The title of Chief Design Officer was uncommon before Ernesto was hired at J&J, and he spoke to Kevin and Dana about his motivation to join the company:
I realized I didn't want to keep designing products that weren't having a positive impact on people… Working in healthcare was an opportunity for me to give back. Witnessing my mom's health issues, having some experience in healthcare, I wanted my children to look at their Dad and say: Hey, Dad's doing something that's meaningful with design.
Next Week: Kaleena Sales and Omari Souza give their take on J&J and the expansive world of healthcare.
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TRANSCRIPT
Kevin Bethune
Welcome to The Design of Business...
Dana Arnett
...The Business of Design.
Kevin Bethune
Where we talk with leaders in their fields,
Dana Arnett
About how innovation, access and curiosity are redesigning their worlds. I'm Dana Arnett...
Kevin Bethune
...and I'm Kevin Bethune.
Dana Arnett
This episode of The Design of Business | The Business of Design is brought to you by ArtCenter College of Design, a global leader in art and design education.
Kevin Bethune
Later on, we'll hear from ArtCenter President Lorne Buchman.
Dana Arnett
On today's episode: Band-Aids, brand experiences, and everything in between.
Ernesto Quinteros
What I think is really critical for designers today is empathy and the ability to connect more with the people that they design solutions for.
Kevin Bethune
Ernesto Quinteros is Chief Design Officer for Johnson & Johnson and leads the global design organization J&J Design.
Dana Arnett
Hello, Ernesto welcome to the podcast.
Ernesto Quinteros
Hi, Dana. Kevin, how are you guys?
Kevin Bethune
Good. How are you?
Dana Arnett
Great. Nice to have you here.
Ernesto Quinteros
Thank you.
Kevin Bethune
So Ernesto and I met roughly seven years ago when I was seeking a community of like minded design practitioners and executives who carried design as a strategic imperative. I met Ernesto at the Design Management Institute, DMI, where we both ended up serving on DMI's board, and we all enter the doorway to design differently. So, Ernesto, tell us a story— tell us your story and the personal motivation that inspired you to pursue a career in design.
Ernesto Quinteros
I think a lot of us designers find different paths, but there's usually an element of creativity that that sparks interest along the way. I think I was very lucky to grow up in a household with my mom, who was an illustrator and liked to draw all the time. And my father worked in the printing industry. So I was surrounded by illustration and graphic design, and I was never told that I needed to be a lawyer or accountant. It was completely "You seem like you like to draw. Go ahead." And I used to build those scale kit models, too, you know, like airplanes and transportation. And I just got this bug for always having to create and make things, even to the point where I would take cardboard and make the airplane hangar for the aircraft models that I would build. So that was always kind of in my DNA from a young age. And then when I went to college, I was studying graphic design illustration. And then one day I happened upon a display case with product design in it. And it was like this moment where like, oh my gosh, this is it, because it's three dimensional. The problems are harder to solve. They're real problems in people's lives, things that people interact with. And I made the jump immediately and never looked back in my education.
Kevin Bethune
Where was this display case that you mentioned? Was it an institution?
Ernesto Quinteros
Yes, it was at Cal State Northridge in Southern California. And then I learned about Cal State, Long Beach, and I heard that some of the designers for Star Wars went to school there. So that kind of got my attention and I transferred and it was a much more rigorous program. I'm glad I made that jump.
Kevin Bethune
So previous to J&J, you held the chief design officer title at Belkin.
