![[RE-RELEASE] How Beautiful Businesses Could Transform the World](https://cdn-images-3.listennotes.com/podcasts/designing-next/re-release-how-beautiful-2AgyNhD7pbI-eFghCxrWJU3.1400x1400.jpg "[RE-RELEASE] How Beautiful Businesses Could Transform the World")
speaker-0: you
speaker-2: Welcome to episode number 15 of Designing Next, achieving growth through transformation and innovation. I'm your host, Steve Koch, and with me today as always is Chad Bruff. Chad, today is all about designing beautiful businesses.
speaker-1: Yes, Steve, I I don't think we always use the word beautiful to describe business. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation with our guest, who I find r is to be a really eloquent speaker and of course he's an author and I think it's somebody that our audience is going to enjoy.
speaker-2: Yeah, that's really true. You know, that beautiful is definitely not a word that people think of when they go into a business meeting or they start thinking about business strategy. But I think I think our guest today will maybe make us all think a little differently. And we're gonna be speaking to Alan Moore. He's a designer, he's a business innovator, he's also an author, and he has a new book coming out this week. It's called Do Build How to Make and Lead a Business The World Needs. And this book is an extension of you know what he says is his life's mission. Which is to help businesses discover their own unique beauty. So today, Chad, you and I are going to talk to Alan about what a beautiful business is and why he's on this mission to transform business through beauty. you know, Alan really believes overall that the world of business is changing, that the single pursuit of profit at any cost has been replaced by a desire to build companies that create a better future and also enjoy commercial success. So in his new book, Do Build, he draws on his years of research into some of the most pioneering and progressive businesses on the planet. And he speaks to their purpose driven founders and discovers that it is possible to lead with generosity, to have a transparent supply chain, and to design products and services that are really well considered and joyful and create a company culture where individuals flourish. it's something we can really think about. It's a mission that's really inspiring. And I'm I think this is gonna be an insightful conversation. Chad, what can listeners look forward to?
speaker-1: I think they have a lot to look forward to just in terms of the language that Alan uses d w with with his vision, you know. Yeah. The the world occurs through language and at some point in Alan's life, he had a road to to Damascus experience that led him to this mission of creating beautiful businesses and what it means. And I'm looking forward to learning from Alan and how we could return to beauty within the context of a business. Also, I think Alan has a lot to say around the sustainability movement and some language that he believes maybe moves that mission forward around sustainability. what he describes as the extractive economy versus the regenerative economy. And I really want to understand more about what he means by that.
speaker-2: Yes, I know Alan has so much passion. I'm I'm really looking forward to hearing his perspective and really listening to the the advice he would give to leaders who are on a journey to create these types of beautiful and transformative and differentiating businesses. So we're gonna get to the interview with Alan right after the break.
speaker-0: Hi, this is Whitney Driscoll and I'm the Director of Strategy for Cast and Hue. Cast and Hue is an experienced design consultancy and a sponsor of Designing Next. Today I'm with our senior strategist, Jonathan Pattice.
speaker-2: Jonathan, tell me how you connected to virtual workshops since the pandemic.
speaker-0: We used to run most of our research. New virtual tools like digital whiteboards were able to easily organize data, create fast
speaker-2: Fat.
speaker-0: and detailed prototypes and get people more comfortable with sharing their opinions. Also, this can all be done from anywhere in world, having
speaker-2: World without having
speaker-0: to travel. How do you ensure people stay engaged when they aren't in person? We use rooms
speaker-2: Utilise breakout.
speaker-0: a lot, depending on the level of engagement we need. And we also encourage people to own ideas and explain them in their own words when sharing with the larger group. Where can people learn more?
speaker-2: You can learn more at castonhue dot com slash
speaker-0: or see the link in the show notes.
speaker-2: Welcome Alan. Thank you so much for joining us today.
speaker-0: Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's a real pleasure and joy to be speaking with you guys today as well.
speaker-2: Yeah, for us for us as well. We're excited to dig in and and learn about beautiful business. And to start out, it'd be great if you could share a little bit just about your background as a designer.
speaker-0: So my story starts actually by falling accidentally into a publishing degree, a oxapolitechnic. And the result of that was a project where I had to design, edit and manufacture a book. So I had to find a manuscript. It was a friend's poetry and then go through all of the production processes that you would do to produce a book. And I can remember standing there after I'd sort of bound 70 copies of this book and just went, so you can actually take an idea and you then actually make an artifact in the world. This idea has been in this person's head and now it's disseminated. And it just kind of really caught me. And I decided therefore that I wanted to be a designer and Thereafter, I the course is very general. So it wasn't a design course. It was just a book publishing course, but I fell in love with the idea of design. And what I did was is actually, I ended up being mentored by a guy called Derek Bursall, who is a very, very famous book designer. And Derek took me under his wing after I'd been very persistent about that kind of relationship that I wanted to have with him. And he showed me... and helped me in a very extraordinary way to think about design and the making of design and how important it was in the world. And I think the two parts of that which I think are important is the sense of craft. Book design is a craft skill and you are in service as a craftsman, craftswoman, craftsperson to the greater good of society. That was one of the other things that I really took from my journey at the very, very beginning. And from there, I fell into graphic design, into advertising, and then just went on this incredible journey where at the time I think that we were allowed to work and play maybe, play and work in a whole variety of different ways with many things. And eventually, after 25 years, somebody said to me, it seems to me that you've designed everything from books to businesses. And I was a bit embarrassed because I said, well, yes, actually that's true. I've had that opportunity. And so I would always describe myself as a designer and design being so important in the principle that everything manmade in this world is designed. There is nothing that is not designed. The chair that you're sitting on, the headphones you're wearing, your shirt, the room you're sitting in, all of that is design. And what that says to me is that we have an opportunity every time that we are given something to bring into this world, it could be a gift. And that design allows us to really think fundamentally about how that is going to be manifest in the world. And I think it also applies to cultures. It applies to organizations, it applies to experiences that we could be creating. All of that, and it all takes me back to book design. Derek said to me a couple of things. One was is whenever you design anything, Alan, you should make it feel inevitable. And that was a real head scratcher for me at 22. And I said to him, well, what do you mean by that, Derek? He said, well, what I mean by that is that your client could not imagine that any other way. And of course, there's no kind of slight rule that you could run over that. But as a sort of a challenge to yourself to do your very best work, I thought was absolutely extraordinary. And the other thing he said to me was is when I asked him about his book designing, and he's an I say, well, Derek, when you when you design a book, where do you start? And he looked at me and he said, Well, I start with the space between the lines and now you can go home. And This is how he would mentor me sometimes. And I was really angry about that because I thought we should be talking about typefaces and type sizes and all sorts of things. But what he was asking me to do was to conceive of the outcome that I wanted to create, the ultimate outcome I wanted to create. And in that sense, that idea and approach to design has always stuck with me and that we have to hold those two things at the same time. great attention to detail, but also not letting go of the final outcome or experience that you want to create for your customers or whatever it is that you're making it for.
