Design Leadership & the Art of Driving Change
A conversation with Maria Giudice on leading with influence, navigating corporate challenges, and embedding design into business strategy.
"Design doesn’t own innovation — everyone does. The key is embedding it strategically."
— Maria Giudice
How can designers lead effectively, drive change inside large organizations, and shape the future of business? I spoke with Maria Giudice, a trailblazing design executive, founder of Hot Studio, and former design leader at Facebook and Autodesk, to explore her journey from artist to entrepreneur to corporate changemaker. Maria shares her insights on leadership, building influence, and the evolving role of design in business. You can watch the full video of our conversation here on our YouTube channel or read an edited/condensed transcript of our conversation below.
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Sam Aquillano: Welcome Maria! Tell us a bit about what initially drew you into the world of design.
Maria Giudice: So happy to be here, Sam! So I wanted to be a famous artist as a child. I came out of the womb wanting to make art. I always was attracted to imagery and creativity. My family is very creative. My uncle was Frank Frazetta. He was a well-known fantasy painter. He had a huge influence on me growing up.
And so my destiny was to be a painter. And that was my trajectory. I was lucky enough in life to know that right away. And I went to art school at Cooper Union. I started out as a painter, I came out as a graphic designer. And what drew me to design the most was, well, when I was at Cooper, I was really disillusioned about graphic design. I was taking the classes, but it felt so formulaic. Like, here's a list of fonts you should use. Always flush left. Make sure you have a ton of white space around things. And you know use good imagery there boom that's graphic design and it wasn't until my senior year of college where a man named Richard Saul Wurman was the guest instructor and he walked into the room and he looked nothing like what designers looked like at the time in the 80s
He was the short, fat man with the scarf, and he was cursing up a storm. And I fell in love with him. And he said the thing that put me on the path for the rest of my life. He said to us, paraphrasing, you are all full of shit. said, you know, design is not about decoration. It's not about making things pretty. Your job is to help make sense of the world on behalf of people.
And I like, mic drop, boom, like purpose, instant purpose in life, got it, understand it. And that really was the thing that has catalyzed my career, has, you know, just put me on a very straight trajectory where even to this day, I strongly believe that the role of the designer is to be in service to others. To use our skills and our creativity to help people make sense of the world. And so that's still my purpose to this day.
SA: How about leadership? That's such an important part of your career and your process. Were there any early experiences or mentors that helped you shape how you think about leadership?
MG: I was always that person who organized other people. I was the one who, if I had an idea, I would get everybody to do something together. When I was growing up as a kid in Staten Island, I had the best parties. I had themes, I had costumes, I had designed the experience, I designed my invitations. I had everything designed. I had the whole experience mapped out from beginning to end. And so the combination of the creativity and then this ability to work with people to get them to believe in something that's bigger than one single person. Those were the two qualities that I brought forth in the world. And so leadership really came out of that organic quality to gather people, to communicate the purpose, to get them excited and enthusiastic and to move forth with excellence and joy. It was a total accident that I became a successful businesswoman.
SA: ‘The Accidental Business Woman’ — tell us more. You founded Hot Studio and then went from running a studio to running design within large organizations.
MG: I had it in my head that when I graduate college, I'd love to be part of an artist collective, a collective of designers working together. So when I graduated college, I went to go work for Richard Saul Wurman as a book designer in New York. And while I was working for Richard, he got the job to redesign the Pacific Bell Yellow Pages.
I thought that that would be a cool project to work on for a few months — when I got there, there was no office. There was no people. And then slowly but surely Richard had more people show up. So I got to witness how to set up a company from zero. And then I worked for the company, The Understanding Business, for two or three years. I was in charge of designing all the maps for California and Nevada. I became a cartographer. And then I needed a lot of people to help me do that. I became sort of a creative director overnight. I was 24 years old and I was managing a team of 15.
And then I got to a place at The Understanding Business where I felt like I wasn't growing anymore. So I left and I started freelancing. And this was at the dawn of the digital age. I knew how to design using computers and freelancing kept getting busy. I started hiring my friends to help and I just kept building. And the next thing, you know, I had a company — there's people here. I thought, I’m going to need structure, I have to think about healthcare. I was still in my twenties, so I kind of just figured it out along the way. But whenever I had gaps in my knowledge, I would take classes to learn about things like accounting. And that's kind of how I hacked my way through building a company. The way I do it without fear is I look at every problem like a design problem. And I'm not afraid of solving problems. I'm not afraid of things that are presented to me, because I see those things as opportunities for design.
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SA: You wrote this amazing book, Rise of the DEO, which I remember seeing and reading and thinking ‘a Design Executive Officer,’ what a concept. I want to get your take on what a DEO is, and what got you thinking about design at that leadership level?
