Design To Grow

What if your company could grow as efficiently as Coca-Cola yet adapt as quickly as a Silicon Valley startup? That’s the challenge at the heart of Design to Grow by David Butler and Linda Tischler. They argue that the secret to thriving in an era of disruption lies in mastering two opposing capabilities: scale and agility. Scale gives you power and reach, but agility lets you learn, adapt, and survive. The key to achieving both, they insist, is design—not as decoration, but as an organizational capability that connects strategy, culture, and systems.

Butler draws on his experience as Vice President of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at The Coca-Cola Company to show how one of the world’s most established corporations used design not just to beautify products, but to rethink how it operated. Coca-Cola had already mastered scale—it could deliver a consistent experience in over 200 countries. Yet the company struggled to move quickly in a world defined by unpredictability, digital disruption, and shifting consumer expectations. To stay relevant, Coca-Cola had to learn to design for agility.

Why Design Matters Beyond Aesthetics

Most people think design means choosing colors or crafting logos. Butler redefines design as a way of connecting visible and invisible systems—products, supply chains, human behaviors—so that everything works toward growth. As he writes, good design solves problems in ways that make things easier, faster, and better. It’s not about art for art’s sake; it’s about purpose-driven decision-making that improves how an organization learns and operates. This book underscores that everyone is a designer, whether or not the word appears on your business card. Every decision about how to connect elements of a system—from a product to a process to a culture—is a design choice.

From Scale to Agility

The first half of the book explores how Coca-Cola used design to achieve massive scale. Through simplifying, standardizing, and integrating every part of its system—from the contour bottle to its red-and-white logo to consistent brand identity—it built one of the world’s most recognizable companies. Butler calls this approach “designing a Lamborghini,” meaning that every component fits together perfectly for efficiency and consistency. This worked brilliantly for decades but left the company vulnerable to rapid change. As markets fragmented and consumer tastes diversified, those very strengths made it rigid. The second half of the book, therefore, reveals how Coca-Cola learned from startups how to design for agility—using design to create modular systems that could evolve quickly, much like “a box of Legos.”

The Golden Circle of Design

Borrowing from Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle (“Start with Why”), Butler reframes design around three key questions: Why we design (our purpose), How we design (our process), and What we design (our products). The most successful firms align these three levels to their growth strategy. Companies like Apple or McDonald’s have thrived because their design philosophy connects purpose to execution. Coca-Cola, Butler explains, needed to rediscover its “Why”—to refresh the world through adaptable design practices that could scale and flex across markets. Without agility, even a well-oiled giant risks its own “Kodak moment”—that jarring instant when market irrelevance catches up faster than leadership can react.

Lessons from a Design Transformation

The book’s rich case studies illustrate how design thinking reshaped Coca-Cola’s operations. From the twisting eco-friendly ILOHAS water bottle in Japan to modular retail systems in Latin America and manual distribution centers in Africa, Coca-Cola found ways to blend consistency with localized innovation. These weren’t one-off projects; they were experiments in developing a new organizational habit—the ability to learn, iterate, and redesign in real time. Butler’s message is clear: design is not a phase, it’s a process of continuous adaptation.

Why This Matters Now

In a world where startups disrupt century-old industries overnight, both entrepreneurs and corporate leaders face the same question: how can you grow while staying adaptable? Butler offers a framework that applies whether you’re a founder seeking scale or an executive fighting stagnation. Startups need design to scale; big companies need design to stay agile. The convergence of these two worlds—what he calls the next “era of scale-ups”—will depend on organizations that design systems capable of learning. Like a good surfer watching for the next wave, successful leaders must position themselves where opportunity meets design. That’s what Design to Grow teaches you: not to choose between scale and agility, but to design for both simultaneously.

When The Coca-Cola Company first began in 1886, John Pemberton’s tiny soda venture was more like a startup than a global empire. David Butler shows how Coca-Cola’s early leaders, like Asa Candler and Robert Woodruff, mastered the art of designing for scale—the ability to grow without losing quality or efficiency. Scale was the company’s superpower; agility came later. To achieve scale, Coca-Cola relied on three design principles: simplify, standardize, and integrate. These principles turned what could have been chaos across hundreds of countries into a system of seamless global operations.

