Convincing isn't really possible in an age of customer control. Customers hold most of the cards today. They have good visibility into their choices, and they can easily share information with each other. Not only that, they don't like to be sold. But they do like to buy. Your job shouldn't be to convince customers to buy, but to help them buy what they want.

Design is the underlying skill that activates innovation. If you want to innovate, you've got to design.

Designers don't actually solve problems. They work through them.

A brand is a person's perception. Of course, it makes marketers nervous to think that marketing is out of their control, but that's why the discipline of branding has emerged.

Without design thinking, the only sane response to a problem is to make a smaller, "safer" move. Smaller moves don't get you very far. They key is to let out the leash on imagination, but not take it off the leash. Imagination is the only path to innovation. It's a good example of something that humans do better than machines.

In a sense, traditional business is design blind.

Cultures are naturally resistant to change. The same shared mental models that allow large numbers of people to work together efficiently can also keep people from imagining new ways of working together. In many corporate cultures, new ideas are viewed as heresy. But it doesn't have to be that way.