Ernesto Quinteros
Yeah. So I joined Belkin as a director back in 2000, 2001. And it was really interesting. They literally asked me to create almost like a business plan to tell them how to set up a design organization from scratch. And that was fascinating because I got to tell them the types of design capabilities that they should hire. Salary ranges. I put mechanical engineering in there because to develop a great product, it can't just be designed, it has to be manufactured. I gave a lot of information around that and we kind of joked it was the Innovation Design Group document, a.k.a. Ernesto Manifesto, because I had a relationship with these guys on the agency side, that's how they approached me after working for about ten months and said: Hey, you know what— we really want to work with you more and we really have a need and we want to build this capability inside the company. Now, Belkin was only around 350 million in annual revenues at that time. By the time I left 13 years later, it was 1.5, 1.6 billion. So there was a lot of interesting journeys along the way, including the acquisition of Linksys from Cisco, which I was part of that. Developing the Wemo I.O.T., Internet of Things, category. Of course, not me alone. A lot of people working together, but the team I led helped design the products, the experiences, the digital interface for the app, for your iPhone and the whole brand cohesion, right? So these were great experiences to have at a smallish company. And because it wasn't like going into a really big well-known corporation, I could come in and kind of architect my own career journey there. So that was fantastic. But when I look at the five year horizon looking forward and the five year horizon looking backwards after helping the design and organization of design and led marketing for three and a half years, designing the building and the brand identity. And we got recognized for being one of the top corporate design teams when benchmarked by IDSA for many years in a row we were in the top five with GE Healthcare, Microsoft, Samsung. So I was very proud. I would often tell the design team—per capita, you're probably one of the best design teams on earth because we're a very small team.
Dana Arnett
So Ernesto, many years ago, Elliot Noyes at IBM could have been called the first chief design officer because he brought to life the scale and dimensionality of bringing a lot of different forms of design to life in the corporate realm. And, you know, let's fast forward about 2014. I think it's been said that the title and role of chief design officer may have come to life through your appointment at Johnson & Johnson. So, you know, going back in history and fast forwarding to today, talk a little bit about that early experience of in that the title and role to which you play in the company.
Ernesto Quinteros
Sure, you're right. I don't think there was a lot of folks with that title at that time. I was previously chief brand officer at the previous company and played the role of overseeing all design and marketing for about three and a half years. And then we finally brought in a CMO and then we gave me the title of Chief Design Officer. So I actually a Chief Design Officer prior to J&J. And they were very clear that they want to find one. I am the successor to Chris Hacker, who was the first one for J&J, but he oversaw the consumer business. And JJ has three businesses, which is: consumer health, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices which is now medtech. So when they defined the new role in 2013, it was a very, very vast search. And then I then I got the role and very, very humbled to be part of that search. But it was quite interesting. It was very lengthy. It was almost a year. And to be honest, I never thought that I was going to leave Southern California. I was very comfortable. The job I had was great. I got to build that team from scratch. I got to help find the new location for the headquarters, hire the architectural firm, helped design the building, I redid the brand identity working with agency out of New York, so I got so many things to do at the previous company, but I started to look at my career in terms of horizons five years looking forward and five years looking backwards. And my mom also passed away in 2013, and that was kind of why I was sticking around Los Angeles. And she had a lot of health issues my entire life and healthcare, health product design has been part of my experience set since I started in design professionally. And this opportunity came up and my wife Xiang, she was the one that said: You know what, I know you normally don't want to do any interviews. You need to do this one. So I agreed. I flew out to New Jersey. I met with the leader that was the huge advocate for design at this time, and speaking to the C-suite that this mattered, that design mattered, and you need to be elevated. And it was a really interesting process. It there's a lot to that process. I don't need to get into all the details right now, but that was a lot of the thinking and the work behind it. And what I realized was I didn't want to keep designing products that weren't having a positive impact on people, not that the products were detrimental to people, but working in healthcare was an opportunity for me to kind of give back, witnessing my mom's health issues, having some experience in healthcare, I wanted my children to look at their dad, say, Hey, you know, Dad's doing something that's meaningful with design with his career. And he chose to work for a company where he could have impact on a lot of people. So that was a lot of the motivation and, and the run up to, to, to the job change. And J&J was a scary challenge. If you think about the scale. It was a 60 plus times bigger than Belkin, but I think it was the healthcare angle, and what a lot of people don't know is I worked with J&J back in the nineties as a consultant for three and a half years on one of their leading product categories, at the time it was a new category it was patient care monitors, it would have one of the first user interfaces, and I don't really tell that story. I should probably tell more people, J&J that I have a history with J&J — but that whole opportunity of looking at what I've learned and do I have what it takes to go inside of an existing organization, understanding the benefits of what's there, identifying what's required to extend and expand it and deepen the capability was the challenge in front of me.
