Core77 is sponsoring a design competition for sustainable electronics, entitled Greener Gadgets... The deadline is January 15th.

Several of the students currently in the DMBA program are publishing blog entries about their experience in the program at Triple Pundit...

Last summer, we were prevented from enrolling the excellent international students who had applied and had been accepted to the program. We're working on changing this situation for the future and have been receiving many inquiries. If you are an international student interested in the program, you should contact us about these developments.

Tonight, we were fortunate to have Mark Dwight, founder and CEO of Rickshaw Bags come to talk to us about his new company. Mark typifies everything this program is striving to integrate: he has both an engineering degree and an MBA (both from Stanford) but describes himself as a lifelong designer. He's been an investor as well as business leader and founded several companies but his attention is on developing innovative solutions from every aspect of product development, manufacturing, and business models.



In addition, Rickshaw makes a point to develop products with sustainable materials, processes, and considerations like overall footprint. They carefully partner with a variety of organizations in order to build environmental, social, and financial sustainability into every part of their company. He's quick to admit that, because Rickshaw is actually a small company, they can't do everything they want or plan at once. Mark's an inspiration for how innovative, integrative perspectives can make positive change not just in local communities but through whole systems.

Of course, the economy is on everyone's mind these days. There's been much talk about the, now infamous, slide presentation from Sequoia over the past weeks. This presentation is fine, to me, until Doug Leon's slides start at slide number 39. The first part of the presentation is all data, which is (of course) sobering and painfully obvious to anyone who's been critically watching the economy for the past few years.

However, Doug Leon launches into ungrounded assessments with his prescriptions and they feel tired and expected (cut, cut, cut... don't think about why or where, focus on features, not on customer relationship). Whether he meant this or not, that's how his advice sounds and it's the same old story that businesses have told forever when times get rough.

Notice how none of his timelines have times or dates on them? That's because they're loose predictions based on opinion and not data. It's pure theory masquerading as fact. Yes, companies need to focus on cashflow but this is ALWAYS what companies should be doing. For those who are suddenly worried about cashflow, their eyes have already been off the ball. If a company hasn't been lean, by all means, it should reassess what it truly needs but, again, this is something that every company should have been doing continuously all along. Suddenly, we expect businesses to get serious about their businesses? That would be the problem all along.

I suspect that a lot of good businesses will die along with the bad ones just like during the bust in 2000-2004. However, those who focus on customer-led innovation and delivering true value in customers' eyes are the ones that will have the best chance not only of survival but of growth. The same goes for sustainability.

Hunter Lovins said a really smart thing last weekend at Presidio:

"In a stable economy, sustainability is the competitive advantage strategy. (Refer to all the aspects of the Integrated Bottom Line.)

In a down economy, sustainability is the turnaround strategy. (See the recent Florida Climate Report: $26 billion savings from achieving 50% reduction in CO2 emissions from now, 33% reduction below 1999 levels. Or the Colorado numbers: consciously unleashing the new energy economy has led to net jobs growth, and relative economic health, even in a down economy.)

"In a collapse, sustainability is a survival strategy. (Look at Braddock, Pennsylvania. It went from 20,000 population to 2,000, from an oil and manufacturing center to a rust belt. The mayor is now using the vacant land to grow biofuels, has enlisted a 100 year old, 3rd generation oil company to produce it, and is growing organic vegetables, and attracting green companies to town.)"

We need to be a lot smarter about the value we deliver to customers and the market than simply cutting aimlessly. Most companies actually need to invest more in development and innovate even harder (that includes the entire automobile and electronics industries). They need new, better, more valuable offerings, not merely selling-through what they already have.

And this brings us to the problem with most US businesses. Try as they might, most companies can't successfully innovate. It's sad but true. Their focus has been on features, performance, and price, not on delivering value or developing deep customer relationships. That's why we've created this program: to help businesses better innovate in meaningful, sustainable ways.

Finally, after waiting on some parts for the storage system, our DMBA studio is finally complete--not that the students haven't been using it for the past two months. Aside from a nice mix of work zones (casual and more formal, team and individual), there's plenty of storage and the large walls on both sides are floor-to-ceiling, edge-to-edge white board surface.

Friday 17 October 2008
6:30 pm
San Francisco campus

Please join us on the CCA campus in San Francisco for an in-depth look at our new MBA in Design Strategy. Nathan Shedroff, the chair of this program, will present the curriculum, application requirements and what to expect as a Design Strategy student at CCA. There will be time at the end of the presentation to address any questions you may have about this exciting new program. Some faculty and students will be on hand to answer questions as well.

RSVP for this event »

Earlier this week, we received word from WASC (the Western Association of Schools and Colleges) that the DMBA program is accredited for students starting this year. We'll be reviewed with the rest of CCA's programs. We still aren't pursuing AACSB accreditation at this time (and won't be eligible for several years) but it remains a possibility in the future.

Over the summer, the facilities and IT folks here at CCA have been upgrading the boardroom to use as a classroom for the DMBA program. Because our classes are big (up to 30 students at once), there aren't a lot of places in the school for us to meet. In addition, dedicating space for classes that only meet once per month isn't an efficient use of resources. So, the school's boardroom in San Francisco is now our new classroom, fresh with some additions that will make it more effective for us as well as for the rest of the school.

Changes to the boardroom include:

• A new projector that casts a big, beautifully sharp picture from laptop, DVD, VHS, etc.
• Microphones mounted around the table to pick-up everyone in the room
• Speakers in the ceiling connected to any audio source we need
• 30 Ethernet and power outlets flush-mounted around the table (there are more in the walls as well
• A rack with mixing boards, DVD player, VHS player, digital audio recorder, and system interface
• 30 beautiful and comfortable new Catifa 46 chairs by Arper. These adjust up and down, swivel, and roll--all things the last chairs didn't do.
• Two new white boards (it's difficult to believe we haven't had any kind of writing surface up until now).

The accounting course in the DMBA program is a mix of both financial and managerial accounting in order to acquaint our students with the kinds of knowledge, skills, and tools they'll need to be leaders. We don't expect our students to follow a path to becoming a CFO, necessarily, but they should understanding how to work closely with financial officers to make strategic decisions.

In addition to readings and problem sets, the students will also work on a semester project comparing companies in a chosen industry.

For those following along at home, the required books this semester include:

• Understanding the Corporate Annual Report: Nuts, Bolts, and a Few Loose Screws, by Lyn M. Fraser and Aileen Ormiston
• Accounting for Decision-Making and Control 6th Edition by Jerold L. Zimmerman
• Three Harvard Business School case Studies: Industrial Grinders, Colorscope, and Dakota Office Products