Phil Gilbert: Making a 114-year-old, 400,000 person company care about design

0:01Phil Gilbert:At the companies that exhibit great design, the non-designers all talked about design and all valued their designers. At the companies where it didn't translate into the marketplace, you didn't feel that. Great cultures are not great cultures because they contain an attribute. They are great because they value the attribute. you.

0:28Changing the culture of a 400 ,000 person company isn't just hard. It's the kind of transformation most leaders wouldn't even attempt. But when Phil Gilbert joined IBM as general manager of design in 2010, that's exactly what he set out to do. And remarkably, he had a lot of success. Phil led one of the most ambitious design transformations in corporate history, hiring over 1 ,000 designers, creating IBM's design thinking framework, and embedding a new way of working across nearly 180 countries. Now, with his new book, Irresistible Change, Phil is sharing the blueprint of how he did it, and more importantly, how you can apply these lessons to your own organization.

1:12In this episode, we talk with Phil about treating change like a high-stakes product, why IBM's transformation was opt-in rather than top-down, and what it takes to win over engineers who spent decades deeply entrenched in a technical worldview. We also explore the design thinking boot camp that became legendary within IBM, the intentional design of physical studio spaces, and what happened after Phil left the company. Phil's insights aren't just for those leading massive organizations. They're for anyone trying to spark meaningful change, build enthusiasm without mandates, and create work that actually matters to the people doing it.

1:46This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. At Design Better, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe.

2:20We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

2:31And now, back to the show.

2:38Phil Gilbert, welcome to Design Better. Thank you so much, Aaron. Appreciate it. Phil, before we hit record, we were just chatting about how our worlds were sort of adjacent for some time that we know a lot of your former colleagues at IBM. And when Eli and I were working at Envision, we spent a lot of time just chatting with your team about the work that you were doing there because it was pretty huge. You were building the largest design team on the planet at the time, undergoing a pretty major transition and change inside of a company that's been around for a long time. We all know IBM well, and it's had a number of different businesses.

3:15You had your hands full. And in fact, I think that there was something like 400 ,000 employees across 180 countries at IBM when you were there. And you've got a new book, a new book that is documenting change, the change that happened there. It's coming out in November of 2025 as we're recording this. In the book, you describe treating change like a high-stakes product. Most people don't think of change as a product. How does that shift in perspective shape leadership priorities and how you think about what you're doing?

3:49Phil Gilbert:Well, it kind of changes everything. Because when you start thinking about change and transformation as a product, and you bring that whole product mentality to your work, you start realizing that it's on you if it fails. One of the reasons, probably the key reason that most transformation efforts fail, and there's a lot of tactical reasons, but probably the single biggest reason is that they're mandated. Somebody says, thou shalt change. You will come back to the office. You will adopt agile. You will adopt design thinking. And the team that's put in place typically under those conditions where it's mandated by the CEO or by some senior person over an organization, the team that's bringing the change to that group then is primarily, usually, an enablement team because the mandate is to adopt this.

4:43Phil Gilbert:Well, for a number of reasons, human nature probably being the most important one, most people resist things that they're forced to do. or at least they initially do. When you bring a product mentality to something, what you say is, I don't need a mandate. What I need to do is I need to deliver this thing in such a way that the teams that need to adopt it want to adopt it. A person bringing a product to market, the market, most of the time, has no mandate to buy that product. You have to be humble. You have to build a product that not only solves a human's problem, but does it in a way that they actually will change what they're doing in order to adopt your new product.

5:25Phil Gilbert:Bringing that mentality into the notion of culture change really flips the script on the leadership team. Because all of a sudden, it's my fault if you choose not to adopt my product. If you choose not to change, that's on me. It's not on you. And by flipping the script like that, it changes everything about the decisions you make, about how you implement and try to get teams to adopt the change that you want them to adopt. And oh, by the way, if ultimately they don't, there's only two explanations. One is the change you propose is useful, but you have failed to communicate that in a way that resonates with people.

6:09Phil Gilbert:Or number two, the change you propose isn't useful because nobody shows up to work to do worse work. Nobody shows up to work to spend more time at work. And so if they don't adopt what you want them to adopt, it's either because the idea is just not a good one or you haven't delivered it very well. Bill, you mentioned the book, you mentioned just now that your product background, your product guy, and you explicitly said you're not a designer. You don't have a design background or a background in organizational behavior. So what led you to come to the conclusion that human-centered design or design thinking was a good way to maybe implement some of these changes?

6:47Phil Gilbert:Well, the way I came to design thinking was way back. In my first startup, I was, during the day, trying to sell the software, trying to sell a solution, and getting a lot of pushback for various reasons. And at night, I would be translating that feedback and recoding the product. I didn't call it user-centered design, or I didn't really call it anything. I just thought that's what founders had to do. You tried to sell your thing, and if people didn't buy it, you had to change the thing in order to induce them to buy it. Well, that doesn't scale very well. So in the early 1990s, I ran across the work of both Alan Cooper, who was one of the first people to do persona-driven design, and David Kelly, and the work that he was doing, which would later be called design thinking.

