This is Reina Moro's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi everyone, welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity and technology. I'm Reina Moro, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in New York, Tokyo, and Singapore.
Today's guest is Kevin Bethune, a multidisciplinary design and innovation executive
and a best-selling author based in California. Kevin is the founder and chief creative officer
of Dreams Design & Life, a think tank that delivers design innovation services using
an empathic, holistic approach. In 2022, Kevin published his first book, Reimagining Design,
unlocking strategic innovation through MIT Press, and it became an instant bestseller.
I met Kevin through a mutual friend, Dr. John Maeda. John Maeda organized an event in Cape Cod
five or six years ago, and it was an intimate gathering of 20 to maybe not even 30 executives
from different walks of life. I happened to be invited to the event, and Kevin was also an
invitee at the event. Since then, we kept in loose touch, I would say, not having spoken too many
times. We just connected through LinkedIn and other social media, and we would send messages
or comments to each other, but that was really the extent of my light relationship and friendship
that I've had online with Kevin. Having read his book, Reimagining Design, I was really struck
by the trajectory and the diversity of his background. His background spans engineering,
business, and design in equal proportion, positioning him to help brands deliver
meaningful innovations to enrich people's lives, and that brings me to the point.
How did Kevin manage his career from one to the next, and how did he find his foot in the door
each time? So, let's get started. Kevin, good to see you. You too, Ray. Thanks for having me.
Yeah. So, where do we find you? So, I'm operating here in Los Angeles proper,
a town called Redondo Beach, California. Beautiful area. I've been there a few times,
not a lot. Can't say I'm that familiar with, but at least I can visualize what your
surroundings might be. A lot of palm trees and some ocean.
I wanted to start the conversation by asking your career, which is, to use your phrase,
an unorthodox path through engineering, business, and design. And you started as an engineer. That's
what you did. You studied mechanical engineering at Notre Dame. And then your first job was an
engineering job. Back then was Westinghouse, which then got acquired by a nuclear energy
company, British nuclear energy company. You then went to get an MBA at Carnegie Mellon.
You grew up in Detroit. For the most part, yes.
Yeah. So, I went to the University of Michigan. Oh, oh, wow.
Yeah. Back in the mid-90s. Okay.
Yeah. So, I went to, I lived in Ann Arbor, and I used to go to Detroit, particularly to see some
gigs, to show, to see shows. Yes, yes.
Yeah, yeah. But anyway, back to you. So, you went to Carnegie Mellon to get an MBA, and you then
went to Nike. And then that's where you discovered design, if I read your book correctly.
That's correct. Yeah, yeah. And then you got a degree
at the Arsenault College of Design. And then eventually you found your way at yourself at
BCG Digital Ventures. And you write in your book that curiosity was a common thread that took you
from one place to the next place. And just talking to people, meeting people, and asking,
just being curious about what they did. And then them, in return, giving you a thing to work on,
an opportunity, and then naturally you went into that. But if you were to do this all over again,
would you start with design? And the question is, why or why not?
Yes. First, I will never, just because I did the steps that you've characterized accurately,
I would never advise anyone to do exactly what I did in those series of steps.
As you said, curiosity was the defining thread that carried me from one to the other.
But the second thing I'll say is that I have zero regrets of the order of which that journey
unfolded. And if anything, I think that journey exposed me to opportunities to connect the dots,
perhaps earlier than what typical global enterprises offer folks when it comes to their
career experiences. I was able to maybe make those transitions early. It wasn't easy, but at
least I was able to make them early. And some of the learnings that arose from that have been very
gratifying and very helpful to not just myself and my business concerns, but also others that I share
those perspectives with. The engineering gave me a proper foundation of just understanding how the
world works, how to understand critical path of what it takes to get something created,
delivered, how to work with high-performing teams, growing as a leader from an individual
contributor as an engineer to ultimately leading engineering projects, and then having natural
questions about why or what is the bigger strategic imperative around the engineering work.
And then I get into the Nike environment and I see, oh, how professional design sort of plugs into
technology and business concerns. And so it was just like an evolving flywheel of learning and
experiences that I will never regret. Right. You talked about high-functioning teams during your
engineering career. Can you share what are some specific lessons that you took away from the early
part of your career? And it sounds like you are, even though you are relatively young in relation
to who you are now, but you were, you had an opportunity to not only to participate or also to
eventually to lead things. When I mentioned critical path, there's a lot to unpack there,
but just, I was working for an original equipment manufacturer or an OEM. Westinghouse Nuclear at
the time had probably a third of the world's nuclear operating fleet, whether it be for
commercial power or military as it relates to probably like nuclear capabilities within the
nuclear Navy, for example. Westinghouse had roughly a third of that OEM design basis across the world.
