Читать книгу Voices of Design Leadership - Ken Sanders - Страница 13

You can only be a great design firm if you’re a great business. You can focus only on design for a short period of time, but if you want long-term excellence, you have to also accomplish business excellence as well.

– Phil Harrison

During my tenure at ZGF during the 1990s, my Partner Bob Packard and I visited the University of Oregon School of Architecture annually to participate as guest speakers in a course on practice management. Together, we represented a “large” firm, while a different architect each year represented a “small” firm. And each year, the small-firm architect would say to the students something like: “Well, you already know you didn’t choose architecture to make money. You have a higher calling.”

Bob and I were always disheartened to hear this. We would politely offer the students an alternative perspective: it is definitely possible – although not guaranteed – to earn a good living and make the world a better place through design at the same time. The two aspirations are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, each strongly reinforces the other. But it begins with belief. If one believes it is not possible to make a good living as an architect, then it is not possible. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To this day, many architecture and design students appear to be influenced by this false belief. Even among some experienced design leaders, a stubborn attitude exists that it is simply not possible, or too difficult, to be an exceptional design firm and a strong business at the same time. This attitude shows up in an old joke where one architect asks another: “What would you do if you won a million dollars in the lottery?” To which the other architect responds, “Well, I guess I would keep being an architect until it was all gone.”

Fortunately, every firm I worked for during my career have leaders who understand that good business reinforces good design, and vice versa. Together they create synergy: a whole greater than the sum of its parts. As a design leader, it is critically important that everyone in your firm understands this.

Is there day-to-day tension between the two? Within project teams? With clients? With consultants? Of course. And leadership decisions that resolve that tension require thoughtful judgment. But tension notwithstanding, design leaders must start with an attitude that achieving excellence in both is essential to long-term success.