan: Yeah, I like that.

Jorge: The reason I bring it up is because the process that you lay out in the book, the sequence, has… I haven’t followed that process exactly, but I was imagining myself walking through these steps with a client, for example, facilitating this kind of discussion with a client. And the outcome of the process, I think, would be clarity, right? Clarity around who we are, what we’re doing, how we’re different, how we deliver value in ways that other organizations aren’t delivering value, and then communicating that and keeping it that way, right? And keeping that fresh and relevant.

Nathan: Yep, that’s exactly right. And first of all, I love that; whether you’ve got the quote exactly correct or not, I love that. And you’re absolutely right, clarity. Value and your relationship of value and how you’re gonna deliver it. That’s really strategy; that’s your high-level plan for action.

One thing I will say, though, is that if you’re doing this right, because there are so many pieces, the clarity is like this 4-D clarity, right? Like, you’re clear about a lot more than just, “What’s Bob and Jane and Mary doing in the company and what should they be focused on?” You have clarity about your market and your industry and the system that it lives within, as well as potentially, the whole industry and the world. You have clarity about all of that in relation to your strategy.

There’s this other tool called the strategy cascade or the strategy choice cascade. And I talk about it in the book too. And this is the latest tool. And if you look at it, it’s these sort of five or six boxes of, I should get this right, I think it’s five boxes of questions. And by all means, like any of these tools, it’s not a bad tool. But all the questions are about yourself. What are our goals? What do we wanna do? How do we play? What markets do we choose?

And the problem that any designer today will see immediately is, what about the customer? What do they want? What value do they need? What are your competitors like? It’s not just about you. So, the clarity can’t just be about, “We’re clear about what we wanna accomplish.” Good for you. How clear are you on every other thing that’s going on in the world around you that’s going to impact your business?

And you can make allowances for startups who don’t have… You know, there are only five people in the company, and yeah, they maybe don’t have a lot of time to see all the other pieces. But for big companies, you probably saw the part in the book that’s probably the most damning, which is this McKinsey report that came out right before lockdown in 2020, where they literally classify 85% of all companies worldwide as zombie companies, which are companies that are just able to make payroll and pay off their debt, but they’re not going anywhere. They’re not moving into new markets. They’re not evolving. They’re just treading water.

Eighty-five percent! Congress should be talking about that. That’s a huge deal. Why are there 85% of the companies, and what are they doing? And I would bet that many of those 85 are — sorry! — McKinsey customers and every other strategic consultant out there. It’s not that they’re not doing anything about it. And ignoring their situation, they don’t know how to get out of that zombie category. And the strategy that they’re employing or that they’re buying is not helping them either.

A big part of it is not only just everything we’ve talked about, but this idea of me, me, my, my, my, our, our, our — like, this hyper-focus on us as a company and missing all the signs out there in the market that market research doesn’t highlight, doesn’t uncover what’s going on, and that could be the basis of whatever change they make to be more successful.

Closing

Jorge: That seems like a really good summary of why folks should be paying attention to strategy. And I see your book as a guide for de-zombification. So, where can folks find out more about the book and about You?

Nathan: My website is nathan.com. I also have a little publishing imprint where I publish all my books now called experiencedesignbooks.com. But you can get it off Amazon these days.

I will say, though, that if you’re a Kindle reader, the epub version has some problems because Ingram forces you to upload a flowable version of the epub, and this book is not a novel, right? It’s not just text that shows up on the next page. It’s a design book; spreads work together, and illustrations relate to text and diagrams. And so, sometimes, that flowable epub doesn’t look so good on Kindle. But if someone buys it there and emails me, I can send them a PDF that they can also read on the Kindle. And then all the pages are static and work together and don’t get jumbled and chopped up. But yeah, you can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it off my website.

I’m doing workshops now on the same subject, so hopefully, there are lots of ways that you know… not just designers, tell your non-design friends, because this is a very designed forward book that I’m hoping that non-designers, engineers, project managers, relationship managers, executives — if they understood strategy this way, they would also value design in a sort of more informed and complete way too.

Jorge: That sounds right. And that, and I’ll say, as I was reading the book, I did not think that it was primarily aimed at designers. I thought this aimed broadly at organizational leadership.

Nathan: I’m glad that came through, by the way.

Jorge: Yeah. No, it does. It does. And it’s a book that I will be recommending to folks. Thank you, Nathan, for joining us and telling us about it.

Nathan: Jorge, it’s always a pleasure. Thank you for having me.