South on I-95

By car to Fairfield, then on to New York by train. I had a bonus with a curbside view of (part of) the Veterans Day Parade up/down Fifth Avenue, and almost stopped in at the New York Public Library to see if they had any books of interest. Then on to Times Square and the 30th floor of the Thomson Reuters Building for The Rotman School Design Thinking Experts Series.

It was an opportunity for Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman Schoolat the University of Toronto to speak about his new book, but to my mind the other speakers, Tim Brown, CEO IDEO, and Will Setliff, VP-Strategy, Insights & Innovation, Target, were more interesting. Bruce Nussbaum - now Professor of Innovation & Design at the Parson's New School of Design, was the moderator for the "conversation."

I don't think I heard anything new, maybe a little more focus on redesigning business education in North America, but that too was a plug for Rotman and its way of equipping MBAs with design thinking tools. One of the more interesting threads was about asking questions, and the power of analytical thinking to ask good questions and how this could help design. But there weren't any specific examples. I didn't hear the words "wicked problems."

I heard two interesting comments during the cocktail hour. One, from a Canadian (graduate of Rotman who had been working for Morgan Stanley in NY for the past four years, he liked Martin's view -- everything was put together in models that mangers could understand. The other from a gallery owner in NY who lamented that no one was doing the sort of art-based design she could display.

Afterwards I did a little window shopping at H&M on Fifth Avenue, then took the train back to Fairfield.