Preface

THIS BOOK emerges from an interest in design and design thinking that has been nurtured by the two of us for almost thirty years. It reflects our belief, and that of the many distinguished scholars, artists, and managers who participated in creating the book, that more widespread design thinking among organization leaders is desirable for the creation of a humanly satisfying and sustainable future. Design thinking is crucially important for managers, but remains overlooked in much management practice and education. We believe that if managers approached their problem solving as the best designers do, that organizations, products, services, and processes would be more functional and better able to create lasting value in society. Today, management is in a crisis, but that very fact makes it possible for us to envision wholly new approaches to its practices and responsibilities. Our hope is that Managing as Designing opens new horizons for the practice of management and presents guiding images for the future.

For the last fifty years, management education has followed a path of least resistance and embraced formulas for approaching organizational problems that have outlived their usefulness. The possibility that managers could be revered as true leaders in society with a valued set of ideas, skills, and competencies to offer is profoundly threatened. Managers now operate under a cloud of suspicion that self-interest, shortsightedness, and failed morals are their hallmark. The centuries-old dream of rags to riches through the creation of unique products and services that had energized our economic growth has degenerated into the dream of the deal, the belief that some exotic financial transaction or stock market leveraging are the preferred paths to wealth.

For example, in the face of overwhelming evidence that growth through acquisitions does not lead to sustainable, value-creating organizations, CEOs still play that tired hand in an espoused effort to “maximize value” for stockholders (for example, Tyco and AOL Time Warner). More likely, the desire of obtaining personal wealth through the dream of the deal is the prime motivator. But the dream of the deal does not create true value for society. It does not create jobs, does not provide new products or services, does not develop new technologies, does not draw on our highest ideals as human beings, and leads to a famine of ideas in management. No wonder there is a cynical view toward managers in the global economy today.

But that cynical view of “big business” overlooks the managers and companies that do operate with a taste for creating value in society by the old-fashioned way of taking bold initiatives to design products and processes that create growth in the economy. This is especially true of smaller, entrepreneurial firms, which are the only reliable engine for growth in jobs and ideas on the world stage. The above characterization refers to the professional managers who are trained by schools of management and their MBA programs to take a place in the corporations, consulting firms, and financial houses that make up the most visible and powerful bulk of our global economy. Those are the sites of design mediocrity created and sustained by a culture of management education that focuses on training students to make choices among the alternatives presented to them, rather than training them to design new alternatives. This book is an attempt to stimulate change in management practice and education. Its creation was motivated by our good fortune to work on the Peter B. Lewis Building project with the architect Frank Gehry and his associates as described more fully in Chapter 1. We were inspired by the power of his design thinking and the almost universal interest in his creations—especially the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles—to believe that the moment was right for beginning an effort to bring ideas from great designers to bear on management practice and education.

This book grew from an invited workshop held at the Weatherhead School of Management in June 2002 that brought together a stellar collection of scholars, artists, and managers to explore the implications of taking the manager’s role and responsibility as a designer more seriously. Attendees represented a wide range of disciplines including, among others, architecture, sociology, design, history, choreography, strategy, economics, music, accounting, and product development, as well as managers of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Frank Gehry opened the workshop with a keynote address on his design process and approach to management. Karl Weick, Rensis Likert Professor of Management at the University of Michigan, gave a keynote on the second day of the workshop, using Frank Gehry’s design process to recast our concept of organization design. Those two talks are included as Chapters 2 and 3 in Part I. The balance of the book is composed of short contributions on aspects of design that are relevant to understanding and implementing managing as designing.

Before the workshop, each participant wrote an initial statement on design intended to provoke discussion. They provided material to spark large and small group discussions during the workshop; these pieces were rewritten after the workshop in light of the ideas generated. We are very proud to be associated with the many wonderfully insightful papers in this volume and hope the reader shares our enthusiasm for them. Each paper is short and self-contained, intended for reading and reflection in its own right, but the contributions are grouped into book parts by theme, with each part arranged to provide a narrative flow within the theme. The book concludes with an initial vocabulary of design for management, which draws from the keynotes, the contributions, and the workshop discussions.

Part I sets the stage for considering management as a design discipline. Part II explores some intellectual foundations for approaching managing as designing. The chapters in Part II consider the design act from theoretical positions ranging from phenomenology to ethics, touching on the structure of argument, the relation of form and function, and the role of language. Part III presents a number of experiences of design practice and what we can learn from them. The theme of those chapters is to reveal the experience of design thinking and design action to understand better how organizations are shaped through design. They pay special attention to the role of collaboration in design projects and its importance for successful designs. Part IV presents some images for the road forward and an initial vocabulary of design terms raised during the workshop and developed in the book.

Moving management practice and education toward design thinking will take many years, and these papers can serve as anchor points for guiding that long process. Changes in management education, public policy, and management practice will all play a part in making managers better designers. The vocabulary of design is a tangible place to begin transforming management education and practice toward a design attitude. A design vocabulary alone is not going to effect change, but using it in our everyday practice, teaching, and researching about management, in ways that bring the words to life in action settings, will. We hope that readers will add to the vocabulary from their own experience and will adopt a design attitude toward their problem solving, so that in the future more managers think of themselves as designers who contribute to human betterment.

Richard J. Boland Jr.
Fred Collopy
design.case.edu