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Older posts Newer posts
‘Free’: The New Currency
February 29, 2008
In his recent Wired article, 'Free,' Chris Anderson talks about the economics of free. Anderson's new book, due out in early 2009, will also be called Free, so we will hear all about this in due time. His core idea is important. How do businesses, so used to proprietary products and services, information control, and the [...]
Space Matters
February 28, 2008
Along the way in our journey into coworking, we have encountered some really cool spaces. Almost without exception the spaces we've visited have been inspiring places to work: Indy Hall, Citizen Space, Nutopia, Hat Factory, Sandbox Suites, and PariSoMa, among others. Though each space is different in its own way, they are all open, have [...]
Playing in the Brand
February 25, 2008
David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosesly Joined, wrote a fictional case study for the current (March) issue of Harvard Business Review. The piece, called Authenticity: Is It Real or Is It Marketing?, raises some important questions. For example (though Weinberger doesn't ask this specific question), can [...]
The Design Dividend
February 25, 2008
We spend a lot of time making fun of the words that the business world uses to protect its place as a secular mystery (see the New Management Dicktionary). Rather than heap another definition on our little brushfire of sarcasm, I thought I'd pass along a definition that might actually make a positive difference [...]
Jump Like a Frog
February 23, 2008
In a recent issue of Business Week's IN, 'Inside Innovation', there are several mentions of frog design. Frog design, one of the world's leading industrial design firms, with offices in the Germany, Italy, and the US, has a star studded reputation in the world of designers. Frog design also matters to those of in management [...]
Designing the Perfect (Anti)Venom
February 22, 2008
(The Butcher) Earlier today we rolled out Version 0.00001 of our business learning platform (our Not A B-School). We posted the outline of a curriculum and some initial readings. Our bias and editorial slant is clear in the initial post, and the 4 content areas we have chosen to focus on—Finance, Marketing/Strategy, Design, and Sustainability—are [...]
Welcome to Not a B-School
February 22, 2008
Conventional B-School curricula are broken and irrelevant for the most part.
We didn't make this up. It has been pointed out by some of the insiders of the B-School world—Henry Mintzberg, Warren Bennis, James O’Toole. For independents, entrepreneurs and small shops of designers and developers, subjects like Human Resource Management, Supply Chain Management, [...]
Management 2.0: Management as Design
February 21, 2008
Some 50 years since the Ford Foundation's influential report on the state of management education in the US, all is not well in the world according to "MBA." To be sure, the economic and cultural capital of B-Schools, and their MBAs, has never traded higher. B-schools around the world are well endowed, well attended, and [...]
I’ve Seen the Future, and it is a ‘T’
February 20, 2008
In a 2005 Fast Company article, Strategy by Design, IDEO CEO Tim Brown writes about the importance of what he calls 'T' Shaped recruits at the Palo Alto-based, award winning design firm. In the article, Brown defines 'T' shaped people as empathetic doers. The vertical axis of the T is a person's background as an [...]
You Don’t Have a Clue
February 19, 2008
In a recent article at BusinessWeek.com's Innovation channel, Innovation at Risk, Lara Lee suggests that "exaggerating design's ability to drive new growth" sets up the possibility that there will be a backlash against design thinking as a mainstay of the corporate innovation agenda. While there is indeed the possibility that the world, at least [...]