Dana Arnett
Yeah, you're touching on a topic that's a real important one right now that we're hearing out in the in the field. And that is this mid-career set of choices that designers face. And in your case, you know, you've climbed the ladder already all the way up into the C-suite. But a lot of times and I'm curious to hear what tradeoffs or choices that you made and mid-tier from going from maybe the drawing board to, you know, designing a team or creating a mentorship mentality within your group. What was the doorway you walk through mid-career?
Ernesto Quinteros
Well, when I came to Belkin and was asked to build a team, I thought I would still get to design a lot because I actually loved doing design. I love solving problems. And we started to get a lot of different programs on the consulting side before I came inside, and what I realized was, well, here is the ability to take my experience and learnings and in scale, scale me by hiring great talent, placing them in the right roles, helping set them up for success, and then getting out of their way a little bit and then being available when required in a program, was probably the next step in my career to see if I could scale what I have so more people could do what I hope is great design and scale out for the organization we were part of. And again, as I as I mentioned a moment ago, that team is very successful. But the idea of scaling, scaling, design and helping empower a lot of young talent was probably more where my head was at, and I think it got easier the further along. I think at the beginning I was still a little bit like, little bit hands on, or like want to be hands on and kind of slowly have to let go.
Kevin Bethune
So before we build on your perspectives around healthcare, when you when you reflect back, though, you've touched a number of different industries in getting to know you, I think you've touched automotive, consumer electronics, fashion, I.O.T— Internet of Things, music. How has that informed sort of your design perspective as you think about healthcare?
Ernesto Quinteros
Well, if we really want healthcare to be successful, we have to understand how to integrate healthcare into normal people's lives. And it can't just be the clinical setting. We know that a lot of patients can have the right medication prescribed to them. But if we don't understand what helps them adhere to their medication or their friction points in filling their prescription, there's a lot of little things like that. You can have the best pharmaceutical solution, but if the patient doesn't understand the benefits or understand the behavioral motivations to take their medication, there's a huge opportunity to improve healthcare from that setting. And that's where understanding different cultural aspects even outside the U.S., I mean, because cultures are different around the world, I think those things feed into a perspective of connecting with people.
Dana Arnett
This episode of The Design of Business | The Business of Design is brought to you by ArtCenter College of Design.
Lorne Buchman
Hi. I am Lorne Buchman. I'm president of ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.
Kevin Bethune
Lorene talked about his book, Make to Know: From Spaces of Uncertainty to Creative Discovery.
Lorne Buchman
One of the things that inspired me and actually inspired my writing of this book, Make to Know, was that — this is an institution that really knows itself. It knows itself well. It has a particular kind of DNA. And a lot of that had to do with this clear focus on an applied kind of learning, a very clear focus on throwing students in the deep end, beginning to make and engage in the making. And then from the making came the questions and the issues and the ideas and the thought and the theory and the history and the community. But the foundation was in the creation itself. And one of the things that I've discovered and that I really try to articulate, because I don't think it found form in articulation, but writing this book hope was that what ArtCenter is interested in really is, not so much graduating visionaries, which has its own kind of problems, but graduating great makers and all that that can come from the production of amazing people who make things and reveal the world to us through the making. I think make to know leadership really is not so much about imposing a vision as it is to build the structure for people to make their own thriving communities, great education, great mission filled purpose— whatever the case may be. And that the translation of what we learned from artists and designers about make to know is really relevant to so many other fields and so many other areas of human experience.
Dana Arnett
Visit Art Center dot edu and discover how make to know is not just a principle but a practice.
Dana Arnett
How did you build your team Ernesto? And how do they navigate the changing landscape of healthcare?
Ernesto Quinteros
So again, there was a team in place primarily focused on a consumer like Neutrogena and Band-Aid, as you mentioned. There was some folks starting to lead some really nice exploratory work with the pharma partners. So there was the DNA was there, but the team was only 25 people when I joined in 2014. And the mandate given to me was: Okay, take that team, you need to expand it, expand its capability beyond what was primarily communication design and packaging design— think about digital, think about service design. These things were, again there, but they were in a very early stages. But now we extend that across all three business sectors. So today we're close to 140 with another 40 ish contractors. We opened up a design center in Singapore, a design center in Los Angeles, and the demand continues to grow. Our partnership with the pharma and MedTech sectors are our two fastest growing engagements in J&J today.