speaker-1: I love the backstory that took you back to your your times in publishing when you first started out and you talk about bringing, you know, an idea into reality and and making a book. You did something similar with your idea for beautiful businesses. Can you tell us a little bit about where this idea came from?
speaker-0: Absolutely. I had a road to Damascus experience a number of years ago when I was kind of known as someone that could take on very challenging innovation projects and bring them to market and a whole variety of different ways. And I did that in the big tech arena. I did that for companies like Coca-Cola working in the automotive industries, et cetera, et cetera. But what I felt ultimately was is the I was in service to an idea that we were only interested in, or the project was only interested in, how much money we can make, how much profit can we make at all at any cost. And the reality is, is until it costs you everything. And that had a huge friction with my sense of ethics and values and the idea of creativity should really be born out of... that sense of you're bringing something good into the world. There's a lady called Iris Murdoch who wrote a wonderful book called The Sovereignty of Good. She was a Cambridge philosopher and academic here in Cambridge. And she said in this book, the good or the seeking of the good should not be the name of an esoteric object, but should be the tool of every rational man. And in the work that I was doing, I felt that the good had been... kind of forgotten on the wayside in terms of this idea of growth, exponential growth and all of those things. So I asked myself, I need to stop doing this and I need to find my mission and what is important to me. And I sat with that for a very long period of time. And what came to me actually was a memory as a seven-year-old boy, I'm on a beach in Cornwall in England. family holiday. My mum and father are there as is my brother and sister. My mum for many reasons was a very anxious woman, worried a lot about many things. And to watch her on the beach as a purely joyful human being gave me as a seven-year-old boy extraordinary joy. My father was a beautiful man, he always was, he only ever lost his temper with me and my brother once in our entire life. He was always up for fun. He was always up for a game. You know, he was a great human being. And I think to just watch that relationship on the beach was just, you know, wonderful to see brothers and sisters. You know, sometimes we don't always get on well with our siblings as we know. So they were all cool in the gang and I was playing with my toys. And I thought, you know what? I'm at one with the ones I love the most. I'm at one with myself. And as we all know, there are times when we aren't at one with ourselves in the way that we could be or should be. I'm at one with the natural world. And that is an integral sense of a very powerful feeling of homecoming. And the only word that I can use to describe that is beauty and beautiful. And so I really thought about that then in terms of my work that I was doing and whether actually we should have a return to beauty within the context of business and what did that mean. And so I feel that as you know because what we've been through over this last 12 months with the pandemic but actually really what we've gone through over the last 30 years where the promise of there is a certain way of doing business, which is actually going to benefit all. We actually see that this is not really the case. We're hurting ourselves. We're hurting the planet. And that's because I think that we've not put beauty on the table as the way that we should be thinking about how we create businesses in this world and what their purpose is, what their mission is and what they should be delivering. So, you know, the title of the new book. you know, the subtitle is how to make and lead a business the world needs. The emphasis is on this on the word need, not want. That was the reason why the idea of Beautiful Business came to me. And I think it speaks a universal language to a lot of people, of course, surface level, people might say, well, yeah, it's just about aesthetics. But reality is it's not it's actually something much more fundamental than that. Waldo Emerson, one of your famous philosophers in America said, beauty gets us out of surfaces and into the foundations of things. And I think business needs to get into the foundations of things in the same way to deliver what I think this world needs right now.
speaker-1: Well tell us little bit more about that. I I love the backstory on beauty and being one with yourself. What what defines a beautiful business?
speaker-0: Well, I mean, think that the other part of that story and your question is, for me, the root word of beauty, where it takes us to is around the idea of regeneration and generosity. So the laws of the universe are said to be beautiful. Einstein's theory of relativity, Paul Dirac's theory about how subatomic particles interact with each other over huge distances in space. The macro and the micro, and in fact Einstein and Dirac had a conversation over many, years with each other about how do we take these two very different types of, know, concepts of the world, the infinite and the absolutely fine, you know, very, very small work. And so the reality is, that Nature is designed therefore around the concept of regeneration. The root word, as I said, of beauty is around regenerative. She has run one of the longest, well, she has run actually, not the one of, the longest R &D projects ever known to this world. And she's got a very interesting playbook about how we might hang around for eternity. And there was some other thoughts that sort of came to my mind around that, which is, Yes, she's there to support the needs of all life. She's not wasteful. There's a very long horizon line. And it's back to the idea that beauty therefore and regeneration exists in the concept of form as in process and as in ecosystems that we could be learning from. In the book, I use a model which is about values and metrics. So, and I think that I make the argument that we have to shift from what I call an extractive economy to a regenerative economy. That conversation is already on the table because I think it takes us also beyond sustainability. Sustainability has got some real challenges with it because of its moral coding. the idea of stopping something. And for people which aren't signed up to that agenda, that will be challenging and confusing for people. But I think it's almost limiting. Somebody once asked me, he said, so what can the language of beauty give the world a sustainability? And I said, well, for a start, it gives them oxygen and it gives it lifeblood. And it gives it actually all the things that we would describe as human beings that make living on this planet a wonderful thing to be. It's about joy and it's about wonder. And the reason why when we walk into any natural environment where it's actually a pristine piece of the natural world, our DNA recognizes it because it signals to us that life can thrive in this place. And that to me, is a very real challenge to business today and also to the idea of telling the story around the sustainability agenda, which is actually beauty is multi-dimensional and it's expansive in terms of speaking to every aspect of us as a human being, whether that's in our moral coding, how we are in the world, how we think, how we speak. That to me is kind of very, very important. And I think that story needs to be taken to business now, which is you can be part of creating something which needs to be around for a much, much longer than thinking around timelines of five to 10 to seven years. And to me, that's extremely important. I was talking to a friend of mine, he founded the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College in London, a guy called Peter Childs. and we were in conversation and we were talking about the idea that what if businesses that were regenerative were thinking about the contributions they could make to the world, we see those things as gifts bestowed, which kind of changes the relationship and the nature of who you're in service to and why you're working in that way. And it's back to... the kind of table that I put together, which is the first question I'd ask is in a regenerative economies, what contribution are you really making to this world? Not what you're taking, but what are you contributing? And that to me seemed like a really important question or value or metric that we should be considering.
