Two book recommendations:
From my friend and colleague Richard Farson: The Power of Design: A Force for Transforming Everything. That’s a bold hypothesis—and to a great extent what I’ve staked my own professional career on in the last two decades. The book is well written, and it’s well worth your time.
The other, also brilliant by my lights: Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company, by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery. Consider a sample of subtitles from the last chapter, “Building a Design-driven Culture”: “Why good design is everybody’s job” … “Why we need risk support instead of risk management” … “Why risk should be understood—not avoided” … “How design requires faith and commitment …” First paragraph: “In 1997, shortly after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Dell’s founder and chairman, Michael Dell, was asked at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo97 how he would fix financially troubled Apple. ‘What would I do?’ Dell said. ‘I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.'” (As you doubtless know, a scant ten years later Apple’s market cap surged past Dell’s.)