The Book-Series I’m Editing At Liber

Attached (hopefully) is the flyer for the book-series I’m editing together with Mats Börjesson for Liber. Some good stuff in there!

Download now or preview on posterous

Säljblad_BeGreppbart.pdf (564 KB)

How To Defeat Top Consulting Firms At Their Own Game

The folks at McKinsey, Bain, and BCG should be happy that Roger Martin [1] likes his job. Otherwise, he could cause them a heap of trouble.

As it is, the dean of the Rotman School of Management [2] at the University of Toronto is traveling the country, throwing down the gauntlet to companies who hope to analyze and strategize their way out of a recession by bringing in armies of management consultants. You’ll get what you pay for, he warns, and it won’t be innovation.

“The business world is tired of having armies of analysts descend on their companies,” he says. “You can’t send a 28-year-old with a calculator to solve your problems.”

The problem, says Martin, author of a new book, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage [3], is that corporations have pushed analytical thinking so far that it’s unproductive. “No idea in the world has been proved in advance with inductive or deductive reasoning,” he says.

The answer? Bring in the folks whose job it is to imagine the future, and who are experts in intuitive thinking. That’s where design thinking comes in, he says.

“If I didn’t like my job, I’d go out and create a killer firm that would take on McKinsey head-to-head in their own market. A company would get better results, at a fraction of the price.” McKinsey, a $5B company, bills out freshly minted MBAs at $1M a year, Martin says. Their billing structure is 10 times what a design firm typically gets.

We spoke to Martin about why MBAs and designers should learn to get along prior to his coming to New York for the Rotman School of Management Design Thinking Experts series [4] with IDEO’s Tim Brown and Target’s Will Setliffe.

Fast Company: As we slowly climb out of the recession, everybody’s looking for where the next innovation will come from. Why does our pace of innovation seem to be slowing?

Martin: Most companies try to be innovative, but the enemy of innovation is the mandate to “prove it.” You cannot prove a new idea in advance by inductive or deductive reasoning.

Fast Company: Are you saying that the regression analysis jockeys and Six Sigma black belts have got it all wrong?

Martin: Well, yes. With every good thing in life, there’s often a dark shadow. The march of science is good, and corporations are being run more scientifically. But what they analyze is the past. And if the future is not exactly like the past, or there are things happening that are hard to measure scientifically, they get ignored. Corporations are pushing analytical thinking so far that it’s become unproductive. The future has no legitimacy for analytical thinkers.

Fast Company: What’s the alternative?

Martin: New ideas must come from a new kind of thinking. The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce [5] called it abductive logic. It’s a logical leap of the mind that you can’t prove from past data.

Fast Company: I can’t see many CEOs being comfortable with that!

Martin: Why not? The scientific method starts with a hypothesis. It’s often what happens in the shower or when an apple hits you on the head. It’s what we call ‘intuitive thinking.’ Its purpose is to know without explicit reasoning.

Fast Company: So, if you’re not getting these Newtonian moments from your management consultants, where are they likely to come from?

Martin: In a knowledge-intensive world, design thinking is critical to overcoming the biggest block: overcoming analytical thinking and fear of intuitive thinking. The design thinker enables the organization to balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration of business, originality and mastery.

Fast Company: Who’s been brave enough to embrace that idea in this market?

Martin: When he first took over, A.G. Lafley at P&G was brilliant enough to realize they were missing a lot about the holistic consumer experience by sticking to things that were rigorously quantified. For example, when the company moved into beauty products, they were looking at face cream. And the scientists decided it must be about pore coverage. So they analyzed the hell out of pores and said ‘We can cover pores better than anybody.’ So when women in their research started talking about wanting to feel beautiful and desirable, they’d say, ‘Don’t talk about that. We don’t know how to quantify that!’ And they couldn’t understand why stupid women would go off to department stores and pay ten times more when they could cover pores just as well. Ten years ago, P&G couldn’t prove they could sell women billions of dollars of Oil of Olay face cream at $30-$60. They could imagine it, but not prove it. Lafley took it as a management challenge to see across the divide.

Fast Company: If you don’t have A.G. Lafley or Steve Jobs at the helm, how can you sell your organization on the idea of an intuitive leap instead of a scientific leap?

Martin: You don’t have to convert the whole organization to design thinking. Propose a little experiment–say, three months in length–where you test out a bite-sized chunk of a problem using this method. If you have a little success, be sure to then attach metrics to it. In that way, you turn the future into the past in a way they understand.

Fast Company: We’re a little biased toward the designers here. Don’t they bear some of the responsibility for the gap in understanding?

Martin: Absolutely. Like anybody who takes a job in another country, and needs to learn the local language in order to function, design thinkers need to learn the language of reliability, terms such as proof, regression analysis, and best practices.

Fast Company: Sounds like there’s a promising future for somebody who’s bilingual and can combine both approaches.

Martin: This is a fascinating time, and there’s an interesting battle coming. One of these smallish design firms might combine the best of the analytical from the business world and the best intuitive thinking from the design world and become gigantic. There would be massive traction for it. It wouldn’t be the first time that a little company in a garage saw things differently.

via fastcompany.com

I love the fact that design firms might be able to solve problems for a fraction of the cost of the big consultancies.

