Design Leadership: How Top Design Leaders Build and Grow Successful Organizations

A yet another book on leadership, siding those millions of blog posts inf estating LinkedIn. Leadership is important. So are cultivating culture and finding the right balance between professional and personal life. In a market filled with titles willing to teach us how to build the proper team and lead it to success, Design Leadership enters the game and gives the reader his own view through a very friendly series of interviews and advices.Released early 2016, Design Leadership is a fresh, easy to read and very colloquial book, perfect for those who wanna kill that 30 minutes commute time to get home from work. Spanning through a little less than 200 pages, the author touches, in 8 chapters, the many different key aspects that a Company has to face to build up a successful team and, thus, a brand.The title, as well as the description that tries to convice us to buy the book, clearly highlight this text is for people working in the design industry. Fine by me, but once you get to the back cover, you will certainly come up thinking that most of the topics apply boradly to any Company on planet Earth.Each chapter focuses on a specific subject, including talent, working space, and planning the future. The author begins discussing the subject, then presents many different points of view collected by interviewing CEOs of many other companies. Between one interview and another, the author also gives us both his thought and experience. At the end of the chapter, and despite the thoughts of the interviewed people, the author comes with The answer and key takeaways—more on these below.I have particularly enjoyed the chapter dedicated to culture. The reader is clearly explained what is a company's culture and how to nurture is so that it positively spreads through the team. Now, about those key takeaways. At the end of each chapter is a page containing a list of advices, some kind of too long don't read that resumes the interviews and what we should get away with by reading them. You don't really want to miss this page at the end of each chapter.At some point the reader can actually come up and directly skip through the pages, jumping from key takeaways to key takeaways. But then, 26$ for merely 8 pages? Is it worth it?

quick delivery, received as expected.

Banfield does a great job bringing together stories from design leaders around core topics for anyone in design, especially if you lead a team. The stories are shaped into themes that gives you clear takeaways at the end to help you solve problems that keep you up at night. One of those books you nod your head to, and pick up again when you're scratching your head.

Overall practical advice. This book is especially useful for design leaders who work at creative agencies. I work at a startup and didn't find a lot of the advice directly relevant. Much of it too high level. I enjoyed many parts of it though. Especially around vision, hiring and culture.My beef with this book is the writing style. Every page features 2-4 voices (including the author's) weaved together, which often felt scattered. At least, for me, it was difficult to follow. Even till the end, I could still barely recall any of the design leader names and agencies mentioned. That may simply be inherent to interviewing "hundreds" of design leaders though. My last issue is that the book is too high level.Overall, not my favourite book but I'm still happy I read it. Got some good bits out of it. I'd recommend this for junior/mid level agency design leaders.

Generic leadership advice. Unimpressive and mediocre.