Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.
Business Influence Without Losing Your Soul
Summary
Key Insights
-
•
Designers need to empathize deeply with colleagues, understanding their goals and pressures, not just users.
-
•
Organizational decision making often resembles politics due to differing business unit incentives.
-
•
Large enterprises commonly operate with multiple independent profit and loss centers, complicating collaboration.
-
•
MBAs focus more on networking and broad concepts than daily business decision realities encountered by executives.
-
•
Remixing familiar frameworks like stage gates and storytelling structures makes new ideas more acceptable.
-
•
Influence in organizations depends more on situational savvy and relationship building than formal business training.
-
•
Trust is often built by delivering small, reliable wins on time and budget before attempting radical change.
-
•
Executive audiences prefer concise, rational communication structures like situation-complication-resolution for decisions.
-
•
Risk management language helps de-personalize change and facilitates alignment in organizations.
-
•
Scaled, sustainable design and organizational transformations take multiple years, not quarters.
Notable Quotes
"A profit and loss center is essentially a business unit with its own incentives and goals."
"Designers have to become savvier in understanding the people and the politics to influence effectively."
"Empathy with colleagues means knowing what keeps them up at night, not just their job title."
"MBA programs teach a lot of networking and collaboration but not always the realities of day-to-day decisions."
"Many executives aren’t making decisions based on MBA learnings but on instinct and past experience."
"We have to remix familiar tools and frameworks so people in the organization recognize and trust them."
"Being on time and on budget with your first projects is one of the most powerful trust-building levers."
"The storytelling structure situation-complication-resolution works well for hard trade-off discussions."
"People like innovation but hate change because change feels personal and threatening."
"When you manage a team or become a director, you’re more like a small business owner than a creative."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Every day is a chance to check: is this how I want to be? This is a long-haul, marathon effort."
Denise Jacobs Nancy Douyon Renee Reid Lisa WelchmanInteractive Keynote: Social Change by Design
January 8, 2024
"We have to ask the question what if it goes wrong? Because causing even intangible, emotional pain is harm."
Dan WillisEnterprise Storytelling Sessions
June 8, 2016
"Jazz has those rules of engagement."
Jim KalbachJazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
June 4, 2019
"If your talk isn’t accepted, it doesn’t mean it’s bad—it might just not fit the program’s narrative arc or available slots."
Louis Rosenfeld Jemma Ahmed Christian Crumlish Uday Gajendar Chris GeisonCoffee with Lou #3: What Makes for a Successful UX Conference Presentation?
May 2, 2024
"Customers can answer what the researcher wants to hear in surveys, making attitude only 28% predictive of real behavior."
Ricardo MartinsUnlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods
March 12, 2025
"A seat at the table versus building the table means setting routines where all the right partners come together regularly."
Frank DuranPartnership Playbook: Lessons Learned in Effective Partnership
January 8, 2024
"Many tech harms run counter to business goals and can be controversial to address."
Alexandra SchmidtWhy Ethics Can't Save Tech
November 18, 2022
"We formed a core task force empowered to make decisions quickly, avoiding weeks of delay waiting for formal approvals."
Davis Neable Guy SegalHow to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team
June 10, 2021
"If you’re designing a site used infrequently, don’t overload it with custom hotkeys that are hard to memorize."
Sam ProulxDesigning For Screen Readers: Understanding the Mental Models and Techniques of Real Users
December 10, 2021
