Design Visionary

Looking for talent? Of course you are. A titanic talent search is under way as managers scour the globe for innovators. Companies are struggling to transform themselves from cultures driven by cost and quality control to organizations that profit from creative thinking. Everybody knows where to find Six Sigma black belts, financial hotshots, and vice-presidents into Total Quality Management. Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, and lots of B-schools churn them out. But innovators?

Enter Patrick Whitney, a 54-year-old Canadian native who is director of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, the largest graduate school of design in the U.S. Whitney is a visionary, a key leader in a new movement to create a discipline of design. Like W. Edwards Deming, who transformed the "mushy" notion of quality into the rigorous, useful TQM methodology, Whitney is turning design into a core methodology of innovation. In doing so, this soft-spoken man has quietly become the guru of integrating the best of business and design thinking.