To describe this moral base is almost impossible, for it all comes out as shopworn truisms: honesty is the best policy; the customer is entitled to the very best quality you can produce; the workers are entitled to respect and fair compensation; the designs have to be the best that can be created whether they conform with prevailing fashions or not. Pious platitudes — until you try to put them into action.
After I wrote some of these things in the introduction to our first catalog, I was sometimes buttonholed by skeptical manufacturers: “Okay, George,” was the way it went, “we know what you wrote in the catalog. But what is the real secret of Herman Miller’s success?”
Their inability to believe that we meant exactly what we had said turned out to be an unexpected blessing… It is to be expected in such a social environment that D.J.’s concern with a moral base should come to be perceived as a charming, nostalgic relic of a bygone time. And yet it is central. Losing this core of meaning in work erodes the possibility of innovation.
George Nelson | from The Legendary George Nelson On Creating A Design-Driven Company (In 1984, Herman Miller asked George Nelson to write an essay on the nature of his design relationship with Herman Miller. This is an edited version the result. Here, he reflects on unfaltering trust the company’s owner, D.J. DePree, had in his designers, which resulted not only in superior products but a never-before-used marketing tactic.)
Design is fine. History is mine. 