Regenerative Beauty with Alan Moore - Part 1 of 2

Alan Moore is a craftsman of beautiful business. He is a business innovator, author, and global speaker whose life’s work centers on one simple but radical idea: beauty is not a luxury in business, but a necessity.

He has designed everything from books to organizations, working across six continents with artists, entrepreneurs, and leadership teams. He has advised companies including PayPal, Microsoft, and Interface, taught at institutions such as MIT, INSEAD, and the Sloan School of Management, and helped guide some of the world’s most innovative enterprises.

He is the author of four books, including Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything and Do Build. How to make and lead a business the world needs. His work has been featured in outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and The Huffington Post.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1. Beauty as a sense of homecoming to self, family, and the natural world

2. Why beauty is felt in the body, not just understood in the mind

3. Beauty as something soulful, universal, and deeply human

4. Living and working through the transition from analog to digital culture

5. Innovation as seeing latent potential and unmet human needs

6. The idea of beauty as the “ultimate metric” for decision-making

7. How beauty challenges dominant ideas of success, value, and the good life

To learn more about Alan’s work, you can find him at:

https://thebeautifuldesignproject.com/ 

Books and resources mentioned:

• No Straight Lines: Making Sense of Our Nonlinear World (by Alan Moore)
• Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything (by Alan Moore)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

Transcript

(preview)

Alan: She called me up two weeks after the book had been published, and she said, "You've given me a problem." And I thought, "Oh my God. What have I done?" She said, “Well, the book is sold out. That wasn’t in the business plan, so now we need to find the money to republish it.” Even this last quarter, we're still selling significant quantities of that book. I know it's gone on and inspired a whole bunch of different people to set up businesses and festivals and whatever. There's some magic in there, which even I am still a little bit confused about.

(intro)

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

What if beauty could be the operating system for innovation? What if the things we design and the businesses we build could feel inevitable, truthful, and life-giving—helping restore balance between ecology, community, and economy?

Addressing these questions is my guest today, Alan Moore—business innovator, designer, and author of Do Design and Do Build. Alan’s mission is to make every business as beautiful as it can possibly be. His work helps leaders reset their vision through the lens of beauty and then do the hard work of building regenerative products, cultures, and organizations. In our interview, we talk about beauty as a kind of homecoming. Alan shares: his journey through the world of innovation, what it means to design things that feel inevitable, why beauty should be the ultimate metric for decision-making in business, and how to move from extraction to regeneration in business and in life.

Let's get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Hello, Alan. It is wonderful to see you. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.

Alan: It's fantastic to be here with you, Brandon. Thank you for the invitation. I'm very much looking forward to our conversation.

Brandon: Yeah, me too. Yeah, there's so much I've learned from your work. But before we talk about your books, I want to ask you—as I do with all my guests—could you share a memory of beauty that lingers with you since your childhood, something that stays with you till today?

Alan: So this is a very easy one for me to answer. Actually, it links right back to me writing Do Design. When I was thinking about writing the book, I really had this question in myself about being feeling very lost and how could I write my way home to where I was. We're going back to, well, more than 10 years actually, because the book was published 10 years ago, or nearly 10 years ago. And I sat with this question, which was: there’s an answer within me that I need to go and find. So how do I come home? That was the question—how do I come home?

A couple of years before I wrote Do Design, I remember having this very powerful memory of being on the beach with my family at the age of 7. So I kind of saw my mother on the beach. She was wearing a skirt and a nifty jumper, bare-legged. She was incredibly happy and playful. My mom wasn't always like that. It's not to say she was a bad person, but she struggled with lots of different things. How do you put food on the table? How do you manage the complexity of this family that we've got going on here? I saw my father, who actually never had a lot of money in his life. He was dyslexic like me, but he was an incredibly emotionally intelligent man. He was always there for us as a family, as individuals. You could never put a Rizla paper between my mother and my father. It was something that I kind of reflected on. They were married for the best part of 50 years. They're both sadly gone now, but there they were. Then I thought about my brother and my sister, and I saw them—unconditional love for both of them in many ways.