Another article of mine at Transforming Management: Innovation is not best practice

via tm.mbs.ac.uk

This has been out as a thoughtpaper before, but not with the amazing Lego Batman-graphics! At http://tm.mbs.ac.uk/comment/innovation-is-not-best-practice/

An Article I Wrote (Re-)Printed In Transforming Management

Manchester Business School’s magazine Transforming Management published a text of mine on “The Financial Crisis and the Complicity of the Creative Economy” at http://tm.mbs.ac.uk/comment/the-financial-crisis-and-the-complicity-of-the-creative-economy/

Full disclosure: The text has also been published in a slightly different form as a thoughtpaper on my website.

Another news-clipping (In Swedish, this time)

From Åbo Underrättelser:
http://www.abounderrattelser.fi/au/2093310.php

Line at the coffeehouse

A clipping, in Finnish

Wicked problems and the modern university

The global economic crisis has made it popular to state that there is something fundamentally wrong with the ways in which we teach economics and business, and if you follow the international debate you’ll find that a unified cadre of pundits are stating that such programs need to be reformed and radically overhauled. Some have gone so far as to suggesting that business schools should be dismantled, or at least governed by more adult and sensible people. So it might seem a tad ironic that Åbo Akademi University, in the midst of this debate, is actually re-instituting its business school at the very moment when these have been widely discredited and the world economy is stuck in what seems like a permanent doldrums. It would be easy to attack the university for this, to state that this is a mistake, or snigger at how slow one has been to adopt this as an institutional form. However, I think both of these reactions are mistaken. The crisis has not made the business schools irrelevant. On the contrary, today they may be more important than ever.

It is a trivial and quite empty statement to say that our planet is in a state of crisis. The financial crisis is a minor wave in the storming seas that the world finds it in, where far more important crises – ecological crises, water-issues, new forms of warfare, the tumbling of the old giants and the unclear goals of the new ones – create an age of “wicked problems”, problems that can no longer be solved with merely technical or political or economic solutions. In fact, problems that altogether lack simple or unproblematic solutions. During the coming 20 years we must somehow both survive as a species, turn a trend of consumption that is completely unsustainable, and further establish a functioning global community. In relation to this, the problems with the financial crisis seem relatively trivial. And the funny thing is that where you can accuse the business schools of having played a small role in causing the latter problem, we often turn a blind eye to how economic know-how is central to solving the former, far more important problems.

Regardless of how we feel about it, economy – even market economy – is a necessary and very much real thing. Unfortunately, we’ve never been able to figure out a better way to transform ideas into reality than by exposing them to economic forces (although these do not alway have to be market forces), and if we are to build a more sustainable society this won’t mean having less economic knowledge, but much, much more. If you want to solve the very real global problem of water – something which will become a far bigger problem that the relatively minor issues we’re having with oil and mortgages – we need to grasp exceptionally complex issues of production, distribution and choosing between several bad alternatives, and all these are issues that economics and business studies has grappled with over decades if not centuries. The same can also be said about many other of our current and future problems, maybe even all of them.

This is not to say that business schools can solve all of the problems of the world, as this would be a ridiculous claim. But if we’re to build a university for the modern world, we need to face the fact that we’re no longer living in a world where a single discipline can make a meaningful impact on a “wicked problem”. Instead, we must be aware of the fact that knowledge, in order to achieve change, needs to be understood as compounds and complexes. This means that business schools need to leave their limited view of what words such as “economy”, “business” and “value” means, but also that other parts of our universities need to open up to economic issues. This is obviously part of the logic of building the new “super-universities”, but even among these one often finds far too many attachments to old, outdated structures.

To solve the Gordian knot that is the modern university, it won’t be enough to suggest yet another re-structuring, or establishing yet another working-group to spout inanities such as “interdisciplinarity is important”. Instead, we need to challenge the very logic of how we teach, and thereby the very structure of our current disciplines. At the moment, Åbo Akademi University is much like all other universities, and teaches much as it has for decades on end. The courses are improved and updated, new names have been established, but the basic logic is still the same – get the kids in early, school them through a defined path, and find joy in the number of people that choose your specific path. A safe model, and one terrifically unsuitable for our age.

The Bologna-process was meant as an antidote to this, one which would enable a student to read a Bachelor’s here, then pick a Master’s there, all with maximum flexibility and the capacity to react quickly to changes in the environment. Did this come to pass? Fuck no. Today we’re still hampered by more or less the same old structure, if with a new look – lipstick on the proverbial pig. The possibilities in Finland to establish a small but relevant Master’s-program that would move beyond existing disciplinary borders is today almost non-existant, the possibility to introduce new subjects – today, when we need social entrepreneurship more than ever, it seems impossible to establish a serious program in it within existing structures – is almost non-existant, and the motivation among those who would really want to enact change… is rapidly getting there.

And this is where the business schools become important. Business studies have often been criticized for not being “hard” enough, not drilled enough into a disciplinary form to be taken seriously as a “real science”. In yesterday’s world this was a problem, but in the world in which we’re living it might be the greatest strength of all. By being less tied to old ideals, the economic sciences have a chance to re-define themselves as sciences for “wicked problems”. We’ve always poached on other sciences, and this is a good thing. We’ve always been turn-coats of knowledge, and in a global storm, this starts to look like a brilliant strategy. Today, the business schools need to think about their responsibility, but not do this through penitence or self-effacing humility-plays. Instead we should do what we do best, i.e. react to change. If no-one else is doing it, business schools need to introduce “design thinking” into the university. If no-one else reacts, it has to be the business schools who nurture the social entrepreneurs of tomorrow. By ignoring the demands of disciplinary rigor the business schools can become the source of passion and energy for the modern university, rather than a total institution among so many others.

Want!

via pryl.feber.se

I know it’s a Microsoft product, but I’d still pay insane money for this.

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