The Power of Systems Thinking

Butler emphasizes that good design connects visible and invisible systems. The formula for the drink, the famous red-and-white logo, the contour bottle, and even the exact serving temperature (36°F) are all parts of a carefully integrated system. Each element connects to ensure that a Coke tastes and feels the same in Shanghai as it does in Chicago. This was achieved not by chance, but by design—through consistently applied standards across factories, distributions, advertising, and branding. These are what Christopher Alexander might call “patterns”: repeatable design solutions that balance efficiency with beauty (as in his landmark book A Pattern Language).

From Chaos to Standardization

Under Robert Woodruff’s leadership in the 1920s, Coca-Cola codified design into every part of its operations. A “Bureau of Standards” established detailed rulebooks covering everything from truck colors to employee uniforms. Every bottler, sign painter, and advertiser worked from the same guidelines—what Butler calls designing a “Lamborghini system,” where each part fits perfectly with minimal friction. Standards, he explains, don’t kill creativity; they make it scaleable. The result was breathtaking consistency: by 1929, the same red script and bottle silhouette appeared in 28 countries, creating what Andy Warhol later celebrated as democratic design—something equally accessible to presidents and street vendors.

Design Patterns and Corporate DNA

To scale effectively, you must identify the design elements that define your brand’s DNA and make it easy for everyone to replicate them. Butler describes this as finding your “six-foot balcony”—the minimum depth at which people actually use a design, borrowing Alexander’s principle from architecture. For Coca-Cola, those elements included its formula, color palette, logo, bottle, and slogan (“Delicious and Refreshing”). Each pattern worked because it connected everything else. When a company protects these patterns while simplifying how they’re used, it creates exponential growth opportunities without diluting brand integrity.

The Lesson for Modern Leaders

If you’re leading a team, Butler advises focusing on buy-in, not credit. True scalability comes from shared alignment, not personal heroics. Everyone must move in the same direction, guided by clear design standards that make doing the right thing easy. Whether you’re managing a global beverage empire or a growing tech startup, designing for scale means balancing standardization with simplicity—creating systems so intuitive that even complexity feels effortless.

As Coca-Cola grew from a “sparkling beverage” company into a “total beverage company,” it encountered unprecedented complexity. Instead of one iconic cola, it now had hundreds of products—juices, coffees, teas, waters—all requiring unique production and marketing systems. Butler explains that the problem wasn’t just size, but complexity: too many interconnected parts changing too quickly for traditional hierarchies to manage. He distinguishes between something complicated (hard to understand but static) and something complex (alive, dynamic, and interconnected). In today’s world, companies must learn to thrive in complexity rather than fight it.

Wicked Problems and the Age of Interconnection

Modern businesses face “wicked problems”—issues with no clear solution, like obesity, climate change, and water scarcity. Each is multidimensional and requires collaboration across sectors. For Coca-Cola, water scarcity was an existential issue since water is the main ingredient in every product. CEO Muhtar Kent declared a goal to be “water neutral” by 2020, returning as much water to nature and communities as it used in production. The company used mind mapping—a design technique to visualize systemic relationships—to coordinate partnerships with governments and NGOs. The process reflected Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline: learning organizations that thrive by connecting all the parts of a system.

The After-Internet World

Butler also explores how the digital revolution intensified complexity. Quoting futurist Marshall McLuhan, he reminds us that “the medium is the message.” In the After-Internet (AI) age, everything is open-sourced, collaborative, and fast. MIT’s Joi Ito argues that survival now requires “resilience instead of strength” and “pull instead of push.” Butler echoes this idea: leaders must stop trying to predict the future and instead design systems capable of learning in real-time. The companies that do this—like Facebook or Airbnb—act like living organisms rather than machines. For Coca-Cola, that meant opening up innovation, treating consumers as collaborators (“the crowd, not the experts”), and designing feedback loops into every process.

Creating Shared Value

Complexity also reshaped the concept of corporate responsibility. Citing Michael Porter and Mark Kramer’s idea of “shared value,” Butler shows how Coca-Cola partnered with musician will.i.am to launch EKOCYCLE—a line of fashion and accessories made from recycled bottles and cans. This initiative reframed recycling as aspirational, not dutiful, turning waste into culture. The partnership blended design, commerce, and sustainability in a way that benefited both the planet and the business. This represented a major shift: leveraging complexity (social, ecological, cultural) not as a threat but as a source of innovation and growth.