And so to understand like what it took to support those nuclear operating reactors and the critical
path sequence of events from being able to conceive against the need, the actual hardware that would
be required to plug the gap or address the need of a particular utility with nuclear plants,
to be able to understand what it took to fabricate such hardware, to work with a crew of technicians
and engineers to make sure everyone is trained on like why we're intervening with this hardware
solution, and then literally taking that solution to the field, to the site of the nuclear power
station and intervening during a maintenance outage when the plant's coming down from power
to accommodate all the different services and repairs needed and understanding the militaristic
sequence of events that need to happen. We were in projects where if you were done early,
upsetting the critical path sequence, if you were done early or if you were done late
and upsetting that sequence, that could cost the plant on the order of millions of dollars
of opportunity cost a day. Oh, wow. You know, when you're upsetting that sequence of events,
people are looking at you like, what's going on? We need answers, we need contingency plans,
we need to understand the overarching effects. Oh, wow. Being empathetic to the business,
being empathetic to the value chain, being empathetic to the critical path sequence of
events in terms of all the different stakeholders that are involved in a critical project,
I am so thankful that the engineering experience gave me that foundation of respect
and tactical empathy. Excuse my ignorance of that particular industry. I have no visualization of
what a project would be like, what one single project would be like at a nuclear plant.
So for the benefit of my ignorance, but also for the audience as well,
can you in a simple way, what a project is and how long it could last?
Yeah, a plant has a need for a particular performance enhancement. And right now,
the hardware doesn't exist. And I'm speaking very much through mechanical engineering language,
because that was the art of figuring out how to conceive of the right hardware solution to
answer the needs. If you think about then when you embark on a project path to achieve that goal,
you'd have to assemble a headquarters team of engineers to begin that journey. And through
classical hand calculations, through researching the prior art, the architectural drawings of a
nuclear plant, the reactor mechanical systems, like bringing out those little drawings of what
the OEM originally fabricated in the first place, pulling all of that knowledge out of the archives,
seeing what's there, and maybe even taking trips to the plant to go inspect what we can inspect
before the plant comes down for its maintenance window. And really collecting all those learnings
through discovery to say what is there truly. And then literally through whether it's mechanical
engineering design in terms of imagining different solution opportunities, empirical testing,
so taking and making prototypes and actually taking them into a test environment and using
the scientific method to evaluate control versus hypothetical groups, actually doing computer
simulations to compare against the hardware testing that you just did. And then also cross
comparing that with classical hand calculations of engineering theory. And then you have to take all
those different types of analyses. You have to bring that in front of a panel of engineers
that are more senior and outside of the project who are almost like an objective tribunal to say,
are you ready to go through the next milestone based on your existing analyses? Yes, proceed,
or no, you have to go back and fix some things and address some gaps and come back to us. So after
you go through different gates and dates of engineering review and verification, then you
earn the right to go fabricate the hardware. And then you have to test the hardware to make sure
it's ready to go for the field. And again, go in front of another tribunal of engineering
arbiters to say whether you earn the right to proceed into field implementation.
Then you have to train a crew, travel out to the nuclear site, pass the utilities requirements for
entry into the plant and their requirements of training and knowledge and validation.
And then you can proceed with the actual scheduled implementation. So it's an arduous,
long, in some cases, if it's an emergency, a project could be three months. Longer efforts
could take years. I can imagine having that kind of rigorous experience at the beginning of one's
career. Like if you make a mistake, not that you made a mistake, but if you make a mistake
designing a shoe, let's say, or an app, like you can debug it, you can fix it, you can change the
manufacturing process a little bit, and then maybe start producing a new set of shoes. Whereas
if something goes wrong at a nuclear plant, it could be devastating. It could be devastating.
It's amazing that those devastating accidents don't now happen. Seems so resilient. So I guess
that kind of discipline and rigor being instilled in you early on in a career must have been quite
formative. Yeah, and I still feel it in my muscles. It's like when I'm even in an innovation
project now, I probably have a detailed orientation that's a bit surprising to
the stakeholders that I'm engaged with because it comes from that carefulness.
