The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage
Mar.15, 2010 in
Uncategorized
- ISBN13: 9781422177808
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apple’s iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative-they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results.
Why? In The Design of Business, Roger Martin offers a compelling and provocative answer: we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinki… More >>
The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage
March 15th, 2010 at 11:22 pm
First off, what got me to buy this book does not appear in the book at all–the author on record as saying that Wall Street was not designed to make money for its investors, only for its mandarins–the same is true of how universities are designed, businesses, etc. but that one observation really got my attention. I bought the book before BusinessWeek featured it as one of four in the October 5th edition (Europe version), and after looking the others over, chose this one.
In the larger context of changes to the Earth that now take three years instead of ten thousand years, as an entire literature flourishes on The Philosophy of Sustainable Design, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage and Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, the book is a four for narrow-casting and lack of context, but you can use Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, to search and sort among my other 1,400 reviews, so no penalty is warranted, This book will be scored Beyond 6 Stars at PBI/PIB for the simple reason that it addresses the core need of all eight tribes of intelligence (academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental organizations), to re-design away from the Industrial Era waste (where Six Sigma stops), and to instead envision how the world could and should be, and set out to achieve that–a prosperous world at peace.
I am eagerly awaiting Redesigning Society (Stanford Business Books) and consider its author, Russell Ackoff, to be the equal of Buckminster Fuller. The author of this book, Roger Martin, in my judgment, not only equal Dean Gartner and his seminal work, The Politics of Fortune: A New Agenda For Business Leaders but moves to another higher plane with all that this book sets forth. I funded the Earth Intelligence Network (EIN), a 501c3 Public Charity, after twenty years to trying to get secret intelligence communities to redesign, and this book has not only articulated all that I could not, but it is written simply enough for any bureaucrat to understand. In that sense, it joins Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace as a primer and an inspiration.
Here are my fly-leaf notes. I hope that someone close to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) will flag this for his attention, because I believe that this book not only can save the $75 billion a year tar-pit that the DNI is nominally in charge of, but that the national intelligence community, if it were led properly, could be the seed crystal for the redesign of the US Government and of the United States of America, to the lasting benefit of all humanity.
Here are my fly-leaf notes that seek to summarize this extraordinary work in terms applicable to creating a Smart Nation such as Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) and I sought to lay out in THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
+ Design thinking is abductive thinking, neither deductive (from general to specific) nor inductive (from specific to general, the academics call this ethnocentric studies now). It seeks to employ observation and imagination to explore, to intuit, and to create “new ways.”
+ Design thinking is NOT an unaffordable flight of fancy. CEOs must keep their designers connected to the triangle of envisioned needs for which no poll or survey exists; technology on the bleeding edge of innovation, AND business bottom-line common sense. The author takes great care to stress the need for blending. Design thinking is NOT an either-or proposition, but rather a HYBRID that takes best of the best to a new level.
+ The author credits James March and the knowledge funnel as being the information operations (IO) aspect of design in that writ large, design moves knowledge from mystery (climate change is an example) to heuristics (weather forecasting) to algorithms (barometers) to computer code (not there, but HAARP, High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program appears to be a nasty example). Design, in other words, is the embodiment of strategy, of IO, and ultimately of how one plans, programs, and budgets the enterprise. Heavy stuff in the most positive way!
+ Alvin Toffler called me and open source intelligence (OSINT) “the rival store” to the secret intelligence community in 1993 (in the chapter on “The Future of the Spy” in War and Anti-War: Making Sense of Today’s Global Chaos and I honestly did not understand the implications until I read this book and appreciated the author’s emphasis on transformation having to address structures (switch rewards and focus from legacy systems to new projects); processes (solve wicked new problems rather than repeating the same old analysis again); and cultural norms (get away from current secrets for the president and instead focus on providing decision support to every action officer in every domain at every level of government).
+ To emphasize this point: the secret intelligence community spends $75 billion a year on legacy systems that provide “at best” 4% of what a very small consumer group (no more than 100 individuals) needs–for that amount of money, I could create the World Brain with embedded EarthGame, provide free education and decision-support to every person on the planet, and in passing end poverty, assure clean water for all, and eliminate most infectious diseases. Secret sources and methods no longer yield innovation–the innovation is to be had at the other end of the telescope, the open end….and at very low cost reaching billions of end-users. THIS is the “aha experience” that this book provided to me personally.
+ The book, the author, and the concept of design thinking are HUGE on embracing the customer or user as a source of inspiration and innovation.