Then I saw myself. In those days, I had long blonde platinum hair, a very different hairstyle to the one I've got these days. I'm playing with my toys on the beach. I thought I'm at one with those I love the most. I'm at one with myself. A part of my journey is not being at one with myself. In many ways, actually, the writing of Do Design was very much about not being in a good place at all and I'm at one with the natural world. So you imagine, like if you had a drone shot, this image on this little boy in his red shorts with his long blonde platinum hair pulling back on this beach in Cornwall, which is where we were. Nobody else is on the beach. We seem to specialize in finding beaches that nobody else was on, which I kind of love. The sea is twinkling like diamonds. The sky is blue. Then you're pulling back on this kind of family, which is in union. I thought, what is the one word that could describe that experience? The word that I found was beauty. It was that kind of idea of coming home to myself, my family, the natural world around me—thinking even about the kind of we are atomic. We are also in a large cosmos that kind of compelled me to feel that I had to go on that journey to write about beauty as something as an exploration of myself and a homecoming—this is what I call it—to what was meaningful. So that's my story about beauty.

Brandon: Yeah, it's a word that I've only encountered in some context—beauty as related to a sense of home. I've come across it often among people in the hospitality industry—restaurateurs, cocktail bar owners, et cetera. And even, I suppose architecture, in some elements of architectural design, they talk about hominess. But it's generally not commonly mentioned as an aesthetic principle, right—the sense of feeling at home, being at home? But I think it's so central to so much of our experience of beauty, you know.

Alan: I completely agree. I mean, I say beauty is our homecoming. In pretty much these last eight years that I've been researching and working on that idea as a concept, it's very rarely that I find someone that is not engaged with the principle of beauty could be something of immense value to people. So the kind of way that people would dismiss you is, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It's only about ephemeral things.

Actually, when I wrote Do Design, why beauty is key to everything, I did no research. I just wrote from my heart and my knowledge and my wisdom of what I knew. I mean, I've written a number of books beforehand and did a lot of research around those things. This is something I wanted to do very differently. And what is very clear to me is that if you turn up to talk about beauty with people—albeit, yes, I agree with you—it makes people a little bit uncomfortable. It makes people a little bit — I don't know. What would be the word? A little bit guarded to begin with, because where are we going with this? But actually, intuitively, people understand that beauty is something that links to them not up here. It's not in the brain. It's actually within the body. It's a soulful reaction and need, actually. There's a need.

There’s a lady called Fiona Reynolds who wrote a book called The Fight for Beauty. She was Director-General of the National Trust for many, many years. In her book, she says, People will strive for beauty, given half the chance, if they know that it is a possibility—or a potential—for them to get their hands on. But it's a spiritual thing. I think even before organized religions were created some two and a half thousand years ago, I think man, mankind, had an understanding that this idea of beauty was something that was absolutely fundamental to them, their lives, their well-being. It connected them to the cosmos, to the stars. It connected them to the land. They were absolutely part of this entire ecosystem that was creating a life for all to thrive well, is what I think.

Brandon: Yeah, there's some really interesting research by anthropologists who studied primates. They found if they put video cameras on the heads of macaques, they actually end up going all the way up to the top of the forest canopy and just stare at a sunrise or a sunset. It's built into us, right? I mean, we really are built for beauty in many ways.

Alan: Yeah.

Brandon: Alan, could you talk a little bit about your career trajectory? What has led you eventually to the point where you're writing about beautiful business? What has that story been like for you?

Alan: Well, I've always led a very creative life, albeit that my mom—bless her—really didn't think that I would ever earn any money from being creative. So I was discouraged from doing anything creative at school. But actually, I was playing the guitar from the age of 12. I was writing songs, poetry. I did a lot of acting, et cetera, et cetera. But then into my professional career, I studied book publishing at college, which is purely serendipitous. So I became a typographer, a book designer, a graphic designer. I became an artist. I worked as an art director, a creative director. I sat at the transition between analog and digital in my creative life.

