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Iowa City is located on banks of the Iowa River in a gently rolling region in the eastern half of Iowa, about 250 miles west of Chicago. It was the state capital until 1858, when the government was moved to a more central location in Des Moines. In 1919, the year the Frank H. Knight family moved to Iowa City, it was a small university community of about 15,000. No doubt Knight and his wife Minerva found it a pleasant enough place to live and raise their young family. To Frank, the town and surrounding area must have seemed much like that of Bloomington, IL, near where he was born and raised. For the first few years in Iowa City the Knight family lived in an 1890s vintage house close to the campus, and just around the corner from a public elementary school.³

Styling is plagued by prejudice in the literature on the management of design – making it a taboo to talk about styling and designers as stylists. At the same time, the ability of designers to shape the look and feel of products still represents the most defining work of designers. However, reduced to superficial changes in form, styling has been misrepresented as simplistic decoration that is of limited strategic interest for managers of design, especially when compared to the more immaterial (processual) qualities that the discipline has to offer.

In this chapter, we question the validity of the conceptualization above, arguing for a renewed interest in the work of designers as stylists. Building on a general reassessment of style in art and design, we appropriate Ackerman's (1962) work on style for studies on styling and the management of design. In doing so, we propose that styling relates to the problem-solving activities of companies, in which designers create and shape solutions and their expressions. By defining styling along these lines, we account for the ‘‘everyday’’ view that designers (as stylists) shape the look and feel of products, but we no longer disregard the central concern of designers to integrate their decisions on form and function when shaping the look and feel of new products in practice.

The occupational stress and well-being literature often focuses on specific causes of stress as health risk factors to be managed, on attributes of work environments that are stressful and/or risky, or on prevention and intervention strategies for managing these causes of stress as well as individual stress responses at work (Quick & Tetrick, 2003). The occupational stress literature has not focused on how executives and organizations can cause positive stress for people at work. In this chapter, we explore a principle-based framework for executive action to create positive, constructive stress for people at work.

The first major section of the chapter discusses seven contextual factors within which the principle-based framework is nested. The second major section of the chapter develops nine principles for executive action. The third and concluding section of the chapter turns the focus to a set of guidelines for executive action in managing their personal experience of stress.