Butler concludes that managing complexity doesn’t mean controlling it. Instead, you design systems that connect diverse elements into coherent patterns. When you think big but start small—building relationships, testing ideas, and iterating—you create adaptability through learning. The secret is not to simplify the world, but to design for it.

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” quotes Butler, invoking Mike Tyson to describe how large companies react to disruption. The story of BlackBerry’s rise and fall illustrates the danger of failing to adapt. Once holding 50% of the smartphone market, BlackBerry collapsed because it kept designing for hardware scale while the industry shifted toward software and ecosystems. In contrast, Apple launched an imperfect iPhone, then learned from real-world feedback to improve rapidly. The lesson: design for learning, not perfection.

Failing Fast = Learning Fast

Startups survive by “failing fast”—testing, iterating, and pivoting based on real data. Butler reframes this as “learning fast.” He reminds corporate readers that the goal isn’t reckless failure; it’s faster learning cycles. Big companies, obsessed with quarterly results, often treat failure as fatal. Yet innovations like WD-40 (which literally stands for “Water Displacement, formula 40”) show how persistence through many iterations can lead to breakthrough success. Each failed attempt is a prototype for learning.

Legos, Not Lamborghinis

To make companies more adaptive, Butler introduces his most powerful metaphor: design like Legos, not Lamborghinis. Integrated systems (Lamborghinis) create efficiency and control but are rigid; modular systems (Legos) enable flexibility and experimentation. Coca-Cola applied this concept across business functions—designing modular packaging, advertising, and even distribution systems so teams could rearrange and localize elements without losing coherence. The “Five Notes” from Coca-Cola’s “Open Happiness” campaign exemplify this: a five-note audio mnemonic so simple it could be remixed into dozens of musical styles globally, enabling local creativity within a universal structure.

Plan Backward and Get Out of the Building

Butler adds two innovation principles drawn from startups and Lean methodology. First, plan backward: gather results and insights before building large plans. Test ideas cheaply and adjust based on real evidence (echoing marketing thinker Jim Ewel’s warning against spending big before testing). Second, get out of the building: you can’t learn about customers or markets from headquarters. Coca-Cola’s field-trip-driven approach—like its modular cooler experiments in China or its retail design pilots in Colombia—forced teams to learn from direct observation, not PowerPoint assumptions.

Through these stories, Butler redefines corporate intelligence: smart companies aren’t those that know the most, but those that learn the fastest. Design becomes a feedback system rather than a creative department.

In the chapter “Faster,” Butler focuses on how speed, learning, and iteration fuel innovation. Large firms often drown in bureaucracy, but startups thrive by designing modular systems that enable rapid pivots. Speed doesn’t mean recklessness—it means shortening the time between action and insight. Coca-Cola learned to prototype like a startup: think small, test early, and scale what works.

Modular Design for Global Brands

Coca-Cola’s redesign of Fanta and its global juice brands captures this approach. The design team realized they didn’t need a static “perfect label,” but a modular visual system adaptable across cultures. They created a global toolkit of elements—fonts, colors, fruit imagery—that local markets could combine like Lego pieces. By balancing fixed (logos, brand DNA) and flexible (imagery, layout) components, Coca-Cola achieved global consistency without killing local creativity. This accelerated production and reduced inefficiencies—a direct outcome of prototyping and modular thinking.

Learning by Doing

Prototyping isn’t just for designers. Butler insists that everyone can visualize ideas to speed up learning. In multinational teams, rough sketches, post-its, and prototypes make ideas tangible and collaborative. This mindset powered initiatives like Project Unnati in India, where Coca-Cola and partners taught farmers “high-density” mango cultivation. By treating the project as a live prototype—testing, failing, adjusting—the company doubled crop yields and accelerated its supply chain for its Maaza juice brand. The lesson: visualizing problems speeds up solving them.

Minimum Viable Thinking

Borrowing from Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, Butler advocates for launching minimum viable products (MVPs). Instead of perfecting ideas in secrecy, release quick versions to test with users. This thinking drove Coca-Cola’s Freestyle Machine—an app-connected fountain dispenser offering over 100 drink combinations. Each unit “calls home” nightly, transmitting data about what people mix most. This real-time learning fuels faster product decisions and marketing insights. It’s design as perpetual beta.