Kevin Bethune
So with the pandemic COVID-19, I guess, how has COVID forced you to rewrite your strategy?
Ernesto Quinteros
Well, some interesting things, right? What we found, though, was that design had more of a democratic presence with business partners since everyone was on Zoom and everyone has a postage stamp on the screen. It wasn't as much posturing from a hierarchy perspective when people got together in the room, and I think it became more about ideas. And so I think a lot of designers had a little bit more voice or a little bit more comfort in expressing ideas, which then because of that, even playing field were much more considered than maybe previously. But these relationships have been building. And because healthcare also has to look at patients not coming into healthcare centers like before. How do you connect with them virtually? So there's a lot of interesting intersections that are taking place right now in healthcare. And some of these experiences, even for the design organization, I think help feed our empathy and understanding on how to connect with patients.
Dana Arnett
Yeah. And speaking of empathy, how do you bring the patient or the consumer into the design process?
Ernesto Quinteros
So a lot of groups, a lot of teams, I think this is very common, they do a lot of different exercises, either ethnographic research, trying to learn and listen and create journey maps, patient journey maps, sometimes service maps. These are great tools because when you create them, it's not about any one person's perspective within the company. Sometimes we have to really try hard to get our internal business partners to say it's not about what they think it is. It's really about what the patients are telling us or the healthcare professionals are telling us. So these tools are great because once you visualize it— time is such a beautiful continuum to understand moments, inflection points where you can come in and identify a pain point that needs to be addressed. You can see where patients maybe drop off some of their therapeutic care or their healthcare solutions just by the fact that you can see where the drop offs happen relative to the care and the quality of their care. So that's been a really important method and we do that pretty extensively now where we're quite respected for that within Johnson & Johnson. And we also have this kind of virtuous cycle of learning. When we create one, we look at different stakeholders and how they map to this and could be even supply chain, you know, where are they coming and going within this journey map? And from that lens, we go into the next one, let's say the next therapeutic area, much more enlightened. And we can point with the new partner team: well, look, here's what we did over here, there's a lot of confidence and credibility. And it just keeps getting easier and it's just great. It's really, really great with the partners.
Dana Arnett
Can you— I'm assuming you get enough support, permission, I guess you would say air cover from the C-suite to- because it's not suddenly as if a designer is sitting at a table with an engineer or somebody that's developing a breakthrough drug. How does it work in terms of, you know, the permission and the rules of engagement internally at J&J?
Ernesto Quinteros
So, with a lot of engagements, they start out small. And I think people need to see proof of where design can add value. There's still a lot of perception out there that design comes in to make something maybe look better. Right. The idea of systems thinking is emerging. The team that's partnering with the pharma business is very, very strong. They've made a lot of traction here. We're doing a lot of patient support programs now, which has very little to do with, you know, graphic design, but really is behavioral and understanding their needs on a day to day basis. And that brings us further upstream. So we've got really interesting charts now that show how design continues to move upstream, even to like what we call the small molecule, because you may need to think about how you deliver that medication versus that's all figured out, now help us deliver it. No we're actually moving upstream to discussing ways, considerations on how you would develop that-that-that drug therapy.
Kevin Bethune
So that active moving upstream. Is it right to say that you've had to cultivate a transformation of sorts? Has transition management been a part of your design strategy?
Ernesto Quinteros
Absolutely. You know, again, they said expand across all three sectors and also bring a new capability. So I have a leader for digital experience design that's been with us for five plus years. We had a couple of digital designers, but that has become a very large practice for us where we're partner with a J&J technology team, we're involved with, let's say CAR-T, which is a new therapy. Developing the employee portals for processing the samples. Again, really, really amazing stuff that no one would have thought design would play that role going back five, six years ago. So it's been accelerating. Our team in Singapore is now doing exploration in that same space again, leveraging what we've done in North America. So it is accelerating. And with MedTech, we designed a robotic platform that launched in the last 18 months the VELYS robotic platform. We designed the-the hardware, the robot itself, it's really a co-robot because it's a robot that works with a doctor and the user interface and even the brand cohesion to make the user interface and the device all appear seamless from a marketing lens. So it's really holistic. The types of programs we're involved with today from 2014.
