Die nachfolgende Besprechung dieses Titels ist eine Kopie meiner Kritik in der aktuellen Ausgabe der online-Zeitschrift "360 degree" der Business Transformation Academy, einer Einrichtung des Softwareunternehmens SAP. Daraus erklären sich Stil und Form der Rezension.
"On the scale of hype for management methods, design thinking (DT) has now established a firm footing. Having soared to dizzy heights as a panacea for the promotion of creative thinking, this is by no means taken for granted. After all, much of what takes to the skies labeled as an eagle often returns to the firm ground of company practice as a simple chicken.
Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie have produced a publication worthy of recommendation on how to handle this exotic species of feathered creature appropriately. Their book "Designing for Growth",which appeared in June 2011,is aimed at managers of all levels who make the decisions about adopting this approach.In a nutshell, the authors have made a magnificent case for the use of design thinking in business practices. Their book is an elegantly formulated special-interest publication produced in an unusual format. With its skillfully integrated stories, anecdotes, and llustrations, it is an absolute pleasure to read. Using equal measures of gravitas and irony, the first few pages provide information about the nature of design thinking. The majority of the book then comprises detailed descriptions of a Liedtka/Ogilvie variant of design thinking that has been reduced to four phases,augmented by a selection of ten tools oriented to practical application. From every line it is evident that the two authors possess extensive first-hand experience of implementing DT. All the tools originated from and proved themselves in project work and can be adopted by the reader with no
need for any major changes.
So why do particularly managers benefit from reading this book? After all, methods,tools, and techniques are a manager's bread and butter. This offering, however, is surprisingly different. Managers are conditioned to implement a desired result in a measurable way, and for clear targets
that can be easily described,this works quite well. It is more difficult though when it comes to something really new as the search for the totally unprecedented overexerts the repertoire of the trained MBA mind. When entering "terra incognita", designers search for different data in a different
way. They begin by looking for human requirements instead of filling out Excel templates. Alternative scenarios depicting the future situation
are more important to them than benchmarks of currently known competitors. And building and using prototypes before making a decision is certainly more important than using SWOT analyses to compare theoretical strategies on PowerPoint charts.
For the organic growth of a company and its innovative strength, design thinking can be what TQM became for quality management. Anyone who is prepared to substitute imaginary eagles for butterflies (a seemingly playful approach), bees (extensive data collections of a somewhat different kind), and falcons (robustly built nests... sorry, prototypes) will get from Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie a great deal of tangible material presented in a light-hearted manner."