Lately, I’ve been thinking about three things. 1. How does a designer learn to become a manager or design leader? 2. Design has become a critical and strategic function in today’s evolving organizations, but will design educators adapt curricula to enable graduates to meet rising expectations for design performance? 3. Will design education embrace experiential learning, through internships, to remove barriers between education and practice?

Must design managers be MBAs?
Many designers aspire to become design managers and some think they will get there faster with an MBA. Not true. First, most business schools do not recognize design management as a critical business function. Second, business schools do not stress the importance of developing skills of persuasion and developing meaningful relationships in organizations in order to get things done. Without relationship-building skills, how will a design manager succeed at guiding an organization through the process of integrating design into their corporate structure?

Has design become too important to entrust to designers? (No!)
Design curricula can adapt to the evolution in business, technology and the social environment by providing students the experience, i.e., internships, to test classroom learning about design fundamentals, research and the process of design in organizations. If curricula do not adapt, design education will be preempted by other specialists who have discovered that the process of innovation, “creativity applied to a purpose,”¹ or “design thinking” (called a “business behavior” by Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek), is fundamental to the creation of marketplace value.

Design thinking is critical to organizations in transforming their functions and form to respond to evolutionary marketplace forces. Business has raised its expectations of design process deliverable—more than nice typography, lovely form or space. But will design education adapt so that grads can deliver “more” and move up the value chain to the front-end of product development? Or will traditional design program grads be relegated to executing other people’s strategies and concepts?

What an MBA is or isn’t
My goal is to demystify the MBA, not denigrate it; to remove it once and for all from consideration by designers who seek to become design managers.

As Harvard Business School professors explain in “Is Business Management a Profession”² (and I paraphrase), “The basis of most business school curriculum today is a functional approach, the grouping of courses to mirror the differentiation of finance, administration, operations and marketing as the major activities of the firm.” (Please note, design is not considered a major activity.) “This structure evolved in response to turning out grads to perform tasks that would be required of them by employers.”

Business students are provided with no more information about getting things done in an organization than are students who study design. An MBA program does not teach leadership skills. And, for the record, leadership and management are not synonymous. MBA programs do not provide study in relationship building, flexibility, collaboration, influencing, presentation and other skills vital for working in organizations. Actually, it is more important to provide experiences where students can practice these skills.

Business schools have lost their way according to recent articles in the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review and books about the Wharton School and Stanford Business School. Professors “know too little about how real businesses work and spend too much time cranking out highly technical papers of the kind that the academic system mistakenly rewards,” said the Wall Street Journal.³ “They are locked into dysfunctional competition for media rankings (‘Top 10 Business Schools,’ for example), that divert resources from long-term knowledge creation.”

Can design schools adapt to today’s environment?
Many design educators are also locked into systems that evolved in response to teaching grads to perform tasks required by employers from another era. Most cannot adapt to the need to offer the integrated array of tools designers need, and accreditation bodies have no incentive to encourage change.

Design work is now done in integrated, multidisciplinary teams. Guiding students in building relationships across “the deep gulfs of understanding between design and other disciplines”⁴ requires experience doing it.

I recommend a requirement that design educators have at least five years of experience working in major consultancies, corporations or organizations. Many become teachers right after graduating from the very schools where they teach. Many do not keep up with design and design process evolution. Many practicing designer/design managers participate in shaping the education process by making presentations at conferences, which educators rarely see, and providing internships. Smart students with career ambitions beyond sitting at a computer screen quickly realize the limitations of their education and so consider an MBA.