In a presentation at the TEDMED 2013 conference last month, he talked about how design principles lead to more discovery and better treatment. Maeda (a speaker at our RoadMap 2012 conference) is persuasive, to say the least. Enjoy the video, and make sure to check out our RoadMap 2013 conference in November in San Francisco, as Maeda is working with us on the event (tickets will go on sale in the summer).

As often happens these days, the Twitter summary of my answer was perhaps more articulate than my answer itself:

@johnmaeda: “Today end-ups — old companies and institutions — want to be become more like start-ups. Yet they are classic and important.” via @AnnePascual

@johnmaeda: “Start-ups want to end up successful. Both want to be great.” via @Sloane

I sit on the board of a couple of start-ups (like Sonos and Quirky), but I spend my days running RISD – what I call an “end-up” in contrast with a start-up. I also used to be at the academic equivalent of a start-up,  the MIT Media Lab, which was founded in the 1980s (30 years is young in academic terms). Now, the term end-up may sound pejorative, but in fact I mean the opposite: If you think about it, the end goal for most start-ups is to eventually become an end-up, which is to say successful and long lasting.

At the same time, you increasingly hear that large corporations and institutions now wish to act more like start-ups, in order to innovate and become more agile. My friend Jocelyn Glei, editor-in-chief of 99U, remarked recently how “start-up culture” is so much more coveted and in the zeitgeist than it was 10 years ago; prior presidents simply didn’t talk about start-ups like Obama does.

(As an interesting side note, this analogy works for countries as well. European nations like France are the great end-ups of civilization. The U.S. was a start-up that is now coping with becoming an end-up. And China is an end-up that feels like a start-up again.)

Here are some of the crucial differences between start-ups and end-ups:

Start-ups have little, but also little to lose

By definition, customers aren’t drawn to start-ups because of a trusted legacy or brand. So they must prove their worth to each and every new customer and get their name out without a well-resourced marketing machine behind them.

End-ups with strong brands that draw customers in, however, can become hesitant to act for fear of tarnishing or altering that brand. Start-ups have no choice but to act, and act fully – it’s the only way they’ll survive.

Change comes naturally to a start-up

A start-up is like a baby growing up: It needs to change and grow to become itself. Start-ups often dream of having the strong internal cultures, passed-down stories, and shared history that you commonly find in end-ups and that guide their decisions.

But change is awkward to an end-up, much like it can be for a grown adult trying to reimagine him/herself. It’s often necessary for end-ups, but it’s never easy.

End-ups have resources; start-ups have commitment

At end-ups, employees have well-defined roles and responsibilities. In the best case, that ensures that things are done efficiently. In the worst case, though, it can inhibit people from taking on new responsibilities with agility.  At a start-up, it’s all-hands-on-deck to make sure things get out the door, even if it’s sometimes unclear whose hands are doing what and chaos ensues.

And it’s important to note that it’s the stories and legends of the great end-ups that inspire most great start-ups – think of HP, Apple, IBM. Rather than assume that all end-ups are decaying dinosaurs, we must acknowledge that each is the envy of the other in some respects.

End-ups have learned to manage scale, and have accumulated wisdom over time; start-ups have the benefit of the agile beginner’s mind. The challenge for both is to seek greatness by learning from each other.

John Maeda is a graphic designer and artist, and is president of Rhode Island School of Design. Follow him on Twitter @johnmaeda.

Photo courtesy of Anettphoto/Shutterstock.com.

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The crux of the leadership problem as Maeda sees it is that the hierarchical format with CEOs at the top and layers of management below them has been upended. “That hierarchy has been hurt indefinitely because anyone can talk to anyone else,” he said at the GigaOM RoadMap conference Monday in San Francisco. “You can’t control the flow of information between people anymore. There is a heterarchy and the CEO has been pulled into the middle of that.”

He implied that this opens up opportunities for creative people to become leaders, but he directly stated that creative people could help make any leader in this new heterarchical structure more effective. The secret to effectiveness in this brave new management world is making all of the data a leader has at their fingertips easily understandable, and to use design to connect concepts and relationships amid a mess of information.

