Friday, July 06, 2007

Intelligent Design: The Scientific Theory That Improves Your Bottom Line

I see that William Dembski, fresh from raking in thousands of dollars for not testifying in the Dover trial, has now branched out into explaining his business savvy to the masses. Look at this announcement for a conference at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for a conference entitled "Intelligent Design in Business Practice: How design assumptions impact management, leadership & organization".

This page has more details. Since ill-conceived ideas like this have a history of vanishing without a trace, I'll repeat the description below:

Successful business leaders are intelligent designers, guiding organizations along innovative paths to achieve ends otherwise unattainable. Intelligent designers are not micromanagers, who short-circuit the freedom and creativity that organizations need to thrive. At the same time, intelligent designers do not encourage unbridled autonomy, which sets organizations adrift, causing them to lose focus and discipline. By striking a proper balance between guidance and autonomy, intelligent designers promote a synergy between organization and leadership that can actualize undreamt possibilities. Intelligent design for now is best known as a scientific alternative to Darwinian and self-organizational approaches to biological origins. This conference brings together scholars and business leaders to discuss the implications of intelligent design for business practice. In particular, this conference will explore how design principles shape the beliefs of leaders about the people they lead, the nexus of innovation, the incentives to entrepreneurship, and the methods for managing organizational change. The overarching theme of this conference is "the business leader as intelligent designer."

Wow. A conference not to miss! Probably they can have breakout sessions entitled "Destroying Darwinism for fun and profit", "God wants you to be rich", and "Street theater: fruitful career choice?"

8 comments:

RBH said...

Well, he got all the (now somewhat dated) buzzwords in there: innovative, creativity, synergy, actualize, nexus of innovation, and so on. Pity that ID doesn't address any of those.

Eamon Knight said...

Geez, Dumbski must be desperate for attention. Remove the one sentence about "Darwinian", and it reads like the blurb for every other biz-management seminar, with "intelligent design" being dropped in as the interchangeable buzzword-du-jour.

Anonymous said...

Oh those horrible dumb Darwinists they don't like intelligently designing things. Intelligent Design is much better at intelligently designing than Darwinists, it's right there in the name... "Intelligent Design"! That means they like unintelligently designing and the Darwinians don't, lol.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for letting my comment through Mr. Shallit. Sadly, I can't make any sense out of what I said there. I think it may have been way beyond nappy time for me. :-) You have a nice day.

Paul said...

WTF does Dembski know about business?

Mark said...

For Paul--About as much as he knows about biology.
And if ID doesn't work out as economic philosophy, perhaps Willy D can try to sell it as a weight-loss system.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of business news, will you be commenting on the recent Laffer curve published in the Wall Street Journal?

Anonymous said...

I'm assuming that Dembski designed the agenda to include serving beans for lunch, prior to the afternoon break-out sessions on How To Be Flatulant For Fun and Profit.