So we were doing things like creating the customer journey, UX, designing brands, product services—when all of these things weren't specialisms by any stretch of the imagination. We just worked at, what I would call, a communications agency. Someone would come in the door one day and say, "Could you help me launch a global car brand? Could you help us design a 3G mobile phone service? Could you help us launch smartphones on a global basis around the world?" And how would you do that? I was very privileged in many respects to kind of have that ability to sort of touch all of those different things, which now I think has become very siloed. But in the days that we were working, you didn't have all of those different specializations as all companies. You just did what needed to be done. We were pioneers in many respects.

Then my side projects were the writing that I was very interested in. Because I could see a world that was being profoundly changed by—initially, that was 2004—digital technologies in those days, particularly mobile. It was interesting to then also see lots of incumbent companies that weren't really interested in the amount of disruption that was going to come into the world. So 2005 to 2010, one of the keywords that you would come across was the word "disruption." We certainly have been. There's no doubt about it.

Brandon: Well, that's a word that's often used to describe innovation, right? And so, I mean, Clay Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation really sort of captured people's imaginations. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your experience in the field of innovation. I know you did some work on that area. What did that entail? What does innovation mean to you? What did it look like in practice, in your work?

Alan: I mean, we worked on physical products. We worked on digital products. I mean, I was writing papers for Microsoft, back in the day before mobile really was a big thing, in terms of trying to help them understand what potential of mobile was. I suppose that whichever client it was, when you were developing those products and services, you were assimilating a lot of information. That is one of the benefits of being dyslexic, in that you kind of start to compute things in different ways. You could see the potential, I suppose. For me, innovation is about seeing the potential of being out to organize and produce products and services that were never before seen in this world. What you were creating were things that were releasing potential.

I have a slightly different point of view on economics these days. But back then, it was, well, how are you going to help this business grow? What are the needs that people have? And so you were really looking at, if you could design a product and/or a service or both. I work both on the B2B side, business to business, as well as business to consumer side of things. You were working incredibly hard to find answers to those questions, which was: what is the fundamental need that is not being met that you could create, that is actually going to kind of go with people, "I really need this to work in my life"? The reality is that there are very few organizations in this world where, to really innovate, you have to go off paced, as a sense. You need to go into uncharted territory. You're going to into no man's land. There's no guarantee of success, other than the fact that you are absolutely convicted that what it is you're going to deliver is going to be absolutely right for this organization and/or this company.

I have always operated on a gut feeling. There's a comedian, a guy called Bill Bailey. He's not on the telly so much anymore. But I always remember him doing this sketch. He says, people come up to me and they say, "Bill, how do you start your jokes? How do you create your jokes?" He said, "Well, I start with a laugh and I work backwards." How many people do I need to kind of make this? What I realized was, is, in my journey, there were times when creatively you're taking a massive leap. Because you can see what that vision is in terms of how it's going to work. So I've had many conversations, heated ones sometimes, where actually it's the storytelling of how you convince people to get over this gap, this leap of faith in a sense, to get them to where they need to get to. Because actually, organizations aren't really designed for innovation. That's not why their designed. That's not their M.O.

Brandon: Yeah, they want to be stable. They want to grow and not deviate too much from what's working.

Alan: Yeah, which is why you have M&As. Because actually, it's easier to go and just hoover up a bunch of companies that have gone through the pain, raise their VC money, whatever. They've proved the point, which is a shame, I think, actually. Because also, in a sense, my wider vision is: it's not just then about commercial activity, but it's about political activity. It's about communal activity. Even at a city level or a town level, there's still the need of innovation in terms of how do we solve. For me, the question is: how do we solve this pressing problem? To me, the answer is, well, we've got to go all in to find the absolute

best answer to that question.

In a sense, it's a very artistic position that you take. Because when an artist, whoever it is — let's say it's Picasso creating the amazing image of Guernica, the German bombing of the Spanish town which became such an icon. Or you could think about Anselm Kiefer as a German artist, for example, or Theaster Gates, an African American artist. These people worked without compromise. I feel that's where, within a kind of commercial or political context sometimes, we are let down very badly. Because there are too many constrictions on the ability to find that innovative answer to the one that we're facing.