speaker-2: Yeah, absolutely. I I'm so intrigued about your concept of beautiful business and especially as you contrast that thinking around that of sustainability and and certainly beauty is something that we're all attracted to. And as as you wrote the book, you studied a lot of businesses that have made great steps towards becoming beautiful businesses. And I I was hoping you could share an example of of one of those businesses. with our audience to give them an idea of what it means to be a beautiful business.
speaker-0: I'd love to. it actually starts. So I'm going to talk about a company called Veja. V-E-J-A. It's a sneaker brand. Veja is Portuguese. And what it means is transparency and to look behind or to see the truth. And the story starts with a guy called Sebastian Kopp and his friend, Christoph. They are running, well, they were actually initially merchant bankers. And then they sort of got interested in the area of sustainability, set up an NGO, which tried to help companies think very differently about their social corporate responsibility, et cetera, et cetera, and thought there could be a way that they could do that. They ended up visiting lots and lots of factories around the world. in India, in China, and they asked actually to see the living quarters of people that were working in this very well-run, very efficient, very clean factory. And what they found absolutely shocked them. And they realized that their work was completely wasted. They felt that they had to do something that was good, bring something transformational into this world and how to do it. So why did two merchant bankers decide to set up a sneaker brand? Because they weren't into fashion, but what they realized was is that their generation wore sneakers. And if there was a way of speaking to this generation, it was through the shoes on their feet. And that to me is very important because all of the businesses that I have been looking at mostly on the whole is this deep, deep sense of mission that comes out of, can no longer stand by and watch this happen. I have got to create a business that is going to transform. So they decided they would design a sneaker brand. As I said, design was very important, a big commitment to that, but their commitment to the entire supply chain, where they got the rubber from. So they spent two years negotiating with people in the Amazonian forest where rubber trees grew wild, which could be harvested sustainably and regeneratively. It mattered to them that that is where those materials came from. It mattered to them that they didn't use chemicals in the dying processes that they were creating that would actually be toxic going back into the sort of water systems that they were using. It mattered to them that they paid for their organic cotton with their farmers upfront so that they weren't traded as a commodity. There are many, many materials that we use in the West, like coffee, for example, which is traded as a commodity. Ergo, therefore, all the people that grow that particular crop are also traded as a commodity. And essentially what these... these guys do is they microscopically look to every element of their supply chain, their processes, their employment laws, very clear practices around there will be no child slave labor, et cetera, et cetera, and to bring these sneakers to market. They started it with a 50,000 euro loan. and they kept very tight control of their company. I think the first round of sneakers that they sold was four and a half thousand. That was 10 years ago. And now actually when you walk around the world in the high street, there's a lot more sneakers with the V shape, which is the V logo. And that to me is an example of a beautiful business where you are there to make profit. There's nothing wrong with making money. know, businesses are there to do that. But they've used their business to demonstrate to other people in their industry that you don't have to run it on an exploitative and extractive basis. And I suppose in a way, I get very frustrated and at times angry when I have this binary conversation with people, you know, I'm sorry, but it's only business. you know, my job is to give, you know, the top dollar, you know, shareholder return to the business. And actually, it doesn't matter that all the other things I do to the people that I employ, or the people that are involved in the supply chain, that we can exploit them, we can damage them, we can damage the earth, we can damage the planet. But as long as we're giving this nice little bundle of $100 bills to our shareholders, everything's great in the world. And all I would say is just look at the world we're in right now. And that is the result of working on that basis.
speaker-1: You you described Alan, you described your own road to Damascus moment. what like what what advice would you give leaders who want to create a beautiful company? How do how does a leader get the mirror held up to them to have this road to Damascus moment? Because I I could hear so many leaders saying we are deeply mission driven. But but you had a moment on that road to Damascus where you saw things differently. What what advice would you give them?
