Actually, the quote I am making light of is:
"If you don't get the magazine from the Rotman School of Management, you're making a mistake."
-Bruce Nussbaum, Assistant Managing Editor, BusinessWeek
Nussbaum's admonition is used by the University of Toronto to promote its business school magazine, but strikes me as oddly worded, or faint praise. As if reading the magazine was avoiding a mistake, but nothing beyond that (e.g. informative, stimulating, etc). Which is too bad, because it's actually an interesting, well presented periodical, with an emphasis on design and its relationship with business.
The current issue, Winter 2008 (recent issues are available as PDFs), espeically, may interest design researchers and designers. Of particular note, Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO authored Informing our Intuition - Design Research for Radical Innovation (p. 52 of the PDF/p. 54 of the print magazine). Like many design research articles targeted at business readers, the content is heavy on definitions and clarifications of terms - for example the differentiation between quantitative and qualitative research:
"...effective research is not just about analysisof objective evidence – there isn’t any directly applicable data anyway; it’s also about the synthesis of evidence, recognition of emergent patterns, empathic connection to people’s motivations and behaviours, exploration of analogies and extreme cases, and intuitive interpretation of information and impressions from multiple sources. This type of approach is now often referred to as ‘design research’ to differentiate it from purely analytic methods."
The Winter issue also contains several articles related to applying 'design thinking' in the context of business. And the Idea Exchange section consists of about a dozen, brief Q&As with thought leaders around the theme of thinking. Ultimately the domain content only goes so far - an experienced design researcher is unlikely to learn much about his/her own field - but it's useful for understanding how to relate and communicate to the business world.
Rotman also walks the walk on design, with strong visual presentation and readability. You could of course, read/print the PDF versions online for free, rather than paying the $99(Canadian) subscription fee, but given the elegance of the format and the relevance of the content, perhaps you'd be making a mistake.
