I think we should distinguish between two types of management here.
There's managing a design group or team, and then there's managing a
business. These are different things, although there is overlap. The
difference is that managing a business encompasses everything that
managing a design team does, plus a lot of other stuff:
* Marketing & Advertising
* Accounting and Taxes
* Infrastructure, Physical Plant, and Technology
* Business Development, Mergers and Aquisitions, Strategic partnerships
* Sales and distribution, supply chain management
* Legal
* etc.
This is what MBAs usually mean by "management". Managing a design
team is qualitatively narrower in scope than managing a business. It
just is. When business people talk about management at a strategic
level, they're not thinking about majors and sergeants, they're
thinking colonels and generals.
What's more, I'm not sure that managing a design team requires much
"business-specific" education anyway. It takes a lot of talent and
the ability to do many things other than hands-on design, of course.
But most designers, I think, can learn to manage designers simply by
working with other designers and having the genuine desire to take
responsibility for and take charge of people and projects.
Moving from designing stuff to managing a design team requires that
you adjust your priorities a little bit, and take on new
responsibilities and develop new skills. But moving from managing a
design team to managing a business of any substantial size (50+)
requires a profound and fundamental change of focus, I think, a
change that for almost anyone who tries will putt hands-on design,
and even intimate design team management, far into the background.
Many designers are capable of this, but not as many as I would like
to see. Perhaps it is because, as Bruce Nussbaum pointed out (in his
response to my response to his response to my response to his
article), design is so much fun and spiritually satisfying that so
many of us hate to push it far to the side in order to take on the
kind of responsibilities managing a business entails.
-Cf
Christopher Fahey
____________________________
Behavior
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com
me: http://www.graphpaper.com
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