We've all heard the news that the traditional MBA framework is broken, but adding courses on business ethics and financial crises won't solve the problem. And although Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg, and the rest are all considering bringing new ways of thinking into their hallowed halls, a relatively small school in Canada is actually transforming the meaning of an MBA right before our eyes. The Rotman School of Management, helmed by Roger Martin, proposes a radical idea: to develop business leaders who are well-grounded in multiple disciplines. The Rotman faculty aim to mold managers who are equally comfortable and adept at using tools and frameworks from business, popular culture, and design to solve the most urgent challenges of the day--what Rotman calls integrative thinkers and what I call hybrid thinkers. He's a bit of a kindred spirit.
Earlier this week, I had the chance to sit down for a public lecture with Roger to discuss his new book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, which focuses on the part of the Rotman approach most absent from traditionally analytical MBA programs: design thinking. Roger cares most about bringing together both the art and the science of management to create better leaders. His work is a correction to the data-driven revolution that has made business more reliable but which has also driven courage and intuition out of management. But he's no fan of simply giving designers the keys to the kingdom, either. An over-reliance on intuition is every bit as limited as management by the numbers.
You can view the entire interview in the video above or get a sense for what we talked about in the beautiful mindmap created by my colleague Jon Gabrio.
Until you have time to get in deep (you can see this image larger here), here are the four biggest takeaways from the conversation:
Strategy is an act of design.
Roger's interest in design thinking stretches back two decades to his time working closely with the senior vice president of design at Herman Miller. What changed the way Roger saw the world was that this highly skilled designer tended to view all of his challenges the same way. Whether overseeing the design and introduction of the Aeron chair or working out new directions for the organization, he focused on new possibilities rather than the application of existing ideas. You can't analyze your way to real strategy. You have to create it from data, guts, empathy, creativity, and a little thin air.
Balancing the analytical and the intuitive is key to great leadership.
At the beginning of this decade, countless companies could have created the iPod but didn't because their analysis told them it was too risky. Analytical thinking prevented them from seeing a promising new opportunity and driver of growth. Apple, led by the famously intuitive Steve Jobs, was able to seize that opportunity and run with it to market leadership. That said, the gut of Steve Jobs is far from infallible. The AppleTV, Power Mac G4 Cube, and his company NeXT were all flops because they didn't make sense from an analytical standpoint. Great leadership involves bringing both lenses to bear to find better possibilities.
Roger's take on design thinking isn't rooted in design.
One of the more surprising comments Roger made during our conversation was that designers aren't necessarily good at what he calls design thinking. Having a tremendous sense of aesthetics, prototyping, form, and ergonomics doesn't inherently reflect the ability to imagine previously unseen possibilities. To my mind, this calls into question the entire term. If design thinking isn't based in design and the abilities of designers, then the term may need to change. Without any question, increasing any organization's design capability will increase its ability to differentiate from its competitors, to build a more consistent brand, and to create more appealing products. But it's something else entirely to create a culture of innovation. We would do well to make this clear in the terminology we use.
Templates, not management theory, are the enemies of innovation.
A few years ago, Roger said, quite provocatively, that managers need to become designers to succeed in the next era of business. This was a comment that was met with great fanfare and not a little controversy. But when discussing the topic now, Roger has a slightly different outlook. It's not that either businesspeople or designers have a monopoly on good ideas. It's that there is a vanishingly small number of people who are actually interested in solving mysteries: as few as 10 to 15 percent at traditional strategy firms, a similar number in design firms, and even fewer among most corporations. Most people, whatever their background, are more comfortable reapplying a formula that has worked in the past than at generating new possibilities. They just try to use a template from an existing success, which is the chief reason we see so many copycat products and copycat strategies. We don't necessarily need more design-minded businesspeople or more business-minded design people. We just need more people ready to take on mysteries.
I've got just one more thing to share from the evening. It's small, but essential to call out. Roger is an incredibly gracious and humble guy, always ready to praise his colleagues and friends. That's rare for people at his level and with his accomplishments. After all, it's his humility and team-building that has allowed him to attract the kind of amazing faculty and executive staff who are the on-the-ground heroes of Rotman's good-to-great transformation.
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Dev Patnaik is the CEO and founder of Jump Associates, a firm that helps companies create new businesses and reinvent existing ones. He advises senior executives at some of America's most admired companies, including GE, Nike, Target, and Hewlett-Packard, and is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University, teaching design-research methods. His 2009 book Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, makes the audacious argument that the human power of empathy is the source of all innovation. Dev was recently featured as a guest on "The Business of Innovation," a series on CNBC. His articles on innovation and strategy have appeared in BusinessWeek, Brandweek and the Design Management Review.