Business Design for Designers
I found this article in the November 1998 issue of Mercer Management Journal via bplusd, a design-thinking blog by Jess McMullin. Funny that McMullins calls this newish, the article is now 7 years old. Here’s the abstract on the business design article:
The discipline of Business Design is a means to capture value from the rapidly shifting “profit zones” of today’s discontinuous business environment. It differs from other strategy frameworks in 1) its relentless focus on achieving shareholder value growth through sustained operating profit growth, the paring down of assets, and predictable performance; 2) its substitution of a product-centric view of business with one that emphasizes five broad dimensions critical to shareholder value creation: customer selection and value proposition, value capture, strategic control, scope, and organizational systems; and 3) its “outside-in” perspective, which focuses on customers and the marketplace rather than on a company’s organizational structure, operations, or core capabilities.
Well, I don’t know whether business design is a discipline, whether shareholder value is the best focus nor whether this model is the answer to all questions but some points are well put, e.g. opening up to the outside, i.e. customers and the marketplace. Sounds right to me, looks a lot like business (model) design, and I like this …
But let me clarify now what design might mean, for businesses and for managers, because I think that organizational design has had a lot of bad press (or worse, no press at all) of late, while design or design thinking has surfaced in many threads about innovation management, organizational success and the like. Think e.g. of Bruce Nussbaums blog at BusinessWeek, Jess McMullins blog on business plus design (b plus d) and other places.
There are interesting things to learn in these designer-driven discussions, and I am fully aware that design as a mindset can be valuable. Still, too often design is used
1) too fluffy and fuzzy,
2) too product-design centric or
3) understood and interpreted only from a design-centric viewpoint.
This may be nothing to worry about, still it leads people (and managers who suspect that design is the answer) to wonder about Apples iPod success only in user experience and colour/case/… dimensions, while neglecting the complex designs governing e.g. supply chains, partner configurations, competencies and capabilities at work and innovation(management) structures.
So, there is no monopoly yet for designers to use the word design – and well, when in the future everybody will be a designer, organizational architects can be designers as well. Moreover, organizational design is nothing new, and the word design has been used by management theorists for quite some time. So Business Design might very well imply Business Model Design or Organizational Design (of structures) for that part. And there is nothing wrong with that, hey, management writers like Nystrom, Starbuck or Weick did in fact even use some kind of genuine design paradigms as guidelines for organizational design (as late as 1981).