speaker-0: Well, I mean, obviously, I can't really say go and have your own epiphany moment because as you know, they don't turn up. You don't diary them in on a Monday morning, right? It doesn't work that way. Yeah. That's why there are epiphanies. But I would ask a different set of questions. Is this go home? You know, if you've got a family. as a leader, you know, go home to your family and then look at them and say, is this a product or a service I want to sell to you? Is this something I want you to eat? Is this something that I want you to drink? These are really simple questions. Am I living my life as beautifully as I possibly can? Am I bringing the good into the world? Am I being a good ancestor? Will I be able to create legacy? If I can't, why not? Somebody wants to ask me a question about leadership, because in the book, there's three big sections. I talk about foundations, I talk about leadership, and I talk about making, because I think all of those are integral. We have to see it as a whole, as wholesome. And in a bit like the guy that thought he had caught me out by saying, so what can the language of beauty give the world of sustainability, which my response was actually quite a lot. If you go and think about it. This other interviewer said to me, so Alan, here you are philosophizing about beauty and beautiful businesses and leadership. So how would you apply that on a practical basis? And I said, it's very simple. You're in a board meeting. The company's under pressure. It's got to make some tough decisions. Okay, it's like, I understand that things are never always black and white, right? are we doing the right thing for the wrong reasons? Or is it just wrong because it's wrong? I don't know. However, I said to him, this is just one thing that I would suggest that any leader would ask when they're in that meeting before they make that final decision. Is this the most beautiful decision we can make now? And he looked at me and I said, so what's going on inside you now is you're starting to unpack my sense of responsibility, my sense of accountability as a human being. I'm asking questions of the team collectively. I'm asking questions then of this board. I'm asking questions of the organization by simply asking that question. And I said, you know, you could bring that down into the munity eye of a team working on a shift and just coming together at the end of the day and say, did we do that shift as beautifully as we possibly could? The other thing that I ask people to do as a practice is I talk about language. Language to me has always been very important because we use it all the time. And actually we forget how important language is because as it is, as you know, more than words, right? And again, what we've witnessed over this last 12 months, for whole variety of different reasons, and maybe the last four years on your side of the pond of mine is language changes the way we see the world. So what I ask people to do is to sit down and write out what is the language of beauty. If you were to write out like word for word, I mean, you don't need, it's not an essay. So you would say, I don't know, compassion. might be associated with my concept of beauty, right? Then you ask yourself, what does that mean to me? What does that mean to me as a leader? What does that mean to my team? And to work through that and equally then what you get is something which seemingly seems very simple, but is actually asking you lots of really profound questions. And then you write down another list, which is, what is not the language of beauty. And then you think about that in terms of yourself, your leadership and your organization and maybe your company culture. And what you start to understand is there maybe are all sorts of things that going on that you're not attending to in the way that you should. Also from a leadership perspective, say that, well, I say we need as many beautiful leaders and makers in this world as we possibly can. Right. So it becomes something. However, to do that, if you're going to create a beautiful business, you've got to work on yourself first. You you've got to be your primary source responsibility because if you aren't turning up to the workplace and the world as your best self, how can you deliver something that's going to be the best that you can make? You know, and we know that, you know, within organizations, a lot of a lot of command and control still. I'm witness to that through things that I can see going on very sadly. Because the reality is also, if we think about the concept of teamwork or culture, the ones that thrive the most, I think, are the ones that are forged in the crucible of trust and openness. that's how you give your best self. It's how you have your best ideas, I think. Of course, there will always be timelines which are pressurized and all the rest of it. We have that, but if you want to create a high performance team, they have to really trust each other. They might get away with it once, they might get away with it twice, but I think if you want to endure and really... do something very successful, then that quality of trustfulness is absolutely implicit. And to me, that's all goes back to that route about being beautiful and what beauty means as a consequence of that. I hope that was helpful.
speaker-2: Absolutely. Yeah. And something for all of us to think about and very inspiring and really enjoyed our conversation today, Alan. you know, we always close as this is the designing next podcast and we're certainly talking about designing the future and so let's end with you know, what needs to happen for beautiful businesses to be more prevalent in the future? How does this become even more Mainstream.
speaker-0: I think that for me, be comfortable with the idea that we can put beauty and business together as a concept. We are offering up ways for people maybe to engage in that dialogue and that debate. You know, in the book, as I said, I've put in, you know, 50 businesses that I believe to be beautiful, which range from, you know, a one man ceramics business to a country. go on that journey, go on that way of inquiry in thinking about, know, is what I'm creating something that really matters to the world? Am I generating something which is regenerative? Am I creating something which is transformative? Am I creating something that is truly useful? Am I being a good ancestor? And I think the... It seems to me that outside of the mainstream media, there is a cohort of people, a generation which is absolutely desperate for a new world to be born and to be made. And I think have that conversation with your members of your team, with the organization, with the board. How is it that we can really be a contributor to this world? Because what I do believe is that business is the engine of transformation. It's not politics. It's not politicians. Certainly not right now anyway, wherever you look around the world, unless it's Jacinda Ardern and maybe the Prime Minister of New Zealand. And if there was a case for cloning, she's it for me. I think that level of dialogue and inquiry is the thing that is very important. I hope the book and the work starts something. We're working on a school idea, so maybe we can start to bring people together that would want to be part of that journey and the exploration. I mean, we don't quite know what it's going to look like. I mean, I'm not being prescriptive by this by any stretch of the imagination at all, but what I'm saying is, I think if we see beauty as our homecoming, if we really embrace it as the model that actually can take us home, then we've got a much better chance. And I think that it offers something which is really important for every single human being on this planet, which is hope and optimism. And everyone is stimulated by hope and optimism. You know, it's easy to be destructive. It's easy to exploit people's anger. It's easy to look at the short term. But I think if we speak truly to people's hearts, then actually they will want to come on that journey because they know that that is something that is really important to them and their children.
speaker-1: Well, Alan, I I really inspiring conversation. I hope that coming out of a pandemic, this is exactly the message, the book we need to
speaker-2: That's right.
speaker-1: I a lot of times I think there's a lot of positive outcomes when we see something as disruptive as what we've been through this past year. People see a different path. And you're offering that through this book. So we're we're really honored to have you on our podcast today.
speaker-0: Great. Well, I very much enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me.
speaker-2: Yeah, thank you, Alan. And and the book again, Do Build, How to Make and Lead a Business The World Needs. And it's available launching this month. In fact, when th this podcast publishes, it'll be the day after your US launch date. And it's available wherever you buy books. So please check it out.
speaker-0: It is. Thank you very much.
speaker-2: Thank you, Alan. So it was a really great conversation with Alan. I'm sure a lot of us, you know, come out of a listening to a conversation or participating in a conversation like that, thinking a bit differently, being reflective. Chad, what stood out to you?
speaker-1: Steve, you know, I am an undergrad liberal arts major. and at one point thought I was gonna spend my life writing and I still enjoy writing. So I always like to talk to people like Alan who use words such as beauty and regenerative as opposed to sustainability. What he's described is how sis sustainability has some real challenges with it because of its moral coding, the idea of stopping something for people which which aren't maybe really what they're signed up for with that agenda and how it can be confusing for people. So I just appreciate what he said in terms of that maybe being a limiting way of describing what he is describing through beauty and regeneration. I also like the idea around regenerative economies and asking ourselves what contribution are we really making to the world? Not what we're taking, but what we're contributing.
speaker-2: Yeah, I think Ellen gave us a lot of really good questions to think about in it as we are in our day-to-day business. You know, the question you just brought up about contributions to the world, you know, that simple question, you know, is this the most beautiful decision we can make now? Definitely gives us a new perspective about our day-to-day work. so really great interview. Really enjoyed it. And to make sure that our new episodes are delivered to you every two weeks, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
speaker-1: We're designers, so of course we want your feedback. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify or contact us directly at podcast at castinhew dot com.
