Hybrid Thinking at P&G: Design meets Strategy

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From the Fast Company article Forget Design Thinking and Try Hybrid Thinking.

Procter and Gamble

When A.G. Lafley was named CEO of Procter & Gamble during the summer of 2000, her job was remarkably ambitious: Make innovation happen at P&G.

To remain the world's preeminent maker of useful stuff for the house, P&G needed to make a lot of changes very quickly and appointed Claudia Kotchka as the company's first-ever VP for design strategy and innovation in 2002.

Her job was remarkably ambitious: Make innovation happen at P&G!

And she did through up-endeding the status quo in P&G's product development process. She made several bold moves that any company may want to consider.

  1. Placed designers within the company's many business units so they could shape strategy directly instead of just designing how products looked.
  2. Educated business people in the company about the strategic impact of design.

  3. Formed a board of leading external design experts who offered guidance for how to make P&G into a world-class design organization.

Over time, her efforts have P&G to once again become one of the most innovative companies on earth.

Between 2000 and 2008, revenue more than doubled from $40 billion to $83 billion, while earnings took a gigantic leap from $2.5 billion to more than $12 billion.

This growth is the kind of performance one expects from an IT company or a firm operating in an emerging market. Not a 200-year-old soap company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. READ FULL ARTICLE>>