Open up your mind and say, ahh...

If you take a close look at Facebook’s S-1 registration statement, you’ll notice something striking: Designers are called out as key to the company’s longterm strategic success.

Tech company filings often call out certain job functions—like engineering—and the organization’s ability ability to fill those position as crucial to its success. But designers? That’s almost unheard of. And yet, there they are. In the section titled “Factors Affecting Our Performance,” Facebook’s filing reads: “We have also made and intend to make acquisitions with the primary objective of adding software engineers, product designers, and other personnel with certain technology expertise.” And in the section titled “Competition,” it says, “We compete to attract and retain highly talented individuals, especially software engineers, designers, and product managers.” (Emphasis added in both cases.)

Facebook says they’ve only scratched the surface of their roadmap.

The mentions underline the importance (little-noticed until now) that Facebook places on its design team. In a story on that team, which ran in the April issue of Fast Company, VP of product Chris Cox and others told the magazine how the company is looking to its right-brainers to help them do something that’s essentially never been done in software before: Design interfaces that catalyze emotions, rather than simply enable users to accomplish tasks.

Chris Cox

Designing for Facebook, Cox said, gets at “the science of things you can’t reason about, that you just feel.” He added: “That’s why, when we’re trying to accomplish something that’s pretty new, it’s important to be iterating in that design mindset.”

That mindset is only going to become increasingly important. Facebook executives say they’ve only scratched the surface of their roadmap. As a result, the company’s been on a hiring tear, tracking down and convincing some of the tech world’s brightest design talent to join the company, including, most recently, the team at Gowalla (brought in via an acquisition) and Elizabeth Windram, a former staff designer at Google who was snatched away from Quora just months after she joined that company.

CLICK ABOVE FOR OUR SLIDESHOW OF FACEBOOK’S NOTABLE DESIGN HIRES

Notably, tracking down the right people and persuading them to join the team is so important that Facebook doesn’t leave the job to HR alone. “We started keeping a dream team list about two-and-a-half years ago,” Director of Design Kate Aronowitz tells Co.Design. “We thought, ‘What if we could assemble all these people in one room?’”

Nicholas Felton and Kate Aronowitz, Facebook’s Director of Design.

The design team themselves maintain Facebook Group called Design Recruiting (yes, the company uses the site as one of its core productivity tools) that team members fill up with the names and portfolios of designers they admire. And Aronowitz says she herself regularly cuddles up with an iPhone or iPad before bed, surfing through a series of apps, looking for flashes of genius.

Members of the design team reach out to targets themselves, meeting up with them at conferences or inviting them out for dinner or drinks, both to test for fit (“see if our values line up and see if we get excited about the same things,” Aronowitz says) and to make the case for joining Facebook.

The design team reaches out to targets themselves. For some, Facebook brings out the big guns.

For some targets, Facebook even brings out the big guns. Both Nicholas Felton, the information designer behind the wildly popular Feltron Annual Reports, and Mike Matas, who worked on the original iPhone and then cofounded Push Pop Press, which created the Apple Award-winning tablet book version of Our Choice, Al Gore’s follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth, got personal invitations from the main man himself, CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (The email Felton saw in his inbox was so casual that at first, he tells Co.Design, he thought it was just a message from Zuckerberg to all Facebook users.)

That email led to a visit to Facebook headquarters for then-New York-based Felton and his partner Ryan Case. Zuckerberg took them on a a walk through the leafy Palo Alto neighborhood where the company was located at the time. He asked them what they were hoping to do with Daytum and talked about his own visions for Facebook. (Matas tells a similar story, of how an initial invitation from Zuckerberg to come talk about Push Pop Press led, several months later, to a formal offer to join the company.)

For all the outreach Facebook does, the bar to actually getting in the door remains high. “I only hire about one out of every hundred portfolios I look at,” Aronowitz told a group of designers at an event at Dave McClure’s 500 Startups last winter.

Facebook isn’t looking for your run-of-the-mill “pixel pusher.” When we meet at Facebook headquarters, Aronowitz ticks off three qualities she looks for: A personal vision (about what the world needs or where design is going), a sense of ownership over the projects they work on, and a “builder” mindset. “We’re looking for people who can say, ‘I have a product idea, I can think through a need, I can think through a customer base, build something, ship it, and then iterate based on how it’s being used.’”

I only hire about one out of every hundred portfolios I look at.

That’s because once they get to Facebook, designers don’t sit in a corner and wait for people to toss requirements at them. Rather, they enjoy an unusually high level of involvement in the product, starting at the very beginning as executives and product leads discuss what they should build. “Here, the designers will be in almost every conversation about their product,” Aronowitz says.

The designers’ involvement is so deep that they often partner with product managers to lead feature teams. Sometimes they even take the lead on their own.

Sofa, the firm that created ingenious apps like this one, was bought outright by Facebook. The team now works on polishing the site’s icons and visual elements.

Last year, for example, we wrote about how Rob Mason, a fresh-faced young graduate from England, with little more than a few Facebook apps under his belt, was handed responsibility for the Skype integration barely moments after he’d walked in the door. “Go figure out what the experience of doing video calls on Facebook should be,” he was told. He spent a few months tinkering around with it and eventually threw out the book on historical video chat conventions, coming up instead with something simple, straightforward, and so easy to use that, as one of the designers said at the time, even his mom could figure it out.

When the designers they hire are particularly good–when the company believes in their own unique genius–the company gives them free reign to come up with their own portfolio. When Matas joined Facebook last year with his Push Pop cofounder Kimon Tsinteris, for example, the two were given an office and told to think about what new features and products they thought Facebook should be doing next.

“If you can hire people that are good,” Cox explains, “you’re crazy to not give them the chance to set up the definition of what they’re doing.”

And not to keep them close. Both Zuckerberg and Cox spend the bulk their days in product meetings, working cheek-by-jowl with designers and product managers, hammering out the company’s next feature sets.

In the old Palo Alto campus, the company’s designers were parked in the same giant, open-plan room where Zuckerberg, Cox, and the company’s other top executives sat. The new Menlo Park campus has nine buildings and room for 3,200 people. And still, the designers were put not just in the same building, but on the same floor—just one open-plan space over—as Zuckerberg and Cox, all of which facilitates the impromptu executive-designer desk-side conversations and hallway conferences that employees say is one of the keys to the company moving fast and generating breakthrough ideas.

“Design is more strategic than ever,” Aronowitz says. “Designers who come to Facebook have a massive scale of audience and a pretty big impact.”

Portraits by Jake Stangel for Fast Company.

In 1953, Joseph Stalin signed the plans for a top-secret nuclear submarine base that would become the operational home for the fearsome Soviet Black Sea Fleet.

Hidden inside the base of a mountain in the port town of Balaklava on Ukraine’s Crimean coast, the 15,300 square-foot facility took nine years to build and its entrance camouflaged from spy planes. It could survive a direct nuclear hit and at maximum capacity could hold 3,000 people with supplies to sustain them for a month. Best of all, the vast subs that slunk in and out of here between tours of duty could enter and leave underwater, keeping them from prying eyes at all times.

Once the most sensitive and secretive of Soviet Cold War hotspots, today it is preserved as a museum. I manage to get special permission to drive into the base during the 8,000-mile Land Rover Journey of Discovery expedition to Beijing. We were the first to do so since the Soviet trucks and trailers that ferried in missiles, supplies and essentials over its 40 years of operation.

Driving through the cavernous entrance carved into the heavy rock of the mountain was pure James Bond, but the base that unfolded inside was a hard-hitting mix of superspy fantasy and the coarse reality of the Cold War world in which it played a key part.

The local guide explained how the facility was split into two clear sections on either side of the huge submarine channel that ran through the center, one side used for the operational running of the base and the other for arming the nuclear warheads. Then she dropped a bombshell of her own.

She had worked on the operational side of the base for five years with level-two security clearance — just one step below the highest possible — yet in all her time at the facility she had never known the nuclear side existed. She was only made aware of it when she began guiding tours here years later.

As she puts it: “It was in our culture then not to ask about what didn’t concern us. A common saying at the time was, ‘The less you know, the better you sleep.’”

Not only was this place so secretive that even its own employees were kept in the dark, every possible measure was taken to keep its existence unknown to the outside world. This included removing Balaklava from all maps in 1957 (it would be 1992 before it reared its head again) and employees’ family members from neighboring Sevastopol — itself a closed city that needed heavy security clearance to access — were put through extensive vetting before visits to loved ones were allowed.

Inside the base we first toured the operational side, working our way through the broad network of tunnels until we came to the dry dock, so large that it was capable of holding a 300-foot submarine.

Beside the dry dock was the huge submarine channel, with space for six such subs end to end. Curved to deflect any blast inside the base, the channel is lined with steel gangways above head height. It provides a fearsome environment, with a hulking sub sitting in the black water and the loud echoes of urgent footfalls, the clanking of tools, and the humming of generators.

Crossing to the other side of the base became even more interesting. Here even the tunnels making up the connecting network were curved for blast protection, as this was where the missiles were armed.

We saw the cabinet where the radioactive parts of the weapons were stored. Now empty, its massive steel roller door sits ajar just as it was left when the lethal payload it once concealed was taken by Soviet authorities.

Even the tunnels making up the connecting network were curved for blast protection.

Finally, we came to the epicenter of this underground lair, the room that stored the armed missiles. It looks innocuous now, but to imagine this place primed with as many as 50 nuclear devices left a sobering scent in the air.

As a final unusual touch, our guide pointed out a simple-looking plastic mount, similar to a small patio light, attached to the wall of the room and holding a solitary human hair. This most basic of devices monitored the humidity in the room, which had to be critically maintained at 60 percent — deviation either way could have resulted in an explosion large enough to destroy the entire base, not to mention the mountain that housed it and much of the surrounding area. If the hair began bending, that was the engineers’ cue to adjust the ventilation, and quickly.

Rolling back out into the sunlight of Balaklava’s bay was almost as odd as driving in had been, but for quite different reasons.

Now instead of Cold War killers, the bay is home to a glittering array of yachts from all over the world and at the water’s edge instead of subs skulking in and out, throngs of locals indulged in a spot of fishing while shooting the breeze over a couple of beers.

If that isn’t a sign of progress, we don’t know what is.

Photos: Jeremy Hart

When Elon Musk envisioned the creation of Tesla, his plan was simple: Develop an exclusive, high-performance sports car for the world’s EV elite, use that money to produce a more attainable mid-range luxury sedan and follow that up with a third, ultra-affordable range of electric vehicles for the masses.

Step one is done. Step two is in progress. But what’s this have to do with Fisker?

Comparisons between the two automakers are all too common – and often all too misguided – but Fisker’s namesake and current Executive Chairman, Henrik Fisker, has a similar plan to Musk’s. It started with the $100,000+ plug-in hybrid Karma and now it’s time to expand with the introduction of the Atlantic.

Formerly known as Project Nina, the newest Fisker is smaller, more attainable and – most importantly – more affordable than the larger Karma. And with a fresh $392 million sitting in Fisker’s coffers after a successful round of fundraising, the Atlantic even has a shot of making it to production.

Like the Karma, Fisker is going with a plug-in series hybrid setup in the Atlantic, comprised of a gasoline engine acting as a generator and sending juice to a brace of centrally mounted batteries that power an electric motor mounted between the rear wheels. Up front is a BMW-sourced, turbocharged four-cylinder engine putting out somewhere in the neighborhood of 240 horsepower and 250 pound-feet of torque. But the exact output is irrelevant since the engine’s gusto is only being used to top up the battery pack.

During the reveal, Henrik Fisker makes it clear that the extended range system is instrumental to the automaker’s ideals, saying simply, “Range equals freedom.”

However, Fisker isn’t providing specifics on range just yet, but it’s likely to be the same or slightly more than the Karma; figure something north of 30 miles of all-electric motoring before the engine kicks in to begin refilling the lithium-ion batteries. Additionally, drivers will be able to manually turn on the engine – just like in the Atlantic’s big brother – to boost performance and battery range.

“This car will be built. It will go into production.”

The styling is just as striking as the Karma, although you’d be forgiven for thinking the Atlantic is just a photocopy of the Karma set at two-thirds scale. But new design elements like the full LED headlamps and rear door handles integrated into the Atlantic’s C-pillars are tell-tale cues that this is more than just a Karma redux. Same goes for the panoramic glass top, which Fisker calls the “Spider roof” because of its multi-point crossmember that doubles as both design element and rollover protection.

Keeping true to Fisker’s stance that concept cars shouldn’t be watered down when they reach the showroom, Fisker is adamant that, “This car will be built. It will go into production.” The automaker claims that the crossmember won’t affect headroom and it took great pains to maximize interior room – something that’s been a consistent gripe with the Karma. And it should have the footprint, saying the Atlantic will be sized similarly to the Audi A5 (around 185 inches in overall length).

Fisker isn’t providing pricing information or an on-sale date, but it’s safe to assume we’ll be seeing a road-going version of the Atlantic within the next two years, and Fisker reluctantly admitted during the press conference that pricing will be in the “upper end of the BMW 3 Series range.”

No matter, the Atlantic will be a looker. “We don’t make concept cars and change them for production,” Fisker said on the eve of the New York Auto Show, “This is a promise of what we’ll deliver.”

The Sheraton Skyline hotel in London (out by the airport) had the word “belong” plastered everywhere. If you’ve seen my speeches in the last little while, one of my favorite points to make is that “business is about belonging.” I thought to myself, “I wonder how Sheraton attempts to make me feel like I belong.”

I did a little research and found that Sheraton has been working on helping me feel like I belong since 2006. Evidently, they used to hand out 10 minute phone cards to encourage you to stay in touch with home. There were other touches in play then, too.

My experience wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t so much about belonging. The front desk process was pleasant. I was upsold into the Club area, which cost a bit more, but afforded me access to wifi (rooms only had wired internet), where I was served some drinks, some snacks, and could watch TV and the like (it looked a bit like the first class room at most airports- US level of quality, not Europe, which is to say, not as good).

What Is the Promise You Make and What Is the Reality?

I’ve been thinking about this as it applies to my own business and efforts. I promise to give people quite a useful and energetic and entertaining keynote. I have to deliver on that, or people won’t want me back. I promise to give my clients useful and actionable strategic consulting around business (primarily sales and marketing), communications, and technology, and if I don’t, then they don’t ask me back.

What are the promises you’re making, and what is the reality of what is delivered?

Now, think about that with regards to social media efforts. Just because you have a happy dappy intern talking sweetly about your whatever company on Twitter, does that relate to the experience people will have in your stores? If no, why promise one thing in your online channel and not deliver it when you get offline? How will these experiences match up?

Are you ready to make the promise that people BELONG at your business? And if so, what are you doing about it?

My recent post, “Why Small Businesses Should Scrap Strategic Planning,” set off a barrage of conversations, mostly from entrepreneurs who agree. Big companies have to make all their strategic decisions at once during an annual strategic planning session because it is too difficult and costly to get their team together more frequently. Small companies get to take the opposite approach: They tackle strategic choices as they come.

Consider Zor Gorelov, the CEO of SpeechCycle, a company transforms how phone and cable companies like Telstra, Cablevision, and Cox deliver customer service. Last week I got a chance to sit down with Zor in the SpeechCycle headquarters. Deep in Wall Street, next to a sunny window overlooking the Statue of Liberty, I asked him to lay out the strategy that’s driven such dramatic growth (SpeechCycle was recently recognized by Deloitte as a “Technology Fast 500”). He walked through five pivotal decisions that collectively compose a disruptive strategy that, so far at least, position them as the uncontestable leader in what they do.

1. The perfect exit: Before launchined SpeechCycle, Zor, a 25-year-old Russian engineer, recognized that while Soviet-era hospitals could not afford even basic sheets, they still wanted cutting-edge IT systems to keep up with the West, so he started building them. He launched a software company and saved just enough to buy tickets and get out of the Soviet Union with his wife and young son.

2. The search for meaning: After a stint at Bell Labs and Microsoft, followed by launching and selling BuzzCompany.com, one of the first Internet messaging software companies, Zor became fascinated by how humans extract meaning from speech. This lead him to launch SpeechCycle with several cofounders to realize a simple insight: They could help large firms use software to listen to and understand their customers better. Because they focused early and intensely, they now have unparalleled expertise using proprietary “High Definition Statistical Natural Language Understanding” technology to understand certain types of conversations.

For example, they know the virtually infinite ways a customer might complain about a slow Internet connection. Do you? If you don’t, you might want to try SpeechCycle, which would enable you to have your phone system simply ask, “What is your problem?” while your competitors guide their customers through the torturous “Press 2 for an option you don’t want” process.

3. Borrowing a road: In their first days, Zor and his cofounders, who bootstrapped the company, figured their best target customers would be electronics firms like HP. They were desperate to win clients so they sat down with a list of 1,500 consumer electronics companies and started cold-calling to win their first customer, a second-tier printer manufacturer. It soon became clear they were barking up the wrong tree because most customers call their phone and cable service providers when they have a problem. You don’t call Linksys when your router is down, do you? You call your Internet service provider first. SpeechCycle now serves leading telecom service providers instead.

4. Use the cloud: On a high-stakes phone call with HP, their target client told them that HP is very unlikely to buy software from a small software company. They simply don’t do that. So years before “software as a service” or “the cloud” were known terms, SpeechCycle adopted that model.

5. Sell value: Early on it was difficult to get customers to take a leap and pay this relatively young, unknown company to do something they were not convinced yet was possible, so the SpeechCycle team pivoted their pricing plan, saying, “Only pay us when it works.” If a customer calls and cannot solve their problem through the automated SpeechCycle enabled system, if they hit “zero for an agent,” SpeechCycle does not get paid.

Now, somewhere at Harvard Business School, a professor is telling impressionable students that the way to create a strategy is to sit down, think, and then document a set of decisions like this. They might even call up SpeechCycle as an example, and argue the company’s strategy is disruptive because they focused on:

1. Getting better than others at extracting meaning from utterances

2. Serving service providers, not hardware makers

3. Moving early to the cloud

4. Adopting value-based pricing

5. Creating a pricing plan that makes it easy for potential clients to sign on

And while this is true, it overlooks how innovative disrupters like SpeechCycle arrive at their strategy. They strategize immediately, as needed, not in November every year. They strategize in 10 minutes in the hallway, not over three days in a boardroom.

The key to outthinking your competition is to make smarter decisions at every turn. So the next time you make a decision, stop what you are doing and think for 10 minutes. Break your thought process apart into five steps. My book, Outthink the Competition, provides tools to manage these steps precisely, but here is a short version:

1. Imagine: What do you want to achieve? Real-life example: I am about to get on a phone call and want the others to hang up motivated and in action.

2. Dissect: What must be true? They have to (a) see we are making progress, (b) hear excitement in my voice, and (c) know what to do next.

3. Expand: Come up with 10 or more ways to achieve what must be true. I can list out all my achievements this week, I can put them in the right order, I can drink an espresso, etc.

4. Analyze: Choose the 1-3 ideas that will have the biggest impact and that are the easiest to do. I decide to list out my achievements and put them in an order that weaves a narrative of momentum.

5. Sell: Think about how to communicate your plan. Since the people on the phone are analytical, I will communicate my achievements with numbers (e.g., we had 2 new pitches, raised $3 million in new commitments, etc.).

Try it out–and if you have a breakthrough, tell us about it in the comments.

Image: Flickr user Michael Broxton