Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Craig Bromberg. A former author (“The Wicked Ways of Malcolm McLaren“), media intrapreuneur and Editor-in-Chief for Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Samsung, who transitioned to working directly on customer transformation over the last five years. During this time, I’ve worked with startups that are truly advancing the dialogue on what it means to create deeper customer connections, including Zemanta, Dachis Group and SurveyMonkey, and I continue to search for additional opportunities to reinvent the future of Customer Experience Design.

What issues are you interested in working on?

My mission is to bring the power of strategic design to help companies reinvent and transform their relationship with customers as co-creators of value. Customer Experience Design is going to be a critical skill of the next decade, and I’m obsessed with its evolution as both a practice and a means of measuring total customer experience.

What inspires you most and keeps you creative?

Startups that capture creativity through the cult of fast failure and fearless exposure to customer success metrics make me stop in my tracks. Aligned to lifechanging innovation, they are unstoppable.

How would you describe the Ms SDM program in one sentence?

MS-SDM is New York’s best lab for strategic design and innovation, and a great place to see the truly global connections between design, technology, and strategic thinking.

What was the most interesting experience you had at the program?

Watching and helping my students take strategic thinking and modeling, and turn it into real-world startups has totally rocked. At least two of these are moving forward, and I can’t wait to see them reach the world.

What book are you reading right now?

I loved Dave Gray’s “The Connected Company“, and his new book “Liminal Thinking: The Art of Creating Change” (forthcoming, Rosenfeld Books, 2016). which I’m reading right now, is all about getting a grip on the belief systems that hold us in place, and what we can do about that, in our lives, relationships, and companies.

What was the best advice you ever received?

Never give up and always follow-up.