Review on "The Design of Business" by Roger Martin

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I found the topic that Roger Martin introduced, "The Design of Business"  was very interesting. He talks about how to design systems that work to help organizations grow and take their businesses to the next level. After all, businesses that make it through each decade are the ones who are constantly evolving with the changing times and the customers needs. Roger Martin introduced a few concepts that I felt were relevant and  that I could easily relate to. Here are the ideas I picked up.

Reliability vs. Validity explains how organizations take a winning formula and get stuck in it. Most of the world incentives reward reliability, even when it becomes the wrong answer. Organizations are often hyper focused on reliability or algorithmic thinking. They resist validity and new ideas. That explains a lot about my experiences in trying to drive change in organizations stuck in algorithmic thinking.  Adapting practices from the design world is a trendy thing to do right now in consulting firms based largely on Proctor and Gamble's recent success. There are some things to learn from this field and indeed as the author suggests, some businesses are living in the past and are too risk-averse if they rely solely on analytic models of past behavior for forecasting future success. 

The Funnel - mystery, heuristics, algorithm describes the natural life-cycle of an offering from innovation to driving towards the lowest cost production of it. It describes how that actually happens. The funnel is like a mystery that can take an infinite variety of forms. To innovate and win, companies need design thinking. This form of thinking is rooted in how knowledge advances from one stage to another-from mystery (something we can’t explain) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us toward solution) to algorithm (a predictable formula for producing an answer).

Throughout the book, Roger Martin provides relevant examples by showing how leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cirque du Soleil, RIM, and others use design thinking to push knowledge through the stages in ways that produce breakthrough innovations and competitive advantage.  This book has helped me see things from a new perspective and how design thinking is the right tool for companies to use to give them a competitive advantage from their competitors.