Brandon: How can beauty be a guide then to the process of innovation, or could it help us sort through which kinds of innovations we need? If there might be an example, even in your own work, where you found beauty to be actually valuable as a decisive criterion.

Alan: Well, it is. I mean, I think that there's a lot to unpack there. But for me, the principle of beauty is based on nature’s incredible design model, which creates the conditions for all life to thrive. So I say nature has run the longest R&D program we've ever witnessed. She's been around for a long time. She has created conditions for all life to thrive. She's not interested in sustainability. She's interested in this idea of regeneration, that also kind of then — but there's a generosity. Albeit we're living in some difficult times now because they're all man-made, I think, in terms of climate change, in terms of the economics, the political economy that we live in, which you are witnessing in America at the moment, which people are witnessing around the world at the same time. There are people that are much more interested in. Nature is powerful, but she's not interested in power. I think there is a generosity in terms of how she kind of turns up in the world and how we've been accommodated. So for me, the grounding of it is: beauty is not about aesthetics. Beauty is about the fundamental laws of how our cosmos and our nature works. And as a specie, we seem to have forgotten that that's the reality.

Brandon: Yeah, one of my other guests, Lisa Lindahl—who is the inventor of the sports bra—she has a book on beauty where she argues that it's about cosmology, not cosmetology. That's the kind of shift, right, that we really need to get people thinking about. It's not just about superficial, the kinds of things we typically if we do a Google search on beauty, you'll get everything from the beauty industry, about various makeup products, and so on. That's not what we're talking about. It's hard to get people understand that.

Alan: Well, as I said, I'd go back to my experience over the last years, which is: when you turn up to talk about beauty and you kind of frame it — I talk about my journey into writing about beauty, I connect it to a universal idea. You are talking to people's souls. You're not talking to people's heads. You're certainly not talking about the color of what's on people's fingernails or any other kind of aesthetic things. I mean, ultimately, there is an element of design which is about the aesthetic value of something.

Brandon: Sure.

Alan: But it absolutely, for me, is so much more fundamental than that. We kind of nudged in a way not to want to have this conversation because it's such a fundamental part of who we are as people. It gets us to ask lots and lots and lots of questions, which I think talk true to power, question so many different things, where people really start to understand that the value of the quality of their lives—from the get go to the end of life—if you were to frame all of that around beauty, people would be making completely different choices and decisions around the type of life that they would be leading, I think.

I woke up to it a little later. Then you wake you up and then you're in debt. You got a mortgage on your house. You're making more sorts of choices and decisions, where you to say, what was the most beautiful life I could have led from when I was conscious? I genuinely believe that people were making very different decisions. But it's anti in terms of the neoliberal kind of story that we're being fed in terms of what actually a successful and good life looks to us. And in a part, what we're witnessing at the moment is a complete failure of that narrative and that story, which is why I think we see what we see in terms of

people struggling with politics, with society, with their own personal identities, men's health. Just a few examples, it's what I think.

Brandon: Yeah, the criteria that we value—the criteria for success, the criteria for a good life—I think have somehow left out beauty, which is why I think your work is immensely important.

Alan: Thank you.

Brandon: Let’s chat about your first book—or at least the first in this series—Do Design, which I really want to commend you on just the quality and the thoughtfulness that’s gone into even the production of this book. Obviously, you've come from a publishing background. Could you say a little bit about what the thought process was behind designing it this way? Because it really feels like a treasure, an object you can treasure—everything from the page quality to the images that have been chosen, to the fonts. Could you say a little bit about what you put into that?

Alan: Well, I mean, that's got nothing to do with me because that's The Do Book Company. There's a publishing company called The Do Book Co, which is run by Miranda West, who I say is the best publisher in the world. People say, "Well, why is that?" And I said, well, she published my book. A very small operation. I think there's only three of them. They designed the format. So I have no input in that. I just wrote the words.

