Braun 1960s v. Apple 2000s: Which Was The Greatest Corporate Design Culture?

Design-Think Smackdown: Measuring Leadership At Braun v. Apple

Note: This post by a member of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership community of students and faculty does not represent the view of the school or everyone in the school. 

By Paul Glader

The design world holds up Braun GmbH in the 1950s - 1970s as one of the greatest demonstrations of design culture. Its closest peer is Apple Inc. between 1997 - 2012, during the second stint of Steve Jobs as CEO.

So what lessons can we draw between the two companies during their heyday? Which one wins the hypothetical battle of greatest corporate design culture?  The Berlin School of Creative Leadership welcomes your vote and comment below. Meanwhile, here is my analysis.

Dr. Klaus Klemp, the Head of Exhibitions at the Museum of Applied Art in Frankfurt and Board Member of the Dieter and Ingeborg Rams Foundation, spoke to students at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership in March as they started the first module of their executive MBA program.

From his talk and outside research on the Braun and Apple companies, here are some key takeaways about how the two companies fostered, celebrated and capitalized on a design culture. There are also warning signs… for times when their design cultures faltered or failed. Given that design cultures might be developed in the same way great boxers are trained, we summarize which company might win if the two cultures were prizefighters.

1) Braun & Apple Cultivated Stars, “Great Groups,” & A Creative Culture

Apple products were guided by the creativity, vision and debate between designer Sir Jonathan Ive as well as CEO Steve Jobs and a 16-member industrial design team that has included Christopher Stringer, Julian Hoenig, Daniel Coster and Rico Zorkendorfer. At Braun, designer Dieter Rams was a super star. But his creativity sharpened by interacting with the 16-member design team at a Braun lab that functioned as a great group, though not always polite to one another.

“It was more of a cooking pot with lots of steam,” Klemp says. “Things exploded.” He notes that is what he sees lacking at some large companies in Asia: the ability to think and speak critically of ideas. Although many talented designers are emerging from smaller firms in Korea, Japan and China, he believes the larger firms there tend to be too polite and hierarchical. “At Braun and Apple, designers and engineers are working on the same level with respect,” he said.

Dr. Klemp notes that Braun’s lab in the 1950s had elder statesmen as well as young guns like Rams and Gerd A. Muller. They inspired each other to go in new directions and push boundaries with design. The younger designers grew up during Nazi times, when swing and jazz music from America was forbidden. Jazz remained popular in West Germany after World War II as American GIs and their music remained in south Germany. Rams and his colleagues at Braun “wanted to produce a design like this cool jazz,” Dr. Klemp said.

Jobs and Apple were influenced by music of the 1970s and a hippie culture of the San Francisco Bay area where he grew up. A Zen Buddhist who traveled to India, Jobs sometimes viewed himself in a war against the more nerdy vision of other entrepreneurs and companies in the tech industry.

Jobs rightly saw the design talent of British designer Jonathan Ive, who consulted Apple in the 1990s from the UK on products such as the 2nd generation Newton and Message Pad110. When Jobs returned to Apple, he made Ive senior VP of industrial design and then head of the design team that created the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Legendary Braun designer Dieter Rams has said that Apple was one of a handful of companies that followed his 10 design principles. Many suggest Ive paid tribute, if not copied, some Rams' designs as depicted in the photo above, with the ipod looking strikingly similar to the Braun thermostat design and the iPhone calculator app also bearing a striking resemblance to the iconic calculator Rams designed with concave buttons and one yellow button.

2) You Must Have Leaders Who Know & Respect Design

“The CEO is the central point,” Dr. Klemp says. “Many CEOs know about finance and other things but know nothing about design.” At Braun, the company created a design department in 1956, headed by Dr. Fritz Eichler, who had led collaboration with the Ulm School of Design to develop product lines. He saw Dieter Rams’ talent in developing the SK4 record player in 1956 with Hans Gugelot. Eichler promoted and freed up Rams to make more design breakthroughs in the 1950s and 1960s.

According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs once said, “If I have a spiritual partner at Apple, it's Jony.” At Apple, Jobs increasingly promoted and protected Ives, giving him his own laboratory and design team, which had tinted windows and was off-limits to most other Apple employees. Ives “has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me,” Jobs told Isaacson.

Dr. Klemp says he thinks business students should be required to take design courses. Klemp says Dutch, Danish and Swedish companies and cultures lend themselves to a healthy blend of design thinking in business. “It’s not only thinking about profit, profit, profit,” he says. Rather its “hey, let us make good things.”

3) The Design Should Be Simple, Reduced & Easy to Use

“Leonardo da Vinci said, ‘The most sophisticated thing is a simple thing’ and I think that also everyone who is working in design knows how difficult it is to make things simple,” Klemp says. He points to the Braun calculator that was so simple that the user’s guide was on its backside. “That was all,” he says. “You didn’t need any booklet or other things.” 

Klemp points to a Braun shaver Rams and team designed. It intentionally lacks ornamentation on the metal but uses ornamentation on the screws of the device. “That makes the ornament,” Klemp says. “This very reduced thing is very, very difficult to make.” Shavers were the cash cows for Braun for many years.

Meanwhile, the 1965 HiFi system Rams designed, which was super simple and cost 15,000 Deutsche Marks (as much as a Mercedes Benz at the time), was a breakthrough in product design. Products like that helped guide the spirit of design in the company. Similarly, at Apple, some newer versions of higher priced desktop and laptop computers are unveiled to maintain the spirit of ambitious, elegant, simple design. Meanwhile, certain products such as the iPad and iPhone function as big sales drivers.

