As a favor to his friend, Vossoughi recruited and hired many of Modo's first staff designers. But he warned Marchant that the cultural impact on the company would be seismic. "You're going to lose hair and put on weight," he remembers telling Marchant. Bringing creative professionals into a traditional business "is like putting cats in a box." As he struggled to manage people whose work he had long admired from afar, Marchant discovered that designers are fantastic at creating value and bad at capturing it. But a bit of chaos, he had learned at Nike, is the cost of running a creative organization. The trick is to channel it. Having boosted the right side of his company's brain, Marchant now had to fit a design-driven culture within the parameters of a traditional manufacturer.
The transformation began with the physical environment. Shortly after hiring designers, Modo moved from a standard office into a wide-open space. The new employees brought their own identifying badges: Beetles overtook Saturns in the parking lot, Thai food replaced pizza at lunch, and the sound of world music and techno-pop pounding from radios at people's desks drowned out the noise of computer fans and keyboard chatter. Marchant wanted the designers' influence to be pervasive, so instead of creating a separate design department, he scattered his new hires around the organization in areas like product development and manufacturing. "You have only to spend a day or two in a studio setting to appreciate that design is a unique blend of business and school vacation," he says.
Working side by side, Modo's designers and engineers soon learned to complement one another, as engineers broke loose from their conservative moorings and designers became better educated about mechanics. Emulating what he had seen at Ziba and at other design firms, Marchant urged his teams to eschew analytical tools -- which Modo had relied on to evaluate a design -- in favor of a more spontaneous approach fired by rapid prototyping. ("Make it and break it. Try, fail, win," the company's new mantra went.) Adopting another design-firm tenet, the company shifted its emphasis from simply maximizing profit from proven successes to creating products that were wholly original.
Subjected to the scrutiny of a design-trained eye, even the company's processes assumed different shapes. Manufacturing, for example, which was originally conceived as a chain of individual suppliers, was reconfigured to be a "web" of multiple vendors, both specialized and general. The new configuration allows Modo to easily change production volume and gives designers a greater selection of materials.
Product design has also been dramatically affected, as Modo's teams fan out to hospitals, clinics, and doctor's offices to observe how their carts are used in the field. While researching a unit meant to hold a blood analyzer, for example, designers saw how important the machine's reliability was to emergency medical personnel. So they created a cart that makes it easy to see a blinking green light that indicates the analyzer is working. Customers' experiences with the product are also meticulously designed, from the sales presentation on. Gone are the days when Marchant and his top salesperson, Steve Mead, would simply roll a cart into a customer's conference room. Now when they call on a client, they park a block or two away because "unloading a cart isn't a pretty sight," says the CEO. They bring the cart in draped in a sheet; Marchant builds suspense by describing the difficulty of the project and the ingenuity it inspired before unveiling his masterwork with a flourish. "You're trying to do everything possible to make the product and the experience extraordinary," he says. "It takes a lot of effort and time and expertise to create what we do, and it should be a revelation, like the birth of a child."
Perhaps the most important adjustment at Modo, however, was a philosophical one: Marchant wanted his entire staff to think like designers. And if you boil down the way designers think, he says, in the end you're left with one word: "Why?" That's because design assumes a governing intelligence behind every decision. And while that intelligence may pursue any of a number of results -- aesthetics, utility, efficiency -- it must first accurately identify the need being fulfilled. Management's traditional troika -- How many? How fast? How much? -- just doesn't cut it.
To ensure that design thinking prevails, Marchant placed at the center of the organization a project-tracking tool called Modo Product Engineering and Design (MOPED). It reminds staffers to ask "Why?" at every stage and to focus on details. Among its mandates is the development of an exhaustive "user map" that accounts for the perspectives of everyone who might come into contact with Modo's carts. If a cart carries some type of monitoring device, for example, should patients be able to see the screen? Will visible cables and hoses frighten them? Does the cart convey quality and professionalism to the patient's family? Is it easy for salespeople to transport and demonstrate? MOPED forces staffers to ask those questions.
But it isn't a giveaway to the pure designers on staff. The system requires constant input and checkoffs from engineers, business developers, project managers, and the like. Marchant remains foremost a businessman, and he is determined to keep the company profitable, as it has been since 1990.
