Hasta La Ideas

Here at Core77, we get our fair share of business books, in part because to design anything on an industrial level, you need to have business in mind. Perhaps you need to get financing to invest in your first injection molding press plates, to the tune of $250k, and it might be nice to have a little hand holding, someone to tell you the press is good for 500k cycles and at your margin, making $3.00/part on an 8% loan gets you a solid NPV if you can sell 50k widgets a year. And yet, if you stroll into the business aisle of a typical bookstore, you see the face of Jack Welsh telling you Elephants can Dance, and providing his experiences in making an agile multi-billion dollar company, so you might just be entitled to wondering how big the market is for billionaires looking for insight into how to improve their NASDAQ-listed stock, because it certainly doesn’t help you. Likewise with the success of Malcolm Gladwell’s particular brand of chapter by chapter insight using the case study method by way of aphoristic lessons about obscure ketchup companies.

Given the continual flow of newly minted industrial designers hoping to make a go at their own business with the tools to make products, rather than companies, we’ve certainly kept our eyes open for new books promising to teach designers how to become business people rather than craftsmen. The latest manifestation of such is The Monocle Guide to Good Business (Gestalten 2014), which is about as far afield as one can go from Malcolm Gladwell while retaining the structure of printed paper laced between two canvas covers. Rather than focus on tycoons and boardrooms, their case studies (beautifully laid out photo spreads with accompanying text) focus principally on small businesses ranging from goat farms to more predictably design-centric shops like type foundries and high street tailors. Each page of the guide has been carefully aligned with the grid and thoughtfully designed, but we confess that at the end of it, we found ourselves far more knowledgeable with how to make an already successful business prettier than understanding how to make successful company in the first place.

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