Sauder has a strategic alliance with the Copenhagen Business School (CBS). This means that we go way beyond the typical Memorandum of Understanding which can often (not always) just mean that institution x will cooperate with institution y and send a few students or faculty members on exchange. The strategic alliance has both business schools putting $$ into a fund that will encourage staff, faculty and students to learn from each other.
For example, this past week several members from the Copenhagen Business School’s research administrative teams came visiting to Sauder. They had a busy program of activities meeting colleagues and sharing experiences and best practices.
On the faculty side, Dr. Daved Barry, Professor of Creative Organization Studies from the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy is visiting me and the d.studio. It is wonderful for me to have Daved here — he brings another, more business-experienced, perspective to the idea of business + design. His area of expertise is organizational design and the fine art of leadership. Here is the link to his home page at CBS: http://www.mpp.cbs.dk/en/Research/Departments-Centres/Institutter/node_6784/Menu/Staff/Menu/Academic-staff/Videnskabelige-medarbejdere/Professors/barry
We had a busy week — working on the Master of Business Arts proposal (more to come on that), meeting research colleagues and Daved taught a session to the COMM 486J d.studio class and to a selection of MBA students. He tells the story of the history of organizational design to its current “renaissance”. This perspective was good for students to hear — and got them thinking about the use of design in business.
Here is a quote from one of Daved’s papers on Re-designing Business Design
To be successful though, this new Organizational Design (OD) will require a lot more than asking executives to brainstorm, prototype, and otherwise “get creative”. Coming up with effective organization designs that deliver, delight, and deepen will require training along the lines that designers get—years of learning how to reframe organizational problems into evocative questions, finding inspirational networks alongside solutional ones, creative and aesthetically sophisticated experimentation, and working with multiple mediums and representational forms. It will also require systematic testing over time, to see where and how these innovative designs work, and don’t work. Clearly, OD is heading towards a new chapter, perhaps its most interesting and inventive one yet.
Daved is at UBC for another week — and we’re looking forward to another busy one!