speaker-2: Thanks everybody, and we will speak with you soon.
speaker-2: Welcome to episode number 15 of Designing Next, achieving growth through transformation and innovation. I'm your host, Steve Koch, and with me today as always is Chad Bruff. Chad, today is all about designing beautiful businesses.
speaker-1: Yes, Steve, I I don't think we always use the word beautiful to describe business. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation with our guest, who I find r is to be a really eloquent speaker and of course he's an author and I think it's somebody that our audience is going to enjoy.
speaker-2: Yeah, that's really true. You know, that beautiful is definitely not a word that people think of when they go into a business meeting or they start thinking about business strategy. But I think I think our guest today will maybe make us all think a little differently. And we're gonna be speaking to Alan Moore. He's a designer, he's a business innovator, he's also an author, and he has a new book coming out this week. It's called Do Build How to Make and Lead a Business The World Needs. And this book is an extension of you know what he says is his life's mission. Which is to help businesses discover their own unique beauty. So today, Chad, you and I are going to talk to Alan about what a beautiful business is and why he's on this mission to transform business through beauty. you know, Alan really believes overall that the world of business is changing, that the single pursuit of profit at any cost has been replaced by a desire to build companies that create a better future and also enjoy commercial success. So in his new book, Do Build, he draws on his years of research into some of the most pioneering and progressive businesses on the planet. And he speaks to their purpose driven founders and discovers that it is possible to lead with generosity, to have a transparent supply chain, and to design products and services that are really well considered and joyful and create a company culture where individuals flourish. it's something we can really think about. It's a mission that's really inspiring. And I'm I think this is gonna be an insightful conversation. Chad, what can listeners look forward to?
speaker-1: I think they have a lot to look forward to just in terms of the language that Alan uses d w with with his vision, you know. Yeah. The the world occurs through language and at some point in Alan's life, he had a road to to Damascus experience that led him to this mission of creating beautiful businesses and what it means. And I'm looking forward to learning from Alan and how we could return to beauty within the context of a business. Also, I think Alan has a lot to say around the sustainability movement and some language that he believes maybe moves that mission forward around sustainability. what he describes as the extractive economy versus the regenerative economy. And I really want to understand more about what he means by that.
speaker-2: Yes, I know Alan has so much passion. I'm I'm really looking forward to hearing his perspective and really listening to the the advice he would give to leaders who are on a journey to create these types of beautiful and transformative and differentiating businesses. So we're gonna get to the interview with Alan right after the break.
speaker-0: Hi, this is Whitney Driscoll and I'm the Director of Strategy for Cast and Hue. Cast and Hue is an experienced design consultancy and a sponsor of Designing Next. Today I'm with our senior strategist, Jonathan Pattice.
speaker-2: Jonathan, tell me how you connected to virtual workshops since the pandemic.
speaker-0: We used to run most of our research. New virtual tools like digital whiteboards were able to easily organize data, create fast
speaker-2: Fat.
speaker-0: and detailed prototypes and get people more comfortable with sharing their opinions. Also, this can all be done from anywhere in world, having
speaker-2: World without having
speaker-0: to travel. How do you ensure people stay engaged when they aren't in person? We use rooms
speaker-2: Utilise breakout.
speaker-0: a lot, depending on the level of engagement we need. And we also encourage people to own ideas and explain them in their own words when sharing with the larger group. Where can people learn more?
speaker-2: You can learn more at castonhue dot com slash
speaker-0: or see the link in the show notes.
speaker-2: Welcome Alan. Thank you so much for joining us today.
speaker-0: Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's a real pleasure and joy to be speaking with you guys today as well.
speaker-2: Yeah, for us for us as well. We're excited to dig in and and learn about beautiful business. And to start out, it'd be great if you could share a little bit just about your background as a designer.
speaker-0: So my story starts actually by falling accidentally into a publishing degree, a oxapolitechnic. And the result of that was a project where I had to design, edit and manufacture a book. So I had to find a manuscript. It was a friend's poetry and then go through all of the production processes that you would do to produce a book. And I can remember standing there after I'd sort of bound 70 copies of this book and just went, so you can actually take an idea and you then actually make an artifact in the world. This idea has been in this person's head and now it's disseminated. And it just kind of really caught me. And I decided therefore that I wanted to be a designer and Thereafter, I the course is very general. So it wasn't a design course. It was just a book publishing course, but I fell in love with the idea of design. And what I did was is actually, I ended up being mentored by a guy called Derek Bursall, who is a very, very famous book designer. And Derek took me under his wing after I'd been very persistent about that kind of relationship that I wanted to have with him. And he showed me... and helped me in a very extraordinary way to think about design and the making of design and how important it was in the world. And I think the two parts of that which I think are important is the sense of craft. Book design is a craft skill and you are in service as a craftsman, craftswoman, craftsperson to the greater good of society. That was one of the other things that I really took from my journey at the very, very beginning. And from there, I fell into graphic design, into advertising, and then just went on this incredible journey where at the time I think that we were allowed to work and play maybe, play and work in a whole variety of different ways with many things. And eventually, after 25 years, somebody said to me, it seems to me that you've designed everything from books to businesses. And I was a bit embarrassed because I said, well, yes, actually that's true. I've had that opportunity. And so I would always describe myself as a designer and design being so important in the principle that everything manmade in this world is designed. There is nothing that is not designed. The chair that you're sitting on, the headphones you're wearing, your shirt, the room you're sitting in, all of that is design. And what that says to me is that we have an opportunity every time that we are given something to bring into this world, it could be a gift. And that design allows us to really think fundamentally about how that is going to be manifest in the world. And I think it also applies to cultures. It applies to organizations, it applies to experiences that we could be creating. All of that, and it all takes me back to book design. Derek said to me a couple of things. One was is whenever you design anything, Alan, you should make it feel inevitable. And that was a real head scratcher for me at 22. And I said to him, well, what do you mean by that, Derek? He said, well, what I mean by that is that your client could not imagine that any other way. And of course, there's no kind of slight rule that you could run over that. But as a sort of a challenge to yourself to do your very best work, I thought was absolutely extraordinary. And the other thing he said to me was is when I asked him about his book designing, and he's an I say, well, Derek, when you when you design a book, where do you start? And he looked at me and he said, Well, I start with the space between the lines and now you can go home. And This is how he would mentor me sometimes. And I was really angry about that because I thought we should be talking about typefaces and type sizes and all sorts of things. But what he was asking me to do was to conceive of the outcome that I wanted to create, the ultimate outcome I wanted to create. And in that sense, that idea and approach to design has always stuck with me and that we have to hold those two things at the same time. great attention to detail, but also not letting go of the final outcome or experience that you want to create for your customers or whatever it is that you're making it for.