Brandon: Oh, wow. Okay. Well, it's very well aligned with — it really does convey everything you're saying in here to the physical medium in a remarkable way.

Alan: Well, yeah. I suppose the serendipity was, is when I wrote that book, as I said, I’d already written a couple of books before, alongside all the other work that I was doing. But it felt very important to me. I made three key decisions. One was that I would only write in what my friend calls “threepenny words”—threepenny words, as opposed to sixpenny words.

Brandon: Sure.

Alan: Plain English. I wanted to write in a way where if it only took 50 words to say what it is I wanted to say, then I would say that. You know, I got to the point where having read many, many books over my lifetime that were 100,000 words long (and some change), that's a big dedication. Sometimes you come out with the end of it and you go, "I don't know what I'm really getting out of this." And so I felt that that was important. Then the third writing decision was, is, if I could elevate this writing that felt somehow universal, it could elevate it to a form of poetics that could feel that would open a door for people. So I've always described Do Design as like, it's like a TARDIS. There's not a lot of words, but it covers a lot of ground.

Brandon: Right. Right.

Alan: But it's a kind of invitation for people to kind of move into, reflect on the ideas and concepts that I'm laying out in that story. Because as you know, telling a story about beauty is a bit complicated because it touches so many different aspects of people's lives. I mean, that's really my contribution—the words. You know, all Do Books are published in exactly the same format. There's variations, I think, in whatever. I mean, I contributed a lot of the pictures, which is what it did.

But the important thing about that book was, two weeks after it was published — I mean, I've got a few people that follow me on LinkedIn, but I wouldn't say I've got a massive following. Miranda's got a small team. There were some goodwill within the community. She called me up two weeks after the book had been published and she said, "You've given me a problem." And I thought, "Oh my God. What have I done?" She said, "Well, the book is sold out. That wasn't in the business plan, so now we need to go and find the money to republish it." Even this last quarter, we're still selling significant quantities of that book. I know it's gone on and inspired a whole bunch of different people to set up businesses and festivals and whatever. There's some magic in there, which even I am still a little bit confused about in terms of what it is. Because as I said, I wrote it for myself, to write myself home. But that homecoming — quite often, if I sign a book for people, I will say: "Beauty is our homecoming."

Brandon: Amazing.

Alan: You should take it a bit more seriously, perhaps.

Brandon: Well, I want to ask you. I mean, you signed my copy Beauty is the Ultimate Metric.

Alan: Indeed.

Brandon: Could you say a little bit about that?

Alan: Well, I mean, there's this famous saying that everything that gets measured gets made. It was in a workshop that we were running with an organization, and I asked people to give me feedback at the

end. This one person wrote on a card: “Beauty is the ultimate metric.” This was from someone that, at the beginning of the session, I think was perhaps a little bit more circumspect in terms of the benefit that they would get from this experience and what it would mean to them.

And so, in a sense, it's a bit like you watch the dying of the day. You watch the sunset go down. You watch the sun go up. You have a smell that, I don't know, it's your mum's favorite dish that she cooks for you. For me, that's beauty. That's the metric. Trying to get people to think about it in terms of that it has an immense value is very important. Because everything else in our lives are measured, you know? You go to the petrol pump. You have a price per liter or a gallon for the diesel or the petrol you're putting in the car. You go to the supermarket, and you buy some vegetables. They are measured in terms of a price, a value, an equation, whatever of that.

For me, beauty is kind of part of that very important idea of its immense value to all of us in big and small ways. It's a hug that someone gives somebody else when they really need it—to spend time with someone when they really need it. They're doing something very beautiful for that person through their generosity. The language around beauty for me is also a very important kind of aspect of how we expand that idea as a concept and a possibility.

Brandon: Yeah, that's amazing.

(outro)

Brandon: All right. That’s a good place to pause the first half of our interview.

In part two, Alan is going to get practical. We’re going to talk about why beauty is the ultimate metric, how to design experiences that feel inevitable, and how leaders can move from extraction to regeneration—including the boardroom tests he gives clients by asking them, “Is this the most beautiful decision we can make?”

See you next time.