The DMBA student body is pleased to announce the official launch of the 2009-2010 Student Annual. This student-led initiative is a true testament to effective leadership and cross-discipline collaboration; core components to the DMBA learning experience. The DMBA at CCA is the first and only program of its kind and we could not be more proud to be a part of such an avant-garde initiative. Join us on Thursday, November 18th for an evening of discovery, dialogue and of course...drinks, that introduces this powerful collection of work and the students behind it. Preliminary event information is provided below. Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.
Event Details:
What: Annual Launch Cocktail Party
When: Thursday, November 18th 6:00-8:00pm
Where: The Nave @ CCA's SOMA Campus, 1111 8th Street, San Francisco, Ca 94107
Register here: http://thedmbastudentannual2010.eventbrite.com/
Curious about the DMBA program? Read an excerpt authored by program chair and founder of the DMBA, Nathan Shedroff.
"Two years into the MBA in Design Strategy program, and with our first graduates finished and out in the world, it´s possible to start gaining some perspective about this program and the world around it. When we started building this program in 2007, we knew there was interest and need from talking with many companies and organizations about what kinds of people and skills they could not easily find. At the time, it was more intuition than anything else that led us to focus on the interaction of Design (and, with it, design thinking and design processes), Sustainability (and systems thinking), and Business (particularly new approaches to management, leadership, and economics). We were the only program to publicly state a focus across these otherwise (and historically) distinct domains-and we still are.
The hunch has turned out to be worth having followed. In the last three years, the business world has increasingly explored its fascination with design thinking. Moreover, the need for new economic models has been fully realized across multiple sectors, and, as the workplace becomes increasingly complex with the addition of new social norms and attitudes, the need for new approaches to "managing" people and expressing leadership has become abundantly clear.
In tandem, the design world is increasingly losing its aversion to "business" as it realizes its potential to create and affect change in the world. Design as a field is reaching a new level of maturity, losing its prior impatience, as designers are able to witness tangible changes (and their related opportunities) embodied more quickly.
Furthermore, sustainability issues have also become increasingly of interest to the business and design worlds. Business leaders and designers are readily embracing the opportunity to engage through this new lens. This was a failing in the past and why it sometimes seems like little has been accomplished in the last 30-40 years of the "green" and sustainability movements.
In our new Fellows program, we are teaching a Systems Strategy Model that shows the overlap in operating principles for multiple organizational domains as a way of showing the intersections of opportunity.
The intersection represented at the heart of this model is unprecedented. It shows how seemingly disparate domains are aligning philosophically around the same principles and, in so doing, provide a basis for mutual understanding and collaboration that has never before been seen. Chief among these is Systems Thinking, but along side are the ideals of stakeholder engagement and customer-centricity. The business world describes these slightly differently (in terms of customer loyalty and value, service models, etc.) but they are entirely compatible with how the design world articulates customers (or users), and the need to design systems. Of course, this kind of cross-sector analysis of stakeholders is not new to the sustainability conversation, except for the design process providing a better route to successful change and a new context for value creation.
This kind of cross-sector thinking is not only reinforcing of Systems Thinking, it has the potential to enable domains, organizations, and individuals to align more quickly and deeply, in order to develop and deploy more successful solutions. The Design Strategy MBA program is at the forefront, defining, shaping, and exploring this intersection, and our students will be better prepared to take advantage of the opportunities inherent in this growing overlap between powerful domains.
As the program grows (we´ve doubled in size starting Fall 2010), we continue to attract a more diverse student body, faculty, and community. Increasingly, we are joined by those with finance and non-profit backgrounds. Our aim is to add to our community conversations and create and share these perspectives and tools so that all of our community can use them to create more positive change in the world.
That is our ultimate aim and the reason why this program has come into being."
Nathan Shedroff