speaker-1: I love the backstory that took you back to your your times in publishing when you first started out and you talk about bringing, you know, an idea into reality and and making a book. You did something similar with your idea for beautiful businesses. Can you tell us a little bit about where this idea came from?
speaker-0: Absolutely. I had a road to Damascus experience a number of years ago when I was kind of known as someone that could take on very challenging innovation projects and bring them to market and a whole variety of different ways. And I did that in the big tech arena. I did that for companies like Coca-Cola working in the automotive industries, et cetera, et cetera. But what I felt ultimately was is the I was in service to an idea that we were only interested in, or the project was only interested in, how much money we can make, how much profit can we make at all at any cost. And the reality is, is until it costs you everything. And that had a huge friction with my sense of ethics and values and the idea of creativity should really be born out of... that sense of you're bringing something good into the world. There's a lady called Iris Murdoch who wrote a wonderful book called The Sovereignty of Good. She was a Cambridge philosopher and academic here in Cambridge. And she said in this book, the good or the seeking of the good should not be the name of an esoteric object, but should be the tool of every rational man. And in the work that I was doing, I felt that the good had been... kind of forgotten on the wayside in terms of this idea of growth, exponential growth and all of those things. So I asked myself, I need to stop doing this and I need to find my mission and what is important to me. And I sat with that for a very long period of time. And what came to me actually was a memory as a seven-year-old boy, I'm on a beach in Cornwall in England. family holiday. My mum and father are there as is my brother and sister. My mum for many reasons was a very anxious woman, worried a lot about many things. And to watch her on the beach as a purely joyful human being gave me as a seven-year-old boy extraordinary joy. My father was a beautiful man, he always was, he only ever lost his temper with me and my brother once in our entire life. He was always up for fun. He was always up for a game. You know, he was a great human being. And I think to just watch that relationship on the beach was just, you know, wonderful to see brothers and sisters. You know, sometimes we don't always get on well with our siblings as we know. So they were all cool in the gang and I was playing with my toys. And I thought, you know what? I'm at one with the ones I love the most. I'm at one with myself. And as we all know, there are times when we aren't at one with ourselves in the way that we could be or should be. I'm at one with the natural world. And that is an integral sense of a very powerful feeling of homecoming. And the only word that I can use to describe that is beauty and beautiful. And so I really thought about that then in terms of my work that I was doing and whether actually we should have a return to beauty within the context of business and what did that mean. And so I feel that as you know because what we've been through over this last 12 months with the pandemic but actually really what we've gone through over the last 30 years where the promise of there is a certain way of doing business, which is actually going to benefit all. We actually see that this is not really the case. We're hurting ourselves. We're hurting the planet. And that's because I think that we've not put beauty on the table as the way that we should be thinking about how we create businesses in this world and what their purpose is, what their mission is and what they should be delivering. So, you know, the title of the new book. you know, the subtitle is how to make and lead a business the world needs. The emphasis is on this on the word need, not want. That was the reason why the idea of Beautiful Business came to me. And I think it speaks a universal language to a lot of people, of course, surface level, people might say, well, yeah, it's just about aesthetics. But reality is it's not it's actually something much more fundamental than that. Waldo Emerson, one of your famous philosophers in America said, beauty gets us out of surfaces and into the foundations of things. And I think business needs to get into the foundations of things in the same way to deliver what I think this world needs right now.
speaker-1: Well tell us little bit more about that. I I love the backstory on beauty and being one with yourself. What what defines a beautiful business?
speaker-0: Well, I mean, think that the other part of that story and your question is, for me, the root word of beauty, where it takes us to is around the idea of regeneration and generosity. So the laws of the universe are said to be beautiful. Einstein's theory of relativity, Paul Dirac's theory about how subatomic particles interact with each other over huge distances in space. The macro and the micro, and in fact Einstein and Dirac had a conversation over many, years with each other about how do we take these two very different types of, know, concepts of the world, the infinite and the absolutely fine, you know, very, very small work. And so the reality is, that Nature is designed therefore around the concept of regeneration. The root word, as I said, of beauty is around regenerative. She has run one of the longest, well, she has run actually, not the one of, the longest R &D projects ever known to this world. And she's got a very interesting playbook about how we might hang around for eternity. And there was some other thoughts that sort of came to my mind around that, which is, Yes, she's there to support the needs of all life. She's not wasteful. There's a very long horizon line. And it's back to the idea that beauty therefore and regeneration exists in the concept of form as in process and as in ecosystems that we could be learning from. In the book, I use a model which is about values and metrics. So, and I think that I make the argument that we have to shift from what I call an extractive economy to a regenerative economy. That conversation is already on the table because I think it takes us also beyond sustainability. Sustainability has got some real challenges with it because of its moral coding. the idea of stopping something. And for people which aren't signed up to that agenda, that will be challenging and confusing for people. But I think it's almost limiting. Somebody once asked me, he said, so what can the language of beauty give the world a sustainability? And I said, well, for a start, it gives them oxygen and it gives it lifeblood. And it gives it actually all the things that we would describe as human beings that make living on this planet a wonderful thing to be. It's about joy and it's about wonder. And the reason why when we walk into any natural environment where it's actually a pristine piece of the natural world, our DNA recognizes it because it signals to us that life can thrive in this place. And that to me, is a very real challenge to business today and also to the idea of telling the story around the sustainability agenda, which is actually beauty is multi-dimensional and it's expansive in terms of speaking to every aspect of us as a human being, whether that's in our moral coding, how we are in the world, how we think, how we speak. That to me is kind of very, very important. And I think that story needs to be taken to business now, which is you can be part of creating something which needs to be around for a much, much longer than thinking around timelines of five to 10 to seven years. And to me, that's extremely important. I was talking to a friend of mine, he founded the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College in London, a guy called Peter Childs. and we were in conversation and we were talking about the idea that what if businesses that were regenerative were thinking about the contributions they could make to the world, we see those things as gifts bestowed, which kind of changes the relationship and the nature of who you're in service to and why you're working in that way. And it's back to... the kind of table that I put together, which is the first question I'd ask is in a regenerative economies, what contribution are you really making to this world? Not what you're taking, but what are you contributing? And that to me seemed like a really important question or value or metric that we should be considering.
