Biography
Jeanne M. Liedtka is a faculty member at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business and former chief learning officer at United Technologies Corporation, where she was responsible for overseeing all activities associated with corporate learning and development for the Fortune 50 corporation, including executive education, career development processes, employer-sponsored education and learning portal and web-based activities.
At Darden, where she formerly served as associate dean of the MBA program and as executive director of the Batten Institute, Jeanne works with both MBAs and executives in the areas of design thinking, innovation and leading growth. Her passion is exploring how organizations can engage employees at every level in thinking creatively about the design of powerful futures.
Her most recent books
are The Catalyst; How You Can Lead Extraordinary Growth (winner of the Business
Week best innovation books of 2009), Designing for Growth: A design
thinking tool kit for managers (winner of the 1800 CEO READ best management
book of 2011), and The Physics of Business Growth. She has a forthcoming
book, Solving Business Problems with Design.
Expertise
Leading Growth
Design Thinking
Corporate Innovation
MBA Courses
Corporate Innovation and Design Experience
Strategy as Design (Barcelona GBE)
Strategic Thinking
Executive Education Courses
The Physics of Business Growth
Design Thinking
About Design Thinking
Design thinking is a hot topic today in the business world. Managers are urged to follow the mindset and approaches of designers to develop innovative products, processes, and business models that can fuel growth and differentiate companies in crowded markets.
But for all the noise this trend has generated, and for all the attention given to the likes of Apple and P&G—perhaps the most widely touted examples of organizations that have transformed themselves around design principles—design thinking has not been easy to pin down. For all those business managers for whom design thinking seems something of a mystery, Darden professor Jeanne Liedtka and Peer Insight cofounder and CEO Tim Ogilvie offer some encouraging words: If you’re a leader of innovation in any kind of organization, they claim, you’ve probably been practicing design thinking all along.
In Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers (Columbia University Press, June 2011), Liedtka and Ogilvie demystify design thinking by laying it out as a coherent, systematic problem-solving process and introducing managers in a wide variety of companies who have used design thinking to grow their businesses. If CPAs can learn how to use this approach, the authors argue, anyone can.