Tesco
Design to Grow
Book

Design to Grow

How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility (and How You Can Too)

David Butler and Linda Tischler
Simon & Schuster, 2015

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Design is crucial to every aspect of your operation and should be everyone’s responsibility, say Coca-Cola vice president David Butler and Fast Company editor Linda Tischler. They define design as “intentionally connecting things to solve problems.” The pivotal problem for businesses, they say, is balancing scale and agility. The solution is to design all the parts of your business – your manufacturing process, distribution system, marketing, and all – to support your brand and work together fluidly. Following their advice, you can turn your business into a giant Lego set – a collection of interlocking modules you can reconfigure quickly to adapt to changing conditions. Butler and Tischler serve up a lot of theory and illustrate their concepts with concrete stories of pivotal design initiatives at Coca-Cola. Their conversational style is free of design jargon, if somewhat hampered by a tendency to bounce unpredictably among topics. getAbstract recommends their intriguing, practical insiders’ tour of Coke’s design world to entrepreneurs, marketers and operations managers who want to grow by design.

Take-Aways

  • To thrive, companies need “scale and agility”: traits that develop by design, not by chance.
  • Design goes beyond aesthetics; it should permeate every element of your operation.
  • Good design links the elements of a decentralized system together to solve companywide problems.

About the Authors

David Butler, vice president of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Coca-Cola Company and its former VP of global design, leads the Coca-Cola Founders initiative, which helps start-up entrepreneurs. Linda Tischler is an editor at Fast Company magazine.

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