on how b-schools have failed

I remember reading "M.F.A is the new M.B.A" while I was a student at Herron and today's New York Times has proved to me again that this is a great time in History to be a designer and a right brain thinker.

But with the economy in disarray and so many financial firms in free fall, analysts, and even educators themselves, are wondering if the way business students are taught may have contributed to the most serious economic crisis in decades.

“It is so obvious that something big has failed,” said Ángel Cabrera, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. “We can look the other way, but come on. The C.E.O.’s of those companies, those are people we used to brag about. We cannot say, ‘Well, it wasn’t our fault’ when there is such a systemic, widespread failure of leadership.”

(...)

“There is a need to broaden from the analytical focus of M.B.A. programs for more emphasis on skills and a sense of purpose and identity,” said David A. Garvin, a professor of business administration and one of the project’s authors.

(...)

Business education “accentuates the simple technical pieces,” said Ms. Samuelson of the Aspen Institute, and “ignores the real complexity and, frankly, the really exciting opportunities business has to be the driver of long-term prosperity.”

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MFA is the new MBA was published in 2003 by Harvard Business Review's Breatkthrough Ideas for 2004. It's available for download here or you can purchase the article here.

the complexity of the credit crisis simplified

This project is the result of Jonathan Jarvis' thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

press start to begin new phase

"If you’re just hoping to 'get through' this year’s financial crisis, you may be missing the bigger picture. The financial crisis is merely the final score of a game we’ve been playing for over a century — it’s called Free-market Capitalism. The game is officially over, and a new game is beginning."

We're in charge of discovering a new way of doing business that exists beyond the "one wins, one loses" idea. To me, that's all very exciting. It doesn't freak me out. It moves me forward. If only more people realized that.


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on how design thrives during economic crisis

Yesterday's New York Times feauted a wonderful article on how history has proven that design can benefit from economic constraints. Makes me hopeful and excited to be part of the industry right now.

"...however dark the economic picture, it will most likely cause designers to shift their attention from consumer products to the more pressing needs of infrastructure, housing, city planning, transit and energy. Designers are good at coming up with new ways of looking at complex problems, and if President-elect Barack Obama delivers anything like a W.P.A, we could be 'standing on the brink of one of the most productive periods of design ever,' said Reed Kroloff, director of Cranbrook Academy of Art.

On the other hand, the design community talked up its role in safeguarding the world after 9/11, with little result.

Modernism’s great ambition was to democratize design. Ikea and Target have shown that the battle for cheap design can be won. The emphasis will most likely shift to greater quality at affordable prices. This time around it will be the designer’s job to discourage consumers from regarding that $30 Ikea side table as a throwaway item.

(...) 'It will be about finding the sweet spot between affordability and durability,' Ms. Lasky said. This kind of innovation means rethinking the economy of production and distribution so that goods are made cheaply closer to home (or in the home, if the most radical ideas are to be taken seriously).

One way or another, design will focus less on styling consumer objects with laser-cut patterns and colored resin and more on the intelligent reworking of current conditions. Expect to hear a lot more about open-source design, and cradle-to-cradle, a concept developed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart that calls for cars, packaging and other everyday objects to be designed specifically for recycling so that their parts and materials are used and reused without waste."

a sign of good things to come

The Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC), which is, as the name says, organizing Obama's inauguration event, has created a site where you can see big chart detailing each and every contribution they have received.

The committee only accepts individual donations, and you can sort them by name, employer, amount, and location. "Unlike previous inaugural committees, the 2009 PIC does not accept contributions from corporations, political action committees, labor unions, current federally-registered lobbyists, non-U.S. citizens and registered foreign agents and does not accept individual contributions in excess of $50,000." You can see several well-known names there: several people from Google, Dreamworks, The Container Store ($25,000), Yahoo!, and the Soros family - who donated a total of $250K, being $150K under the Soros Fund Management employer name.

That's the thing about transparency: if information is available, people ARE going to make their way to it. It's really a simple and revolutionary idea.

design in the time of crisis

One of the things that were discussed at the II Brazilian Design Biennial I went to this past week was how "design innovation" differentiates itself from "technological innovation" in the situations where it's applied. Lincoln Seragini mentioned that Design can be a "shortcut" – in the good sense of the word – as a quicker, more immediate way to achieve a specific result. Innovation in technology requires a more extensive time to be developed and implemented, while an innovation in design can and should simplify an existing situation - turning it into a improved one.

Design is and should always be based in a wide range of research and observation of things like human behavior, culture, usability, economics, social context, and so on. But, undeniably, the process of design thinking requires more insight, creative intelligence and common sense than money. And because of that, it can guide businesses though a time of crisis and recession. (That applies to big corporations. Let's not forget that, for small and medium-size businesses, big expenditures are never an option, regardless of the financial context.)

Here are 3 innovation principles that Bruce Nussbaum got from Sam Lucente, designer for HP.

1- Design Can SIMPLIFY. Design can save money by creating a common design language among different products that reduces parts and makes them more user-friendly. Design can also simplify supply chains and organizations in general, also saving money. Incremental design can be good design.

2- Design Can DIFFERENTIATE. In a down market, a company needs to have THE product that consumers must have. That's what Sequoia said recently to its startups. Design can come up with that killer product by understanding what customers need and want at this point in time and giving it to them.

3- Design Can INNOVATE. Recessions are great times to come up with a service, product or experience that is totally new and game-changing for launch once the economic recovery begins. Remember, Apple came up with Apple stores and the iPod as the tech bubble burst. Companies that cut back on innovation to save on cost in a downturn lose competitive edge in the upturn.

You can click here to watch a quick video on the original post (sorry, it can't be embedded).