Stanford Business

NOVEMBER 2006


Laboratory Director Shuts Red Door


Sara Little Turnbull in 1988.
Photo by Ken Reno

After 18 years at the Business School, the little lady behind the red door has retired. Sara Little Turnbull, ageless, who helped students take a creative approach to conceiving and designing everyday items, had what anyone might consider a full career before she opened the School’s Process of Change Lab in 1988.

As editor of House Beautiful magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, Turnbull anticipated the post-war American home. Later, as a design consultant, she helped corporations find peacetime uses for wartime materials. She created CorningWare from a material originally developed for use on missiles.

Watching African cheetahs grab and carry their prey inspired Turnbull to redesign the handles on cooking pot lids. Sitting at afternoon tea in London she pondered why she hadn’t been served a fork with her plate of frosted cakes and suddenly realized why an American cake mix wasn’t selling well in England—to the British cake was a finger food, and her client’s product was so soft it required a fork. Someone once asked Revlon president Charles Revson to explain her contribution to his cosmetics company. “After all these years I don’t understand a thing she says—but I can’t live without her,” he replied.

Turnbull was, and is, one of a kind. When she opened the Process of Change Lab she had the door painted red. “If someone is looking for me, I don’t want to say, ‘It’s the third door on the left’; I just say, ‘Look for the red door.’” Turnbull was named a “Living Treasure” by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2001. We knew it all along.