Phil Gilbert (design executive)

Phil Gafford Gilbert Sr. is an American executive and design leader specializing in corporate culture and large-scale transformation. He spent 30 years as a start-up entrepreneur before IBM appointed him as their General Manager of Design in 2012 to spearhead a broad transformation of the company.

Phil Gafford Gilbert
Born (1956-09-08) September 8, 1956
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
EducationUniversity of Oklahoma (BS)
Occupation(s)Investor, lecturer
SpouseLisa (2001–present)
Children4

At IBM Gilbert established a modern standard for the role of the arts in business — design thinking – and added or trained designers en masse into IBM at an unprecedented scale, and led the re-skilling of its global workforce into more human-centered. Gilbert’s contributions have been widely attributed for IBM’s ability to survive the rise of 21st Century tech giants like Amazon and Google, and were the subject of the documentary film The Loop.

Gilbert retired in 2021 but remains active as an investor, consultant, lecturer, and member of various boards of directors.[1]

Early life, family, and education

Gilbert was born and raised in Oklahoma City. As a young man, he worked as a newspaper carrier for The Daily Oklahoman and Oklahoma City Times, attended John Marshall High School, and graduated as a Pe-et (top ten) senior from the University of Oklahoma in 1978. He currently lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Lisa. They have four children, and six grandchildren.[2]

Career

Following graduation, Gilbert started Gilbert Technologies Group, which he ran for 11 years as CEO.[3] Afterward, he served in an executive capacity for a variety of tech start-ups and other companies, including Lombardi Software in Austin, Texas, where he was Chief Technology Officer and later president.[4] In 2010, Lombardi was acquired by IBM,[4] which kept him on board in a leadership capacity with the task of “doing at IBM whatever it was he did at his former company to make customers love their product” – Gilbert’s application of design thinking.[5]

When Virginia M. Rometty became chief executive in January 2012, she told her executive team that she wanted “to rethink and reimagine” the experience of IBM’s customers. As technology became more integrated into business operations, more workers in functional departments were making technology decisions. She asked Gilbert “what would it take to get our massive company to move more quickly and invent things in new ways? And fast?”[6] Gilbert opted to put “Design thinking at the center” of the cultural transformation of the company.[4]

Design Thinking

According to Gilbert,design thinking reverses traditional technology product development, so instead of developers coming up with a new product to sell downstream to customers, the philosophy is to identify users’ needs as a starting point.[4]

He wasn't trained as a designer, but he “got religion” on how it could help scale businesses in the 1980s, and “Ever since then I’ve been pursuing this notion that the magic in any product or service is how it's experienced by the end user,” he said.[7]

As technology has advanced, this practice become increasingly more important. Gilbert’s program and IBM was written up as a case study. In it, he told the Harvard Business Review in 2021 that software developers are often in the habit of addressing pain points of IT departments rather than the needs of the end user. “Sometimes we developed new features simply because they represented a technical advancement, not because they solved the users’ business problems.”[8]

To introduce design thinking to 400,000 IBMers, Gilbert identified three broad aspects of the company that needed to change: its People, its Practices, and its Places.[9] To facilitate this, Gilbert organized the Design Program Office (DPO) in 2013 and hired IBM’s first cohort of 60 designers.[8] When he left in 2022, IBM had hired more than 5,000 designers and had certified more than 250,000 IBM Design Thinkers through a curated digital credentialing system.[6] IBM set up a design facility in Gilbert’s home of Austin, where among other things they started holding design “boot camps” for new hires and multidisciplinary product teams to cover everything from AI to cybersecurity to the Internet of Things.[7]

The DPO utilized the Stanford five-step rubric empathize, design, ideate, prototype, and test. Engineers initially objected to this linear progression, so adapted a repeated three-phase process of observe, reflect, and make called The Loop.[8] This would become the subject of a documentary film of the same name in 2017.[10]

By the time of his retirement in 2022, the design group had expanded to 5,000, integrated into every aspect of the company’s business across 175 countries, playing a major role in performance evaluation, HR, finance organization, data, and other services.[6] To improve the user experience, Gilbert integrated designers into every “aspect of the way the product functions, even all of the really gorpy details of integrating a product.”[5]

By 2020, the impact of IBM’s new approach was validated as its Net Promoter Score had increased by 20 points, “catapulting us into the top quartile in the industry.”[6]

Awards and honors

At IBM, Gilbert served as co-chair of the global Women’s Executive Council, and established the company’s Racial Equity in Design team. He has lectured at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, on leadership and design.[11]

In 2018, Gilbert was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame for his role in establishing a modern standard for the role of the arts in business.[1] In 2019, Gov. Kevin Stitt named him an Oklahoma Creativity Ambassador for his achievements in the world of creative thinking and innovation.[2]

References
  1. "NYFA Hall of Fame Honoree Phil Gilbert". nyfa.org. New York Foundation for the Arts. March 12, 2018. Retrieved August 10, 2023.
  2. "Phil Gilbert, GM of Design - IBM" (Press Release). creativeoklahoma.org. Creative Oklahoma. April 6, 2022. Retrieved August 10, 2023.
  3. "At the Crossroads of Chaos and Calamity". Stamps School of Art & Design. University of Michigan. October 9, 2014. Retrieved October 19, 2023.
  4. Lohr, Steve (November 14, 2015). "IBM's Design-Centered Strategy to Set Free the Squares". The New York Times. Retrieved August 10, 2023.
  5. McElroy, Nicole (September 7, 2021). "The innovative engine of IBM's design philosophy". Fortune. Retrieved August 10, 2023.
  6. Rometty, Ginni (March 7, 2023). Good Power: Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World. Harvard Business Review Press. p. 139. ISBN 1647823226.
  7. O’Keefe, Brian (July 15, 2022). "How IBM is Training Its Workforce to Think Like Designers". Yahoo! News. Retrieved August 10, 2023.
  8. Datar, Srikant (April 20, 2021). "IBM: Design Thinking". Harvard Business Review. Retrieved August 10, 2023.
  9. "At the Crossroads of Chaos and Calamity". Stamps School of Art & Design. University of Michigan. October 9, 2014. Retrieved October 19, 2023.
  10. "THE LOOP, a short documentary about design thinking at IBM". YouTube. Inside Design. November 14, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2023.
  11. ""The Art of War"- IBM's Phil Gilbert on design and security contexts". YouTube. Joint Special Operations University. December 20, 2019. Retrieved October 19, 2023.
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