I’ve reached Amazon’s word limit. More at PBI/PIB.
See also:
The Knowledge Executive
Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization
Rating: 5 / 5
March 16th, 2010 at 12:31 am
In order to win in business, today’s companies need to latch on to the idea of design. This is at the heart of Roger Martin’s //The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage//, which focuses on a deep understanding of customers, creative resolution of tensions, collaborative prototyping, and continuous modification and enhancement of ideas and solutions. It falls somewhere between the exploration of new knowledge (or innovation) and the exploitation of current knowledge (or efficiency).
Design thinking is a way to push knowledge through stages in ways that produce breakthrough innovations and competitive advantage. //The Design of Business// maps the route followed by successful design thinkers in business, science, and the arts. Colorful stories and practical guidelines illustrate how to: combine proof-based analytical thinking with possibility-based “abductive thinking”; change structures and processes to move knowledge from one stage to the next; develop the key tools of design thinkers–observation, imagination and configuration; defend design thinking to employees, boards, and investors; and revamp financial planning and reward systems to encourage bold ideas.
As a shift or departure to typical business thinking, Martin’s //The Design of Business// can serve as the new foundation of profit and success.
Reviewed by Dominque James
Rating: 5 / 5
March 16th, 2010 at 1:21 am
I was interested in learning more about “design thinking” and how it applied to businesses and purchased the book. After all, Martin had a strong reputation in the field and I wanted to read what the best in the field had to say about the subject.
The first chapter whetted my appetite; I was able to get a glimpse of what design thinking could offer. In the subsequent chapters I learned about a few more pieces of the puzzle as the author seemed to remove some veils. But the more veils removed the more it looked the same: cloudy with some allure of the beauty hiding behind the veils. Most salient attributes, repeated over and over again, are “reliability vs validity,” “traditional vs. design thinking,” “backward looking vs. forward looking,” “inductive and deductive reasoning vs. abductive reasoning.”
The fundamental argument set forth is this: Reliability oriented managers of the traditional organizations try to find comfort in reliability based on historical data. Future does not necessarily a repeat of the past; ergo, reliability based thinking is old fashioned and traditional. Contrary to this, validity based thinking seeks validity in the unfolding future. Now, all this is very attractive thoughts to me. But …
The writing has far too many examples of how successful design thinking worked for P&G, Herman Miller, RIM, and others. The amount of explanation of what design thinking is, how abductive reasoning works, or how design thinking can be learned or taught is generally missing. Ironically, despite the forward looking strength of design thinking, most of the narrative is the backward looking evidence seeking in nature, and thus, one could argue that it leans towards the antithesis of design thinking: reliability orientation.
You will leave this book somewhat frustrated and not really understanding what design thinking is. The author spends much more time making a case against reliability oriented, traditional thinking than for forward looking design thinking.
Now, some will likely say that if I don’t get it design thinking is not for me. Who knows, maybe they are right. But I would have expected a book with a stronger presence in the domain of design thinking rather than in the backward looking traditional thinking, and make the core idea clearly presented rather than talking around it by way of examples. Read chapter 7 (the last chapter) first, that may help alleviate the above problems to a small extent.
The book succeeds, however, in getting you read more about design thinking and abductive logic, and is entertaining.
Rating: 3 / 5
March 16th, 2010 at 1:54 am
Other reviewers have given a great review of the book and its contents, so I will not try to duplicate their comments. What I will say, as someone in the business world thinking about how to add more design thinking and innovation to a very ‘financials’ based organization, this was a great book that opened my mind to new possibilities. While the book isn’t necessarily prescriptive, it does offer many insights and is very approachable (i.e., quick and easy read) for those who know nothing of the design / design thinking world. I echo an earlier comment that any exec having anything to do with products or innovation, or really any exec at all, should at least be familiar with the concepts descussed in the book.
Rating: 5 / 5
March 16th, 2010 at 2:43 am
Roger does an amazing job of explaining the concept of design thinking in his latest book. With the construct of “knowledge funnel”, Roger explains pretty much all of the thinking that happens in an organization and gives you a new tool-set to think about designing businesses, products and organizations.
Various designers have attempted to advocate the relevance of design to business. However, most of their arguments are centred around an artistic framework and unfortunately fall short of convincing a result-oriented business manager. This book written by a professional management thinker embraces design thinking and builds such a solid frame work around it as to leave no doubt of its importance to business in the next decade.
Rating: 5 / 5