this week I’m looking forward to meeting the first MBA class of the “Zollverein School of management and design” in Essen/Germany. tomorrow friday, april 29th I will conduct a workshop on “applied strategic thinking” together with a selected group of 18 prospect designmanagers.
at the same time I will collect valuable data on how different groups of people approach strategic thinking depending on various segmentation criteria like: professional, educational, geographical and cultural background. my aim is to include this research into the bigger context of my doctoral thesis.
anyway I’ve seen a lot of “designmanagement” programmes come and go in the past 5 years it has always been interesting to be part of a group of people trying to shape new approaches on how to build the bridge between “Design and Business”. the understanding of “Strategy” and “Strategic Thinking” is a crucial element of the necessary set of designmanagement skills.
even though the term “Strategy” seems to be a familiar one for most creative (and business!) professionals only very few people see strategy as an ongoing process of:
while most people tend to see strategy as a process of sequential planning Johnson & Scholes, the originators of this concept, see the three elements as dynamically linked to each other. you can find a concise overview of this concept in Shaun C. Laurens’ weblog.
unfortunately I will not be able to join the “Institute of Design Strategy Conference” which takes place in Chicago, may 18-19th 2005. From their conference mission statement you can see the shifted focus of this event:
“The Institute of Design Strategy Conference” seeks to help build this bridge. It is intended to be a business conference discussing design, rather than a design conference discussing business.”
I think designmanagement veteran Peter Gorb would be very happy to see this focus!