Braun also invented a totally new radio design in great contrast to the normal 1950s designs, which looked like a “black box on the table.”

Dr. Klemp notes the Braun design allowed head to flow from the device. “It was a very clean” look they brought into the living room. Braun used color sparingly. For example, its black calculator used convex rather than concave buttons and had one button that was yellow, which made the product standout from boring alternatives.

Apple’s products also often go for very simple controls that leave devices looking start and beautiful. Some of Ive’s designs for early iPods are near replicas of designs Braun used for thermostats. Transferring good designs from one product to a different application is a good design principle Klemp says. Venture Capitalist Ryan Craig writes on Jobs:

Years before he conceived the iPod, iPhone and iPad, Steve Jobs was designing videogames for Atari.  Jobs hated complicated manuals, saying products needed to be so simple that a stoned freshman could figure them out.  The only instructions for the Star Trek game he built for Atari were:  “1. Insert quarter. 2. Avoid Klingons.”  His main demand of iPod, iPhone and iPad product designers was:  “Simplify!” If he couldn’t figure out how to navigate to something or if it took more than three clicks, he would flip out.

4) Consider How People Live (Or Want To Live) When Designing Products.  

Max Braun started the company in Frankfurt in 1921 by making radios. At their peak in the 1950s and 1960s, Braun was in close touch with how Germans lived and what they wanted in their homes. Earlier designers such as Peter Behrens at AEG had moved from a historic style to a machine style influenced by the US. The Bauhaus School founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar (it later moved to Dessau and Berlin before the Nazis forced it to close) also sought the idea of mass production for the common man though it ended up almost accidentally creating designer chairs and useful household products. Bauhaus did achieve a focus on clean, simple, household products focused on how people live, though. The Braun designers moved further from the machine style to a kind of “civil style.”

Klemp points to a coffee press by Braun in 1952 and notes how it contrasts with machinistic looking products that rivals were making at that time. These machines were “technically, completely the same but what a difference in the aesthetics of these two machines.”

Similarly, Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (a childhood friend of Jobs) had a strong intuition of how people might want to use computers. They pioneered the shape and colors of personal computers. They popularized the graphical user interface and the idea of a mouse to click on icons and open programs. Jobs and Ives took the same kind of thinking into the creation of features and design in the iMac, Macbooks, iPods, iPads and iPhones.

5) Both Companies Had Moments of Disruption

Max Braun’s brand was introduced in the 1930s with a familiar logo with it's distinctive raised A in the typeface. The company was on track for solid product and sales growth. But the rise of the Nazis and World War II disrupted the company's strategy. It was forced to abandon products for the civilian sector and to make only shavers during the 1940s. Its Frankfurt factory was nearly completely destroyed in 1944 and Max Braun had to rebuild the company facilities and personnel.

Similarly, Steve Jobs ran into problems at Apple in the mid-1980s as conflicts developed on operational sides of the business and some Apple executives began to resent Jobs’ tendencies to micro-manage. He was forced out of Apple in a boardroom coup in 1985. As time went on, though, Apple product design, business strategy, growth and profitability all suffered. Meanwhile, Jobs founded computer company NeXT Inc. the same year and helped create the Pixar film studio.

Struggling to find its way, Apple bought NeXT for $427 million in late 1996 and Jobs returned to Apple as interim CEO in 1998. Jobs comeback was as dramatic as that of the boxer Sugar Ray Leonard in 1987 against Marvin Hagler. Jobs immediately terminated several projects including the Newton, Cyberdog and OpenDog. The company implemented technology from NeXT into Apple products such as Mac OS X. Jobs and Ives partnership launched Apple into its second renaissance.

6) A Design-centered Company & Culture Is Difficult To Maintain Long-term

Going public on the stock market, corporate takeovers & leadership changes can impact a company’s success and its design culture.

At Braun, the company slowly lost its design mojo. Braun went on the stock market in 1962. The Boston-based Gillette Group purchased a majority share of Braun in 1967 and took full control of its operations in 1982, making it a wholly owned subsidiary. Braun made Rams the head of design, a position he held until he retired in 1998. Many of the products he designed are now in museums around the world.

But the company faced copycat designers, an often-changing corporate structure and pressure to continue growing sales and profits. Gillette, itself, was sold to Procter & Gamble in 2005 and Braun became a wholly owned subsidiary of P&G. In early 2008, P&G limited Braun’s product portfolio to only shavers and electric toothbrushes in the US (Braun’s other product lines still sell in Europe).

With the passing of Steve Jobs, Apple Inc., Jonathan Ive’s role has been elevated to head all product design initiatives within and across

all of Apple.  Will Ive be able to maintain the design culture that led Apple to the highest market capitalization on Wall Street? Or will the company’s recent stock decline mark the beginning of a decline of both corporate results and a brilliant product design culture?

Who Wins In a Smackdown Between the Two Design Cultures?

Apple’s market capitalization as the biggest company in the world and its disruption of several industries and its two phases of brilliance make it the unanimous winner for performance. Braun’s vision and early innovation make it a nostalgia favorite and the early visionary, a Max Schmeling perhaps to Apple’s Sugar Ray Leonard.

@PaulGlader, an EMBA student at The Berlin School of Creative Leadership, is a journalist, professor and entrepreneur. He's been a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal and has written for BusinessWeek, The Washington Post, USAToday and others. He blogs about education trends at WiredAcademic.com and @WiredAcademic.