Jeremy Utley
Lecturer and Director of Executive Education
Jeremy was using the principles of design thinking long before he encountered the d.school.
From starting a small-venture incubator in Bolivia to hanging out in biker bars to evaluate acquisition targets for clients of the Boston Consulting Group, Jeremy has sought to meld his analytical nature with his passion for human-centered innovation.
A graduate of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Jeremy has seen first-hand the cascading impact of the d.school in the world, while working in India for D.light Design, a venture-backed start-up founded at the d.school. As a 2009 d.school Fellow, he taught our flagship class, Design Thinking Bootcamp.
Jeremy currently leads our work with organizations, managing and directing our executive education programs. He serves in an advisory role to help organizations—from Fortune 500 companies to cutting-edge start-ups—implement design thinking. The key ingredients are often a mix of inspiration, coaching, provocation and the development of a passion for customers and a bias towards doing rather than thinking. The result is often a shift not just in practice or strategy, but a fundamental change in organizational culture.
Jeremy’s own passion is for fostering creative confidence and leadership potential in his students. In addition to leading our executive education programs, he also teaches d.leadership, an advanced d.school course which offers master’s students at Stanford the opportunity to move beyond the fundamentals of design thinking by leading design projects to tackle difficult challenges in organizations.
His latest experiments include a tool to enable d.school faculty to coach their students more effectively, a course called “Designing Life, Essentially,” which attempts to turn the design process on the practitioner to refine criteria for making better decisions, and a daring pop-up class “Taming Temptation: Design for Self Control,” which attempts to leverage cutting edge behavioral change techniques to overcome habitual lapses in judgment.
His interests include rock and roll trivia, board sports, and anything his wife Michelle happens to be into. As a Texas native, Jeremy considers it a major developmental milestone to have developed a preference for Indian food over barbecue.
