India
of the early 1990s used to react to B-school graduates and the brand value that
B-schools brought to the table with awe and respect in the same breath. The
times for sure have changed. As India steps into celebrations of 25 years of
economic reforms, the academic team at Ishan Institute of Management &
Technology, one of the top MBA colleges in Delhi NCR lays the mortal remains of
the B-school concept on the surgery table for a post mortem analysis.
From
the D-school established at Stanford University with the aid of $35 million by
SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, to the baby steps taken by the then new CEO
designate Dr.Vishal Sikka for 20 top corporate leaders at Infosys to the
obsession that late Steve Jobs had, design thinking is creating ripples out
there in the market. With evidently inadequate literature on design thinking in
India and most B-schools yet to integrate it into academic curricula, design
thinking represents one of the biggest opportunities to corporate India and its
conspicuous absence from syllabi of B-schools, the biggest challenge.
A few
months back the CEO of Infosys, Dr.Sikka in an interview to a leading English
daily remarked that the rise of automation to such unprecedented levels will in
the near future lead to a day when people will no longer be required to solve
problems of business and engineering. Machine learning, big data, internet of
things, machine to machine communication and artificial intelligence shall be
more than adequate to solve problems. The challenge for people shall be to find
and identify the nature of problems. Perhaps this may be the shortest and
surest way to understanding design thinking.
I do as Said, Not as It Can Be Done
Steve
Jobs, the iconic entrepreneur and artist of design thinking had once said that
design thinking was not how it looked but how it worked. More and more
companies across the world are beginning to realize this statement. It may
appear subversive if not paradoxical that the Indian way of doing business as
stated by Peter Cappelli in his book “The India Way” relies on the obedience
school of leadership. This in effect limits the performance of employees at top
and middle levels to compliance of protocol, achieving stipulated targets that
are essentially financial metrics and have less or nothing to do with the
people and programming one’s work to obeying to spill over of instructions. Is
this what explains India’s non-performance in innovation at the corporate
level? Sadly the answer may be yes.
Design
thinking is like an empty canvass with the boundaries being set by the
corporate protocol and targets of revenue realization. Yet, it is possible for
academicians to lay out some fundamental principles of design thinking and
follow the same at top MBA and PGDM colleges. These are as follows:
Move Over Performance to Experience
The
euphoria over the products of Apple may be mistaken into being an extended
reflection of the charismatic leadership of Steve Jobs. Agreed that there is a
man in the machine and a machine in the man, but nothing substitutes for buying
and using experience. In fact user experience which is about how the user feels
about the product is in many ways more important than the performance of the
product itself. This is straight from the Steve Jobs manual. Saying “Hello” to
your customers when they least expect it to do so is after all a great way of
creating business value.
Understand and Design around the Customer
Right
at the board level, there has to be a Chief Design Officer. The Chief Design
Officer backed by the personnel from operations, sales and strategy must become
the voice of the customer at board meetings and in key positions of meetings
where strategic decisions are taken. They may be conceived of as the chaos
group in the company. Organized chaos is a precursor to innovating solutions to
problems that clients face within the scope and ambit of business projects. It
is not that this chaos group shall have the liberty of rebel poets, but must
have the democracy to voice customer centric woes to redesign products and
processes in tune with what customers demand.
Faster Time to Market
A faster
time to market takes a beating when companies try to create products that are
perfect. Instead it is advisable to create a minimum viable product, create
systems for customer feedback and learning, and incorporate that learning for
product improvement as the company hits the ground running. It saves time,
money and efforts. Most importantly it allows a company to learn from the
teacher leader “coach” like a football team does during the progress of play.
At Ishan Institute of Management
& Technology, the academic team has
conducted a mini case study on the Aikido project of Infosys that was
introduced by Dr.Vishal Sikka and the department faculty members are working on
a project to study it in greater detail aimed at a full- fledged case study on
design thinking to be taught in strategic management.