Learning from Apple’s Design Consultant

Emma Weber

I was enticed to read an article on Peter Senge’s blog this week entitled ‘Learning from Apple’s Design Consultant’. I borrowed the title and the full article can be read here.
Essentially it is a review from BusinessWeek Magazine of an interesting book by Hartmut Esslinger ‘A Fine Line: How Design Strategies are Shaping the Future of Business’.

Esslinger owns the design consultancy ‘Frog‘ whose clients include Apple, Louis Vuitton, Disney and SAP.

His central argument is ‘Creative strategy offers clear benefits over the traditional supply-chain dominant approach to business’. The ‘how’ of this can be summarised as producing solutions designed from human beings rather than commodities.

‘All road lead to Rome’ was my immediate thought.
Whatever role we are in whether it’s transfer of training, design, strategy, sales, customer service or IT it’s all about the people.

Consider how you can focus more on the people aspect of your process or business – what do they, as individuals, need to get the best results?

Emma Weber is a recognized authority on the transfer of learning. As CEO of Lever–Transfer of Learning, she has helped companies such as Telstra, Oracle and BMW deliver and measure tangible business results from learning. She has also been a guest speaker at learning effectiveness conferences worldwide and authored the hugely successful book “Turning Learning into Action“. Much more detail around the issues and solutions examined in this article are available in the book – please feel free to download a free chapter. Emma and her team also developed Coach M, a coaching chatbot that delivers fully scaleable learning transfer. She is also a co-author of the books Making Change Work, and Designing Virtual Learning for Application and Impact. Her work and approach is also featured in Data and Analytics for Instructional Designers by Megan Torrance (Author), Foundations of People Metrics and Analytics – by Renjini Joseph and an ATD 10-minute case study series – Chatbot Coaching for Learning Transfer.