Due to our unique make-up from design planning, business analysis and social sciences, we are difficult to classify. I believe that we are more akin to McKinsey than we are to anyone in the design field.

The difference between us and McKinsey is that people that would come to us should be expecting us to identify the hidden assumptions that prevail within an industry and to try to challenge them to reinvent the industry--its products, its services, its messages and its information systems. And in those four things we are able to construct a new paradigm, a new way of behaving for the industry.

People should not come to us to develop a product extension. They should come to us to transform the basic foundation of their industry.

I made a prediction five years ago: by 1999 or so, everybody in the design field would need to respond to this new development in some basic way. It is inevitable that this will happen. Doblin Group will by no means be the sole provider of this kind of discipline. To a greater or lesser degree, all successful designers will come to have, or use, design planning expertise.