MG: Well, you know, I didn't really know that I was doing anything very differently, right? Because again, I didn't have any assumptions going into it. I was asked to give a TEDx talk, which is terrifying. And I remember talking to my speech coaches at the time, and saying ‘I don't have anything relevant to say.’ And the coaching company was called Tech Talks. And this woman, Kristi Danes, looked at me like, ‘what are you kidding me? Maria, you run a company differently than anybody I've ever experienced.’ And she said, ‘you know, you're not a CEO, you're a DEO.’ So she coined the phrase DEO. And that really like stuck. Which got me on the stage to talk about the belief that the next great leaders in the world are going to be creative business leaders. And so I define the DEO as a creative business leader who looks at all problems as design problems, solvable through imagination and metrics.
I looked at the qualities of what a DEO is, and I came up with a few. They're change agents, risk takers. They use intuition as well as business acumen. They look at things in terms of systems and systems thinking. They are centered on people, that their purpose in the world is to benefit humans or all sentient beings, and then they get shit done. These are things that designers learn in school. This is what designers do. So if you apply those qualities to business problems, my hypothesis was you're going to get great outcomes.
SA: Did you get to test these ideas when you got to some of these larger enterprises?
MG: Well, that's got me to write Changemakers, frankly, because I got into these organizations thinking I had all the answers, right? But it's not necessarily the good ideas I always win in large companies. It's really about winning over people and influence and hoping that you keep your integrity through the process. So when I got to Facebook, I really struggled. My company was acquired by Facebook and I was 50 years old and Mark Zuckerberg was 25 years old. It's an understatement to say that I looked at the world very differently than he did at that time. And it was really hard for me to work in an environment that only valued output. They didn't necessarily value wisdom.
Then I got recruited to go work at Autodesk. And Autodesk was a very different kind of company. First of all, the CEO, Karl Bass, was a guy I interviewed for Rise of the DEO. So I already knew that he understood the intersection of creativity and technology. He was really supportive of me being hired. And the chief product officer at the time was my champion. He's like, I know who you are. I know what you can bring. I don't know what your role will be yet because they never had a VP of Design at the time. But I want you in here. So lesson number one about changemaking is you have to have executive champions who have your back.
I was wildly successful at Autodesk while they were both in power. But two years later, Carl Bass stepped down, then my boss quit. And suddenly I was in a position where there was nobody at the top who supported my position or believed that design should be at that high level of the organization. And that's when I got shown the door.
That rocked me to my core because it was like, hey, I have the receipts. I have the details. I have so much data to show how I was successful in this organization. And it didn't matter because the people in charge were threatened by me and didn't like me. And I was shown the door. And so then I went through, again, shock and disbelief, like how could this be? And that got me to think about, okay, what could I learn from this? What did I do well that I can be really proud of? What were things that I missed that led me to lose my job? And then I got curious and I started interviewing people who I respected in multiple industries who I felt like were leading change in small ways and large ways. And that took about a year of interviewing people. And then I got a ton of, I looked at the patterns and recruited my co-author Christopher Ireland and we wrote a very cathartic book with Changemakers.
SA: That resonates — for me there are the people who were believers in what I was doing. In that time I was able to thrive. And then those people either moved on or changed roles. And the new people weren't believers. With your experience — if you could go back, is there anything you would do differently?
MG: There was no playbook. What I learned was, first of all, don't come in too hot. Don't come in assuming that you are going to be solving problems that haven't been solved before. That people haven't tried to solve these and haven't been successful for a number of reasons and you should find out why.
You have come in with a little bit of humility and respect for the people who are already in the system. And then you need to not be so beholden to the org chart, assuming that that is the position of power. The position of power is throughout the organization and there are people who hold power that may or may not be supportive. So you need to do your research, you need to really understand the system and you need to understand the people who are working within the system, what their motivations are, what are they afraid of, what does success look like for them? And build those. You have to do this ahead of time and look outside of your org, look outside your direct reports or silo, you need to look around. And then you try to help those, what we call traditionalists become supporters. Now they may never be supportive. You may never win them over, but you know, you need to make sure that you have your eyes wide open — because they can either be threats later on or they can slow your initiative down.
It's not a perfect science, but the more you know about the people in your system, the better, the more successful you're going to be. And to find shared goals and alignments with them so that they feel like it's a win-win.
I often tell people that designers are really good at being the relentless customer ally. We are not necessarily good at working inside an organization and treating people with the same level of compassion. And we need to be more compassionate with the people that we work with, even if they are blocking what we're doing.
SA: Almost as if they're one of our user groups, right? Our users are so sacred in design. Maybe we need to treat our colleagues as our users.
MG: They totally are. Equally. And when you're working inside a large company, that might even be more important than the end user right now.
SA: Right, in order to get the outcomes that you want at the end of the day. Now you've got me thinking about internal personas and let's go there actually.
