Hasta La Ideas

While not exactly summer beach reading, Hartmut Esslinger’s new book on Design Strategy, A Fine Line crams as many ideas, themes and disparate story arcs into its 180 pages as a Dan Brown novel. For the first few chapters Esslinger follows the tried and true business book methodology of using real world examples to illustrate lessons in leadership and strategy. For the last three chapters, he begins to apply the design lessons he learned in the corporate world to what he terms “industrial-colonial capitalism” — the problems of the modern age caused in part by the last century of design strategy. The beginning brims with ideas and scattershot observations about people and companies that occasionally distract from the underlying message, but by the end Esslinger has hit his stride, talking about big ideas applying principles with real insight.

Esslinger’s clearly not afraid to express his own opinion and in the early pages. When he recounts the garage days of his fledgling consultancy, frog, the book engages in a fair amount of “I told you so,” and name dropping as he heaps praise upon friends (e.g. “the brightest minds of our age, including Dieter Motte, Akio Morita and Norio Ohga of Sony …”) and scorn upon enemies (e.g. “including Paul Kunkel, who wrote a largely inaccurate and trashy book about Apple’s Design in those early years”). Depending upon your perspective, these early chapters could be refreshingly candid or unpleasantly gossipy. That said, Esslinger’s certainly entitled to a few “I told you so’s”. From his very earliest work, when he proposed that the clockmaker Kienzle use radio signals to synchronize with an atomic clock (in 1968!) his brand of design thinking was met with frequent skepticism and disdain. Today, however, companies all over the world chase the sort of strategic design thinking that frog pioneered, radio clocks are a standard (you’ve probably even got one in your pocket, depending upon whether you set your cell phone’s clock or it’s time zone) and Kienzle clocks are mostly museum pieces. Fortunately, much of frog’s design is still in production.

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