Earlier this year, an episode of the sitcom 30 Rock made great work of parodying Six Sigma, the business-management system developed by Motorola. With its penchant for pseudoscientific jargon and karate-inspired hierarchies, it makes for a ripe target, but it’s hardly a unique phenomenon. Every few years, the business world latches onto some new management paradigm that promises to reinvigorate corporate America and—perhaps more critically—maintain liquidity in the highly lucrative business-consultancy sector.
The latest panacea offered by the management-industrial complex, as you may have noted, is “design thinking.” A whole raft of books on this subject has hit stores over the past year. There’s Warren Berger’s Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World, a Gladwellian self-help primer drawn from the platitudinous mind of design guru Bruce Mau. There’s Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, a manual for the MBA set penned by Ideo’s Tim Brown. There’s Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value, by Thomas Lockwood, president of the Design Management Institute, whatever that is. These are just a few of your options, and if they don’t suffice, you can enroll in Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, where you can earn a graduate degree in, yes, Design Thinking.
(Read more) Via architectmagazine.com