Want to Improve Your Work?
To innovate, you don’t need big, abstract ideas, just a fresh approach and some tools to help plot your successful execution.
That’s what you’ll get in a superb new book called Design for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers, by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie.
Ogilvie is the CEO of Peer Insight, an innovation strategy consultancy. Jeanne Liedtka, a professor and former associate dean at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, previously served as chief learning officer for the United Technnologies Corporation.
Designing for Growth is an illustrated guide that shows how to translate “design thinking” into practical, everyday tools. As the authors note, “Design thinking can do for organic growth and innovation what TQM did for quality – take something we always have cared about and put tools and processes into the hands of managers to make it happen.” In reading the book, it struck me how useful their tool would be in the publishing industry where ebooks and handheld readers have blown up the publishing value proposition.
To unpack the process of good design and apply it to a business problem, the authors start with a process of four questions, What is, what if, what wows, and what works? Essentially, these are translated as: (more…)
