My name is Melissa Dalrymple, and I'm a designer. I've spent about 20 years in the design industry, and I'm a partner at McKinsey in Chicago, focusing on building our design and customer experience practice globally.It's been a long journey. You know, the entirety of the design world has changed while I've been here design and innovation. I started in Digital back in the late nineties. I was working on to believe it or not. Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign website back in the nineties before she ran in New York for Senate. So long time ago, the very first websites for most of the organizations we were working with both nonprofit and entertainment on politics, as I said on then started realizing that all the work that I was doing was beginning to transform the businesses I was involved in. So if I was working for a company and building them a website, I was fundamentally transforming their business. And so I started to realize I needed slightly more chops than what I had as somebody who was trained and design in our history and went back and got my MBA. So I had sort of both sides of the equation to be ableto leverage, and so ever since then, my my journey has really been about a balance between the business side of the design side, trying to kind of find the Venn diagram overlap of those two things and probably slightly ahead of the curve in terms of thinking about design is a strategic capability that needed to be embedded in organizations. Once I went to business school, I started moving more directly into innovation and ended up at IDEO in London after having spent maybe the 12 years beforehand in New York City and spent a lot of time at Ideo learning about innovation, human centered design, which is probably the foundation of the way I think about things so design as a way to think about not just how to win, but also where to play. I'm really strategic sense of questions. And then about four years ago now I joined McKinsey, which had started up design practice about a year previous, because the McKinsey clients were starting to realize that just handing over power points and suggestions wasn't as powerful is actually being able to build things on DSO. Ironically enough, having spent about 20 years across a number of design organizations, I joined McKinsey in a late October, so let's say November and by May I had a product and market which had never happened that quickly at any of the design organizations that I worked with. So I have the advantage of learning about the business, learning about the design but also getting the work out in market quickly, which oftentimes didn't happen in my other firms. So it's been an interesting journey for sure, and feels like the business community is starting to recognize the value of humans under thinking more and more eso. I spend a lot of my time now helping with our research, which is oriented around how to elevate design, um, into the C suite and ensure that human centered thinking is part of, you know, sort of a larger way of thinking about problems, whether they're more capital oriented problems or whether they're people and community oriented problems. So that's my journey, yeah.

uh, Mackenzie has two core missions. They are client and people. So our goal is oriented around serving our clients. Our goal is around creating an unparalleled place to work for talented people on our purpose is about creating good and lasting change in the communities and organizations that we start eso. Those are the priorities of what any of us do. And amazingly enough, you know, give or take. Mostly if you look across our many, many thousands of people globally, you will find people who actually are very aligned around those values. Eso pretty consistent culturally. Um, what responsible and decisions do I have? Because client is key to our mission. I serve clients. There are very few people here who are client facing who don't serve. Clients even are managing partner who runs the entire organization serves his clients. We believe very deeply in the service, as opposed to necessarily the theory of what we dio. And so we all focus on serving clients. Um, I work across clients. I work on everything from hospitality to retail thio, telco to insurance. So any organization that's trying to understand how to serve the people that it serves better and my work is oriented around understanding where there are opportunities to improve experiences and products and create MAWR effective organizations who can continually have the number at the center of what they dio. So that's what I work on, um, top priorities. I think I covered that. I also happened Thio be the senior partner, really in Chicago with our design team. So I helped run the design practice globally, and I'm sort of helping manage the team in Chicago, which is made up of product designers, service and experience designers, a zealous folks who work on capability building. So it's a huge mix of folks and a great opportunity to both work on design but also helped link them into our broader strategy, Mackenzie.weekly work hours. You know, making this a little bit like a roller coaster. It's different every week, which is part of why I love it. It keeps me highly entertained. Um, I'm an entrepreneur, Really? As all the partners are, we have an opportunity to make our own times our own hours and to serve the clients that we feel are important to serve on problems that we find relevant. So I, uh, probably work on 2 to 3 clients every every day in various capacities, whether I'm running the conversations or supporting others to do so, I work on a number of, uh, proposals for lack of a better word for people who want to talk to us about new work and are learning about the fact that Mackenzie has designed, which is an unusual thing for us. Um, and my hours are, you know, they really depend. Right now, I'm doing a lot of work with a colleague in Singapore, and so I tend to work Ah, little bit earlier in a little bit later because then I leverage her day when I'm going to bed and I leverage my day when she's going to bed. So it's been a little bit funny, but when you're working those weird hours, then you could maybe take a break in the middle of the day and, you know, work out or something like that. So I guess it's funny. There are no traditional hours at the firm. We try very hard not to work much on the weekends, but I also really like to be able to manage my own time. I don't like to wake up on Monday not knowing what's coming. So generally I don't consider working life all that separate for me. I love design. I do it all day long, whether I'm working or not. So usually I'm probably on email a little bit every day checking in. My colleagues and my clients are my friends as well. So to me, most of my work doesn't feel like work.

sure. So any time you work with clients instead of in a business, you are advising them, and they don't have to agree what? You advise them, right? So there's always a risk of you know what you recommend. They don't happen to believe. You know, a thing about it is oriented. Get a lot of back. I don't know if you're taking, um when I think about the challenges in our organization, um, you know, it's about trying to set up clients for success, right? And we therefore have a lot of rigor in the way that we do work right. We make sure that we have the information, whether it's user centered or data centered, uh, to be able to make a case for what we're recommending, we do it with them. So we're true partners. We aren't about, you know, hearing a problem, going away and solving in a black box and coming back. We sit with the clients and solve it together so it becomes their solution, not our solution. And so I'm a big believer in building capabilities, not just delivery bles. And so it's all about making sure that the clients can actually get done what you're recommending instead of saying this sounds nice, good luck and then heading out. Um, so that's how you know those are the challenges in serving clients. Pain points for us. You know, up until quoted, we travel a lot to be spending time with clients. So for us, it's been fascinating in the last, you know, nine months Thio not travel. So to be able to do what we do by a zoom has worked out pretty well. So the ability toe build relationships and to get to know people digitally has been an interesting experience for a company or invented around Trump.