7:28Phil Gilbert:And it was like a light bulb went off when I realized, oh my gosh, the formalism of design, And that's what I was trying to do. There is a formalism to it. And I can scale that because there's a rigor behind it. There's design behind it. And so for me, originally, it was a way that I could scale my business and deliver quality results. It was that simple. And that's still how I think about design thinking, is it is a way to get higher quality outcomes at scale because there's a method behind it. So that's how I came to it. And over the years, in the second startup, I used it for product design.

8:07Phil Gilbert:And then in our third startup, Lombardi Software, which was what was bought by IBM, we designed the entire company that way. Every single person from the CFO to the services people to our product people were all design thinkers. And we had mental models of our users and the people that we served, and we tried to understand them better. And so that was how I came to it. and when we got acquired by IBM, I was asked to lead a relatively small part of IBM, which was about 1 ,200 people, and they didn't know what I did. The person that asked me this couldn't spell design thinking, had no clue that that's what it was, but what I was asked to do was make this division into which you've been acquired, make this division more like Lombardi and less like IBM, and so I brought these practices into that group, and that took about 18 months or so, And as a result of that, the story of the improvement there, which is we went from 1 ,200 people to 700.

9:06Phil Gilbert:We took market share. We took about 50 % market share. We were growing at about 20 % or 30 % a year in a space that was growing 10%. Those business outcomes are then what caught the attention of Jenny Rometty, who was the new CEO in early 2012. And she said, okay, can you do what you did there everywhere? That's kind of how I got to design and design thinking at all. But that provocation of, can you do what you did there everywhere? That's really where I had to figure out what ultimately became this product thought, which is when I was president of a startup, I could tell people what to do and I could bend the culture at will.

9:48Phil Gilbert:in the group of 1 ,200, I was the one who was in charge. So I could, again, pretty much bend the culture to my will over time. And a company of 400 ,000, none of whom reported to me, that was the real magic trick that I had to try to solve. And that was when it hit me that, how do you get any market to adopt something, product 101? You design a product that is so much better than their current solution, they choose to adopt it. What was happening at IBM at that time internally and strategically when you were given this mandate to change more broadly throughout the company? Morale was pretty low when we got bought.

10:30Phil Gilbert:IBM had been run by a fellow who was pleasing Wall Street and was committing to five-year plans of numbers. And the first five-year plan, And the company hit all of them, more and more hitting the numbers, not because of revenues and growth, but more and more hitting the numbers because of taking costs out of the business. When I got to IBM in 2010, I was shocked at the state of the physical plant. My startup didn't have fancy offices by any means, but they were nice, and we were proud of them. I walked into the space in Austin, and it was dreary. I mean, holes in the carpet, lights out in the hallway, doors closed and rubber plants and trash cans in the hallway.

11:10Phil Gilbert:I mean, it was a dreary place and the morale was similar. And in 2012, when I was asked to start this, we were just beginning the third year of a second five-year plan. And they were going to hit those numbers and make the shareholders happy, even if we gutted the company. That was my opinion at the time. That was the backdrop and what Jenny inherited when she became CEO. And one of the bravest decisions, I think, that the company made was actually not the transformation, but actually when she told Wall Street, we're stopping this financial plan nonsense. We need to invest in the company. We need to address the morale issues.

11:50Phil Gilbert:We need to address the physical plan issues. And the company will need to succeed on its own, not because of some predetermined number that we're supposed to hit. So that was kind of the business backdrop to what we needed. The technical backdrop to what we needed was, as a result of some of that and other things, we were missing massive moves in the marketplace. IBM had completely missed the cloud by 2012, right? When we were bought in 2010, the iPad was about six or eight weeks away from being launched, and we were building one of the first purpose-built apps for the iPad. And when we got bought in January, the executive who we were reporting to scuttled that project and told me that business-to-business SaaS will not be a thing.

12:42Phil Gilbert:Just slightly wrong. Right? A little bit. But ultimately, the reason was is because the culture had become so insular. And so we didn't have the sensemaking out in the marketplace that companies need to have. Forget the highfalutin concepts behind human-centered design. We weren't even talking, much less listening with our users. And so we were missing massive moves in the technical marketplace, as well as the strategic backdrop of gutting the business more and more. To me, that was the strategic setting into which Jenny arrived and said, what's going on right there is good. Can we do that everywhere?

13:22Phil Gilbert:And again, it wasn't because she thought design thinking was good. At the time, she didn't know it was design thinking that was the primary catalyst for what I had done. It was just the outcomes that she was seeing and the engaged people and the excited customer base. Phil, I'm curious about maybe some of the early challenges you faced kind of implementing the strategy. Aaron and I were at Envision, we talked to a lot of different companies that often struggled to implement more design thinking with our organization. And I think one of the things was that, you know, maybe a team would come together or a consultant would come in and they do some design thinking and there would be like post-its and essentially maybe felt a little bit like theater.

