Drucker and User-Centeredness
27
April
While I was reading Tims Brown’s “definition” of design thinking for the x-time now, I actually never checked his reference to Peter Drucker. Drucker is, according to wikipedia the “best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of management theory and practice”. True or not, I was quite curious about what he wrote on the subject so I searched his book, “The Essential Drucker” for converting need into demand and found the following in the chapter entitled “The Purpose of Business”:
“It demands that business start out with the needs, the realities, the values of the consumer. It demands that business base its reward on its contribution to the customer…. It will force business to become market-focused in their actions as well as in their pronouncements.” (p. 16)
Seems like a quite strong statement, taking Drucker’s reputation into account. But be aware that, also its sounds like a great statement for user-centered design, the argument was done to clarify the role of marketing and innovation (the “only two” basic functions of a business, according to Drucker).
Drucker rocks! :-)
And – as you may have noticed – isn’t it so that all academic areas of study tend to include all other, or at least all related, academic areas of study?! So design theorists might say that innovation is a subset of design. Operation researchers will say that innovation management is part of operations (typically viewed as an innovation “process”). Strategists will say that innovation is part of strategic management. Marketing will say that design, innovation and strategy are part of marketing. And innovation scholars will include most of it in innovation management. Et cetera. :-)
I like to think of the different subject as different perspectives on a similar core problem. And just like different positions and focus-depths of a camera lens will highlight certain features of a motive but also include related features with less detail, different management fields tend to focus on different features of the problem, but to different degrees also include many of the related aspects of the problem. (I guess the core problem for our fields tend to be the “problem of achieving profit”.)
Btw, I’ve noticed that this phenomenon can even be generalized to much broader fields – such as math, physics, philosophy etc. For example: Take a look at these definitions of the respective fields from Wikipedia and think about what’s not included in each subject. :-)
“Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, and change”
Physics…. “is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.”
“Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems… It is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument.”