Customer Reviews

Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers (Columbia Business School Publishing)

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There has been a veritable onslaught of strategy and business 'design' literature published in the past few years. Most of it is interesting but falls into one of two traps: either it's too theoretical to put into action, or it's directed to a choir of the design-familiar and leaves everyone else behind. Liedtka and Ogilvie break the mold with their new book, providing a framework and a tool kit to help almost anyone with interest and motivation explore the power of design thinking.

It starts with a relatively simple point. Most of the time, most of the world sees the design process as messy and unpredictable and nonlinear and twisted and terribly inefficient. In many organizations, that's why design is often considered a black box so impenetrable that it's outsourced to marketers, product developers, and, well, designers. Liedtka and Ogilvie take the mess and unbundle it all into a four-phase, 10-step framework that starts to look more like a process that individuals and organizations can learn and replicate.

While the steps are somewhat familiar, the recommended approaches in each phase sound reasonable but are more challenging for most people to put into practice. (Try explaining to a typical business planner that you're going to generate new business offerings based on research you conduct with a dozen or so customers, and you'll see what I mean.) Lucky for all of us, Designing for Growth provides concrete tools and step-by-step instructions and plenty of real-life examples for each step of the journey so that there's sufficient structure to help the reader navigate the discomfort of trying something new.

I've been fortunate enough to collaborate with Liedtka and she's fond of saying that she's not a designer, and that if she and her faculty colleagues can make good use of the Designing for Growth tools then anyone can. Having watched her in action, I'd say she's more of a designer than she'd like to admit, though perhaps not in a traditional sense. Because for me -- and as illustrated throughout Designing for Growth -- being a designer isn't about being artistic or clever or even all that creative. Being a designer is about approaching a complex problem with curiosity and empathy and patience and then having the discipline to explore many possible answers before selecting a path forward. This book helps bring out that design thinker in each of us.

"Design for Growth" parts the clouds of stagnation and confusion and lights a path of organizational growth and evolution. This book presents a model and most importantly tools for systemic change that I can use in any organization from my business to my family, even though I'm not a professional business or organizational expert or consultant. The concepts and tools are easily understandable and accessible. The authors make good use of examples and provide immediately usable project aids. For me, this book is one of those few that have changed the way I approach my work, but more fundamentally my life.

Wow! What a great, color by numbers description of how to use design to help you innovate in business. I have been reading lots of design books and this one is the best as it not only describes the tools of design but also tells you exactly how and when to use them. It is a very practical guide, but still emphasizes the theory of design.

I love this book!

A good practitioner's guide addresses the Why, the What, and the How of the practice in question.

Designing for Growth works for me because the authors succeed in blending the three elements of their enquiry on design thinking. One could, with a background in using the tools they identify as critical to the practice, begin to pursue the practice. And, as the authors note, design thinking is very much a practice: one grows more capable with each pass they make at applying the approach.

Read only few pages, but love it already. This book has all the answers to tons of questions I have in mind related to "how to address users problem best way". The real world examples and the practical approach are really great.

The authors have given design thinking a sophisticated but easy to understand and much needed new presentation. This book has already provided great fodder for conversations around the design community. I am a big fan and would recommend this to anyone trying to understand how to help people and organizations make the most out of complex opportunities. I will use the ideas in this book throughout my professional career. I hope I can meet the authors someday so I can tell them this in person!

The authors have designed an excellent resource for design thinking, that functions as both a manual and a how-to tool kit for the entire creative process, from conception to implementation. It is practical, well-designed, filled with easy-to-follow actionable ideas, and above all, it is NOT overly simplistic. I recommend this book for innovators who want to incorporate design-thinking in their organization.

You got problems? This book will help you solve them. It taught me how to take the guesswork out of product development, to focus on the essentials and effectively incorporate customer feedback. Overall, I found it to be a well written, easy to follow guide to design thinking. The only problem I had was with a design element in the book itself: whoever came up with the idea to put white text on a light blue background obviously did not think about the design much.

Today this book is the top 100 Management books here on Amazon. I think this is going to make it to the top 10. I really appreciate how this book takes my notion of design and (I think) properly stretches it to solve business challenges. The authors provide the barest grounding in design theory, but still enough to contrast how designers are trained to solve problems, versus how MBAs are trained -- and this is enlightening (and opens up a world of possibilities that is really needed). As a professional that is exposed to both, I attest to how its first chapter alone is eye-opening and I am sure that it has changed how I communicate and collaborate with business-trained colleagues - helping them better understand the potential and the approach that application of design theory to business can make all the difference. As an aside I love the layout of the book too -- just enough illustrations and magazine-like elements including sidebars and checklists. All in all, a very satisfying tour of the potential and actionable insight into where design thinking is going now, its impact on building exciting and winning businesses (and business concepts), and the tools that can be used to be really successful with it. I really think the ideas here (and so well explained) is something that every business (and growth oriented) leader / manager / entrepreneur and entreprenearial-aspiring larger organization could benefit from. Enjoy it -- you won't regret this purchase.

If you read and liked Daniel Pink's, A Whole New Mind, or Tom Kelley's, The Art of Innovation, this book is for you. It helps shift innovation and design from a daunting and abstract goal to a practical and tangible effort. The book will serve as a guide to incorporating design thinking and creativity into existing change management techniques and frameworks. It is a must read for MBAs, management consultants, and general managers.