Posts Tagged ‘transformation’

We’re proud to say we have officially gone international. Readers from other countries are visiting our site, reading trying to read our posts and contacting us. We promise we’ll be bilingual from now on. Just to start, I have translated my fist post: M.B.A x M.F.A; “doers” x “thinkers”.  We appreciate each and every visit. Feel free to leave us your comments. And thanks for coming!

I remember reading an article on Business Week in 2005 about the relatively new wave they called the “commoditization of knowledge”, a byproduct of the transition from the Knowledge Economy to the Creativity Economy. Renowned global companies like Proctor & Gamble and GE are mentioned in the article as the two main American companies to subscribe to the idea that analytical and systematic work, associated with the idea of knowledge, can be outsourced to countries like China, India, Russia and Hungary, where professional are highly trained and lower-paid. This trend brigs with itself the idea that it is essential to invest in creativity as the key competitive component in the american market.

That concept is very similar to what Radical Marketing proposed in contrast to Traditional Marketing. Conventional marketing has always been, at least until the mid-90s, a mostly rational discipline, with metric and mathematical tactics for validation, while Radical Marketing proposed a more intuitive, organic approach to users or potential consumers, a more ambitious approach when it comes to behavioral changes. Instead of concentrating in the bottom line, Radical Marketing was also concerned with more comprehensive social and sensorial experience to individuals it came in contact with.

The Business Week article also mentioned, for instance, the bold move made by Proctor & Gamble’s Design, Innovation and Strategy VP at the time, Claudia Kotchka, who let go several high executives, middle managers and scientists in order quadruple the company’s design team, hiring a multidisciplinary group of professionals from a wide range of industries. Kotchka stayed at P&G until 2008 and was responsible for creating a culture of Design Thinking, starting from the top. P&G transformed itself from a multibillionaire corporation into a completely innovation-centered organization.

In 2005, when I first read that article, I looked for opinions of online users and it was clear that the majority of readers saw in that kind of change implemented by Kotchka a high-risk move. Some even mentioned statistics that showed a 3% rate of success in that type of innovation, without citing specific sources. However, people who were already in the design field and were, back then, up-to-date with the industry’s literature, already knew about the article published by Harvard Business Review in 2004 – the short but very dense “MFA is the new MBA”. Professionals with a MFA background were becoming highly valued in a market that was already giving signs of how much MBA executives were becoming obsolete. That was in 2005, in a pre-Obama, pre-economic-stagnation world (which also showed its face in Brazil).

Five years later the discussion continues, with the newly publish book Rethinking the MBA. The book, also published by Harvard Business Press, discusses the legacy left by traditional MBA executives who’ve traditionally run the world’s biggest corporations. That legacy has gaps which go from lack of risk management, complex systems behavior to social responsibility leadership, not to mention a layer of ethics and the capacity to involve people emotionally inside and outside corporations – demands that have increasingly been fulfilled by Design professionals.

We currently see a demand for professionals with artistic abilities and a more human perspective of the market and of relationships between people – who can no longer be reduced to the condition of “consumers”. We are, before anything else, individuals with families, lifestyles, likes, needs, values and series of attributes that transcend our consuming habits. People who were once called “target audience” are now producers of content, co-designers of services, and hold a power that, in a very recent past, did not represent a big threat to big corporations.

Businesses are realizing that the only way to exist in that scenario is to transcend their products and services. The emotional appeal and excessive exploration of their brands’ social dimensions is no longer enough. It is vital that they DO something for someone, for a community, or that they evolve a specific industry. Offering technical quality and nice aesthetics hasn’t been enough for, let’s say… 5 years.

The image of the traditional, suit-wearing-executive has been increasingly substituted by the image of the creative professional, detached from corporate hierarchies and clichés. Someone who can navigate between a number of scenarios and who can be a catalyst for change. Those individuals are being hired for their complex profiles, which include not only good notions of finances and marketing but also of behavior, culture, lifestyle, technology and so many other areas that make them able to predict and be empathetic with the new demands, wants and needs of people.

Institutions like Stanford’s d.School, and even my alma mater, Herron School of Arts and Design, are know for been pioneers in preparing their student by a more systemic approach, stimulating capacities that go beyond form and aesthetics. Those students once graduated assume various roles – from strategists and brand managers, sense-makers to catalysts of social change, not necessary working as graphic designers – wich is still the most common path being followed by designers in Brazil.

Doers are increasingly being substituted by thinkers. Qualities like knowledge of business, critical thinking about human behavior and the capacity to work in multidisciplinary teams are being recognized as tools for brand positioning, reinventing business, developing products, designing services and more efficient processes. We have gone form form manipulators to agents of transformation.

Design has finally transcended its condition of subject and has become a verb.