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Gavin Ivester
Cisco, Bang & Olufsen, Apple, Nike, PUMA - Design & Innovation Leader - Brand Builder - Harvard Business
Gavin Ivester is a design executive with an impressive career spanning multiple renowned brands. He currently serves as the Director of Industrial and UX Design for Webex Devices at Cisco.12 His professional background includes significant design and product leadership roles at several iconic companies:
Professional Experience:
- Apple: Designed the first-ever PowerBook
- Nike and Puma: Product design leadership
- Gibson Guitar: Chief Creative Officer
- Bang & Olufsen: Design leadership
- Cisco: Currently leads design strategy for collaboration devices136
Academic and Professional Highlights:
- Guest Lecturer at Stanford and Vanderbilt universities
- Currently based in Denmark
- Harvard Business School Executive education
- Design executive known for driving exceptional growth in strong brands34
Recent Design Achievements: At Cisco, Ivester has been instrumental in design innovations, including:
- Winning iF Design Awards for products like the Cisco Room Bar Pro and Cisco Room Kit EQX
- Focusing on sustainable design practices
- Creating intuitive and consistent user experiences across collaboration devices2
Ivester describes himself as a "hybrid product and brand leader with roots in Silicon Valley industrial design and extensive European design experience"5, emphasizing his global design perspective.
Highlights
“Il n'y a pas d'innovation sans désobéissance.” ("There's no innovation without disobedience.”)
- Michel Millot— hopefully correct attribution!
Great designers maintain a spark of disobedience, driven by their own higher standards. Not to derail or disrupt for the sake of subversion, but to elevate— sometimes in unexpected ways. To take the spirit of what is needed, imagine beyond accepted constraints, and push further.
Jeff Mokos, who is one of those great designers, expressed that spirit perfectly: “Rarely is the brief as exciting as the opportunity.”
Great leaders not only protect those great designers, they promote them and their ideas.
#Fridaymusings
Some of the most successful athletes of all time are famous for making the teams around them better. Michael Schumacher (whom I wish could write a piece like this 😢), Michael Jordan. Tom Brady— who brings some very good leadership advice here.
