"Designers found out that female gate agents struggled to keep kiosks charged because their constricting uniforms prevented them from reaching electrical plugs behind the machines. By finding the root of the problem, IBM delivered a mobile app that significantly eased the boarding process and reduced airline costs."

The outfits are too restricting, so let's make an app.

I am a part of this push! I work for IBM Design in SF. It's great to see an emphasis being placed on Design in the company, but granted it's going to take a while for the effect to propagate across all 400,000 of us. The core team has made a push for transparency by publishing our Design Thinking externally to help bring the ideas to other large companies and rationalize our design process.

I'm definitely excited to be a part of this new Design Initiative in such a large company.

This initiative is what brought me to IBM; not to mention such a strong belief in leveraging IBM Design Thinking to pave the way.

But make no mistake, I do not believe Design Thinking is the magic bullet that will solve all of the company's problems. And to have Design Thinking to be successful throughout a company of over 360,000 people, it is a problem of scale.

However, scaling is a function of alignment - and this where I believe the IBM Design Thinking approach will help solve the alignment issue.