The Executive Designer Meta-Model
Why aren't there more designers in the C‑suite of large corporations?
In 2017 I started a PhD with that question, using the Fortune 50 as my sample. Three years, thirty interviews and two surveys later, I had ten reasons, a model that connects them, and more questions than I started with. This site shares all of it, and opens it up.
9 of 763
In 2019, 9 of the 763 executives in the top teams of the Fortune 50 held a bachelor's degree in design, art or architecture. Less than 1%. The count covers bachelor's degrees only, from public data. These same companies employ an estimated 50,000 designers, and no one I interviewed disputed that design matters.
Why large corporations
Large corporations shape more of daily life than most of us notice: what we buy, how we bank, how we are cared for, how we work. They employ designers at a scale no one else does, and they decide what design gets funded, scaled or cut. Start-ups and mid-size companies matter too. Many of them are closer to design, and some are led by designers. But when design reaches millions of people, it usually does so through a large organization. That is why I asked the question there.
01
Explore the model.
Ten stages, two scopes of action, one loop. See how it holds, and where it can be broken.
02
Take the Ethos self-test.
Ten tensions, about eight minutes. No right or wrong answers. Keep your result. Take it again in a year.
03
Join the conversation.
Challenge a stage, propose a tension I missed, or work on this with me.
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