????Facebook's (FB) director of product design, Maria Giudice, believes executives can benefit by applying principles of good design to business. In Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design, Giudice, along with co-author and designer Christopher Ireland, offers up a workbook for the modern manager. Fortune recently caught up with Giudice for a download on design, entrepreneurship, and working at the world's largest social network.

????Fortune: How would you define design?

????Giudice: I think historically design has always been thought of as an expense on a balance sheet, not an investment. I want to change that. I define design widely. Typically designers are thought of as makers of artifacts.

????The word "design" needs a redesign. Designers need to be thinking not about the medium that they're serving but more about the process to get to something that is tangibly made to serve people's needs. It's about facilitation. It's about collaboration. It's not done in a vacuum. It's about working in a multidisciplinary team in collaboration to create something greater.

????What makes a good designer?

????The characteristics that I think designers posses -- I call them superpowers. The first thing is empathy. When you go to art or design school you learn how to be empathetic, and that serves you well in business.

????inker. And our world is so heavily complex because technology has been a great equalizer. The systems are so complex that you can't design for a discreet problem without looking at the whole thing. Designers learn about systems.

????It seems that that complexity is the fundamental challenge for the 21st century in the same way that information and access to it was for the 20th century.

????Yes. So designers like to make that complexity simple. Through pattern recognition, they can take complexity and learn to simplify it. So, systems thinkers need to be at the CEO level. You're going to need somebody who can think that way.

????Another [superpower] is being a risk taker, but a smart risk taker. Traditionally CEOs are slaves to the P&L. It's hard to move forward. But the world is not waiting for you. You have to move fast and the only way you can do that is by understanding how to take risks in a smart way.

????There are certain CEOs that do take risks. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is taking risks. Another example: Autodesk (ADSK) was a software company, but it's transcending being a software company to rethink what its product does for the world. That's smart risk.

????So you are calling for a DEO?

????Yes, a designer CEO.

????This is really about unlocking these soft skills earlier. CEOs are going to have to get them whether they like it or not.

????When I talk about being a DEO, I don't mean going to design school to become a DEO. It's leveraging these characteristics that we inherently learn in design school, but in theory can be taught in much younger age to people rather than focusing on just math and English. What happens with creativity is that we're all going along at the same curve, and then at fourth grade there's a drop-off. We start worrying about testing and just focus on math and English. For those people who don't define themselves as creative, it's beaten out of them by the fourth grade.