Good design is good business.
This is a genuine and well-documented Watson Jr. formulation, not a floating aphorism. As IBM CEO he made design a corporate program — bringing in Eliot Noyes, and through him Paul Rand and Charles Eames — and 'good design is good business' was his standing argument for it, delivered as the title of a lecture he gave at the Wharton School in the early 1970s and repeated throughout IBM's design literature. The attribution is treated as settled in design history. I am confident of the phrase and the speaker; I am not certain enough of the exact lecture date or published venue to state a formal citation, so earliest_print_source is left null. Author field is correct as Thomas Watson Jr. (distinct from his father, q_1345).