The future is ours to imagine, design and create. And if we’re dreaming the future into being, why not dream of a future where business is beautiful. Where business delivers the promise of happiness. Where business is an incredible force for positive change in the world.

1. Can we design
organizations
for
beauty?
@joyce_hostyn

2. orc / mordor/ sarumon’s dark place

4. “They
could NOT
make
beautiful
things.”

5. We aren’t
Orcs (even
though
sometimes
we act like it)

10. …shareholder
value is the dumbest
idea in the world.
Shareholder value is
a result, not a
strategy...your main
constituencies are
your employees,
your customers and
your products.
Jack Welch

11. They
could NOT
make
beautiful
things.

12. we need a new
narrative for
business

13. Why is the language of business so
sterile, so uninspiring and so
relentlessly banal?... Customers,
investors, taxpayers and
policymakers believe there’s a hole
in the soul of business. The only way
for managers to change this fact, and
regain the moral high ground, is to
embrace what Socrates called the
good, the just and the
Gary Hamel
beautiful.

14. “Never has there
been a more exciting
time for all of us to
explore this next great
frontier where the
boundaries between
work and higher
purpose are merging
into one, where doing
good really is good for
business.”

15. Here's to
creating the greatest
car company of the
21st century, and to
making a real
difference in the
world, and to moving
us off fucking oil as
fast as possible.
Elon Musk, Tesla
1. Build sports car
2. Use that money to build an affordable car
3. Use that money to build an even more
affordable car
4. While doing above, also provide zeroemission electric-power generation options

16. When I say
‘fool,’ I am
talking about a
company that
embraces
unconventional
wisdom.
Tom Gardner

18. Bridge has the potential
to create a minimum standard of
education for every child in the
world that is much higher than it
is today. Hands-down, it is the
most innovative company in the
education space at the base of
the pyramid and has created a
model that will be studied and
replicated by organizations
across the world. I will be sad to
leave, but I am optimistic that
the company will change the
world.
Josh Weinstein

19. “beautiful,
meaningful
and
humane…”
Handmade School in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, Architects: Anna Heringer, Eike Roswag

20. the beautiful

21. places we call
beautiful are… the work
of those rare architects with
the humility to interrogate
themselves adequately about
their desires and the tenacity
to translate their fleeting
apprehensions of joy into
logical plans – a combination
that enables them to create
environments that satisfy
needs we never consciously
new we even had.
Alain de Botton
Stefano Boeri’s Urban Vertical Forest: Bosco Verticale

22. people at the center
Procter & Gamble Olympics Mother's Day Ad

23. powered by purpose

24. product of deep integrity

25. values-centered

26. elegantly crafted

27. loving of all stakeholders

28. sustainably good
WikiPearl™ draws inspiration from the magic of grape skins to eliminate plastic
from foods and beverages. Revolutionary and delicious, WikiPearl™ is triply good
-- good for the planet, good for you, and just plain good.

29. community-centric

30. emotionally resonate
Now we look at
prosthetics and don’t think of
them just as technology
solutions, but think of the
problem of a missing limb
and whether there is a way to
incorporate design and the
arts and human emotion into
the solution. It invites us to
see problems and solutions
in an entirely different light.
Scott Summit, Bespoke
Innovations

31. empowering heroes

32. building connection
The Born Friends Family Portrait , by Skype, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nRKyQ11494

33. delivering a promise of happiness
illustration by Sunni Brown, Delivering Happiness

34. forging lasting relationships
I love Apple. I use multiple Apple products
every day. I get excited to walk into Apple’s
candy colored immaculate stores. I walk
through the different sections enamored with
each product. I could spend hours exploring
each product’s nuances. Surprisingly
enough though, my love of all things Apple
wasn’t love at first sight; it was more like a
seed planted that slowly grew… My love of
all things Apple will continue to grow. I know
this because the company is always
reinventing its products in a way that makes
the coolest thing you own even cooler!
Erin Vogelsanger

35. turning impossible into possible
Mindsets play
strange tricks on
us. We see things
the way our
minds have
instructed our
eyes to see.
Muhammad Yunus

36. making the world a better place
Question for the Blue Monster Crowd: “Who owns the soul of Microsoft? Hugh McLeod

37. To call a work of architecture or
design beautiful is to recognize it
as a rendition of values critical to
our flourishing.
Alain de Botton

38. business can be a terrible force for
evil

39. The very essence
of capitalism is under
threat as business is
now seen as a personal
wealth accumulator. We
have to bring this world
back to sanity and put
the greater good ahead
of self-interest.
Paul Polman
CEO of Unilever

40. or an incredible force for
good

41. We owe our existence
to innovation. We owe
our prosperity to
innovation… We owe our
future to innovation…
Innovation isn’t a fad –
it’s the real deal, the only
deal. our future no less
than our past depends
on innovation.
Gary Hamel

42. capitalism
needs a brain
and a soul
Nancy Koehn

43. for it’s the
soul of
business
that keeps us
moving forward as a society

44. Henry Ford West
Bloomfield Hospital is
unlike any hospital in
the nation. We believe in
a comprehensive health
care experience that
includes mind, body
and spirit as essential
elements in the healing
process.

