 I was talking to John Awada about ten minutes ago and IBM has a new way of working that he'll be talking about in a moment but he encourages everybody to start a meeting with a story. So I brought a little prop, which is Herman Miller Honeycomb Honey. I was at Herman Miller last week and they gave me this and I said, Branded Honey, tell me about this and when they finished this beautiful lead building for their designer studio they all of a sudden noticed thousands of wasps, huge wasps. And they talked to some eccentric beekeeper in Grand Rapids and she said, you need bees because when the bees come the wasps will disappear. So not only did the bees come but then all these beautiful wildflowers grew and as a result they produce this delicious, delicious honey. So for me, here we have Herman Miller, this icon of design thinking for decades and now look what they've done with a problem that they then made into a wonderful, wonderful surprise. So with that I'm going to pass it on to Aaron to get our conversation started but that is our centerpiece for today. And actually a really good segue story because I think the first topic we really want to get into is sort of expanding the aperture on design. When people first come to the word of design, to the idea of design, they probably think of it very narrowly. One of our sort of jobs and mandates as a group is to broaden that definition and talk about design thinking in all the different manifestations that it can have. And so the first sort of provocation to the group is maybe to talk about ways that design thinking has kind of played a role in solving a problem within your organizations or organizations you've been part of in the past similar to this but probably not with quite such a delicious outcome. To kind of get a sense of all the different ways that it's showing up in our lives in our businesses and how people understand just how impactful and how broad design thinking can be. So maybe Alex you could start by just sharing some of the things you guys are thinking about and now some problems that are being solved in new ways. I'll tell you it's tough to bite a jet engine. I work at General Electric and I help run innovation. The biggest thing that we're focused on right now, one of the most interesting things we're focused on is sort of the democratization of design. Aided by new manufacturing techniques, we have the ability now, we're starting to have the ability and not just GE but the world to really link design and actual products. So what we're seeing now with 3D printing and prototyping and small batch manufacturing we've been able to really shorten that cycle for design so we can actually get things in a customer's hands very, very quickly, get feedback, do iterations as opposed to what we were talking about this earlier the way we used to do things at GE where we would hunker down for three years come up with what we think is the perfect design, not really talking to customers build a $150 million factory to launch it and roll a dice in hope that it worked which is obviously not a best practice in product design. So we're turning that around and doing a lot of open innovation and crown sourcing on the front end of design tapping into sort of the global brain to see new designs that are coming from the outside world as opposed to just our closed past approach rapid iterations and seeing what customers say. It's been a real shift in the way that we design our big hardware and our software as well that we're now creating with what's called the industrial internet which is sort of big data and analytics sitting on top of our big machines. Some of my team members took some of our CR people down to our community relations people down to Joplin and ran boot camps in first hand with education because they were looking at how do they look at high school education. So we took some of them down and put them through a boot camp there and sort of experienced how design thinking would work in the social form and they came back really excited and said hey let's do this for library makeovers. So we did these boot camps all over the country and it was really interesting is sometimes it was parents saying this is the first time someone's listened to me and students too like wow no one ever asked me what education means and then we were able to prototype right there with students and educators and there was an interesting story of through the process that we had to change our language and think about you know we're used to working in a corporation and talking about how we talk about design and our lingo and we had to change it working with the education. That was part of the prototyping process is we prototyped like okay you know we need to go back and my team went back quickly and said okay we need to change how we're talking about these terms as we talk to students and educators they're not used to speaking this language they're not used to this so we were prototyping the process while we were prototyping the actual school makeover or library makeover idea. If I connect this to this discussion so design thinking and is it a department or is it something that you just deploy in a corporation as a capability it also gets to collaboration so here's a story of collaborating with the human resources department on a problem to solve called our culture. So we're probably one of the few companies in the world that can run ads on television and say I'm an IBMer and have a brand associated with a human being. Question and it's hugely differentiated and it's true in more than 150 countries. Question what is an IBMer? All of our brand research shows that the clients interaction, client, university, community, etc their interaction with the IBMer trumps their interaction with the product. So as much as we might obsess over the product design and the product experience here's a problem if your brand is mostly defined by the interaction with the human being and we have 430,000 of them and they work in 173 countries and they're very highly educated which means they're very independent thinkers and they're from every culture of the world. How can you deliver a consistent differentiated intentional experience through human beings? So we partnered with HR earlier this year because the to-do from the CEO was improve the client experience. You get to the IBMer as the big driver of that. How do we deliver a consistent experience through humans? So we applied design thinking and one thing we did was scale as an advantage. We said let's ask 430,000 people why they care about being an IBMer and what makes an IBMer an IBMer not just another person with a good background and a person of good character. So we use a social network inside the company and for 72 hours the CEO invited the entire workforce to jump in here and we had four in different ways to facilitate this but it's basically untethered go and in 72 hours they created the equivalent of 200 novels of content. We then applied analytics to what did they say and we also had 250 people independently of each other read it all and tag it and we correlated the tags of the humans with the analytics and we found very clear threads to say no, no, there's no question that at least the IBMers feel that what makes them different when they're at their best it's not true every day, we look like this. That became nine practices and then when it was launched in June of this year we launched an app for every IBMer. It's our purpose, our values and our practices called 139. It's a storytelling app. We pre-populated the app with stories from the jam, we call that thing a jam but we also said we're going to learn how to be an IBMer not through process or through education but through stories. So here are some stories behind each practice but also contribute stories and start a ritual, start a meeting, share a story. Start a meeting, share a story. You'll understand big companies, right? You sort of introduce this thing and say do it and people said where am I going to get a story? Well, get a story here and three months later we have 2,500 stories and they grow every day and they're socially rated. I love the story, you know, it's relevant. They're uploading stories via video, they're typing stories in, posters are being created, illustrations and so what's happening is in problem solving through design, intentional but it's not a product, it's a culture.