Why should designers need to understand Accounting?
Accounting is a worrisome topic for designers. We believe that there are benefits that can't easily be reduced to numbers. These include emotions, values, meaning, brand, experience, and loyalty. We suspect that what gets measured in a company, gets attended to and valued, which is probably accurate in most organizations. Many benefits, especially in the customer side, aren't very easy to reduce and measure as numbers so most of these aren't regarded in the same light as financial performance.
In addition, accounting is exacting. It requires diligence, an eye for detail, and no coloring outside the lines. Accounting isn't seen as a "creative" occupation and designers are all about being creative.
At my now gone company, vivid studios, I had always told people that the most creative person in the organization was our CFO. I still believe that. It wasn't glamorous but somehow, he had to make payroll every pay period and sort through the demands of a high-growth business working with start-ups with fluctuating funds as well as traditional companies on the 30, 60, and sometimes 90 day pay plan with a ridiculous amount of red tape to jump through.
The first class on the first day of business school found me dreading accounting, resigning myself to my fate, and promising myself to "get through it somehow." What I found, however, was unexpected. The first thing I did in reviewing a standard balance sheet was to look for design. With only three options (Assets, Liabilities, and Owners Equity), surly design had to be in the Asset column. It didn't fit the definition of Owner's Equity and no designer thinks of either themselves or the value they provide as a liability! It turns out, however, we are--at least in accounting terms.
And then it hit me! This is representative of the entire misunderstanding, miscommunication, and (often) mistrust between designers and other business leaders in one, clear point. This is what I had come to business school to understand. Designers walk around believing that they are assets to a company, generating new solutions from nothing, and driving innovative, successful, and appropriate solutions. To business leaders, however, we're liabilities. We're a cost center and in traditional business terms, we should be minimized if at all possible. We're seen with dollar signs above our heads while we imagine they're gold stars--or even halos.
This is the bridge designers need to cross if we expect to be seen in a different light by the rest of our peers and it requires learning the tools, issues, and language that our peers speak. Why must we learn their world? Because it's unlikely that they’ll learn ours. Japanese and Finns, for example, would love for travelers to their countries to come speaking their language but they don't expect it. They know, as minorities in the world, it's an unrealistic expectation but a nice surprise when they encounter it. So, they spend time learning English (which is lucky for us). Designers need to have the same attitude and that this is the point of this program, to help them do just that.
In addition, to those other professionals who want to develop a n appreciation for, an understanding of, and experience with design innovation processes, the very same program can help them accomplish that.