Designers are optimists, at heart. We look toward the future and everything we do is aimed at making an improvement in some way: in someone's life, in a process, in a product, in the world, etc. Unfortunately, we aren't always successful. What we create may miss the mark but, more often, we're not able to convince others of our vision, whether it's our clients or our peers within a company. Designers are often naive about the way businesses and other organizations work and get frustrated when others don’t see what we do.
For several years when I've given talks within the design community, I would stress the need for designers to do something about this--and the only thing to do is to learn how better to interact with our peers outside the design world. This might be engineers, marketers, or those in manufacturing and operations but, most often, it's business leaders. We speak different languages and address different concerns. Often, designers just don't appreciate non-design issues in an organization so they have no way to approach the priorities and processes they don't see. Furthermore, we can't expect business leaders from other disciplines to learn our language and all about our domain. If we want to be successful in organizations--especially if we want to be strategic--we need to learn the language of business.
This is why I went to business school myself. It wasn't something I had considered before (I used to make fun of MBAs when I had my own consultancy because their expectations were unrealistic about how product development, customer interactions, and even cash flow worked in the "real world"). My penance, I tell people, was to become and MBA myself (something I did in June of 2006).
What drove me was the belief that if I better understood business processes and issues across the organization, I could better communicate customer needs, strategy, and design-based innovation.
The program we're developing here at CCA is focused on just that. It's for designers who want to work strategically in their organizations and for their clients and be business leaders, not merely design leaders. However, it's not geared only toward designers. What makes this program unique is that it's just as appropriate for business people from all domains to come and learn how design processes and principles can be used to spur better, more appropriate, and more meaningful innovation. It's designed for business people who want to become true innovators and drive sustainable growth within their organizations. Lastly, it's worth noting that business isn't always corporate, nor always for-profit. In theory, there's no difference between how a for-profit or non-profit should be managed. One might be more values-oriented in its goals (though this is changing rapidly in the corporate world), but people, leadership, and organizational management is the same dynamic, no matter what is done with the profits. We're looking for people who want to make meaningful change in the world, whether in the corporate, start-up, NGO, or even governmental realms.