• Ethos and Culture of Design
• Future of Managing as Design
• Design of corporate citizenship, sustainability, social entrepreneurship
• The 80% Design Conundrum

Businesses everywhere are discovering the power and promise of design and increasingly managers and management schools are turning to architects, creative artists, graphic specialists, product designers, open source communities, nature’s design genius, and performing artists as inspired models for innovation, improvisational leadership and collaborative designing. New volumes such as Managing as Designing (Boland and Colony, 2004); Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work (Austin and Devin, 2003); Discovering Design (Buchanan and Margolis, 2000); Designing Information and Organizations With a Positive Lens (Avital, Boland, and Cooperrider’, 2008) are portraying the essence of management, not so much as a science of rational decisions within a known and stable world but, instead, as the art of generating design visions, rapid prototypes, feedback loops, and interactive pathways embedded within an increasingly uncertain and dynamic world. Indeed Nobel Laureate Herb Simons outline the three pillars of management as “intelligence,” “choice,” and “design”—yet somehow, over the years, the design pillar was conspicuously glossed over in favor of a decision-analytic stance. Why don’t our management schools, for example, look like design studios, alive with hot interdisciplinary teams and innovation labs, bringing together the latest and best in applied creativity and “the science of the artificial”? What might managers learn from an iconoclastic architect such as William McDonough, or an acclaimed design firm such as IDEO, or the whole field of bio-mimicry where innovation is elevated and inspired by nature? How might the design mind, and its many disciplines, enlarge our conception of good managing, especially as it relates to the next stages of corporate citizenship and the game-changing potentials of sustainable value? Equally important is the question’s reversal: how might the domains of corporate citizenship and sustainable value transform design—after all, isn’t it a field, as researchers have estimated, where 80% of the social and ecological footprint of a product, service or system is determined in the design phase?

• Finding Leverage Points for System Change
• Designing Forums for Transformational Cooperation
• Designing System Change from Everywhere
• The Design and Re-design of the Concept of the Corporation

In his most recent volume Common Wealth, the macro-economist Jeffery Sachs describes the privileged moment we live in: "Ours is the generation that can eradicate extreme poverty, turn the tide against climate change, and head off the thoughtless extinction of other species."

From the economist's perspective these are not utopian goals. The investments, Sachs argues, are tiny in comparison to the returns. With less than one percent of the rich world’s income, for example, an economic cycle of empowerment can be generated where nobody has to die of poverty. The solutions, in many instances, are all there. The resources, likewise, are all there. But questions of system-wide change remain, especially concerning the means and methods for building global cooperative capacity for overcoming classic collective action dilemmas.

Likewise in the realm of sustainable business, it is increasingly clear that we’re no longer lacking in isolated sustainability solutions. Everyone, in some manner or another, is going green or socially responsible. Our greater challenge lies in system-wide design—for creating more widespread commonwealth and for discovering the ways of overcoming the challenges of collaborative creativity across multi-stakeholder supply chains, entire industries, and larger whole systems.

Of course it is also true that the design of the positive sustainable future will emerge out of numberless diverse acts of courage and innovation; successful small steps that influence the systems to which we are connected. But today's big prizes and most interesting questions—whether for a Wal-Mart seeking to catalyze a profitable sustainability revolution across a vast range of stakeholder networks, or an industry association attempting to build an industry-wide system that is part of the solution, or a global society that can turn gridlock into inspirational innovation—involve the questions of change at larger and larger scales of wholeness. Each of these, we are now clear, involves succeeding in the art of system-wide design and transformation

In many ways, implementing the sustainable future that we envision requires extraordinary abilities for massive, scaled-up innovation—multi-stakeholder and interdisciplinary design modalities focused on enduring, systemic change. Jeffery Sachs puts the case persuasively. The single most important variable affecting our fate is global cooperation and, as he writes, “it's a fundamental point of blinding simplicity.” It's also the central executive question faced by every CEO. Whether we are talking about designing a sustainable enterprise with a 67,000 person telecommunications firm, or seeking to scale up micro-enterprise solutions such as the Millennium Development Villages concept, the pervasive question looms large: what do we know about change at the scale of the whole?

• New Designs for Business Schools
• Action-Based Responsible Management Education
• Sustainability and Management Education

Shortly before he passed away Peter Drucker, in a concise and remarkable few words, re-united management strategy and social responsibility into one powerful and integral whole when he said: “I wrote about it many years ago…‘that every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise’—just waiting for the innovation, the pragmatism, and the strategic capacity of great companies to aim higher.” 8 Along this dimension, of envisioning a truly strategic mindset toward global citizenship, the question must be asked: when judged in relationship to the needs and opportunities of our times, how well is management education doing and, more importantly, where are the innovations in curricula, values, methods, research agendas, partnerships and interdisciplinary dialogues? If anything imaginable were possible, how might we re-imagine and design a new kind of responsible management education—one that enables every manager to turn social and global issues into bona-fide business opportunities (actually creating the business case) while simultaneously building a more inclusive and sustainable global economy?