Not An MBA

Time for a little prognostication. Here’s what’s going to happen in corporate America in 2008…

1. The number of your employees working outside of the hive will increase. More damning, the number of your ex-employees working outside of the hive will increase. Worse still, these will be the employees you need to keep to remain innovative and competitive.

What do they want? Flexibility, freedom, and community. Check out the Intuit Future of Small Business Report by Intuit and the Institute for the Future.

2. Together-Apart will define growing communities around the world. Face the facts—your kids already do it. Their community transcends their surroundings. Ask yourself… is your employees’ community defined by the four walls of the building they are in or by the network of their peers? Ask yourself, how many of your employees are closer (in the 6-apart sense) to their peers in other companies than they are to their peers one cubicle over?

True story… Several years ago I was kicked (hard) in the nuts for sending out a short e-mail announcing the resignation of one of my team. Years later, I’ve moved on, the rest of my team has moved on, but we’re all still in touch with one another. We’d all work with each other again—some of us already do. Where do you think our loyalty is? Here’s a hint… my nuts still hurt…

3. The dinosaurs will continue to downplay the importance of social networking platforms and the tools built on top of the APIs that were released throughout 2007. Smart companies will start to build their next generation of collaborative tools on top of these platforms.

Generation gap? Your senior managers and top decision-makers started working before e-mail and cell phones. Your new hires consider email old-fashioned. Good luck managing that…

4. The design dividend advances into a design divide. Companies will compensate by hiring designers, user-experience engineers, and usability experts into their IT organizations. The first bloody clashes between the IT-way of thinking and the design-way of thinking occur. Latter-day converts will adopt all sorts of radical short-cuts to get into design fast. Desperation is always easy to see through, and loud mouth converts are quick to become loud about something altogether different when the wind changes direction.

“Research from Peer Insight has calculated a tenfold advantage in stock-market returns versus the S&P 500 for companies focuses on consumer-experience design.” See the Letter from the Editor in Fast Company.

5. Management as Design will become one of several competing frameworks for making sense of, practicing, and teaching Management. Rather than assuming that well-trained and well-informed managers can implement statistically valid decision trees and arrive at the one best way to solve a problem, management will focus instead on observational research, structured brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and iterative launches to new product and business concepts.

Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman School of Management, calls this design thinking. See Designing in Hostile Territory.

6. Design schools will become central to the recruiting for innovation challenge. Schools such as the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute for Design, Stanford’s new d.school (the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design), INSEAD’s joint degree with the Pasadena College of Art and Design, and Rotman School of Management’s joint programs with the Ontario College of Art and Design are and will be places where mainstream companies recruit.

Read Design’s New School Of Thought. MBA programs are fantastic at producing analysts and administrators. Design-oriented business education produces people who not only know about business, but who have the skills and sensibilities to understand and connect with the experiences of consumers.

7. Coworking will come of age as a business. The drivers are an increasing number of people choosing to work this way, as well as the growing number of large firms making the decision to reduce fixed costs associated with real estate and office space.

Read my lips, office face-time is dying. See the map here which shows where established co-working spaces are already up and running. Read about nomads in the news, here and here.

8. Baby-boomer managers retiring in increasing numbers make the earlier predictions presented here regarding Gen-Xrs and Gen-Yrs become more, not less, significant. Leadership and leadership development will have has as much to do with plugging into communities across social networking platforms such as Facebook as they will with the (very me-generation) 360 degree feedback off sites conducted at places like the Center for Creative Leadership.

A CCL “Get to Know Myself” week-long workshop costs about $10,600 and the ROI is negligible. Becoming a part of a community of innovators via Facebook is free! Put that in your ROI-pipe and smoke it, baby! Read about the baby-boomer leadership vacuum.

– The Butcher and Bandit