MG: Yeah, absolutely. We do have internal personas in the book. They were profiles that came from this group, ORSC, which is a team coaching organization where I became certified. They defined it in three types. There's the profile called Leapers. Leapers are the people and organizations who will right out of the gate support your initiative. They are enthusiastic. They love to start new things. They love fresh ideas. They're really the early adopters. They are enthusiastic people that you start building and they evangelize of your mission. They're great at starting things, not necessarily great at finishing things because it's when they get into the weeds of details, they lose interest.
The second group is the bridge builders. These are the people in organizations who require evidence. So they're slower to adopt change. They want to see evidence before you win their support. But if they believe in the evidence, they can then be very strong supporters.
And then the third group, which is the slowest to adopt change is called the tradition holders. Tradition holders are people typically who've been in the organization a really long time and have change fatigue. And they've seen people like me come and go like the wind. They've seen people like me fail miserably. So they kind of wait things out. They're kind of a little stealth. They may be very vocal in their support or lack of support, but more often than not, they can be very quiet. And these are the people you have to pay the most attention to. And for them, the way you could win them over is make sure that you're doing things that support their initiatives and give them a lot of credit and respect and acknowledgement. Because they might be there a long time, but then they don't really feel like they get the credit.
These are the three profiles to be starting from. Oftentimes when I teach workshops, I have people do a system map of the people system? Basically a stakeholder map. And then I have them identify the leapers, the bridge builders and the tradition holders throughout the system. Then we devise strategies of engagement for the people within the system.
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SA: I love that. Again, it's a design project within the design project. I've been kind of thinking about it in the back of my brain ever since you said that design is in service of things. Design is in service of technology or the business, the client, the customer. Within the business, where can design have true accountability? The business certainly has true accountability around results. Tech has accountability. Do we have accountability as designers? Do we want it? Is it there for us to find?
MG: That's a tough question. When you're in the management or director role, you might be in charge of multiple teams of designers, right? And so your success is being measured based on whether they're successful. So the accountability there is making sure that you have really good culture and that you're hiring the right people with the right skills at the right level. That's where accountability is. Do they have people who are really successful at what they do? Are they creating a culture that can allow designers to grow and thrive?
And then you move up to leadership at the C-suite level — then you're really talking about the business. You are looking at the impact of people on the business and how the business can thrive through the lens of serving people. And that's serving their customers and making sure that the customers love the product or service and want to buy it and support it. Or the employees that are throughout the company, are they creating a culture that's going to create innovation, which everybody is responsible for? Designers don't own innovation.
How at that level, do you become the cheerleader, the evangelist for creative thinking within the business? And so, and then you figure out what kind of metrics can support that idea. The accountability is really dependent on where you sit in the organization.
SA: What I'm hearing is accountable for that culture of design innovation, which creates the future, right? That's really interesting.
MG: Yeah, and when you get to that level, you might not even be using design language and that's okay. You don't have to. People get so hung up on language and they like to defend. I was at a conference recently where this speaker was talking about the difference between UX and UI. I'm like, who gives a shit?
Why should people in organizations need to know and care that they're using the right or wrong language to define something? They can call it whatever they want. It's what comes out of it. And if people get hung up on the word design, come up with a word that they use, because the work that we do is needed and is important. But we often shoot ourselves in the foot by fighting the wrong fights.
SA: Yeah, I have been, of course, a staunch believer in design. But lately I've been like, can I change my department name from business design to business acceleration? What business leader would not want to hire the business acceleration team?
MG: A lot of design leaders right now are dropping the word design and calling themselves product executives. They're not going to stop being designers. They're just using the language of the business.
Just focus on what's important. And again, think empathy and compassion for your coworkers. They might not understand the language that you're speaking. Right? And so find a common language that the business speaks. And it's not just business. It could be marketing. It could be engineering language. It could be legal language. Help them. Understand that you're part of the team and you look at the world differently. You are that people-centered executive who is going to keep them honest about the why, why they're doing the work.
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SA: If folks want to learn more about your work, I know they could check out your books: Rise of the DEO and Changemakers. Your website also has awesome resources, at hotstudio.com.
So this is a school. I'm going to ask you, if you were teaching a class on business design, what one resource would you recommend for students to learn more about design leadership, leadership in general, beyond your two fantastic books?
MG: I would look at the work that Nathan Shedroff is doing. He's another one of those really great design leaders who works at the intersection of design and business. And he has a really great book out on strategy right now.
SA: I so appreciate you sharing your wisdom. Thanks so much for joining us.
MG: My pleasure and you know, carry on.
SA: Remember folks check out Maria's incredible work at hotstudio.com and of course stay in class at businessdesignschool.org.
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I’d really love to hear from you: how do you practice leadership and changemaking in your organization? What’s working? What’s holding you up? Please reply to this email with your thoughts.
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Thanks for reading! Talk soon!
— Sam
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