Victor

My colleagues and I realized recently that although designers are (obviously) a primary source of the design thinking at the heart of business design, the proposition that only designers possess the thinking skills required is a little arrogant and even a little separatist. In fact, the most interesting writing on the subject thus far has…

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…

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…

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…

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…