Kevin Bethune
Robotics and doctors, I'm putting that image in my head. Very cool.
Dana Arnett
So Ernesto, rather than focus on surface attributes like a lot of designers are confined to do and knowing your-your role and the important role design plays at J&J, does everything ladder up to something bigger?
Ernesto Quinteros
Yes, it's interesting. We have a purpose statement and it was not defined when I joined J&J, and it was defined within the first 24 months that I got there. I was very fortunate to be pulled into a very core team of senior leaders across Johnson & Johnson to establish this purpose statement. So the organization is very purpose driven. There's also Our Credo statement, which is over 75 years old now. And what's interesting, I often say that Robert Wood Johnson, the individual who crafted that statement, I say he's the first design thinker within Johnson & Johnson. There's four, there's four paragraphs, every single paragraph addresses a different stakeholder group. It's very people centered. And it's, it's it's an awesome document. I think there's very few corporations that have one with the same type of meaning and inspiring purpose in that document. So yes, it ladders up to those things. And then that I think permeates all organizations via supply chain and technology and the business units. We have that in common across the entire enterprise.
Kevin Bethune
So from your experience, clearly healthcare squares with design and business and the level of traction that you and your team have achieved within Johnson & Johnson, it sounds incredible. I guess, can you distinguish a difference between design thinking and the actual practice of design in your context?
Ernesto Quinteros
I don't think design thinking needs to be owned by design. Sometimes I refer to it as integrated thinking, right? It's really about the idea of bringing different parties that all have a role to play to the table, to develop a solution together with those people, stakeholders at the center. Of course, design— I think we have this natural ability of being very people centered because we observe and then we develop things and we put things in people's hands and we observe again and we see if things work properly. So we kind of have that natural, innate ability. But when you get the different stakeholder groups together, be it technology, supply chain, marketing, etc., it helps create a cohesion for all of us to work together towards the same goal. And sometimes I think they get a little bit- the folks who haven't really been involved with the design thinking process, because they may have that misperception come into it. But, very often they're converted. And once they're converted, that's great. But that's sometimes the obstacle or the hurdle to get over. I hope that answers your question.
Kevin Bethune
No, it does. It does. Sometimes to take a step forward, you have to maybe educate or convince, you know with ten conversations to take that one step forward. But hopefully over time, it becomes less of a burden.
Dana Arnett
So, Ernesto, what do you what do you see designers needing right now in terms of skills or tools or methods?
Ernesto Quinteros
Well, the interesting thing with design, I think there's so many places to get information on how to use the latest software packages and things like that. So I think that one's getting kind of easy. We didn't have all that. You had to go to a school to get some of those education. Now you can watch a YouTube video and quickly learn some techniques with some sort of a software application. What I think is really critical for designers today is empathy and the ability to connect more with the people that they design solutions for. That could include getting more familiar with ethnographic research service, you know, blueprint mapping, things like that, which take it away from designing a thing to designing an experience. Because once you start to design the experience, there are tangible things that will be part of that experience. But the more successful solution will be the one where experience end to end is the most important thing to wrap your head around and to get familiar with. And I do see a lot of younger talent that we're tapping into and we're bringing to that organization, have that passion to be familiar with that type of thinking and work.
Dana Arnett
So with those fields and those new experiences that you're touching, are you drawing from conventional design programs to find these next generation of designers who can, you know, either touch robotics or they or they have engineering backgrounds? Tell us a little bit about where you're finding your talent.
Ernesto Quinteros
It's a variety of ways. There is definitely new breed of design talent that's emerging where they may have had a mechanical engineering degree, they maybe did some product design, and then they're interested in digital before they even come our way. And we love those types of people. We often call them T-shaped. You may have heard that term — I-shaped very, very deep and steep in a particular design craft, but the T-shaped tend to have other peripheral experiences, which I think they're great connectors. And so we are seeking to hire more and more of those over time. Some of the design team that we had on staff have also evolved and have this curious appetite to learn. So they're getting involved with programs where they're stretching themselves and they become more T-shaped over time. But we do have an organization that has subject matter, expertise, crafts, and teams that are very T-shaped. And again, we assemble teams based on the problem to solve the need of the business. But we are looking more and more for those T-shaped types of design, emerging design talents out there.
