Design

From 1998 to 2002 Fred Collopy and Richard Boland, professors at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, had the privilege to work with architect Frank Gehry on the design of their new building. Gehry is generally considered one of the most important architects of our time, whose iconic and innovative buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao draw visitors from all over the world. Boland and Collopy’s collaboration with the architect allowed them to experience first-hand how he and his partners work and approach problems. It was an inspirational episode for them, which opened their eyes to a very different mindset from the one they were instilling in their management students. From working with Frank Gehry, Boland and Collopy developed the view that ‘if managers adopted a design attitude, the world of business would be different and better’.1 At the occasion of the opening of the Peter B. Lewis Building in June 2002, they assembled scholars, artists (Frank Gehry among them) and managers for a workshop entitled ‘Managing as Designing’. This workshop and the book that resulted from it2 were very influential in casting a new light on organizational design,3 an academic subject that until then seemed to have gotten stuck somewhere halfway through the twentieth century.