With a background in design and engineering, Garen has counselled the C-suites of multinational businesses across the globe on operations, product development and R&D excellence, including multi-year corporate transformations in sectors including consumer goods, medtech, retail, industrials and aerospace. In his last role as Associate Partner at McKinsey, he developed and co-authored McKinsey's influential reports on the Business Value of Design, as well as leading professional training programs for clients and McKinsey’s own leaders on leadership excellence and design in business.
Garen is the Lead Lecturer for Leading Beyond Design.
What excites you most about teaching at the iF DESIGN ACADEMY?
Having seen and shared the value design can bring business as well as coaching, teaching and learning from some of the brightest business leaders in the world, the iF Design Academy is the only place currently bringing that all together – at scale – to drive meaningful change in both design and business. What’s not to love?
Why is your course especially relevant for design leaders right now?
Designers’ ambitions often seem crimped by feeling frustrated that their business doesn’t “get” design, while at the same time not fully understanding the business – or that they are not unique in feeling this way. While economic cycles continually affect the corporate appeal of “design” as a label, businesses consistently lack enough strong, human-centric, multidisciplinary leaders – clearly a task designers can readily fulfill if they are excited to grow beyond their role.
What is your teaching philosophy?
This course is about designers leading beyond their craft - and it won’t pull any punches in doing so. By definition it should push participants out of their comfort zone, suggest new ways of working, challenge misconceptions, mistruths and the beliefs that can hold designers back. It will expose participants to some of the business realities and tough decisions that could one day be their responsibility, yet they may never have covered in academia.
Given that, it’s especially important the course is highly conversational and provides a safe space for trying out those new approaches. We’ll dedicate plenty of time to coaching and sharing with one another - some of the greatest learning moments will come from your peers’ experiences, so the more you put in the more you’ll get out.
What personal career experiences will you bring to this course, and how will participants benefit from them?
Having covered a career spectrum from designing products to helping C-suites build entire design departments, I’ve also been privileged to counsel individual executives during some of the toughest, most exciting periods of their own careers. Throw in several years of training senior consultants on leadership skills and I hope to combine all of that to help participants of this course fast-track their own journey, avoid common corporate pitfalls and strive to lead not just their department, but their business.
How did you choose the guest experts for this course, and how will participants benefit from their experience?
Many design leadership courses offer insights from designers on being successful in business. This course instead invites business leaders to discuss how designers can be successful leaders beyond design. The speakers come from a range of organizations where they have interacted with or led design functions but can give you a rare glimpse of how “business” really works and thinks.