 Welcome everybody. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Caroline Bowman. I'm acting director of Cooper Hewitt. And I'm really thrilled to welcome each and every one of you. Thank you for being here bright and early on the Upper East Side. And this is only the second event in this beautiful space. And this is the trustees room. So we'll do dinners here, meetings, etc. And it's also available for corporate events. So I thought I would put that plug in. Well, it's a good getaway, you know, brainstorm space, I would think. Huge shout out to Beth Comstock, who is the president of our board of trustees. And GE is sponsoring this special breakfast. So thank you, Beth. Thank you, GE. And welcome, Linda. And just to tell you a little bit about this breakfast. We started National Design Week. It's hard to believe. Seven years ago now, thanks to Target. And obviously the aim was to really spread the message of design more nationally. And so far we've done a great job. It's getting bigger and better every year. Thank you to many of you who participated in our teen design fair yesterday. We welcomed over 350 teenagers. And it's like speed dating, except you sit down with a landscape designer, an interior designer, whomever you'd like in the design industry. The kids can ask anything they want. I love one year, one kid asked Isaac Mizrahi, how much money do you make? And Isaac said, less than last year. And I thought, what a great response. And then last night we had a celebration with five of the winners of the National Design Awards. And we had a winners panel. Again, we had over 400 people. And then tomorrow night is our gala. We have about 550 people coming to the gala. So join us, get involved. Wonderful to see you all. And now I'm very, very honored to introduce Bob Safian. FALSE Company has been our media partner now for several years. And this is the third year that you've moderated. And since there have been many debates in frequent weeks, I think you have some competition. But I know you'll come out number one. So over to you, Bob. Thank you. It's nice to see everybody here. One of the great things that I love about this breakfast is it's casual. It's easy. As was clear in the beginning, you guys are not shy about talking and sharing things. And my job is simple. It's just to let you guys talk with each other and try to have a conversation about where you see design and business and where you see it going and what lessons we can offer each other. I believe that this era is made for designers. I think this is made for designers. We have not been trained and schooled for a world that is chaotic. MBAs are trained for a world that follows a certain kind of order. Designers are trained for a world that anything can happen and everything is open. And I think that creates a lot of opportunity for designers. But I also wonder about what kind of responsibility that puts on designers to help bring others along and what that challenge is like for you guys within your organizations to be the person who's trying to bring people along to some place that maybe they need to be, but they don't necessarily want to go to. What is the role of design and the designer? Design and a design philosophy, the approach to design, is an excellent problem-solving methodology for business and that not enough people use it and even think of it in the base case as an approach to business solutions. Now we get to the point where we oftentimes don't even know what the problem is that we're trying to solve. And I find that designers are amazing at identifying the problem. Anyone can write an interesting idea in an email or put it up in PowerPoint, but the designer can actually sculpt it and bring it to life. So if you can feel, you can touch the experience, that's when you really can help shape the future. I think with the world we live in, everything's getting more complex. And I think there's an urgent need for people to simplify. And simplification for it to be relevant needs to be made by somebody with deep knowledge in something. It's like service at a restaurant, you want to focus on the meal, not on the service, right? I think for us to progress in whatever it is, generally the best design is something that to your point is simple, but that simplicity requires deep knowledge to get there by somebody. And as we've introduced design-led thinking brought in interaction designers, industrial as well as software designers, it feels as though we're bringing the customer in because our engineers have a wonderful view of technology. I think what our user experience and our user designers have done is said this needs to apply in the world. And clarity and simplicity and ease of use are all things that need to marry with the best of technology. The role of innovation is to close the gap between the current user experience to the ideal. It's not about making inventions. So if you focus it on the user experience, and for us the definition of design is a total experience thinking, so it's not only the way it looks, so everything is combined together, then it becomes very central within the company. And every element of the, not only the product, the packaging, the way it's published, the way it's advertised, everything revolves around this experience thinking. And then I think it's really a possibility to make it a central piece of business. My time at Nike was just an awakening experience because I got to see so much new, cool, innovative stuff. And then when I would go consult for another brand, the first thing I would say is I'm going to do it like Nike does. That's your problem. You're not allowing your creative team to show you a new, innovative way, so you're one degree always behind the curve. I wouldn't say that in LSE there is any difference between business and design. There might be an exception in that goal, but really everything in all the steps are informed by design. And so really there is, I don't see a lot of conflict in my company between MBAs and designers. So it's almost like knowing another language, right? And design is a language. When we're looking for a marketing person, it's not defined as a design role, but that marketing person with that awareness of innovation process, it's like a cultural component to any discipline. An engineer that has that sensitivity is a more valuable engineer. But then there's so many other ways that design is influencing how we run our business. We have product design that's generating user experience on the web. We're celebrating physical product design by selling LSE or chairs or physical product. What I do most of the day is more of like a workflow process, human resources design, where I'm tingling complexities, creating efficiencies, figuring out the best way to create a workflow process. And each person, it's about I think figuring out the best way to do what they're doing. I think that's the point is that designers focus on behavior. And first layer is individual behavior if it's a lonely product. But the next layer is group behavior. And for a lot of things we're realizing that the value goes up when it becomes a group behavior, when there's a way to connect the thing to more. So I think it's becoming a required skill set. And not that everything has to be social, which right now has been the knee jerk reaction, which is I think wrong. But every item should be questioned, is it more valuable if it becomes social? And if so, then play it out. I want to reframe the designers make money, because I'm a dealist to designers create value. That then the money comes from. I think great leaders, great CEOs are trying to create value, which then it turns into money. The single question I get most from designers is like, how do I convince the company the value of design? And I'm so sick of that question because if you have to argue it, you're not doing the right. So you have to show up and just in your day to day work prove that out. I'm struck when I'm hearing all of you talk about the essential sense of optimism and possibility in this room. And when I talk to people about this chaos that's going on in many business organizations, there's a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety around this. And I'm not saying you guys don't have fear and anxiety, but I think it's sort of overridden by your optimism and the possibility that you see in it. And I think that's terrific. It seems like you guys are having a good time. I think that's a good, you know, all of that stuff comes from design. Use design to be provocative in your organization. It's funny how simplicity can be provocative in a complex organization. An alternative approach to the problem, a reframing. They want the broadest set of problems to solve. You'll be able to do this and this and this and this, and that's the thing that seems to spark.