So for Maeda, the question is both how do you lead in this new age of the heterarchy as well as how you can use design to support the leader. But in the 15 minutes before he got to that point, he led a fun intro into the importance of typography as an example of how design puts form to content, classified the difference between startup culture and larger company culture (he calls those “end ups” as opposed to startups,) and offered a book recommendation. As as one would expect, his slides were awesome. So check out the video for an entertaining talk and for startups out there thinking about data visualizations, check out his last few minutes to understand visually how design and data can aid leaders. Any company who can build those links will make a mint.

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and that video recording of the session follows below:

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We’ve brought together some of the best design-oriented minds we could find to share their insights at RoadMap 2012, starting a little later on Monday in San Francisco. It’s an impressive roster of speakers, including former Apple executive Tony Fadell, now reinventing the way we think about home automation with Nest; Perry Chen, co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter and a new way to find grass-roots support for new projects; John Maeda, who is currently teaching the next generation of talented minds how to think about design as president of the Rhode Island School of Design; and Evan Willams, one of the founders behind a simple idea — Twitter — that has changed the world with its intuitive design and the current CEO of Obvious Corp.

We’ll be updating this page with live coverage from the event written by GigaOM’s talented team of writers, and a live stream of the event can also be found here. It all gets started at 8:30am Monday with opening remarks from GigaOM founder Om Malik and Senior Writer Katie Fehrenbacher, who organized the event. Please join the conversation on Twitter by following @gigaom and using the #roadmapconf hashtag.

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John Maeda, the President of Rhode Island School of Design and  one of the most influential people in the world of design and technology, spoke at TED earlier this year about the importance of art, technology and design inform creative readers. I stumbled on to his talk, thanks to Tina Roth Eisenberg, and found it fun and educational. Of course, you can hear John speak in person at our RoadMap conference on November 5 that I am co-hosting with Katie Fehrenbacher. Our theme for the event is design in the age of connectedness. Join us!

If you don’t know Maeda, he pioneered computer-based visual art at the MIT Media Lab and his work appears in the Museum of Modern Art. Now as the head of Rhode Island School of Design, he is pushing forward the boundaries of expression, design, connected culture and leadership. He’s given numerous TED Talks on themes like Designing for Simplicity, and his Journey in Design and recently wrote an article for GigaOM on how “design is both the insanely radical and the passionately incremental.”

Maeda wrote:

In the year since the passing of Steve Jobs, design has experienced a moment — a renaissance. Walter Isaacson’s biography cemented the fact that Jobs’ unusually acute passion for both art and design within the tech industry was the key to its dominance today. Design-driven startups, including Rhode Island School of Design’s own Airbnb, are garnering much more attention in Silicon Valley and the more design-driven New York tech scene.

Design is emerging as a key focus for today’s web, mobile and gadget creators. That’s why at RoadMap we’re bringing together both the thought leaders who are creating tomorrow’s connected products, and those who are dominating the connected industry today. Speakers at RoadMap will include:

• Perry Chen, CEO, Kickstarter
• David Karp, Founder and CEO, Tumblr
• Ben Silbermann, Co-Founder and CEO, Pinterest
• Kevin Systrom, Co-Founder and CEO, Instagram
• Evan Williams, CEO, The Obvious Corporation
• John Maeda, President, Rhode Island School of Design
• Yves Béhar, Founder, fuseproject
• Stefan Olander, VP, Digital Sport, Nike
• Tony Fadell, Founder and CEO, Nest
• Dave Gilboa, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker Eyewear
• George Blankenship, VP, Worldwide Sales and Ownership Experience, Tesla Motors
• Alex Ljung, Founder and CEO, SoundCloud
• Katia Beauchamp, Co-Founder, Birchbox
• Steve Case, Founder, Revolution
• Paul Mascarenas, CTO and VP, Ford Motor Company Research and Innovation
• Oren Jacob, CEO, ToyTalk
• Jennifer Pahlka, Founder and Executive Director, Code for America
• Bobby Podesta, Head of Creative, ToyTalk
• Scott Wilson, Founder, MINIMAL

There’s a limited number of tickets, so buy yours now here. Come be inspired at RoadMap 2012 on November 5th.

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And so it’s not surprising that the word “design” gets thrown around a lot now as the reason for a brilliant success, or the excuse for a fantastic failure — especially when it gets to be that time of year when Apple announces its newest products. From a commercial perspective, the iPhone 5 has already been a resounding success. But on the matter of its design compared to the iPhone 4, it seems the jury is still out.

