Taste is a Business Decision

For most of commercial history, the hard part of making something was making it. A competent identity, a working website or a well-shot campaign required skilled people and real money, and competence alone was enough to stand out. That constraint has largely gone. A founder can now produce a hundred logos before lunch, a dozen homepage layouts by the afternoon and more copy than anyone will ever read.

What remains scarce is the ability to look at a hundred options and know which one is right, and to see why the other ninety-nine fall short. The ordinary word for that ability is taste. Leaders tend to file it under personal preference: something an individual has or lacks, and therefore something a company cannot manage.

The argument of this article is that taste inside a company is the result of decisions its leaders make. Who holds it, how much authority they are given and what is allowed to overrule them are organizational choices, and they show up in everything the company puts into the world.

Judgment without a visible technique

The record producer Rick Rubin has worked on some of the most successful albums of the last forty years. Asked on 60 Minutes in 2023 whether he plays instruments or knows how to work a mixing desk, he answered: "I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music." What he does have, he said, is that he knows what he likes and is decisive about it. "The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists."

Steve Jobs made a similar point from the other side. In a 1995 interview he said of his main competitor that its only problem was that it had "no taste", and went on to describe where taste comes from: "It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you are doing."

Both are describing a skill. Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, two psychologists who spent years disagreeing about whether expert intuition can be trusted, eventually wrote down the conditions on which they agreed. Intuitive judgment is reliable when the field has real regularities to learn, and when the person has had long practice with feedback on their calls. A designer who has made, seen and critiqued thousands of pieces of work meets both conditions for the craft itself: what reads clearly, what holds together, what looks finished. The same authors warn that confidence is no evidence of accuracy, and that skill in one area does not carry over into the next. Predicting what a market will embrace is a harder call than judging whether a layout works, and good taste includes knowing which of the two is being made.

Taste, in other words, is trained judgment. It is easy to mistake for opinion because it has no visible technique: the output is a decision, and everyone in the room is capable of having a view about a color or a headline. That resemblance is the reason companies underpay for taste and overrule it so readily.

What the market now pays for it

In May 2025 OpenAI agreed to buy io, the hardware company co-founded by Jony Ive, in a deal valued at $6.5 billion. Under the arrangement, Ive's design firm would take on design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI. The deal brought engineers and a product plan as well. Still, it is hard to miss the shape of it: a company whose technology can generate almost anything on request decided that what it needed to acquire was judgment about what should be made.

The broader evidence points the same way. McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 public companies over five years and found that those in the top quarter of its index grew revenue 32 percentage points faster than their industry peers, and returns to shareholders 56 points faster. The gains sat almost entirely in that top quarter, and the differences among the other three were marginal. Being reasonably good at design earned very little. These are correlations, and well-run companies tend to do many things well at once. The more telling finding is a smaller one. Fewer than 5 percent of the companies surveyed said their leaders could make objective design decisions. Most leadership teams are making choices about how their company looks and feels without a method for making them.

Why a committee cannot hold it

Good work has a point of view, which means it reflects a consistent set of preferences from beginning to end. A committee has several sets. Each member removes the element they are least comfortable with, and what survives is the part nobody minded. The result is competent, inoffensive and indistinguishable from the work of every other committee.

The best-known account of this from a designer's side is Doug Bowman's. He was Google's first visual design lead, and when he left in 2009 he explained why in a post that is still passed around. "Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better," he wrote. He had recently been asked to prove whether a border should be three, four or five pixels wide. Data, he argued, "eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions."

Fairness requires the other half of the story. A Google executive later said that the blue which won those tests was worth an extra $200 million a year in advertising revenue. Testing works. What it works on is a choice between options that already exist, measured by how people react the first time they see them.

That last condition matters more than it seems. Jan Landwehr, Daniel Wentzel and Andreas Herrmann studied how people respond to car designs over time, using both experiments and sales data. Typical designs were liked more at first. Unusual designs were liked more after repeated exposure. Any method that decides by first reaction, whether a split test, a focus group or a show of hands in a meeting, will lean toward the familiar. A company that decides everything this way ends up with the average of its category, which is where most categories already are.

Deciding who decides

If taste cannot be held by a committee or delegated to a test, it has to be held by someone. The useful question for a leadership team is who that is, and whether they have the authority to do the job.

Brian Chesky's reorganization of Airbnb is the clearest recent example of a founder answering it. Speaking at Figma's Config conference in 2023, he described moving the company to a single roadmap, merging product management with product marketing, and reviewing the work himself on a regular cycle. "I'm gonna be the chief editor," he said. The phrase is exact. An editor's job is to decide what is good enough to publish and to keep the whole in one voice, without writing every page. Chesky's account of running Airbnb this way later prompted Paul Graham's essay on founder mode.

The approach has real costs. One person reviewing everything is a bottleneck, and an editor can be wrong. Ron Johnson, who had built Apple's retail stores, was hired to run J.C. Penney in 2011 and replaced its coupons and markdowns with flat prices and redesigned stores. Sales fell 25 percent the following year, and he was removed in 2013. His judgment about retail was real. It had been formed on a different customer. Taste that answers to nobody drifts into self-indulgence, so whoever holds it has to be held to results and kept close to customers. Those are arguments for choosing the person carefully. They are weak arguments for spreading the decision across ten people.

Not every founder is the right editor, and the honest ones know it. In that case the decision is who to trust. It may be a design lead inside the company or a studio outside it. What matters is that the role comes with the power to refuse. A creative director whose choices can be reversed by anyone senior is a title, and the company's real taste will be that of whoever reverses them.

A few structural choices follow from this. Keep the number of people who can approve creative work small, and make it known who they are. Judge candidates and partners by the choices in their past work, since those are the choices they will make for you. Write down the handful of things the company will never do, because a refusal that is recorded survives the departure of the person who first made it.

How it is built

Jobs's description is also an instruction. Taste develops through exposure to excellent work and through the habit of asking why it is excellent. A leadership team that looks only at its competitors will converge on them. One that looks at the best work in any field, including architecture, publishing, film and industrial design, acquires a wider set of standards to draw on.

It also develops through critique. Teams that review work regularly and specifically, saying what is working and what is weak and why, build a shared sense of quality that outlasts any individual. Teams that review by approval or rejection alone learn nothing from either.

Most of all it is built by refusing. A company's standard is set by the weakest thing it allows out of the door. Each time something adequate is sent back to be made good, the standard rises a little, and the people doing the work learn where it now sits.

The sum of what gets through

Every company has taste, in the sense that every company ends up with a body of work that expresses someone's choices. In some companies those choices were made by a person with trained judgment and the standing to use it. In others they were made by whoever spoke last in the meeting.

The difference is visible from outside, and buyers read it as a measure of how the company makes decisions in general. As the cost of producing things continues to fall, it will become one of the few differences left. Deciding who is allowed to say no on the company's behalf is among the more consequential choices a founder makes, and it costs nothing but the willingness to make it.

References

• Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree. American Psychologist, 64(6).
• Landwehr, J. R., Wentzel, D., & Herrmann, A. (2013). Product design for the long run: Consumer responses to typical and atypical designs at different stages of exposure. Journal of Marketing, 77(5).
• Sheppard, B., Sarrazin, H., Kouyoumjian, G., & Dore, F. (2018). The business value of design. McKinsey Quarterly.