Jenny Dearborn: Soft Skills Will Be Essential for Future Careers

The September issue of the Harvard Business Review features a cover story on design thinking's coming of age. We have been applying design thinking within SAP for the past 10 years, and I've witnessed the growth of this human-centered approach to innovation first hand. Design thinking is, as the HBR piece points out, "the best tool we have for … developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture." This means businesses are doing more to learn about their customers by interacting directly with them. Meanwhile, technology is making it possible to know exponentially more about a customer.