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Are we teaching business leaders the right skills for today’s dynamic, unpredictable, and yes, exciting environment?

If you earned a master’s in Business Administration more than five years ago, you would have studied the prescribed disciplines of marketing, economics, finance, operations, organizational behavior, and leadership through lectures, textbooks, case studies, and group assignments. You would have learned that marketing revolved around four P’s, competition comprised five forces, and strategy boiled down to one of three choices: market leader, fast follower, or low-cost provider. A leader was someone who could communicate the big picture, and managers had operational skills to oversee projects and people. A lot has changed since then. Today, constant change is fueling new disruptors and disruptions, leaving old strategies in the dust.

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DRIVING FOR INNOVATION

Competition is no longer based on who can grab the biggest share of (fixed) customer needs but on who can respond to real customer needs in entirely new ways, in real time, as they constantly change. With a click, customers can find any service or product they desire. And if they don’t like what’s offered, their global megaphone can instantly inflict damage with a few nasty tweets.

Driving for innovation is the rule today, not the exception. Viable business models now come in a variety of flavors, and enduring success is far more complicated than outlined in the case studies used in traditional MBA courses.

So what do future business leaders need to know and experience to lead successfully in today’s dynamic, unpredictable, and yes, exciting environment?

// Emily Robin DMBA graduate 2016

INTUITIVE SKILLS

Ten years ago, author Daniel Pink challenged us to think of the “MFA, or Master’s in Fine Arts, as the new MBA.” In his seminal book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future, Pink predicted the world would get more automated, outsourced, and abundant in its offerings. He argued that more educational and organizational attention should be placed on high-touch, high-concept skills such as empathy, story, play, and meaning. In short, he urged disciplined training to support the development of our creative and intuitive skills and our process-driven, quantitative skills.

Pink’s vision predates most of the things we couldn’t do without today, like smartphones and Uber. He was right in his predictions, just wrong about how soon they would occur.

AMBIGUITY

The DMBA believes it’s time to incorporate Pink’s MFA as the new standard for MBA programs. We can start by changing the title of these programs. Long gone are the days of “Mastering Business Administration” (what are we administering anymore?). Today, the model we must teach is more appropriately titled “Mastering Business Ambiguity.”

// Shribalkrishna Patil DMBA graduate 2016

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LONG GONE ARE THE DAYS OF “MASTERING BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION.”

For the last six years, Lisa Kay Solomon has been part of the groundbreaking MBA in Design Strategy, focused on integrating creative and analytical problem-solving skills that help create, capture, and scale value in sustainable and impact-driven ways. As one of 13 progressive graduate programs at the California College of the Arts, the “DMBA” curriculum is informed by the integrated pedagogy of the well-regarded 109-year-old art and design school and the entrepreneurial spirit of the Bay Area.

ADAPTIVE PROBLEMS

At the DMBA, each of the four semesters includes a studio-based course that weaves together theory, best practices, dynamic tools, and hands-on engagement with real clients or emerging world issues. Classes are designed to help students think beyond profits to consider the social, community, and environmental impacts of their work. In “Innovation Studio,” students have tackled complex, adaptive problems such as the Future of Money, the Future of Work, and the Future of Voter Engagement. These challenges start on the first day of their graduate school experience, as a primer of the divergent and convergent processes they’ll experience and practice throughout the program.

TEAM BUILDERS

Like any business challenge, this approach calls for courage and a willingness to take on problems that don’t have single, simple solutions. Students discover their way to possible solutions, applying the same tools and skills found in this book. They learn generative skills such as visual and design thinking, perspective-taking, and empathetic, open-ended questioning. They learn to facilitate collaborative and productive teams of diverse perspectives across nearly every kind of communication channel. They have the opportunity to work directly with a wide range of industry experts and leaders who frequently come to our classes not just to lecture, but also to learn with the students as co-creators, mentors, and network builders.

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// Sebastian Ibler DMBA graduate 2016

BECAUSE ...

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IDEAS IN ACTION

In each semester, DMBA students have opportunities to create original solutions to unfolding issues. They use dynamic frameworks and tools to interrogate existing business models – and invent new ones. They have to be ruthlessly curious investigators and methodical researchers, while also honing their own intuition and strategic judgment. They have to find new and compelling ways to translate their insights into hypothesis-driven experiments to move ideas into action. They learn to share their ideas through compelling stories and experiential presentations that highlight emotional needs, not just the financial upside of an idea. Students grow comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. They take risks and move outside of their comfort zones to build new competencies, even if it means early failure.