Yeah, yeah. And then in your book, you talk about how you started talking to other people
in your company, say like the salespeople and other people, and you got curious about the
business aspect of just the world in general. But what specifically drew you into the business side
of things? I think the mechanical group that I was a part of, it was called Mechanical Systems
Integration focused on the reactor mechanical hardware. If you think about the control rods
that move in and out of the fuel, like all the mechanics around how the reactor behaves,
that was our group. And it was a very high demand group in terms of it had the attention of the
business, the collective business, because we were spawning a lot of growth. The services were
very high margin. It was in demand by a lot of nuclear owning utilities. So there was a lot of
eyeballs on us. And from the ingenuity that comes out of each project, there was always an
opportunity to help conceive of a new product line, a new hardware that would answer a performance
attribute for a plant. And utilities find out about it and they want that solution for their
plant too. And so I observed that the marketing department was always visiting our team
to figure out like what are the inputs, what inputs can they extract or understand to inform
the next set of proposals for the next utilities that need this. And so there were opportunities
to naturally lend my expertise or contribute. And then you get to know the marketing folks
pretty well in those interactions. And then they invite you more. And then the more I'm asking
questions, they invite that. They invite that appetite more to be helpful to their proposal
crafting. Wow. Wow. So then you decide to go get an MBA at Carnegie Mellon. You spent two years,
which then gives you an opportunity to meet somebody at Nike, particularly in the business
planning department, correct? Correct. Yeah. And then you emailed that person and then you eventually
were invited to come to Nike in the business operation. But when it comes to business planning
at a company like Nike, which is known for its marketing, known for its design. So tell us about
what business planning looks like. No, you're right. Honestly, when I first met the gentleman,
it was at an MBA career fair, actually during my first year of study. And I just kept in
touch with him. Every quarter we would have an email exchange. I was just curious, like
in your position at Nike, like what issues are you dealing with? And so in our quarterly exchanges,
he'd give little breadcrumbs of perspective of the hot issues facing a public company
at the gravity of a Nike, to your point. And so by the time my graduation came around,
he made that invitation to interview. But I still didn't know necessarily what business planning
meant. And mind you, the classroom knowledge was still relatively fresh and I had
zero business experience applying that classroom knowledge yet. But he gave me my first opportunity.
So when I entered his team, we were literally sitting one floor below the Nike senior executives,
one floor above us. And through every earnings release, there had to be a roll-up of all the
financial and operational insights of how the business was doing. And our team was meant to
serve as that primary headquarters interface for almost the objective financial and operational
read of the company. First, I'm learning political capital. I'm learning how to navigate the Nike
matrix at that time. And I totally respect my boss' perspective around what will it look like
having our team interacting over there? I'm not comfortable with the questions that would
arise from that. So I don't support that activity. And I believe Albert Shum, he's a mutual friend of
ours. He was the business design hybrid guy that was over in innovation that I was introduced to.
And he had an open invitation. Hey, if you want to help us out, even if your team doesn't support
it, you can still just come over and help us as Kevin. You don't have to have a title when you're
over here. Just help us on your lunch breaks, help us on your evenings and help shape our programs.
If you have the desire and passion, we'll welcome it. So I really appreciate just that
tact I had to navigate and getting Albert's advice in terms of how to handle it.
Oh, wow. What was that transition like? After 18 months as a business planner, my side hustle
forays did give me the opportunity to interview for a position within the global footwear product
engine of Nike. And it was at a unique time in that Nike was heavily investing in advanced
digital creation competencies to hopefully accelerate and make more efficient and more
relevant the actual footwear product creation process from initial conception of a shoe all
the way to when you actually confirm the thing you want to mass produce. So that upstream window
of product creation, it used to have been a very analog process of sample making and
napkin sketches back and forth across the ocean. But with 3D and advanced techniques like that,
you could articulate your design intent much more clearly, eliminate the guesswork, be more relevant
to what the consumer wants, these kind of things. And so I was more or less in an operational job
around that paradigm shift within Nike product creation. And that really exposed me front and
center to now newfound design friends, as well as manufacturing developers and product marketers
and managers. And I was able to see Nike's approach to multidisciplinary product creation.
And my newfound creative friends saw some of the things I was doing outside of work
for artistic exploration. And a few creative directors gave me some briefs that didn't have
a designer to them. And some opportunities to stretch myself and learn footwear design under
their mentorship. The Jordan brand was the first category to give me a couple shots to design shoes
that made it into production. And then the Innovation Kitchen allowed me the opportunity
to contribute for a couple of years with them. Yeah, yeah. And then that gave you the motivation
to officially study design at the Art Center College, right? Yes. I had to be honest with
myself first and foremost to say a sequence of shoe projects, even though I was gratified by that,
it didn't necessarily answer fully the creative foundation that I didn't have the proper
foundation of studio training like my design peers, my design friends had. And I started
talking to colleagues and friends there about how did they establish their creative foundation?
