Emotion By Design: Creative Leadership Lessons from a Life at Nike

Put simply, a brand gains a competitive advantage through its ability to construct powerful emotional bonds with its consumers. I believe this connection can be consistently achieved by cultivating a strong creative culture.

One essential element, the wellspring from which so many inspiring ideas originate, is empathy. Our ability to understand and share the feelings of someone else is what allows us to get to the deeper truths and begin fashioning a story around them. It’s because of empathy that we can get outside ourselves and begin the search for what moves others.

I call this Emotion by Design—the ability to create stories, images, and experiences that make people feel that even their most audacious dreams are possible to achieve.

Curiosity is the catalyst for creativity. It’s what allows you to see opportunities and harness the inspiration to seize them. Finding inspiration can be difficult, despite how infinite it is. So rather than waiting for it to find you, create a plan that allows it to flow naturally through you and into your work. So, bring the outside world into yo

Throughout this book, we’re going to be talking a lot about the process by which we do this: How do we tell the most effective story to connect with our consumers? Where do we start? What are we looking for? But before we get to those stories, we first need to lay the foundation.

Good brands create memorable moments; great brands create movements. But any movement needs to begin with an aspirational vision: What do we want to achieve? Put another way, since brand movements are tied to products, the better question is: What do we want this product to achieve? Not do, but achieve. What can it facilitate? How can it improve th

Shred. A mobile app, Shred connects users to outdoor adventures all around them (or to places they’re traveling to), and to each other, making it easy to do something fun and active without a lot of online research.

The Product Is the Hero

The trick was to communicate these things not as an engineer would (no offense to engineers), but as your friend who just got this new gadget would.