What if beauty—rather than efficiency or growth or profit—were the ultimate metric for business decisions?
My guest today, Alan Moore, is a craftsman of beautiful business. He is a business innovator, author, and speaker whose life’s work centers on one simple but radical idea: beauty is not a luxury in business, but a necessity.
He has designed everything from books to organizations, working across six continents with artists, entrepreneurs, and leadership teams. He has advised companies including PayPal, Microsoft, and Interface, taught at institutions such as MIT, INSEAD, and the Sloan School of Management, and helped guide some of the world’s most innovative enterprises.
Alan is the author of four books, including No Straight Lines: Making Sense of Our Nonlinear World and Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything. His work has been featured in outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and The Huffington Post.
In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:
1. Beauty as a sense of homecoming to self, family, and the natural world
2. Why beauty is felt in the body, not just understood in the mind
3. Beauty as something soulful, universal, and deeply human
4. Living and working through the transition from analog to digital culture
5. Innovation as seeing latent potential and unmet human needs
6. The idea of beauty as the “ultimate metric” for decision-making
7. How beauty challenges dominant ideas of success, value, and the good life
To learn more about Alan’s work, you can find him at:
https://thebeautifuldesignproject.com/
Books and resources mentioned:
No Straight Lines: Making Sense of Our Nonlinear World (by Alan Moore)
Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything (by Alan Moore)
This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.
