Buying Great Designers Does Not Guarantee You’ll Get Great Designs

Samsung wants to get better at design:

Can Samsung Electronics design its way out of its recent profit slide?

As the South Korean smartphone giant struggles to fend off a slew of low-cost Chinese and Indian handset makers and a reinvigorated Apple, it is increasingly drawing from its Cupertino, Calif. rival’s bench of talent to bolster its design chops.

The latest move: Samsung plucked Lee Don-tae, a top executive at U.K. design agency Tangerine that consulted for Apple in the early 1990s, as senior vice president of Samsung’s global design team, giving him oversight of the company’s global design centers.
Listen: Jony Ive worked at Apple years before Steve Jobs came back to the company and while he did his best to design great products they pale in comparison to what he designed under Jobs (and after). The 20th Anniversary Mac, anyone? How about [the second generation Newton](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)?
Just because you hire a talented person does not guarantee they’ll be empowered to make great things.

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