Emotion By Design: Creative Leadership Lessons from a Life at Nike

I call this Emotion by Design—the ability to create stories, images, and experiences that make people feel that even their most audacious dreams are possible to achieve.

“Running just became a lot easier”—is what every would-be runner wants to hear. What does this thing do? It makes running a lot easier.

But as I put the hours into this varied work, a structure began to form, slowly at first but also inexorably toward a defining central idea. Namely, that a brand builds a creative advantage through the fostering of a strong culture of creativity which leads to the consistent ability to construct powerful emotional bonds with its consumers.

Throughout this book, we’re going to be talking a lot about the process by which we do this: How do we tell the most effective story to connect with our consumers? Where do we start? What are we looking for? But before we get to those stories, we first need to lay the foundation.

One essential element, the wellspring from which so many inspiring ideas originate, is empathy. Our ability to understand and share the feelings of someone else is what allows us to get to the deeper truths and begin fashioning a story around them. It’s because of empathy that we can get outside ourselves and begin the search for what moves others.

Shred. A mobile app, Shred connects users to outdoor adventures all around them (or to places they’re traveling to), and to each other, making it easy to do something fun and active without a lot of online research.

Visually stunning concept books aside, the speed at which Ray and I moved from idea to visualization was central in turning the concept from a conversation into something real. How often do you and your teams find yourself talking about an idea in a meeting, leaving the room, and then not addressing it again until a month or even a year later? “Hey

The trick was to communicate these things not as an engineer would (no offense to engineers), but as your friend who just got this new gadget would.

Platon

Lauren also once said: “I am not a fashion person. I am anti-fashion. I am interested in longevity, timelessness, style.”