speaker-2: Yeah, absolutely. I I'm so intrigued about your concept of beautiful business and especially as you contrast that thinking around that of sustainability and and certainly beauty is something that we're all attracted to. And as as you wrote the book, you studied a lot of businesses that have made great steps towards becoming beautiful businesses. And I I was hoping you could share an example of of one of those businesses. with our audience to give them an idea of what it means to be a beautiful business.
speaker-0: I'd love to. it actually starts. So I'm going to talk about a company called Veja. V-E-J-A. It's a sneaker brand. Veja is Portuguese. And what it means is transparency and to look behind or to see the truth. And the story starts with a guy called Sebastian Kopp and his friend, Christoph. They are running, well, they were actually initially merchant bankers. And then they sort of got interested in the area of sustainability, set up an NGO, which tried to help companies think very differently about their social corporate responsibility, et cetera, et cetera, and thought there could be a way that they could do that. They ended up visiting lots and lots of factories around the world. in India, in China, and they asked actually to see the living quarters of people that were working in this very well-run, very efficient, very clean factory. And what they found absolutely shocked them. And they realized that their work was completely wasted. They felt that they had to do something that was good, bring something transformational into this world and how to do it. So why did two merchant bankers decide to set up a sneaker brand? Because they weren't into fashion, but what they realized was is that their generation wore sneakers. And if there was a way of speaking to this generation, it was through the shoes on their feet. And that to me is very important because all of the businesses that I have been looking at mostly on the whole is this deep, deep sense of mission that comes out of, can no longer stand by and watch this happen. I have got to create a business that is going to transform. So they decided they would design a sneaker brand. As I said, design was very important, a big commitment to that, but their commitment to the entire supply chain, where they got the rubber from. So they spent two years negotiating with people in the Amazonian forest where rubber trees grew wild, which could be harvested sustainably and regeneratively. It mattered to them that that is where those materials came from. It mattered to them that they didn't use chemicals in the dying processes that they were creating that would actually be toxic going back into the sort of water systems that they were using. It mattered to them that they paid for their organic cotton with their farmers upfront so that they weren't traded as a commodity. There are many, many materials that we use in the West, like coffee, for example, which is traded as a commodity. Ergo, therefore, all the people that grow that particular crop are also traded as a commodity. And essentially what these... these guys do is they microscopically look to every element of their supply chain, their processes, their employment laws, very clear practices around there will be no child slave labor, et cetera, et cetera, and to bring these sneakers to market. They started it with a 50,000 euro loan. and they kept very tight control of their company. I think the first round of sneakers that they sold was four and a half thousand. That was 10 years ago. And now actually when you walk around the world in the high street, there's a lot more sneakers with the V shape, which is the V logo. And that to me is an example of a beautiful business where you are there to make profit. There's nothing wrong with making money. know, businesses are there to do that. But they've used their business to demonstrate to other people in their industry that you don't have to run it on an exploitative and extractive basis. And I suppose in a way, I get very frustrated and at times angry when I have this binary conversation with people, you know, I'm sorry, but it's only business. you know, my job is to give, you know, the top dollar, you know, shareholder return to the business. And actually, it doesn't matter that all the other things I do to the people that I employ, or the people that are involved in the supply chain, that we can exploit them, we can damage them, we can damage the earth, we can damage the planet. But as long as we're giving this nice little bundle of $100 bills to our shareholders, everything's great in the world. And all I would say is just look at the world we're in right now. And that is the result of working on that basis.
speaker-1: You you described Alan, you described your own road to Damascus moment. what like what what advice would you give leaders who want to create a beautiful company? How do how does a leader get the mirror held up to them to have this road to Damascus moment? Because I I could hear so many leaders saying we are deeply mission driven. But but you had a moment on that road to Damascus where you saw things differently. What what advice would you give them?
