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P&G Using 'Design Thinking' To Imagine Possibilities

Seven years ago, P&G CEO A.G. Lafley told Claudia Kotchka, the company's vp for design, to "get design into the DNA of the company." She came up with the concept of "Design Thinking," and P&G is using the approach to change its culture. Leadership is listening, learning, and deploying; cross-functional teams are cracking vexing problems across its business landscape; and visualization, prototyping, and iteration are facilitating communication internally and with customers like never before.

With a cadre of 100 internal facilitators, more than 40 design thinking workshops have been held in P&G business units across the globe during the past year. The design thinking facilitation team comes from every function at P&G (such as marketing, research and development, info tech, and product supply as well as design).

Perhaps most important, half of the workshops focused on something other than new product initiatives to include other types of pressing business issues such as strategy, retail relationship building, and matters of operational excellence.

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