Writing

Newsletter: The Merholz Agenda

I publish a (semi-)weekly newsletter called The Merholz Agenda, delivering my thoughts on Design Leadership and Organization Design straight to your inbox or RSS feed. It’s less formal than the blog here. 

Most recent issues:

[TMA] Leadership Masterclass Feb 25-26/ Podcast with Roger Martin
[TMA] Leadership Masterclass Feb 25-26/ Podcast with Roger Martin

From the desk of Peter Merholz— Happy Superbowl Sunday (to all Americans at least)! I don’t really follow the NFL, so I have no real opinion about the game, but, judging by people I know and follow—go Eagles! In this issue, I’ll cover: New Design Leadership MasterclassLatest Finding Our Way [...]

[TMA] Quality >>> Craft | Reframe Your Mandate
[TMA] Quality >>> Craft | Reframe Your Mandate

This past week, I participated in the Design Leadership Summit in Toronto. It filled my head with many ideas. Here, I’ll share a couple of overarching takeaways. Talk Quality and Performance, not Craft Over the past year, I have seen more calls that design has lost its way with strategy, [...]

[TMA] First person design leadership stories; rankings redux
[TMA] First person design leadership stories; rankings redux

From the desk of Peter Merholz— Last Friday, Hang Xu and I continued our discussion ranking design organizations. My write up for our first session shocked me by becoming my most-viewed LinkedIn post, ever. Clearly, there’s hunger for understanding organizational perception, health, and maturity. (Which makes my court-jester approach feel [...]

[TMA] Design Org Ranking, this Friday (Jan 17) for a good cause!
[TMA] Design Org Ranking, this Friday (Jan 17) for a good cause!

From the desk of Peter Merholz— Dropping a quick note to say that this Friday, January 17th, at 9am Pacific (12n ET, 5pm UK time), I will rejoin Hang Xu to continue the Design Org ranking we conducted last Friday. Hang is conducting a series of livestreams to raise money [...]

Blog

I maintain a semi-regular blog with postings on organization design, design leadership, and other relevant matters. 

Critique is not review, and many other thoughts on an overlooked practice

TL; DR: Critique and review are different. 🗣️Critique is simply about making the work better. Review is about assessing readiness for the next stage in the process. Healthy critique requires ✨psychological safety✨. To make the work better means being able to discuss it openly, and frankly, warts and all. To do so in a constructive fashion requires that everyone involved know there will be no retribution for their

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Org Design for Design Orgs

In 2015, Kristin Skinner (with whom I worked at Adaptive Path, and who had stayed on and joined Capital One) and I realized that there was hunger for guidance on how to build in-house design teams, and almost no resources for design leaders to support them in this effort. 

So, we banded together and wrote Org Design for Design Orgs, which came out in 2016, and is still the only book focused on this subject. 

We built a website for the book, that includes a blog with new thinking since the book came out. I stopped writing there in 2019 in favor of this site,

 

Readers have a habit of reading the book in detail.