Watching the chatter from my perch as President of RISD, the more people talk about its design, the more I wonder if we designers have done a good enough job explaining what “design” really means. I believe the passionate incrementalism of the iPhone 5 is just as important a design accomplishment as the original breakthrough of its predecessors.

Let me explain. Sometimes design is about making something that’s never been seen before. It’s like Steve Jobs said — you can’t ask people what they want, you need to design it and show it to them. The result can sometimes be a quantum leap, an epiphany that comes to life as an object or experience nobody in their right mind could have imagined before. Great designers can stretch us towards the limits of our comfort, and then create a new comfortable place where we didn’t expect to find one. Often, however, design breakthroughs are achieved in a less revolutionary sort of way. Great design can be about refining, or “perfecting.”

For example, think of the Sony Walkman — the first portable device that enabled you to listen to the music you wanted on the go, in all of its stereophonic glory, within the comfort of your own head. You no longer had to surrender your mind to whatever was playing on your pocket radio. The Walkman symbolized freedom and established a cocoon around you to help you achieve tighter isolation from your surroundings. After all, what teenager doesn’t want to turn off the world around them?

On the other side of the coin, think of Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System or any other means to pursue a 99.99966 percent level of flawlessness, and unless you’re a Six Sigma black belt, you start to yawn interminably. The quest for perfection isn’t always called out as a particularly brilliant form of design or innovation. Yet it is that kind of incessant pursuit of otherworldly excellence that ultimately grounds a designer’s ability to find new ideas much farther afield.

It is a furniture designer’s knowledge of the wood they are using — exactly which tree it came from, what layer of wood, and which side faced the sun — that results in a chair that bends in impossible angles. It is the web designer’s attention to the question of which screen resolution and what version of Javascript and which other applications might need to run in concert that results in the breakthrough mobile app.

So when you see Jony Ive talking about shaving microns off of a glass surface, or lasercutting tiny holes into aluminum, you see someone driven by one single purpose — to make the most perfect experience imaginable. There is much debate about whether the subtraction of N grams or M millimeters made the new iPhone too light or too thin, and certainly the determination of “better” is a difficult and ultimately personal one. Most importantly, the existence of this debate signifies how Apple is now reaching the apex of perfection on this slab of metal we carry around with a devotion that rivals Gollum’s to the Ring. They have achieved refinement, a critical milestone in the designer’s process of finding the next breakthrough.

Both the radical breakthrough of the Walkman and the perfection-driven refinement of the iPhone 5 represent significant design advancements, and both kinds are critical to the process of innovation. On this anniversary of Jobs’ death, I am reminded how artists — who are always asking the big questions that drive us — and designers — who are always trying to find the solutions — are the ones who obsessively navigate the difficult terrain of making us comfortable with what is new, and ultimately, making us happy.

John Maeda is president of the Rhode Island School of Design, and has been recognized as a leader in the fields of art and design. More information on his background can be found here. He will be speaking at our RoadMap event, focused on design in the age of connectedness, on November 5th in San Francisco.

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The company also executed $90 million in secondary financing. The secondary financing allows existing investor BV Capital and other shareholders such as employees, founders and angel investors to cash in their chips. BV Capital has come to the end of its association with Sonos and as a result, Andreas Von Blottnitz from BVCapital is going to leave the board.

Sonos is adding a few new people to its board. KKR will be represented by David Kerko along with Elevation’s Fred Anderson (and former Apple CFO) and John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design. I think addition of Maeda is a pretty big deal for the nearly ten-year-old company that started out making an expensive wireless music player but has since expanded into a series of more affordable speakers that can stream music directly from services such as Spotify and also from music libraries stored on our hard drives.

When they started talking up their product in 2004, I was highly skeptical (and downright dismissive) of their chances, for I have seen a lot of consumer electronics startups in Silicon Valley fail. Boy, have they proved me wrong or what. They have steadily improved their products, made them simpler and have turned into a player in the hi-end audio business. They are in more than a million rooms now!

My colleague Stacey Higginbotham wrote this piece – How to build a consumer platform: lessons from Sonos – that captures Sonos’ history and strategy very well.

This story was updated at 12:39p.m. to clarify that Redpoint Ventures is a new investor in Sonos.

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