Idris Mootee

Sometimes I wonder how much progress we’ve actually made over the last 50 years. In Saudi Arabia, women are still not allowed to drive, along with many other things. Today, a group of Saudi women have taken to the streets in their cars on a day of collective protest against the ban on female drivers. I am sure they will be getting threats of all kinds and if we’re talking about human rights let's start with this. There were about 17,000 people who signed a petition calling for women to be allowed to drive.

For all those cash-rich companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook, there is a race to hire celebrity architects to design their headquarters. Google headquarters consists of nine angled buildings connected by bridges. Reportedly, the idea was based on data collected from Google employees’ behavior which then translated into some kind of architectural algorithm that should produce “casual collisions” to make innovation happen more often. 

“Design Thinking” has gone beyond fashionable in the design industry, but now quickly getting into management circles and even boardrooms. B-schools are tapping into this new trend and but many are yet to understand what it means and its applications. The idea of management that we teach in B-schools was originally designed for a set of very different kind of needs - managing repetitive tasks, improving economic efficiency and labor productivity and maximizing scale.