45. Sanitary napkins
produced in a “Small
is Beautiful” model
can deliver
livelihood, hygiene
and dignity to poor
women, and help
them strengthen
society.
A. Muruganandam

46. …if we put customers
first, other stakeholders
will also benefit, as long
as they’re willing to take
the long-term view. And a
long-term approach is
essential for invention,
because you’re going to
have a lot of failures along
the way.
Jeff Bezos

47. What is your
organization
saying?

48. with its public space

49. with its employee space
Wish You Worked Here: Beautiful, Productive Office Spaces, HBR

50. with its communications

51. with its information
beautiful
information
reduces
violence by
50%

52. with its meetings

53. with its behaviours

54. with its employee experience
The world we see
around us, countries
and continents, have
been built on the back
of these signatures. The
future too will be
written on these
signatures. Signatures
of employees... Truth is,
every employee is a
hero.

55. with its language
How to
make your
business a
better
version of
itself.
Hugh McLeod

56. with its stories
The Scarecrow, Chipolte www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUtnas5ScSE

57. with its products
“Imagine your
organization
powered by
technology that's
beautiful, easy-touse, and designed to
speed performance.
Beauty as core
competence drives
Infor's UX”

58. with its employee apps
intranet can be beautiful
… ‘beauty’ is not
just about what it
looks like, but in
how it works,
allowing
employees to share
knowledge…
Beautiful Intranets

59. with its innovations
This is one of the most beautiful
things I know. It's a plastic bag. And
when I looked at it first, I thought,
no, there's no beauty in that. Then I
found out… if I put it into a filthy
puddle or a stream filled with
coliforms and all sorts of
disgusting stuff, that that filthy
water will migrate through the wall
of the bag by osmosis and end up
inside it as pure, potable
drinking water. And all of a
sudden, this plastic bag was
extremely beautiful to me.
Richard Seymour, How Beauty Feels

60. with its packaging
because the
presentation was
so lovely that I
felt like I was
being sent a gift
to say thank you
for supporting
Who Made Your
Pants

61. with its footprint

62. with its user experience
… it'll begin "learning"
immediately. Over the
next seven days, Nest
will collect data about
the way you adjust your
heating or cooling, and
only then will it begin
giving you smart
feedback to help you
conserve energy.

63. through its service
with its service experience

64. signaling its empathy

65. Beauty
requires us to
think in new
ways

66. It’s impossible
to develop new
styles of
organization and
management
while continuing
to think in old
ways.
Gareth Morgan
image by Medi Belortaja

67. Without a deeply felt – and a
powerfully lived – sense of
meaning, every business will
devolve to what the investment
banks became: machines
engineered with relentless
precision to destroy long-run
value, often implosively so.
Umair Haque

68. Always the beautiful
answer
who asks a more
beautiful question.
e.e. cummings

69. “At our core is the
eternal question—
what if? What if
business applications
were agile? What if users are experiencing a
Today’s
they were social? What
renaissance of user-centric consumer
if they were
software— beautiful, engaging, and easybeautiful? What if applications such as Flipboard℠,
to-use
people worked the
Instagram℠, Mint.com, and Facebook. With
way they live?” in mind, Infor created Hook & Loop, an
this
internal creative think tank made up of
more than 50 designers, information
architects, and creative storytellers, all
focused on creating the next generation of
business applications for the next
generation of business application users.

70. What if you imagined the kind of city in
which you’d like to live, and then
designed a car for this ideal place?
amorebeautifulquestion.com

71. Can organizations be beautiful? Can
organizational designs be beautiful?
Is there a ‘designerly-ness’ to the
process of organizational design?
Are there overarching design
concepts that can be described as
beautiful? I think Shaker
communities might be considered
beautiful, not just because they
created beautiful things but because
of the simplicity of structure, clarity
of purpose and thoughtfulness for
every aspect of the experience.
Tim Brown, IDEO

72. what if?
… leaders embraced truth, beauty and goodness as
ideals worth striving for?
… organizations mentored employees in designing
the story of their life’s work ?
… you imagined the kind of business that could win a
Noble peace prize, and then designed it?
… organizations were designed as epic narratives?

73. how might we?
… design organizations for beauty?
… architect organizations for happiness?
… make empathy an organizational core
competency?
… craft organizations as creative forces for positive
change in their communities?

74. Tomorrow’s
management systems
must give as much
credence to such
timeless human ideals
as beauty, justice,
community as they do
to the traditional goals
of efficiency, advantage,
and profit.
Gary Hamel
The Connected Company, Dave Gray

75. image by Michael Chimero

76. is it beautiful?

77. … if the
solution is
not beautiful,
I know it is
wrong.
Buckminster
Fuller

78. And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn
formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these
three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too
obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot
reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty
will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the
work of all three. And in that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoyevsky to say that
“Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

79. When people talk about new forms of capitalism, this is what I have in mind:
companies that show, in all transparency, that they are contributing to society,
now and for many generations to come… Success will require courageous
leadership. We will need companies that are prepared to march in the vanguard
and pioneer new ways of working and build new business models. By doing so
they will rebuild trust in business and, I am sure, grow profitably.
Paul Polman, CEO Unilver

80. Being good in
business is the
most fascinating
kind of art. Making
money is art and
working is art and
good business is
the best art.
Andy Warhol

82. what is beautiful
is loved

83. be an artist, an
architect, a
designer of beauty