current
newsletter: ISSUE 3
At our March 1st Strategy
Workshop in San Francisco, Clement Mok, a leader in many
dimensions of the design field, drew a diagram showing
new opportunities for design to create value in organizations.
There were two curves. The first showed the rapid growth
and decline of value creation in new products and communications.
This is the curve that innovators seem to live by, where
great teams create hits which are soon surpassed by the
new offerings of a competitor, or by the same company in
fear of competitors. The second curve, showing value lasting
much longer, was about designing better organizational
processes.
At the same event, Rob
Forbes, founder of Design Within Reach and, with
Clement, a Fellow at our conference this May, told
us about designing his business, including the roles
of people and the value systems that guide his company.
There are other examples
of design focusing on the organization. Roger Martin,
Dean of Rotman School of Business at the University
of Toronto, has written about how the speed and scale
of business is causing the emergence of new type
of business leader who is more comfortable with complexity
and who needs to focus on the "design of business".
In the January 3rd issue of Business Week, Bruce
Nussbaum predicts that design is emerging as one
of the key capabilities to help companies prevent
their offerings from being outsourced commodities.
In this newsletter, Kevin
Fong tells us why design is relevant to his portfolio
of companies at the Mayfield Fund. Jim Hackett describes
how design thinking is a key tool for him and his
executive team at Steelcase to tackle complex problems
that, in the past, would have been addressed by over-simplifying
them and denying their complexity. And Dr. Allan
Duncan relates how he and his team are using design
to change how decisions are made at the Mayo Clinic.
Just as design is becoming comfortable with going
beyond communications and products to the design
or interactions, services and experiences, it is
now becoming clear that the core capabilities of
design can be focused on the organization itself.
The emergence of these
kinds of new ideas is one of the great benefits of
gathering people from diverse backgrounds together
for two days. The underlying themes of the Strategy
Conference are already coming forward; just wait
until we are all in the same place!
INTERVIEW:
James Hackett
President and CEO of Steelcase Inc., Jim Hackett exposes complex systems as the natural state of business and explains why they should be approached as design problems.
READ
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW:
Kevin Fong
Kevin Fong, the Managing Director of the Mayfield Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, orients us to the new and continuing roles design plays in creating economic value for entrepreneurial ventures.
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article
INTERVIEW:
Alan K. Duncan, MD
The Medical Director of Mayo Clinic's SPARC Innovation Program, Alan K. Duncan, MD, shares with us how medical rigor and design practices can merge to improve patient healthcare.
READ
INTERVIEW
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