Author: Victor

At the Information Architecture Summit there was a strong thread of interest in business and management (my hypothesis for this centers on two trends: the population bell curve places many IAs at an age where they are rapidly moving into management for the first time, and as a discipline IAs have already invented many of the technical skills they need to get that job done). In this environment many were interested in my new-ish company — Management Innovation Group — and appreciated our approach. Our chats started early and ended late and I heard many helpful ideas and skepticism, especially from the wise and thoughtful Jess McMullin. That’s going to fuel many of my future posts here; you’ve been warned.

The approach has been termed Business Design, though that framing of it isn’t entirely satisfactory. My working definition is The application of design thinking to business strategy and operations. I’ll talk more about what I mean by design thinking in future posts, but for now the best description I know is Jeanne Liedtka’s essay Strategy as Design in the Rotman design issue (.pdf), required reading on the subject.

Strategy + Business is a pretty good quarterly. Free registration allows access to the copious archives. Without reading the About page, you might never know it’s published by a consulting firm, Booz Allen.

Roger Martin and the folks at the Rotman School are helping to popularize a model of Integrative Thinking they see in more successful leaders. Summarized, integrative thinkers consistently consider a broader and more diverse set of inputs to be salient to an issue. They work on all those inputs simultaneously — bringing each into focus in turn — rather than consider them in discrete sequences. They perceive indirect casual links among the inputs. And they work creatively to find new solutions, rejecting the tradeoffs that others accept.

Here’s the slides from my recent talk, Can We Run the Company? (.pdf). You’ll have to imagine me waving my arms wildly as you read.

To summarize, if we got into this business to empower people, we can do even more empowering from higher up in the organization. Our skills as designers can be used not just to create artifacts but to help us perform management functions as well. But, even though we’re still using our design skills, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as designers and start thinking of ourselves as leaders.

While some have read the Gillett-Proctor & Gamble merger as leverage against Wal-Mart, James Surowiecki argues it was all about combining innovative like-minds:

A. G. Lafley, the C.E.O. of Procter & Gamble, denied that the acquisition had anything to do with the power of Wal-Mart. When he was pressed, he said, “The power has shifted to the consumer.” This may not be mere talk. In a world where brand names alone don’t confer power, the only way to prosper is to make products that genuinely improve (even if only marginally) on what came before. This is exactly what Gillette and P. & G. have done. Gillette’s razor line is one of the most lucrative businesses in history, mainly because the company has invested billions in technological innovation. This has allowed it to introduce a new razor every few years that costs considerably more than the one it’s replacing. And while historically P. & G. has focussed more on brand-building and marketing, in recent years it has invested heavily in innovation, too. The Swiffer mop and the SpinBrush electric toothbrush may not quite rank up there with penicillin or the Model T, but in the world of consumer products they count as real breakthroughs.

There doesn’t seem to be many first-person accounts of Rotman’s recent Business Design Conference. Here’s some of the press releases instead:

Shift Needed in Design World, Says Whitney

“The power of design thinking must be freed up to deal
with all sorts of issues on a global scale.”

The Design of Business, Rather Than Designing for Business, Leads to Greater Innovations Says IDEO President & CEO

“Whether you like it or not, the more innovative you try to be, the more you are going to affect the business and the business model.”

Intelligent Design is Key to Our Success Says Four Seasons Hotel President

“…last but not least is our decision to focus all of our energy and expertise on hotel management rather than ownership.”