Momentum and the Pull Strategy

Finally, Butler stresses momentum. Don’t push innovation where it’s unwelcome; instead, go where the pull is. Early wins create traction and credibility. Coca-Cola’s projects in Indonesia and Latin America succeeded because teams partnered with local markets hungry for change. That energy became contagious—it spread design thinking throughout the organization faster than corporate memos ever could. In Butler’s view, momentum is the speed of trust: small experiments that prove value and win believers.

“Faster” proves that the most enduring advantage today isn’t scale—it’s the ability to learn and act faster than your competitors.

In its final major section, Leaner, Butler describes how organizations can become lighter, more collaborative, and efficient by designing open systems. He contrasts closed companies like the old World Book Encyclopedia with open ecosystems like Wikipedia, where modularity and participation allow exponential growth. Openness, he explains, doesn’t mean lack of control—it means creating fixed rules that let anyone contribute creatively within shared boundaries.

The Design Machine and Internal Innovation

Coca-Cola applied openness internally through its Design Machine, a web-based platform that let employees worldwide create marketing materials aligned with brand standards. It balanced standardized templates (colors, logos, layouts) with local flexibility (imagery and messaging). This open, modular system produced $100 million in savings and empowered over 35,000 global users. The lesson? Tools that make doing the right thing easy amplify leadership. Butler quotes Peter Drucker: “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Design provides the tools to make both possible.

Emergence and Collective Intelligence

A major outcome of openness is emergence—complex behaviors arising from simple rules, like birds flocking or gamers co-creating worlds in Minecraft. Coca-Cola’s 5by20 program, which aims to empower five million women entrepreneurs by 2020, is a living system that evolves differently in each culture. From solar-powered micro-retailers in India to training buses in Brazil, it enables local adaptation while advancing global purpose. When designed for emergence, systems self-organize; your role as leader shifts from controller to gardener, cultivating conditions for growth.

Focus and Shared Metrics

To keep open systems from drifting into chaos, Butler insists on shared focus—what he calls the “One Metric That Matters.” For startups and large firms alike, a single clear measure aligns energy and draws attention to what truly creates impact. For Coca-Cola, one such focus was replacing all petroleum-based bottles with PlantBottle packaging by 2020. Partnering with Ford, Heinz, and Nike, Coca-Cola turned its bio-based technology into an open platform, sparking new industries in sustainable packaging. Openness multiplied both impact and influence.

Ultimately, being leaner isn’t about cutting resources—it’s about designing for participation. When you open your systems, you unleash creativity, speed, and ownership across boundaries. Lean companies don’t just do more with less; they learn faster because more minds are engaged in the process.

In the book’s epilogue, Butler looks ahead at what he calls the next wave of innovation: the rise of the “scale-up.” While it’s easier than ever to start a business, most startups fail before achieving scalable growth. Meanwhile, big companies struggle with agility. The future, Butler argues, belongs to organizations that merge the startup’s flexibility with the corporation’s resources. Scale-ups are the hybrid species that design for both: they’re as lean as a startup but as powerful as an enterprise.

Entrepreneurship as Doing

Butler sees entrepreneurship not as launching companies, but as a culture of doing. The best entrepreneurs, whether in startups or inside big corporations (intrapreneurs), share one trait: they act. They don’t over-plan; they prototype, learn, and adapt. Building “a culture of doing” replaces the old corporate obsession with managing. In practical terms, this means rewarding experimentation, de-emphasizing hierarchy, and designing tools that lower the friction for innovation (much like Design Machine did at Coca-Cola).

Design’s Radical Reinvention

In a powerful story from the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town, Butler contrasts two approaches to design. Dutch designer Maarten Baas argued that design should be pure art, untouched by commerce. Butler disagreed, pointing out that in South Africa’s slums, people cared more about jobs and education than expensive furniture. True design, he countered, is not elitist—it’s democratized. As technologies like 3D printing and the Internet of Things expand, design will become a universal skill. The future isn’t about “the world of design,” Butler concludes, but “the design of the world.”

Riding the Next Wave

Extending his surfing metaphor, Butler calls on leaders to learn to read patterns—the “sets” of technological and social change forming at the horizon—and position their organizations to catch them. In the new economy, everyone will need design skills to navigate complexity, think systemically, and build adaptive organizations. Whether you lead a startup, a corporation, or a nonprofit, your success will depend on how well you use design to connect purpose with action, agility with scale. The wave is building—your job is to ride it.

In the end, Design to Grow is not just about Coca-Cola; it’s about how any organization can design itself to stay alive in a world that never stops changing.