I had a terrific west coast trip last week. It started with a great visit on November 2 to Jump Associates for the west coast launch of The Design of Business. Dev Patnaik, Jump founder and CEO and author of Wired to Care, was the consummate host and a wonderful interview partner. We talked about the book, the shortcomings of MBA education and the challenge organizations face in balancing reliability with validity.

We had a nice talk about design consulting, strategy consulting and the role I see for firms like Jump Associates to combine the best of each to trump both in the marketplace. I am dying to see a firm like Jump take dead aim at the big strategy consulting firms who are, in my opinion, too anchored in the world of reliability/exploitation/analytical thinking. Clients are waking up to the need to balance that array with validity/exploration/design thinking and the big strategy firms, by and large, don’t have the capacity to deliver against that need. So there is a fantastic opportunity for Jump Associates or other more traditional design consultancies to steal a march.

Later in the week (November 4), I had the pleasure to guest lecture in Sara Beckman’s design class in the MBA program at Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley.  For those of you unfamiliar with Sara’s work, you should look her up.  She is one of a handful of leading lights in the business school world who are teaching design thinking in MBA programs. For those operating in business schools proper (rather than design schools or interdisciplinary programs like the d.school), Sara and Jeanne Liedtka at Darden are my favorites. Both are willing to stretch the minds of MBA students, whether it is Sara getting students to contemplate a fresh tomato for twenty minutes or Jeanne dragging her students to Barcelona to appreciate the architecture of Gaudi.  Slowly but surely, the largely dormant right sides of MBA brains are being exercised!