What is a Design Attitude and Why Would a Manager Care?

Haven't read the author's book, but the ideas sound very much like Christopher Alexander's work in systemizing collaborative design. If you're not familiar, i highly recommend these:

http://www.google.com/books?id=Kh3T3XFUfPQC&printsec=fro...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Experiment

and finally: http://web.archive.org/web/20070528030431/http://www.rainmag...

basically, alexander pointed out back in the 60s/70s that the simplest design problems, when approached from a conscious design perspective & properly considered, spiral out to millions of small relationships that are well beyond any one human's grasp. and so he formulates a system for organizing the people involved with the project & defining a hierarchy that enables the big problems to be settled before the small problems & for individual domain specific/'problem owners' to be established at the right place within overall the process.

that said, for all the beauty in his theories, in practice (in architecture at least) political issues often affect the design process far more significantly than he anticipated - which is why this article is interesting, as it addresses the political value of this approach first.

+1 for social hacking.

"...humans have a limited cognitive capacity for reasoning when searching for a solution within a problem space. Given the relatively small size of our brain’s working memory, we can only consider a few aspects of any situation and can only analyze them in a few ways... The first step in any problem-solving episode is representing the problem, and to a large extent, that representation has the solution hidden within it (pp. 8-9)."

Always love a good economics quote -- behavioral economics, cognitive costs and etc are, generally speaking, awesome topics. See recent edge posting: http://edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/class4.html

Not a designer so the rest of the article doesn't apply to me as much...