Voices of Design Leadership. Ken Sanders
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client relationships are not about satisfaction. They are built on trust, friendship, loyalty, and even love. Both Doss and Deanne are examples of successful design leaders with clients who have no problem publicly showing affection toward them. Do yours?
Lehman Brothers
Joe Brancato is Co-Managing Principal of Gensler’s Northeast and Latin America regions and currently serves as Chair of the firm’s Board of Directors. A remarkable client experience story involving Joe began during the global financial crisis.
One Sunday afternoon, Joe was watching football at the home of his client and good friend, a senior real estate executive at Lehman Brothers. The date was Sunday, September 14, 2008. The New York Giants dominated the St. Louis Rams that day, 41–13. But the biggest news broke during the game: Lehman Brothers was planning to file for bankruptcy the following morning. At the time of its collapse, the company was the fourth-largest investment bank in the US, with over 25,000 employees.
Imagine yourself at the home of your good friend – a husband and father – as he watched most of his retirement savings and his job vanish before his eyes. The possibility of future Gensler projects with Lehman Brothers disappeared as well. But the relationship did not. Joe kept in touch with his friend and always returned his calls. After a few months, Joe helped him land a real estate job at a smaller firm – at less compensation – but his friend was grateful for Joe’s help.
His friend subsequently moved on to a better position at another company, and a couple of years later, Joe let him know about a Vice President of Real Estate position opening up at one of the top financial services firms in New York. With Joe’s encouragement and support, his friend applied for the job and was hired. Today, that firm is one of Gensler’s top financial services clients.
Years later, Joe’s friend told him that after the loss of his job, he made calls to other architects as well. But Joe was the only one who always returned them. The story is an illustration of Joe’s loyalty to his friend as well as a tough commentary about architects who pay attention to clients only when they have projects in the pipeline.
The strongest client relationships always extend beyond the project at hand. Just ask yourself two questions. How many of your clients are good friends? And how much attention do you pay to them when they don’t have work for you?
T-shaped Professionals
Collaboration across disciplines is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective – to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth.
– Tim Brown2
“T-shaped” describes a leader with deep expertise in one or more disciplines who also is well-versed at integrating cross-disciplinary teams. The vertical stroke of the letter T represents expertise, while the horizontal stroke represents integration. A T-shaped professional is a vertical expert and a horizontal integrator.
Early in their careers, design professionals typically develop expertise in one or more specialty areas. These might include conceptual design, digital technology, marketing, project management, construction documents, specifications, or others. Later, they may focus on different project types or market sectors: education, sports, retail, hospitality, residential, etcetera. Over time, they are recognized as experts and market leaders. Integrators, on the other hand, see a broader playing field and work to combine expertise in ways that unlock innovation and value.
Two of the world’s most impactful T-shaped leaders are Dr. Jennifer Doudna3 of the University of California at Berkeley and her French collaborator Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier, who jointly won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The two leaders and their research teams collaborated to develop CRISPR, the gene-editing technology that saw its first significant commercial application in testing and diagnosis of COVID-19. Like many scientific innovations, CRISPR is largely the result of discipline integration: bringing together expertise from chemistry, biology, physics, and manufacturing-at-scale to confront an unprecedented global pandemic.
Each of the design leaders profiled in this book can also be considered T-shaped. Barbara Bouza, President of Walt Disney Imagineering (Chapter 5), leads an integrated design-build organization with over 100 different disciplines. Billie Faircloth, leader of the transdisciplinary research team at KieranTimberlake (Chapter 10), is a research expert and integrator. Nader Tehrani, the founder of NADAAA and Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union (Chapter 15), thoughtfully integrates the acts of design and making within his professional practice and academic curricula.
In multi-discipline design firms, T-shaped professionals are essential. Even within single-discipline firms, most teams need to integrate the expertise provided by external consultants. In either case, T-shaped professionals play critical roles in sponsoring design innovation.
The 3D-Printed House
A personal story illustrating this idea began with an unexpected phone call in 2014 from Diane Hoskins, co-CEO at Gensler. She had learned of a potential project involving Winsun Global, a Chinese construction firm and inventor of a large-scale proprietary 3D printing system, and the Dubai Future Foundation (DFF), who was interested in exploring new methods of developing mass-produced housing that were less dependent on imported labor.
Given my background in leading design technology, my prefabrication experience working with clients such as Google and CitizenM, and my global relationships across Gensler, Diane thought the project might a good fit for me. She asked: “Would you like to pursue this?” My first thought and response: “Absolutely!”
Diane shared her contacts and we concluded our brief phone call. My immediate second thought: “How am I going to pull this off?” It was a question borne not of apprehension, but of curiosity. I did not know the answer, but I was confident I could assemble a strong team to solve the problem.
I again reached out to Xiaomei Lee, now the Managing Director in Shanghai, to identify a team to work with Winsun in China. She tapped Project Architect Qiu Sheng and Project Manager Wei Wang. I also reached out to the Costa Rica office, who had prior experience designing prefabricated housing units using shipping containers. Led by the amazingly talented Richard Hammond, the Costa Rica team included Jose Leiva, Andres Lara, Mariana Madriz, and Desiree Vargas. In Chicago, we brought in computational geometry design experts who had extensive experience with Rhino and Grasshopper, including Jorge Barerro, Daniel Craven, and Brent Watanabe. Todd Desmarais from Chicago was assigned overall project management responsibilities, and Tareq Abu-Sukheila, a Principal in Gensler’s Abu Dhabi office, served as liaison with DFF. We also engaged our trusted partners Thornton Tomasetti for structural engineering and Syska Hennessey for mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) engineering.
The Gensler Design Excellence Awards (GDEA) jury discussing the 3D-Printed House prototype design at the 2015 Gensler Principals Meeting in San Francisco. Photo Credit: Ken Sanders.
After developing multiple design iterations, the team finalized a prototype design using 3D-printed concrete “cassettes” that could be efficiently packaged and transported in standard shipping containers. Using Winsun’s 3D printing system, the prototype design was eventually deployed in a demonstration project in Abu Dhabi for a 2,600 square foot (242 square meter) “office building of the future.” For that project, the team also collaborated with a talented local firm, Illa Design, who was responsible for the design of the interior finishes, furnishings, and expanded polystyrene insulation and exterior plaster system.