Managing as Designing

The Association of Computing Machinery (www.acm.org) has an on-line reading service. The first book that caught my eye was Managing as Designing edited by Richard J. Borland and Fred Collopy. This is one of those rare business books that actually resonates with me. Most business books, other than technical texts about cost accounting and risk management, are much too high level. Full of platitudes and woolly headed suggestions about how to improve some errant process.

This book makes the conjecture that management is actually a "design" discipline. If managers adopt a design attitude, the world of business would be different and better. Managers would approach problems with a sensibility that swept in the broadest array of influences to shape inspiring and energizing designs for products, services, and processes that are profitable and humanly satisfying.

These words are used by many of the agile advocates, without any suggestion of how to actually deliver on the promise. Managing as Designing shows how to put the platitudes into practice.

It's time every agilest started speaking in terms of "actionable outcomes," "practices" targeted at specific problems and thinking like a building architect as described in this book.