14:00And then everybody went off and they just kind of forgot about it or maybe they tried it for a little while and abandoned it. So what about your strategy at IBM, and maybe you faced some early challenges, led it to become successful over time?

14:13Phil Gilbert:I'll preface that by this story. When I was asked to do this everywhere, one of the first things I did is I went on the road and I talked with a lot of client companies because IBM has, obviously, most companies in the world buy something from IBM. And I was able to go to some very design-forward companies and also visited a lot of design-laggard companies, but that I knew had some designers. And I came away from those meetings in that summer of 2012 with a real epiphany as I was thinking about how we needed to think about this program. And what I found in all those companies was that the design teams across the board were, frankly, excellent.

14:55Phil Gilbert:And there was really not a lot of difference between the design teams at a Coca-Cola or an Apple with the ones at the time maybe at other companies who weren't known for design, right, or Nike. The design teams weren't that different, but what was different was all the non-designers. At the companies that exhibit great design, the non-designers all talked about design and all valued their designers. at the companies where it didn't translate into the marketplace, the non-designers, you didn't feel that. You didn't feel it when you walked in the door. I kind of came to this conclusion that great cultures are not great cultures because they contain an attribute.

15:40Phil Gilbert:They are great because they value the attribute. And what that meant all of a sudden is that, yes, I needed to focus on bringing design thinking skills into the company. I needed to focus on bringing designers into the company. But what I really needed to focus on were all the non-designers and getting them to value this thing. And so that became a key part of the product that we ultimately built and delivered. What were very intensive experiential moments as well as lower intensity, but still kind of moments where we would touch the teams. And we constantly had the lens of trying to get the non-designers to value the designers and the outcome of the design process, as opposed to worrying too much about the rigors and practices of design thinking itself.

16:28Phil Gilbert:And that's what I think most change efforts get wrong. You can use the word design thinking, or you can use the word artificial intelligence, or you can use the word return to office. In all of these efforts, there's too much of an emphasis on the thing and not nearly enough emphasis on what does it mean to value the thing? And how do we not only plumb the people to value the thing, but how do we plumb the systems and processes around the people so that it reinforces that value?

17:02We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

17:09If you've ever felt like the hardest part of being a leader isn't the work itself, but actually getting everyone to work together, well, we've got something coming up for you. Eli and I have partnered with our friends at September Works on the September Workshop Leadership Excursion. It's a two-day gathering in Sonoma on September 28th and 29th. And let me set the scene. This is wine country at its most beautiful, rolling hills, golden light, the kind of place where you can finally hear yourself think and walk away genuinely inspired. The format is intimate by design. Just 40 leaders are going to be there.

17:47It's no stage. It's not really an audience format. It's very conversation first. It's the kind of room that challenges you to think bigger about your work and your craft. And Eli and I will be there in person the whole time. So this is a real chance to hang out with us and swap ideas and get into the good stuff together. The lineup is incredible. A few are voices that you've heard right here on Design Better, including Paul Dichter, one of the lead writers on Stranger Things, Bill Burnett, the author of Designing Your Life, Designing Your Work Life, and Creating a Meaningful Life, and Andrew Evans of The Magic Patio.

18:23There are only a handful of tickets available, and they're going fast. So head to september.works slash excursion2026. that's september.works slash excursion2026 to see the full lineup and reserve your spot before they're gone. Design Better is supported by Masterclass. There's always something that you want to get better at and for me, it's guitar. I've been studying every week for years and I kind of hit a wall. I wanted to make the instrument actually sing. So I went to Masterclass and took a class taught by Tom Morello. He's the guitarist behind Rage Against the Machine, and more recently I saw him perform with Bruce Springsteen.

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22:03That is fire. Whoa, that's good.

22:06Phil Gilbert:This might be the drink of the summer. Okay, I like this one too. I'm rocking with it, okay. Try it for yourself. Starbucks Refreshers Concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours.

22:21And now, back to the show.

22:28Can you give us an inside look at some of the specific methodologies that you employed? I'm very curious because I've talked to a number of IBMers, and I've heard a few times the challenges of someone who's been at IBM for 25, 30 years, they're sort of intractable. Like, we've always done it this way, and you're coming in as young upstarts, idealists, and how do you convince someone who's so entrenched in the way that things have been done before?

23:05Phil Gilbert:Yeah, what I believe, and certainly what we saw time and again, is you can't convince them. So evangelism was never a part of our program. I believe that for any change to be adopted, it has to be experienced and it has to be really taken on as a good thing from that experience. And so this is an oversimplification, but we basically designed the onboarding of the program. Well, the first thing we did is we branded it and we had a set of values associated with that brand. It was a real product. It wasn't just called design thinking. In fact, it was called the Hallmark Program. And a lot of people didn't know what all went in the Hallmark Program, but it gave us a vessel into which we could not only pour the values that we wanted to pour, but it also allowed us the freedom to also bring in, as we saw things that got in the way of adopting design thinking and interdisciplinary teaming and design, we could change those.