Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - August 18, 2011
Editor's Note: frog Senior Strategist Tanya Khakbaz authored this as a continuation to an earlier post. In her last post, she described how she entered the design industry as an MBA, having been exposed to the fanfare and excitement of design thinking that is dominant in business schools today. As a strategist working on teams with designers, Tanya has learned several lessons about what it takes to make the business-design partnership work, which she continues to share in this post.
PROBLEM-SOLVING: Top-down thinking has its limits
As a former management consultant, I was conditioned to think “top-down.” We generated hypotheses at the start of the project that we adjusted depending on the results of the analysis. Though we were creative within a framework, we relied heavily on these frameworks to ensure that we were thinking about the problem in a systematic and exhaustive way.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - August 16, 2011
Editor's Note: frog Senior Strategist Tanya Khakbaz authored this post to share her own experience transitioning from being an MBA to life in the trenches at an innovation firm. At frog, Tanya works with design teams to incorporate the business and market perspective into the design process. She has worked on a diverse set of frog projects, from ATM redesign for a large bank to digital media strategy for a media conglomerate. Before joining frog, Tanya worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. She received her MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and her undergraduate degree in Economics with distinction from Stanford University.
(Part Two here)
PART ONE
When I was an MBA student at Harvard Business School (HBS), there were several companies that drew crowds of over-eager students to their recruiting presentations. Students would claw their way into classrooms to snatch a seat, and after the presentation, stay late to elbow their way to speak to the presenters. These sought-after potential employers were the usual suspects: venture capital and private equity firms, hedge funds, top-tier management consulting companies. However, there was one industry whose companies only started to participate in recruiting, but nonetheless generated Justin Bieber-like fanfare: design consulting.
Blog Amphibious
By Adam Richardson - February 19, 2010
We recently hosted one of a series of workshops that we do at frog for IESE, the highly-regarded business school in Barcelona, and it was interesting to see that several challenges emerged as common for the participating companies.
