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It was a tense moment for me in the color-and-materials studio of BMW. A senior manager in the finance department was grilling me: why, he wanted to know, did my team insist on using costly materials that the customer would never see? Didn't I know that people buy our cars for their looks and their fine engines? Just at that moment, a visibly distressed senior designer walked up to us, carrying a preproduction middle console from one of our new sedans. Disregarding the finance manager, she opened the console lid, reached her fingers into a dark pocket deep inside, and asked me to do likewise. "Feel this;" she said. "The supplier is having a terrible time getting the texture right in here. The surface is not good, Herr Bangle." As she waited for my response, the finance manager watched me intently.
That moment crystallizes the persistent, inevitable conflict between corporate pragmatism and artistic passion that I manage at BMW. The designer was right—the texture inside the pocket didn't meet BMW's exacting design standards. And yet the finance manager was also right: would customers know the difference? His job was to put the brakes on costly, seemingly insignificant design details. We are a business after all.
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| ...design is what makes both our artists—and our customers—intensely loyal. | |
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| — Chris Bangle |
My job as director of design, overseeing 220 artists at BMW, is to mediate between the corporate and artistic mind-sets within the company. What I do is not unique to BMW. Plenty of companies face the challenge of balancing art with commerce: movie studios, fashion design firms, and luxury goods manufacturers struggle with the same thing. But BMW is an example of the intersection of commerce and art writ large. Our fanaticism about design excellence is matched only by the company's driving desire to remain profitable. And those objectives have required me to develop a unique set of operating principles.
Three principles in particular have stood me in good stead. First, protect the creative team—that is, shield them from the unproductive commentary of others in the company. This is necessary because artists intrigue other people as much as they confound them. Everyone at BMW wants to know what the designers in my group are up to, but that interest very rarely gets communicated to the designers in a constructive way.
Second, safeguard the artistic process. By this, I mean that my managers and I have to construct a barrier around model development so that time-to-market pressures don't disrupt or harm the actual work. Over the years I have found that safeguarding the process takes a lot of effort, but it is necessary because it guarantees that BMW's design is never compromised. And that design is what makes both our artists—and our customers—intensely loyal.
Third, be an inventive communicator. In any organization dependent on art and commerce finding common ground, managers must have unusual powers of persuasion. Unless they do, they can never be good mediators—and mediation is what managing at the intersection of art and commerce is all about.
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Principles for artists and managers
To manage the tricky relationship between the business and artistic sides of BMW, Director of Design Chris Bangle has developed three operating principles:
1. Protect creative resources by managing around the psychological vulnerability of the artists.
2. Protect the process: Make sure managers understand the design methodology to keep them from overstepping creative boundaries.
3. Communicate effectively so that designers know the larger context of their work, while the business side understands the subtleties of BMW design.