You may be surprised when I tell you I beleive this is coming. Especially if you know I've been a boardroom level business strategist all my life with advanced business education credentials. This post is inspired by a question posted by David Armano from Critical Mass. Can an MFA do the job of an MBA? I vaguely remember reading something in HBR a while back declaring MFA is the new MBA...essential for a business career. Companies have come to realize that the only way to differentiate their offerings is to make them desirable and emotionally compelling -- which suggests an arts degree is now a hot credential in business (although I can't imagine them teaching finance in design school). Today very few large corporations explicitly recruit for MFAs. I wouldn't be surprise if B-Schools start offering upgrade courses specifically designed for MFA students.
So what is design (in business)? It is often being used interchangeably with creativity and introduction of new products. For an automobile company such as BMW it is means “engineering”; for a luxury goods company such as Prada or Hermes it means “styling”; for an Internet company such as Yahoo it means the “usability”; and for an office furniture company such as Herman Miller it means “human ergonomics’. In fact, design has always been a key component of business success to all of them. Having said that, design is often only treated as “downstream” activities.
Design has never been a subject discussed in the boardroom. In my long career as a strategy adviser to Fortune 500, I have never seen "design" as part of any corporate level strategy consideration. Now this might change.
Strategy + Design are two very different disciplines in nature. One is maximizing profits through economics of scale and scope in marketing and production. The other is about customer empathy and dreaming up new products/services. The intersection of design and business is where design is being taken up to a strategic level and being used as a basis of competition and tp power a competitive strategy. The key question is should one follow the other or is there an intersection of design and strategy or are both completely overlapped? What happens if the realms of design and business completely overlap and design becomes the core strategy of the business and the business turns out to be all about design? We have yet to figure what's the best organization structure to make this happen. Here are the four scenarios of how strategy and design works together. More on this topic next week.
