Love or Hate

From Adi Ignatius’s interview with Nooyi on design thinking, Harvard Business Review, September 2015 (pp. 80-85). The article describes her decision to hire Mauro Porcini as PepsiCo’s first chief design officer in 2012 and to rebuild the company’s product process around design. Ignatius asked her to define good design; this was her answer.

In Nooyi’s own follow-up, the alternative to love or hate is the customer who says “Yeah, I bought it, and I ate it.” Engagement is the standard; sales without it is the failure mode.

Earlier in the interview, she had given each of her direct reports an empty photo album and a camera and asked them to photograph design they admired. Six weeks later most went unreturned; of those who tried, some had their wives take the pictures. When she raised design as a topic, the conversation kept drifting to packaging colors: “Should we go to a different blue?” That, she said, was “putting lipstick on a pig, as opposed to redesigning the pig itself.” The Porcini hire was her response.