speaker-0: Well, I mean, obviously, I can't really say go and have your own epiphany moment because as you know, they don't turn up. You don't diary them in on a Monday morning, right? It doesn't work that way. Yeah. That's why there are epiphanies. But I would ask a different set of questions. Is this go home? You know, if you've got a family. as a leader, you know, go home to your family and then look at them and say, is this a product or a service I want to sell to you? Is this something I want you to eat? Is this something that I want you to drink? These are really simple questions. Am I living my life as beautifully as I possibly can? Am I bringing the good into the world? Am I being a good ancestor? Will I be able to create legacy? If I can't, why not? Somebody wants to ask me a question about leadership, because in the book, there's three big sections. I talk about foundations, I talk about leadership, and I talk about making, because I think all of those are integral. We have to see it as a whole, as wholesome. And in a bit like the guy that thought he had caught me out by saying, so what can the language of beauty give the world of sustainability, which my response was actually quite a lot. If you go and think about it. This other interviewer said to me, so Alan, here you are philosophizing about beauty and beautiful businesses and leadership. So how would you apply that on a practical basis? And I said, it's very simple. You're in a board meeting. The company's under pressure. It's got to make some tough decisions. Okay, it's like, I understand that things are never always black and white, right? are we doing the right thing for the wrong reasons? Or is it just wrong because it's wrong? I don't know. However, I said to him, this is just one thing that I would suggest that any leader would ask when they're in that meeting before they make that final decision. Is this the most beautiful decision we can make now? And he looked at me and I said, so what's going on inside you now is you're starting to unpack my sense of responsibility, my sense of accountability as a human being. I'm asking questions of the team collectively. I'm asking questions then of this board. I'm asking questions of the organization by simply asking that question. And I said, you know, you could bring that down into the munity eye of a team working on a shift and just coming together at the end of the day and say, did we do that shift as beautifully as we possibly could? The other thing that I ask people to do as a practice is I talk about language. Language to me has always been very important because we use it all the time. And actually we forget how important language is because as it is, as you know, more than words, right? And again, what we've witnessed over this last 12 months, for whole variety of different reasons, and maybe the last four years on your side of the pond of mine is language changes the way we see the world. So what I ask people to do is to sit down and write out what is the language of beauty. If you were to write out like word for word, I mean, you don't need, it's not an essay. So you would say, I don't know, compassion. might be associated with my concept of beauty, right? Then you ask yourself, what does that mean to me? What does that mean to me as a leader? What does that mean to my team? And to work through that and equally then what you get is something which seemingly seems very simple, but is actually asking you lots of really profound questions. And then you write down another list, which is, what is not the language of beauty. And then you think about that in terms of yourself, your leadership and your organization and maybe your company culture. And what you start to understand is there maybe are all sorts of things that going on that you're not attending to in the way that you should. Also from a leadership perspective, say that, well, I say we need as many beautiful leaders and makers in this world as we possibly can. Right. So it becomes something. However, to do that, if you're going to create a beautiful business, you've got to work on yourself first. You you've got to be your primary source responsibility because if you aren't turning up to the workplace and the world as your best self, how can you deliver something that's going to be the best that you can make? You know, and we know that, you know, within organizations, a lot of a lot of command and control still. I'm witness to that through things that I can see going on very sadly. Because the reality is also, if we think about the concept of teamwork or culture, the ones that thrive the most, I think, are the ones that are forged in the crucible of trust and openness. that's how you give your best self. It's how you have your best ideas, I think. Of course, there will always be timelines which are pressurized and all the rest of it. We have that, but if you want to create a high performance team, they have to really trust each other. They might get away with it once, they might get away with it twice, but I think if you want to endure and really... do something very successful, then that quality of trustfulness is absolutely implicit. And to me, that's all goes back to that route about being beautiful and what beauty means as a consequence of that. I hope that was helpful.
speaker-2: Absolutely. Yeah. And something for all of us to think about and very inspiring and really enjoyed our conversation today, Alan. you know, we always close as this is the designing next podcast and we're certainly talking about designing the future and so let's end with you know, what needs to happen for beautiful businesses to be more prevalent in the future? How does this become even more Mainstream.
speaker-0: I think that for me, be comfortable with the idea that we can put beauty and business together as a concept. We are offering up ways for people maybe to engage in that dialogue and that debate. You know, in the book, as I said, I've put in, you know, 50 businesses that I believe to be beautiful, which range from, you know, a one man ceramics business to a country. go on that journey, go on that way of inquiry in thinking about, know, is what I'm creating something that really matters to the world? Am I generating something which is regenerative? Am I creating something which is transformative? Am I creating something that is truly useful? Am I being a good ancestor? And I think the... It seems to me that outside of the mainstream media, there is a cohort of people, a generation which is absolutely desperate for a new world to be born and to be made. And I think have that conversation with your members of your team, with the organization, with the board. How is it that we can really be a contributor to this world? Because what I do believe is that business is the engine of transformation. It's not politics. It's not politicians. Certainly not right now anyway, wherever you look around the world, unless it's Jacinda Ardern and maybe the Prime Minister of New Zealand. And if there was a case for cloning, she's it for me. I think that level of dialogue and inquiry is the thing that is very important. I hope the book and the work starts something. We're working on a school idea, so maybe we can start to bring people together that would want to be part of that journey and the exploration. I mean, we don't quite know what it's going to look like. I mean, I'm not being prescriptive by this by any stretch of the imagination at all, but what I'm saying is, I think if we see beauty as our homecoming, if we really embrace it as the model that actually can take us home, then we've got a much better chance. And I think that it offers something which is really important for every single human being on this planet, which is hope and optimism. And everyone is stimulated by hope and optimism. You know, it's easy to be destructive. It's easy to exploit people's anger. It's easy to look at the short term. But I think if we speak truly to people's hearts, then actually they will want to come on that journey because they know that that is something that is really important to them and their children.
speaker-1: Well, Alan, I I really inspiring conversation. I hope that coming out of a pandemic, this is exactly the message, the book we need to
speaker-2: That's right.
speaker-1: I a lot of times I think there's a lot of positive outcomes when we see something as disruptive as what we've been through this past year. People see a different path. And you're offering that through this book. So we're we're really honored to have you on our podcast today.
speaker-0: Great. Well, I very much enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me.
speaker-2: Yeah, thank you, Alan. And and the book again, Do Build, How to Make and Lead a Business The World Needs. And it's available launching this month. In fact, when th this podcast publishes, it'll be the day after your US launch date. And it's available wherever you buy books. So please check it out.
speaker-0: It is. Thank you very much.
speaker-2: Thank you, Alan. So it was a really great conversation with Alan. I'm sure a lot of us, you know, come out of a listening to a conversation or participating in a conversation like that, thinking a bit differently, being reflective. Chad, what stood out to you?
speaker-1: Steve, you know, I am an undergrad liberal arts major. and at one point thought I was gonna spend my life writing and I still enjoy writing. So I always like to talk to people like Alan who use words such as beauty and regenerative as opposed to sustainability. What he's described is how sis sustainability has some real challenges with it because of its moral coding, the idea of stopping something for people which which aren't maybe really what they're signed up for with that agenda and how it can be confusing for people. So I just appreciate what he said in terms of that maybe being a limiting way of describing what he is describing through beauty and regeneration. I also like the idea around regenerative economies and asking ourselves what contribution are we really making to the world? Not what we're taking, but what we're contributing.
speaker-2: Yeah, I think Ellen gave us a lot of really good questions to think about in it as we are in our day-to-day business. You know, the question you just brought up about contributions to the world, you know, that simple question, you know, is this the most beautiful decision we can make now? Definitely gives us a new perspective about our day-to-day work. so really great interview. Really enjoyed it. And to make sure that our new episodes are delivered to you every two weeks, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
speaker-1: We're designers, so of course we want your feedback. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify or contact us directly at podcast at castinhew dot com.
speaker-2: Thanks everybody, and we will speak with you soon.
