Designing businesses is, in essence, designing human organizations to produce the systems, services, and products. The idea that design firms such as IDEO, Nielsen Norman, and the Policy Lab are addressing these problems from a design perspective anchored in the four orders of design is new. Management consultants and management experts are now working from the design thinking perspective. This is also new. Organization design is not new. While organization design as a specific term in management dates back to the 1940s, the idea of organization design is far older. The purposeful design of organizations for human purposes is as old as the first groups of people who organized governments and governance based on customary law and local versions of black- letter law. The first writings on organization theory are embedded in documents that we think of as philosophy, religion, or political science. This is in part because early writings on the organization and conduct of life in all its aspects were framed in a general wisdom literature. It is also because many early thinkers explicitly believed that it was impossible to separate out the different parts of life and human experience

Many early documents on organization did not involve explicit reflection on how organizations function but served as partial and normative instructions on organizing tribes, religious behavior, cultures, or societies. Along with guides to individual behavior, the first five books of the Bible also contain extensive instructions on how to organize public life, conduct legal trials, perform worship, and organize the social systems that make these activities possible. In Exodus 18:13-26, for example, Moses’s father- in-law Metro offers advice on how to delegate authority that leads to the first judicial system of the twelve tribes. Exodus 29:1-37 and Leviticus 8:1-36 prescribe the ceremonial consecration of the priesthood and establishes the legitimate line of succession for priests. Deuteronomy prescribes organizational norms for law courts and kings, requirements for government leaders, and laws of succession. As early as 1000 BC, the Egyptians had the equivalent of a civil service handbook that is preserved in fragmentary form as The Instructions of Amenemopet. Written as a training manual for Egyptian civil servants and a guide to wise professional practice, fragments of this document survive in the Bible. We can still read traces of Amenemopet’s advice to young managers in the Book of Proverbs (22:17–24:22)