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Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand|Audio

December 31, 2009

S1E1: John Bielenberg

John Bielenberg is a designer, entrepreneur and imaginative advocate for a better world. He is the founder of Project M and CCA Secret Project, and co-founder of Future and Common. He is known for his work in innovation regarding the practice and understanding of design and leadership in the “design for good” movement.

“Our brains are super efficient at following existing pathways,” he says on The Design of Business | The Business of Design. This efficiency is wonderful in many situations, but it makes it hard to generate new ideas.

While working for Deutsche Bank, Bielenberg says: We got ads from the Wall Street Journal from all the big investment banks and took the logos and switched them around. Nobody could tell whose ad was whose.…I tried to convince them to just do a giant Deutsche Bank logo, five by five inches, and nothing else, and said that would have a bigger impact subliminally.

So how hard is it to think wrong? “Try to talk wrong. it’s almost impossible to put words together in a nonsensical sequence,” Bielenberg says.

Michael Bierut gives it a try.

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The Design of Business | The Business of Design is recorded at the Yale School of Management.

A big thanks to our launch sponsor, IBM.

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By Michael Bierut & Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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