Forget business administration: teach design thinking!
By Infonomia

Heather Fraser is director of the Design InitiativeTM , at Rotman School of Management in Toronto and leads Designworks TM , an entity under the roof of the Rotman School, dedicated to delivering customized executive workshops, student learning programs and business design consultancy to corporations and organizations. Under the leadership of its current dean, Roger Martin, Rotman School is spearheading a profound paradigm change in management education.

At Rotman, business is taught with an integrative, holistic approach, arguing that 21st century business challenges cannot be resolved by using traditional models developed within functional boundaries. Fraser and Martin even go a step further saying that, “leaders and managers will have become designers and companies have to acts like design shops”, in order to success in a design-based economy. Heather explains us why business cannot be simply administered anymore and therefore management education has to change.
It is mostly about unlearning. Students who come in the Rotman MBA, let’s say with an engineering background or a science background or a legal background, have to unlearn some things from the past. Ultimately, the biggest challenge for most people, especially those who are quite competent and have a professional background is to be comfortable with ambiguity and be able to take risks, and have the courage to be able to be dead wrong and say, “Well, that was good, I learnt something from that. Let’s move on to the next situation!”