THESE ARE OUR NEW LEADERS

Most important, DMBA students learn a mindset of possibility, optimism, and abundance – they become confident that their role as leaders is not to deliver a single, proven “right” solution, but to create the space, conditions, and team to bring to life something fundamentally new. They carry with them a new language, new tools, new skills, and the ability to continuously and repeatedly harness opportunities from change. If you want to make change in the future, this is the mindset you must have.

// Design MBA Bookshelf

DMBA ALUMNI
MASTERING AMBIGUITY IN THE REAL WORLD

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ADAM DOLE, DMBA GRADUATE 2010

DESIGNING ACCESSIBLE HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS

Shortly after completing the inaugural DMBA class, Adam was named a Presidential Innovation Fellow, working at the White House in partnership with the US Department of Health and Human Services to accelerate private sector partnerships and accelerate the growth of personalized healthcare in the United States.

SUE POLLOCK, DMBA GRADUATE 2013

DESIGNING A SUSTAINABLE PLANET

As Project Director for the Conservation Program Development at The Nature Conservancy, Sue uses design to help its diverse staff of scientists, conservationists, advocates, funders, and nonprofit agencies work together toward common goals. “Our work is inherently about wicked problems. Convening stakeholders and building trust are the keys to getting the work done.”

MOHAMMED BILAL, DMBA GRADUATE 2014

DESIGNING CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNITIES

Mohammed Bilal is a captivating storyteller, producer, and TV personality. As the Executive Director of the African American Art and Culture Complex, Bilal oversees a dynamic institute that focuses on empowering the community through Afro-centric artistic and cultural expression, mediums, education, and programming and inspiring children and youth to serve as change agents.

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THE CORPORATE LIFE

BREAK THROUGH THE PARADIGM

If I were to impart one tip to the companies I used to work for, as well as to my former self, it would be this: start designing today. Start designing for customers. Start designing business models and value propositions. Start designing strategies for the future. Just start. Though I didn’t always think this way.

THE BEGINNING

Before enrolling in California College of Art’s (CCA) MBA in Design Strategy (DMBA) program, I had worked for very large B2B software companies, like Oracle, Hexagon, and Autodesk, for almost 15 years. During my time with those companies I held a wide array of roles, from sales engineer, to software engineer, to product manager and strategist. These product-focused (vs. customer-focused) companies tended to talk about things like market requirements documents (MRDs), product requirements documents (PRDs), and product roadmaps. Specifically, at Autodesk, where I was the senior product manager, most things worked on one-year product cycles, which were often based on five-year roadmaps.

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However, as Autodesk made big, transformative moves to the cloud, it was becoming apparent that the company would need to shift to incremental improvements over a continuous release cycle. Personally, as well, I had become frustrated by what seemed to be an endless, and often futile, guessing game. I knew there were better ways to develop software.

At about the time I began to consider getting my MBA, design practices like lean and agile development were becoming popular. Even at Autodesk, groups like mine began to switch over to agile development methodologies. As I continued to drive my multiyear roadmaps forward, I read a lot about design thinking as a way to build better products. And, of course, I also knew that I didn’t just want to build products – I wanted to build products that mattered.

TRANSFORMING INTO A DESIGN THINKER

Most people pursue a business degree to increase their job opportunities. I was no different. Being an intrapreneur, I certainly wanted to make a name for myself at Autodesk. But as an entrepreneur, I was also intrigued by the world of possibilities outside Autodesk, especially as the tech scene in San Francisco and Silicon Valley exploded.

In looking for MBA programs that had some entrepreneurial focus, I came across the DMBA program at CCA. What caught my attention was the promise that DMBA students would actually practice design thinking with a lens on the strategic implications therein, rather than just learn the theory behind these popular terms.

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In just two years, each student group would develop business models and strategies for/with at least six real-world clients and projects in a (relatively) safe (to fail) environment. I was hooked.

At Autodesk, I had to keep one big software ship afloat. As such, I generally was not afforded the opportunity to work on a bunch of different projects at the same time – and I certainly could not afford to fail at many of them. So, I enrolled in the DMBA program.

A-HA MOMENT

My personal journey through the DMBA was a bit different than most of my classmates. For one, I was older than 99% of my cohort – most of them were in their mid-20s; I was in my (very) late 30s. I also was far removed from my younger, more creative self. Having worked for giant, product-focused companies for a long time, what little design skills I had left had been buried deep in my subconscious. However, the age gap between me and my classmates wasn’t what surprised me the most. Rather, I was most surprised at how many extraordinarily talented and creative designers had enrolled in the DMBA. Needless to say, in a program that focuses on design, I was a bit intimidated. But I knew that what I brought to the table was of equal value: experience.

