Blog:

In the March issue of Fast Company, a fascinating article titled "What's the Biggest Change Facing Business In the Next 10 Years?". In the article, Fast Company asked '10 of our favorite brains what's next--and how to get ready for it." The brains include everyone from Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker magazine and best-selling authoring of The Tipping Point to Tim Brown, president and CEO of Ideo.

Below are two comments I found particularly interesting

Avram Miller CEO, The Avram Miller Co., San Francisco, California
Miller, 61, was vice president of business development at Intel and a cofounder of Intel Capital. He played a critical role in launching broadband. He now consults on strategy and business development for consumer-focused Internet companies.

"The cornerstone for this millennium is the end of time and space. Most organizations today are run the same way as early-20th-century businesses. Everyone goes to his car, drives to work, has certain hours, has a certain job. It's all built on the factory model. Moving forward, it really isn't going to be important where you are in order to do your job. Ideas are being worked on 24 hours a day. Nobody seems surprised anymore if I wake up in the middle of the night and start IM-ing someone in Europe, because the fact is, they don't even know where I am. And it doesn't matter.

Fewer and fewer people will want to be employees of corporations, because corporations don't have anything to offer. Corporations don't provide security and provide fewer and fewer benefits. People may find new ways to sell their skills. I can imagine eBay or the equivalent of eBay being in the business of letting people bid on work all day long. Office buildings may turn into housing, or maybe individuals will rent offic space as you would rent a hotel room.

And those individuals will compete with people from all over the world. This isn't globalization, because globalization to me feels big. I think it's the opposite, it's villagization--making everything smaller and in some sense more intimate. And that's very powerful. I'm totally capitalistic, but I don't like large organizations because they tend to want to control. If this reduces the power of corporations and governments to limit what human beings can do, the thing most exciting to me is the potential for everyone to participate."

Tim Brown President and CEO, Ideo, Palo Alto, California
Brown, 43, has helped formulate the design strategy of such companies as Motorola and Procter & Gamble. Some of his designs for the furniture manufacturer Steelcase have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. First appeared in Fast Company: July 2001

"Teams in business will be thinking about problems as design problems and tackling them like designers. Good design is the output of good design thinking, and companies will be looking to apply design thinking in many places where it hasn't been applied before. These are the methods and approaches that designers use to solve problems, such as understanding and anticipating user needs, prototyping to evolve ideas, and using storytelling to bring ideas to life. If you look at things like the new d.school at Stanford, those kinds of ideas are moving into business.

The implication for designers is that their responsibilities are broadening. In general, designers have thought of themselves as representing the point of view of the user, the consumer. In the future, they're going to have to be much more sophisticated when they're conceiving new ideas, and think about how they're going to speak to the market and how those ideas are going to contribute to marketing rather than just sending it down the line.

Essentially, any business problem that has an audience and a tangible outcome is a candidate for design thinking. For instance, a brand manager charged with reinvigorating her brand could easily use these methods to get her ideas approved in her organization. Similarly, a CEO who wants to get his company to innovate can use the same processes to understand how his organization works today and design alternatives that are better suited to conceiving and executing new ideas. A supply-chain manager for a manufacturer could work collaboratively with his retail partner to develop new and better ways of getting the right products to the right customer at the right time.