Kevin Bethune
I have to applaud you for the traction that you and your team are achieving at Johnson & Johnson, and as you look ahead and as we enter sort of this new horizon of unknowns, like—what new paradigms are you most concerned with for you in particular, or maybe for your team? And what paradigms are you most excited by?
Ernesto Quinteros
You know, I think I may, may be cursed with being too optimistic. What I mean by that is there's always challenges. We see them all the time, even on a weekly basis as an organization within a very large corporation. But usually when those challenges come, they open up another opportunity. And that's the way I like to talk about it with the team. And again, we continue to see expanded engagement with partners. They continue to see more and more excitement with us. But I will say, and I can't speak to this being only with design, this may happen in other fields, but there's always groups when you get to a large corporation, because humans can't really connect— if you think about even what we read in the news in the world, it's really hard to connect humans, right? When you get to the scale of a large corporation, that connectivity is also challenged compared to a smaller corporation. And so that's one of the challenges I see, is how do we scale, keep that connection, build that trust, while other groups may not even understand the value or feel that they can go set up their own design organization, let's say sometimes that happens in big corporations. But again, I'm feeling really good about the traction we're making. So I don't that's quite the paradigm question you have, but that's what I see on the horizon is how do we continue to deliver value by integrating design and help the business. I think that's how we get rewarded in that sense.
Dana Arnett
So we'll end with the big one here— Ernesto, what impact do you think, or hope, design can continue to make or perhaps discover as we plow into the uncertain future?
Ernesto Quinteros
Well, I think design has a very interesting role to play in solving complex, ambiguous problems. I think we tend to be more empathetic and people-centered compared to some capabilities. So if you look at society and look at climate change or pollution, overpopulation, food shortages, water shortages, these are complex problems. And I hope that design could be more tapped into as a type of mindset, as a capability to contribute to problem solving. There are some societies in the world where design, design thinking plays a really critical role. For example, Singapore, I've seen presentations by the Singapore government where design thinking is part of their strategic plan and how they solve their societal issues, even though they're a small nation. It allows them to develop concept ideas, prototype them, and then scale. They're not to scale the United States. But what's really fun to watch, I think fascinating, is that they understand the value design and they're applying it in this way. And I hope that more, more governments, even small government cities statewide within the United States might start to think about that. I have a friend who is now doing some design thinking work, she's currently in Hawaii right now working with one of the governments there. And it's applying the same kind of mindset this way of working and thinking for that government there as Singapore is. So I think that's a big opportunity. If you were to ask someone out on the street about design, they'd say: What are you talking about? But that's, I think that's the hurdle that design has, is we have too much history with making things look attractive. And what we really need to focus on is the systems thinking ability that we really, really have and should get more opportunities to demonstrate its value. Maybe design needs a different name or something, but I think that's the opportunity for design.
Kevin Bethune
What I feel from you Ernesto is design is problem solvers, and I think you represent that. Your team represents that. So thank you.
Ernesto Quinteros
Well, thank you.
Dana Arnett
Thank you, Ernesto, for an inspiring, enlightening conversation. Keep up the great work.
Ernesto Quinteros
Thank you. This was fun.
Kevin Bethune
Ernesto, thank you so much.
Kevin Bethune
The Design of Business | The Business of Design is a podcast from Design Observer. Our website is D-B-B-D dot Design Observer dot com. There you can find the complete archive for past guests and hosts. To listen, go to D-B-B-D dot Design Observer dot com.
Dana Arnett
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Kevin Bethune
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Dana Arnett
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Kevin Bethune
Our producer Adina Karp. Judybelle Camangyan edits the show. Our music is by Mike Errico. Thanks as always to Design Observer founder Jessica Helfand and to Design Observer executive producer Betsy Vardell.
Dana Arnett
Thank you, KB and team. See you next time.