After some initial breaking-down-of-walls via well-placed a-ha moments, I was able to rebuild my approach to business and life in a brand-new way. In fact, by the second month of the program, my mindset had so changed that I saw big-company challenges and opportunities in my professional life that were more or less hidden to most everyone else in my company, save designers.

PARADIGM SHIFT

So, how did this happen? How does a design lens allow one to see things that others don’t? As aforementioned, the DMBA program at CCA is developed around the core idea that anything and everything can (and should) be designed. Sure, we all know that a product, website, and/or service can be designed. But innovations, businesses, and even futures can be designed using the same tools, skills, and techniques. Design processes provide essential frameworks that focus on customer needs as well as prototyping and validating assumptions before building products. And when you start to see real-world examples of this way of thinking, like Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, Procter & Gamble, and many other organizations with groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting (deliberately designed) business models, you simply can’t un-see or unlearn it. For me, this happened in month two, in a course called “Innovation Studio” taught by Lisa Kay Solomon.

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As I replaced my own business knowledge with new tools, skills, and a mindset, I realized that my own experiences (life and professional) had only added to my ability to apply the practice of design-thinking in real time. Back at Autodesk, I wore new design-colored glasses, which helped me zero in on new human-centered innovations with my teams. I worked with my design colleagues to constantly test our assumptions using simple prototypes and lots and lots of questioning. I also scrapped every presentation I had ever given and designed a new visual language that I used to facilitate (what I now call) strategic conversations (without a lot of “blah blah blah”). With every new day, I added a new tool to my tool belt.

The innovations we developed (using customer-centric design thinking principles) for the products I was managing at the time were also paradigm shifting. In fact, some of those technical innovations have patents pending – which is a nice side benefit of customer-centered design.

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INTRODUCTION TO INVESTMENT READINESS LEVEL

Whether you’re an investor, running an incubator, or a startup entrepreneur or a manager at a large company, you’ll want to understand the metrics that distinguish a successful project, product, or company from an unsuccessful one early on in the process.

GUT FEELING ISN’T ENOUGH

For a long time, investors and corporate managers wanting to judge whether or not a fledging project or startup was a sound bet had to rely on a gut feeling. This required a strong constitution. Most often, the only metrics at their disposal were qualitative ones, like product demos, slide decks, and the project team. Some people’s instincts are certainly better than others. But as Steve Blank states, “There was no objective way available to help judge.”

THE INVESTMENT READINESS LEVEL

Today, most every project, product, and company is built atop a tower of data. What if we could use that data to qualify and quantify the progression and success of a project, product, or company? In fact, we can.

The Investment Readiness Level (IRL), developed by Steve Blank, enables anyone to compare projects, products, and companies – in a simple, straightforward way – to others across the company or investment portfolio.

MONEYBALL

Throughout this book we’ve explained that designing better businesses is about assembling the right team, gaining the right skills and mindset, and applying the right tools and processes at the right time. At face value, these qualities seem to be entirely intangible; how can they be measured by any metric besides the ultimate success or failure of your venture?

Interestingly enough, this belief was held by American baseball managers until 2002. As depicted in the award-winning film Moneyball, which is based on Michael Lewis’s 2003 nonfiction book of the same name, the Oakland A’s manager, Billy Beane, took advantage of analytical metrics of player performance to field a team that competed successfully against competitors with much deeper pockets.

Using statistical analysis of both hitting and on-base percentages, Beane proved that data provided a better way to determine offensive success than the qualities most other teams looked (and paid) for, like speed and contact (with the ball). As a result, the team was able to save tens of millions of dollars by signing baseball players from an open market – totally unheard of at the time. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Oh, and the A’s went from having a mostly losing record to making the playoffs in 2002 and 2003.

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DO IT YOURSELF

To achieve results from scaling design, you’ll need the right combination of people, skills, tools, mindset, and process. Using the Investment Readiness Level will provide you with the ability to play moneyball in order to gauge how your project, product, or company is doing by applying metrics to its achievements.

On the next page, we’ll show you how you can use the Investment Readiness Level to evaluate your design project in an easy, metrics-driven way.

For more background, read: The Startup Owners Manual by Steve Blank