Phil Gilbert (design executive)

Phil Gafford Gilbert Sr. is an American executive and design leader specializing in corporate culture. He spent 30 years as a start-up entrepreneur before IBM appointed him as their General Manager of Design in 2012 to spearhead a broad transformation of the company.

Using principles of design thinking, Gilbert drove "wholesale" corporate change to IBM in response to the rapidly changing tech industry. Gilbert’s approach brought a version of the military “Commander’s Intent” into the design world to help align large teams distributed globally, and was the subject of the documentary film The Loop.

Gilbert retired in 2021 but remains active as an investor, consultant, lecturer, and member of various boards of directors.

Early life, family, and education
Gilbert was born and raised in Oklahoma City. As a young man, he worked as a newspaper carrier for The Daily Oklahoman and Oklahoma City Times, attended John Marshall High School, and graduated as a Pe-et (top ten) senior from the University of Oklahoma in 1978. He currently lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Lisa. They have four children, and six grandchildren.

Career
Gilbert managed a variety of tech start-ups and other companies, including Lombardi Software in Austin, Texas, where he was Chief Technology Officer and later president. In 2010, Lombardi was acquired by IBM, which kept him on board in a leadership capacity, asking him to drive the design-led transformation in 2012.

When Virginia M. Rometty became chief executive in January 2012, she told her executive team that she wanted “to rethink and reimagine” the experience of IBM’s customers. She asked Gilbert “what would it take to get our massive company to move more quickly and invent things in new ways? And fast?” Gilbert opted to put “Design thinking at the center” of the cultural transformation of the company.

Design Thinking
According to Gilbert, design thinking reverses traditional technology product development to focus more on user experience. Although not trained as a designer, Gilbert “got religion” on how it could help scale businesses in the 1980s, and “Ever since then I’ve been pursuing this notion that the magic in any product or service is how it's experienced by the end user,” he said.

As technology advanced, this practice become increasingly more important. Gilbert told the Harvard Business Review in 2021 that software developers are often in the habit of addressing pain points of IT departments rather than the needs of the end user. “Sometimes we developed new features simply because they represented a technical advancement, not because they solved the users’ business problems.”

To introduce design thinking to 400,000 IBMers, Gilbert identified three broad aspects of the company that needed to change: its People, its Practices, and its Places. To facilitate this, Gilbert organized the Design Program Office (DPO) in 2013 and hired IBM’s first cohort of 60 designers. IBM set up a design facility in Gilbert’s home of Austin, where among other things they started holding design “boot camps” for new hires and multidisciplinary product teams.

The DPO initially promoted the Stanford five-step linear process of Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. However, it soon became apparent that such a linear process wasn’t useful in an enterprise environment where most products were already in-market and the software was being delivered continuously using agile. In response, Gilbert’s team developed a non-linear approach called the loop, which would become the subject of a documentary film of the same name in 2017. By 2020, the impact of IBM’s new approach was validated as its Net Promoter Score had increased by 20 points.

By the time of his retirement in 2022, the design group had expanded to 5,000, integrated into every aspect of the company’s business across 175 countries, playing a major role in performance evaluation, HR, finance organization, data, and other services. To improve the user experience, Gilbert integrated designers into “all of the really gorpy details of integrating a product.”

Awards and honors
At IBM, Gilbert served as co-chair of the global Women’s Executive Council, and established the company’s Racial Equity in Design team, having written in The New York Times that leaders need to "Hear every voice in the room." He has lectured at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, on leadership and design.

In 2018, Gilbert was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame for his role in establishing a modern standard for the role of the arts in business. In 2019, Gov. Kevin Stitt named him an Oklahoma Creativity Ambassador for his achievements in the world of creative thinking and innovation.