A snapshot from 2017 to 2020, published as it was

Situating the work

I did this research between 2017 and 2020, as a PhD in Design at IADE, Universidade Europeia, in Lisbon. I defended it in December 2020. The data on executives comes from public sources gathered between 2017 and 2019. The names, titles and companies I cite are those of that period. Many have changed since. Several of the design leaders I mention have moved on, and some of the companies have reorganized.

I haven't updated the research as a live census. What you find here is the model and the findings as I published them, shared for use and for discussion. Where I add something new, I mark it as a 2026 note.

The ground has moved since 2020. Remote work. Generative AI. New debates about what designers are for. I think the question still stands. This site is partly a way to find out whether it does.

The question and the hypotheses

Why aren't there more designers in the C‑suite of Fortune 50 corporations?

I started from two hypotheses:

• H0. There aren't more designers in the C‑suite because there is no reason why there should be.
• H1. A number of factors explain the situation, and each of those factors is itself a hypothesis to research and validate.

I set out to test H1 without throwing away H0.

The question made people uneasy. Some senior designers heard that they were unable or unwilling to lead. Some executives heard that whoever represents design today isn't doing a good enough job. I meant neither. I wanted to understand why a professionally educated group, hired in large numbers to do work everyone calls important, so rarely reaches the top of the organizations that employ them.

Most of what I heard pointed at CEOs who don't understand design. I came to think that was too easy an answer, for everyone involved. The model is my attempt at a fuller one.

Why large corporations

Start-ups get the attention. Large corporations still carry much of the innovation that moves the economy, often by buying the start-ups. They also employ designers at a scale no one else does. From public figures, I estimated the design population of the Fortune 50 at around 50,000 people, not counting agencies and contractors. Estimate

Large corporations are also where decisions about design are made furthest from designers. What gets funded, what gets scaled and what gets cut is decided in rooms where, in 2019, designers were almost absent.

I chose the US Fortune 50 for practical reasons. These companies are heavily scrutinized, so public data is abundant, and the list spans 14 sectors, from financials to retail to energy. I don't extrapolate my findings to the rest of the Fortune 500 or to the Global 500.

I'm not defending large corporations against start-ups. We need both, and design works differently in each. I chose to study the place where design's scale and design's absence from the top meet.

Where I stand

Large corporations expect lawyers to lead legal, finance people to lead finance and marketers to lead marketing. Design is often the exception, led by someone trained in something else. I'm not arguing that every design leader must be a designer. I'm arguing for a better balance.

I believe that willing and able designers, people trained in design who have also done the work to lead a business, are generally the best people to lead design at the top of a large corporation. I also believe they can lead other functions, the way leaders from marketing, engineering or technology lead design today.

Many people who lead design without a design degree do it well, some of them very well. This is not an argument against them. It is a question of balance: in 2019, 9 of the 763 executives in Fortune 50 top teams held a bachelor's degree in design, art or architecture.

What supports my belief, and what doesn't yet: it was strongly supported in my interviews. One interviewee told me, "I have zero shadow of doubt that design should be managed by designers." A two-time global chief design officer named the gap: when a CEO doubts that design needs its own seat, there aren't enough examples, cases or data to prove that CEO wrong. He was right. I have not found a study that compares companies whose design is led by a trained designer with companies whose design is led by someone else. The studies on the business value of design, such as DMI's Design Value Index and McKinsey's The Business Value of Design (2018), measure investment in design, not who leads it, and they show correlation, not causation. So this is a hypothesis with strong support. It is not proven.

2026 noteA 2024 study of 200 manufacturers in China found that a mature design function improved innovation performance through the design management expertise of top managers (Liu and Cheng, Design Studies, 2024). It did not look at where that expertise came from. That supports "able". Whether "trained" matters too is what I want to test.

"Willing and able" is the hinge. Few designers get there without changing how they see business, power and their own careers. That change is what the meta-model describes, and it is why the model starts with the designer, not with the CEO. The other half belongs to executives: open the path, mentor designers, and judge them by what they can do at the table.

When good design thrives, everyone benefits.

How I did it

• Secondary research on the 2017 to 2019 Fortune 50 top teams: titles, reporting lines and degrees, from public sources.
• 30 semi-structured interviews over twelve months, about an hour each, with design leaders, recruiters, coaches, researchers and educators.
• An executive survey (n=30), run with The Official Board.
• A survey of senior and mid-career designers (n=36), with the support of IDSA, AIGA and the Design Museum Foundation.

Supervision

My PhD in Design is from IADE, Universidade Europeia, in Lisbon: a three-year doctoral program accredited by A3ES, Portugal's agency for higher-education accreditation. The research was hosted by UNIDCOM/IADE, a design research unit rated Very Good by Portugal's Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in 2019.

Supervisors, with their titles in December 2020:

• Sebastian Fixson, Associate Dean of Innovation, Babson College. PhD, MIT (Technology, Management and Policy, 2002).
• António Cruz Rodrigues, Associate Professor, Universidade Lusófona. PhD in Design, IADE, the program's first doctorate.
• Carlos Rosa, Associate Professor, IADE, Universidade Europeia. PhD in Design, Faculty of Architecture, Lisbon.

Limitations

• Small samples. Two surveys of 30 and 36 people, and 30 interviews. The findings are indicative, not statistically representative.
• Access. Fortune 50 companies communicate in a choreographed way. Many people I contacted declined, engaged partially, or asked to stay anonymous.
• Scope. The US Fortune 50 only. No comparison with the Global 500, or with European and Asian companies.
• Definition. I counted as designers people with a formal degree in design, art or architecture. Many design leaders trained otherwise.
• Time. A snapshot of 2017 to 2020, not a longitudinal study.
• Me. I'm a practitioner with more than thirty years in design, not a career academic. I did this research while working full-time in a demanding corporate role at Philips Lighting, which became Signify in 2018. I have a stake in this question, and you should read the work knowing that.
• Personality. I did no personality testing of design executives. The Ethos is a working synthesis, not a measured trait model.

Read further

• The full thesis: hdl.handle.net/10400.26/36638
• The thesis in short posts, on zemanel.com: zemanel.com/category/phd-thesis
• dos Santos, Fixson and Rosa, Leading by Design: Why are there so few designers in the C‑suite?, IPDMC 2021
• dos Santos and Fixson, 10 Factors for Creating the Next Generation of Chief Design Officers, Design Museum Magazine, Issue 021, January 2022