I read a lot of books on design leadership and management, and some are more useful than others.

When it comes to driving business impact as a design leader, or setting the environment to bring design leadership into your organization, there are a few that are a cut above the rest.

Here’s the 3 books to read if you want to drive business impact through design leadership:

#1: Design Leadership: Securing The Strategic Value of Design by Raymond Turner

This book covers the effective use of design as a business resource for competitive advantage, commercial success, and social benefit.

“design is a business tool that makes strategy visible”

Raymond covers all of the core areas in this book, including design maturity, how design operates at different levels, and the impact design can create for business when done well.

“The essence of design leadership involves helping organizations envision the future; generating tangible, business scenarios, considering that future; utilizing design-related skills to clarify the implications of those scenarios for the company and its customers; and ensuring the most appropriate design direction is selected to realize the company’s wider strategic intentions.”

#2: Design: A Business Case, Thinking, Leading, and Managing by Design by Brigitte Borja de Mozota and Steiner Valade-Amland

If you’ve read Brigitte’s book on Design Management, this is a great follow on. This book aims to bridge design thinking (inspiring), design management (enabling), and design (embodying) to stimulate and drive innovation in organizations.

Design:

• increases speed to market

• extends market reach

• drives engagement and loyalty

• enhances internal capabilities

• inspires visionary transformation

#3: Managing Strategic Design by Ray Holland and Busayawan Lam

This book showcases the power of design management to drive corporate strategic goals, showing how design strategies can be thoughtfully formulated and managed to improve the performance of organizations.

“To be effective at the top strategic level, design must be embraced for its ability to add real value, change visions and generate new thinking about the organization as a system and what it offers. It needs the support of the senior management, ideally the CEO if it is to become a mainstream contributor to performance.”

These are three design leadership books I find extremely useful and have informed how I structure organizations, influence change, and drive transformation.

What ones would you add?