What schools did they go to? And I met a lot of Art Center alums who encouraged me to think about
a graduate chapter of education, additional education to solidify that foundation.
Yeah. For those of those listeners who might not be familiar with the Art Center College of Design
is basically the Harvard of Design and Arts in the United States. It's one of the best design
schools in the country. So I have a lot of respect for you and anybody who studied there. And I've
met quite a few people from Art Center of College of Design and everybody that I've met from that
school had a great balance between concept and craft. It wasn't just a craft side or it wasn't
just a concept side of things. So I wanted to shift gears a little bit. You write in your book, often
we hear a lot of rhetoric about what it takes to be successful. Hard work, resilience, working over
100 hours a week. Creativity is rarely mentioned. I tend to agree. I tend to agree. And part of the
reason why I'm doing this podcast is that human creativity is what is going to differentiate me
from you and from others. But why is it that creativity is not talked about or at least mentioned
in the context of success? Yeah. When I was a business planner or the ops person within product
observing design for the first time, it's like I saw my creative colleagues walking in with the
cool clothes. They were usually coming in late at 11. And Nike was a kind of a culture where people
are like super intense during the workday. And then for the most part, everyone kind of leaves
at a respectable hour to go see their families or whatever. So Nike is not a place where you see
buildings full of people after 7 p.m. So all I saw was the late people coming in, the fashionable
clothes. They get to take these really cool, exotic inspiration trips. And I thought, oh,
that's creative. It's very cool. I don't perceive them working as hard as me as this planner
crunching over Excel. I learned pretty quickly when I got to ArtCenter how wrong I was and that
at ArtCenter and the Graduate Industrial Design Program, I have never worked harder in an academic
arena compared to my business schooling and compared to my engineering, which is both very
difficult chapters of academics. No way. Really? Just because of the level of iterations required
to get to the answer. If I could barrel through a scientific method in engineering and get to
a strong point of view, as long as my calculations and my simulations and testing backed it all up,
I could arrive at the end with success. But at ArtCenter, you're going through a very non-linear,
iterative, divergent, convergent, divergent again, making mistakes, pivoting, co-creating with people
in the field to strengthen your point of view. It took a lot more work to get to that same
conclusion than previous instances. And then maybe to round out the answer to a question
around this perception, I don't think, you know, we're talking about different disciplines coming
to the table to guide companies forward and the perception of success. I think the creative
people at that table are still the least understood, even with design thinking and
the prevalence of that over the last couple decades. Creativity is still perceived as the very
last step in the value chain after all the big thinking has been done by your business person
or your engineer. It's, okay, now address the aesthetic opportunity at the end of the chain of
events. And so the perception of how integral design has a hand in shaping value creation,
it's still the minuscule percentage at the very end of the process, not fully embedded through
the entire value chain. So I think that's where that perception comes from. And I think we have
a lot to showcase that, no, design can play and create value through every step of any value chain.
What advice do you have to yourself as a designer, say, if you were 25 years old now,
starting out your career or even younger, but in 2024, not 20 years ago or whatever, when you were
25, but if you were 25 now, what advice do you give to the young Kevin? Yeah, I think in our
present moment, we're facing unprecedented complexity, just the confluence of all these
different headwinds, tailwinds, trends, emerging paradigms. And I believe the designer today, as
well as the designer tomorrow is going to find themselves in more and more multidisciplinary
situations. We have to handle this complexity. And if you sprinkle generative AI into the
conversation, arguably that algorithms will be able to take a lot of the lion's share burden of
things that we can automate, hopefully to accelerate our efficiency, accelerate our
relevance to get our stuff, our work done. And ideally the value of creative problem solving
and critical thinking elevates. So if that designer, the younger Kevin today or tomorrow
is navigating, they're going to be proximate to more business people. They're going to be
proximate to more technologists. They're going to be proximate to opportunities to wire the guiding
principles that allow these algorithms to run the way they run. And ideally they do it with
the sensitivity of the cascade of intended as well as unintended consequences. And so
I advise any young person, as well as I think about my former self in today's context,
like what is the breadth and depth of how we're expected to then contribute? And when I say breadth,
it's like knowing that you're going to be in a multidisciplinary situation.
