Pattern #1
Giving Purpose
A shared purpose is an organization’s most enduring source of sustained performance. Authentic leaders give purpose through their behaviors and actions.
As the primacy of the shareholder in twenty-first century capitalism comes under attack, new ideas are appearing about rebalancing the corporation’s purpose. One unlikely source of inspiration: Eliot Noyes, a mid-century American designer whose beliefs suddenly seem both fresh and relevant again.
Noyes trained as an architect in the Bauhaus School. He became an accomplished practitioner, designing buildings that would help reimagine how Americans worked and lived. Following a stint as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he immersed himself in the growing profession of industrial design, and went on to create truly iconic products, including the IBM Selectric typewriter. His most powerful work, however, was in the application of his deeply-held humanism to the design of the modern corporation itself.
The IBM work grew out of Noyes’ relationship with Thomas Watson Jr, son of IBM’s founder and—on his father’s retirement in 1956—his successor as the company’s CEO. Inspired by foreign manufacturers like Olivetti, Watson was fascinated with the power of modern design. “Good design is good business” was how he summed it up.
Noyes began at IBM with one-off projects. As his relationship with Watson deepened, he put forward a more ambitious proposal: a first-of-a-kind program that would unite graphic design, architecture, exhibitions and industrial design into a single, integrated corporate program.
Working from his office in New Canaan, CT, Noyes put together an extraordinary team: graphic designer Paul Rand made the famous IBM “eight bar” logo; architect Mies van der Rohe designed the IBM building in Chicago; and Charles and Ray Eames worked on exhibits and a famous collection of educational videos. As IBM’s Consultant Director of Design, Noyes was the group’s guide and mentor, emphasizing unity of vision over uniformity of output, an approach that allowed each element of the program to define and achieve its own sense of excellence.
Noyes’ vision was anchored in what he called corporate character. A corporate design program could help communicate a company’s character through purposeful design of the way people experienced it—the buildings and sales offices through which employees and customers moved; the products the company sold; the letterhead on corporate stationery; the ubiquitous brand mark; even the employees themselves. Everything and everyone should contribute to the corporate character. Nothing should take away from it. It was an extraordinarily ambitious vision that achieved extraordinary results—rivalled in the modern era perhaps only by Apple.
Noyes’ legacy? The quality of the work speaks for itself. But beyond that, Noyes taught us the profound value of injecting human purpose into the heart of an organization. His most powerful and lasting gift of leadership to IBM was to clarify the company’s understanding of its purpose—as a champion of modernism, as a forward thinker, and as an advocate of progress through technology. More than 40 years after his death in 1977, IBMers continue to draw inspiration from Noyes’ vision, and find motivation every day to pursue it.
