Last month the first ever Creative Mornings in Atlanta kicked off with 125+ attendees & amazing content from Sid Mashburn. This Friday we are gearing up to host our second event with design legend Rick Anwyl.

Rick is an amazing gem to have in our darling city of Atlanta. Starting out as an illustrator and eventually running his own design firm for 18 years, he has worked with some of the largest and most influential companies in the world over the last 35 years, including FedEx, Coca-cola, and working directly with Lou Gerstner, the IBM CEO credited with saving the company in the early 90s.

Here's the story for those that don't know it:

IBM had a strategy in place to disband IBM into several sub-brands tentatively called the "Baby Blues". Mr. Gerstner came in as an outsider at the helm and realized the loosing battle of the personal computer market, which was costing the companies millions each year, and saw the potential for the internet as a "business phenomenon". Lou decided to refocus the corporate strategy on keeping IBM together as one, creating a strong company culture, and setting the course for a new vision to become a world renown IT Services business. His strategy paid off with 50% of IBM's revenues coming from IT Services and stabilizing the company while it exited the personal computer category. Changing categories for a market leader is hard and Lou Gerstner did with it with perfection. His success was due to people like Rick Anwyl helping with corporate communications, crucial to vision casting internally and transitioning brand equity externally.

If you are interested in hearing how businesses transform through design practices you will not want to miss Rick Anwyl this Friday at 8:30am. Be sure to sign up on the waiting list here (the event is already sold out!) but we will be releasing some additional tickets.

For photos from the Sept. event click here. To keep up with future Creative Mornings Atlanta events follow us on twitter.

Back to Blog