How well from a breadth perspective are we able to communicate, collaborate, and strategically align
and see the future together through shared lenses of perspective? That's where the breadth comes in.
And then still as a person around that problem solving opportunity,
I think each individual has to still be trusted and relied upon to deliver specific contributions.
You could call it craft, you could call it expertise, but we still have to be able to
significantly contribute something, not just talk, but something of value to move the team forward.
And so for any young person, it's what can I learn? What can I experiment with? What can I
get cycles of experience in to develop a pillar of depth around something? And over our careers,
there might be a couple pillars that we develop over time. It's not a short game where you're
bouncing between jobs after a year. You're not going to develop any depth doing that.
Can you devote yourself to developing a pillar over perhaps a significant tenure of experience
before you move on to develop the next pillar? So that was part one of my conversation with
Kevin Bethune, the author of the best-selling book, Reimagining Design, and founder and chief
creative officer of Dreams Design and Life, a think tank that delivers design innovation services
using an empathic, holistic approach. When I picked up Kevin's book a couple years ago,
based on the title, Reimagining Design, I thought it was strictly about design, but I was pleasantly
surprised to read his career path, which is quite unusual. Each step of the way, starting with his
college days, where he studied engineering at Notre Dame University. And as he said in this
conversation, in his first semester, he was discouraged by his professor that he should
not pursue engineering as his academic study. Later in his career, when he was at Nike,
he was somewhat looked down upon because he wasn't a designer. He wasn't trained as a designer.
But at each of these moments where he was perceived a certain way by people around him, he took it
upon himself to prove them wrong. And not just to prove them wrong, but prove them wrong with
actual artifacts, whether it was grades at his university or an actual degree, a graduate degree
in industry design, so that he can be recognized, he can be approved as a proper designer. He took
those negative perceptions and used them as the springboard to catapult himself to the next level.
And it's a combination of curiosity and his grit that took him from one place to the next.
And it's his curiosity to be interested in surrounding topics and areas, and his motivation
to talk to and connect with individuals in those adjacent areas. Each time, what started as
curiosity turned into conviction. That was the next thing that he wanted to pursue. And looking
at his 25, 30-year career, I would bet that a 21-year-old Kevin studying engineering at Notre
Dame, or a 23-year-old Kevin being a nuclear plant analyst and engineer, to an MBA student
at Carnegie Mellon, a business planner at Nike, an industry design student at the Art Center College
of Design, a business consultant at BCG, and now his own firm, Dreams Design & Life, a 21-year-old
Kevin would not have been able to imagine what a 50-year-old Kevin would be 25, 30 years later.
Through that journey that he took, and that gets to my point, what I call inspiration to live by.
This is what I would like to share with you. My inspiration to live by that I received
from Kevin is the following. Don't let perception guide you, follow your conviction. Like I said,
from early on, and especially being a black individual and black engineering student
back at Notre Dame, which if I may say so, I'm sure a fairly white college, he must have
battled with different types of perception, but he didn't let that perception define him.
He followed his conviction to prove them wrong, and to prove them that he can do it on his own
term. Later on, whether when he was at the nuclear plant where he worked, and I'm sure he was one of
the few black individuals there, to one of the most celebrated brands in the world, Nike, and I've
been to Nike campus many, many times. Is it the most diverse campus? Is it the most diverse
environment? Perhaps not. In the context of business planning to design, he must have felt
many times lonely, and he must have received so many different types of perceptions and other ways
of being viewed, but it was really his conviction. If there was something that he was curious about,
if there was something that he was remotely interested in, he would let that conviction
guide him to the next level. And not just guide him to the next level or next territory,
he had the conviction to stay with it, and to graduate from Notre Dame with good grades,
to practice as a full-fledged nuclear plant engineer, or a business planner, or a designer
at the Arsenal College of Design, and then eventually find his way into consulting,
and working at one of the best consulting firms in the world for many, many, many years.
And it was his ability and his stubborn persistence to stick with his curiosity,
and more importantly, his conviction. So today's inspiration to live by from Kevin Bethune is
Don't Let Perception Guide You, Follow Your Conviction.
If you like our podcast, please follow us wherever you are listening. And if you could leave us a
five-star rating, we'll be so grateful. If you have questions or comments, please send them
via the link in the show note. In part two of this conversation, I asked Kevin something personal,
challenges as a minority, a black individual in academic and corporate America. So stay tuned.
I'm Reina Moto, and this is The Credit Mindset. See you next time.