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

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.

When I speak about brand identity to my audiences, I often use the metaphor of a picture frame. Your brand identity is how you frame every image, every product, every bit of output from your brand. The frame shouldn’t overshadow the picture—or the thing you’re trying to showcase—but it should contain recognizable elements that would tell anyone thi

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What Google and Apple did very well with their own product launches was focus on the amazing things that the innovation enabled the consumer to do, not on the specific technical features. When we set out to communicate the benefits of the new Apple Watch Nike+, we needed to resist the temptation to focus on all the exciting things that the watch co

But perhaps product design’s biggest source of inspiration is Nature itself, through the practice of biomimicry, which is the art of drawing inspiration from nature and applying it to design solutions for people. Sometimes this calls for taking design cues found in plants, animals, even insects. Other times it’s drawing directly from the human body

Embrace the Daydreamers: I kicked off my speech with a call to embrace the “daydreamers,” by which I meant the right-brained creative thinkers on your team with a penchant for driving you and everyone else, well, a bit mad. Traditionally, right-brained people, those who ask the question “What if…?” or say “Why not…?” and eschew process and order, h

Visually stunning concept books aside, the speed at which Ray and I moved from idea to visualization was central in turning the concept from a conversation into something real. How often do you and your teams find yourself talking about an idea in a meeting, leaving the room, and then not addressing it again until a month or even a year later? “Hey

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

the ingredients that go into building the right creative team seem so counterintuitive. But like the Brazil National Football team, if you can get it right, then magic will happen. One cannot appreciate the stories in the pages that follow without first understanding that it all begins with the right team.