“In my experience, true success comes for the designer and the business executive when the two can bridge the artificial lines that too often separate their worlds.” So says acclaimed designer Hartmut Esslinger in “A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping The Future Of Business,” a book he issued in 2009. Esslinger draws on his insights and experiences as founder of the San Francisco innovation consultancy, frog, as well as a long career spent establishing design’s strategic role in business. In “A Fine Line,” he provides a step-by-step overview of the innovation process—from targeting goals to guiding new products and services to the marketplace—and takes us through several riveting, design-driven strategy case studies involving some of the biggest global brands. A self-professed, realistic optimist, Esslinger advocates design as the vanguard of humanistic, economic and cultural progress; in other words, design is not merely the key to building better businesses and a more profitable future, but also a more sustainable one.