Business & Society

Designer, author, educator and artist Bruce Mau is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for life-centered design. Across thirty years of design innovation, he’s collaborated with global brands and companies, leading organizations, heads of state, renowned artists and fellow optimists. Mau became an international figure with the publication of his landmark S,M,L,XL, designed and co-authored with Rem Koolhaas, and his most recent books are Mau MC24: Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work and, with co-author, Julio Ottino, dean of Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World – The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. Mau is co-founder and CEO of Massive Change Network, a holistic design collective based in the Chicago area."I don't start knowing what to do. I start trying to understand what the opportunity is. It was actually my friend Marc Mathieu, who is the head of global brand at Coca-Cola, who - after we built the global sustainability platform for Coca-Cola, after we finished the work, Marc said, 'You know, Bruce, the best thing you did, you didn't charge me for it. You didn't tell me you were going to do it. I don't know if you even know that you did it.'  And I said, 'Please, please tell me.'  And he called it 'branding the opportunity.' And I said, 'What do you mean by that?' And he said, 'Well, you were able to articulate the opportunity in a way that inspired everyone on the team to move in the same direction. Before you arrived, we had 150 people pointing in 150 directions, and the way that you were able to see the problem and articulate the opportunity – What would happen if we accomplished it, the impact that we could have in the world, it inspired everyone to work towards it.’That's an important thing to do in your work is to actually articulate the opportunity and not only the problem. To say, look, here's what happens if we do this? If we do this, and we succeed, how is the world different? I like to say that when you lock in, you also lock out. So the moment that you lock in on what you're going to do, you're also locking out everything else. Right? So when you define what you're going to work on, you're defining the scope of the opportunity.”www.massivechangenetwork.comwww.Brucemaustudio.comMau MC24The NexusImage Courtesy of Massive Change NetworkBusiness & Society is a 10-episode limited series co-hosted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk.