How do you get 400,000 employees at one of the world’s most storied blue chip tech companies to adopt design thinking as a tool to transform the culture of its workforce?

When entrepreneur Phil Gilbert was brought into IBM, which in 2010 had acquired his Lombardi Software, he was convinced that his days were numbered. Tasked with teaching Big Blue how to grow as fast as his business software processing company did, he felt out of place: “I pretty much knew that I was a square peg in a round hole,” he says.

Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm Design in Macau on Tuesday, Gilbert noted ruefully that businesses typically enlist him “when some effort is failing”. IBM wanted him to replicate the secret sauce that made his Austin-based Lombardi so agile and its products so beloved by customers.

The

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