Workplace Efficiency

[nca]

I thin a lot of offices are run by both partners with ‘business sense,’ whether they have an MBA or not, as well as ‘designers.’

An design office run by MBA’s has disaster written all over it in my opinion, unless the MBA’s also have a background and experience in design, of which I think there are few because people with MBA’s tend to want to make money and live and die by efficiency. Real design isn’t always ‘efficient’ in an economic sense. There are intuitive leaps, hours of fruitless investigation and research, and rapid-cycling, ie trial and error. Trial and error alone is a business persons worse nightmare. Artists, and designers I think are trained to get the canvas dirty. You know, that moment before you start a painting or drawing when the tension is off the charts because you’re afraid of spoiling that pretty white page?

Certainly, there is an ‘economy of design,’ but letting the objectives drive the inherently subjective nature of architecture is putting the cart before the horse in my opinion.

When I took part in a summer internship program a few years ago we were encouraged to work with MBA’s. The internship was kicked off with a 10 day charette. Of the 16 students invited, we were split into 4 groups of 4. Each group included 2 landscape arch students, 1 arch student, and 1 MBA, real estate or finance student.

The immediate response by the finance or MBA student was to manage the designers and the product, but it was like putting milk back in the cow through the udders (nice visual huh). Fundamentally speaking, economics relies on a linear process of checks and balances,whereas design happens four dimensionally. I suppose what I’m getting at is that in the design phase of a project (which I could argue happens until the project is built and the some) there needs to be lots of room for adaptation and improvisation if you want to get the ‘best ‘ product. Doing so, undoubtedly sacrifices some degree of economic efficiency. Design in the 21st century is already squeezed into a neat little white cube. Efficiency rules design, I’d call it contemporary modernism.

Generally, though I agree with the previous statements. I think I am relatively ‘right-brained’, but I also think I have a good ‘market sense’ (purposely skirted the term ‘business sense’) which might make me a valuable business partner, but I have little desire to manage a business (not like the average LAmanages, but how a business manager would).

[nca]

By the way Johnson….faux! to that Pollock. **

[Thomas J. Johnson]

Then again, I’m cursed with a perfect balance of right / left hemispheres. It’s true, I’ve been tested. I can see the art and design but also the business side of things. Most people in a studio can only see one or the other and as a result those personalities are constantly at odds with each other. IT wants order and efficiency, designer wants a creative utopia. I can see both being a reality. They are not diametrically opposed. Quite the contrary. When work flows flow, it leaves MORE time for creativity. When we get bogged down in technical inefficiencies it compromises the entire process.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of my all time favorite books. It speaks at length about quality, logic and process, while recognizing the art of it all….

It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.”
— Robert M. Pirsig

“Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness. ”
— Robert M. Pirsig

“The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.”
— Robert M. Pirsig

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower.”
— Robert M. Pirsig

“It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
— Robert M. Pirsig

“This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that’s what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.”
— Robert M. Pirsig

“The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.”
— Robert M. Pirsig

“Is it hard?’
Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.”
— Robert M. Pirsig

[Thomas J. Johnson]

Actually Ace, it is a Pollock; “Untitled [Silver over Black, White, Yellow, and Red]” (1948).

Unless you were trying to make a funny about my statement being a faux pas (faux Pollock)… in which case, I say, “sacred cows are the most delicious…”

[nca]

I was just guessing really, I’m not that clever. I was thinking it looked like the one on the cover of that film about the woman who finds the Pollock in a garage sale.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_m47RlRiYoAg/S7BXMxMZJSI/AAAAAAAAGzE/AZxGpjdSqLc/s1600/who_the_bleep_is_jackson_pollock.jpg

[nca]

“Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and the artist works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed.”

~Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance

Most people in a studio can only see one or the other and as a result those personalities are constantly at odds with each other.

I don’t think it’s so much that people can’t see the other side, it’s that they believe one should have a higher priority over the other.

[Andrew Garulay, RLA]

Hmmm. In a week where I am working feverishly to respond to the deadline of the day each day after begging over and over for input on each of these projects and for several weeks have constantly been making review prints that disappear:

If you are a manager, efficiency dies when you do not manage and delegate to your personnel and only concentrate on trying to do everything yourself!

Trying to do everything yourself is not management unless you have no help. Employees are like high priced software, they are an investment when you utilize them correctly, and an expense when you do not.

IF you want to micromanage the project, you MUST micromanage the personnel as well. Give your employees input OR give them leash length. You can’t have it both ways.

I recall from my Professional Office Practice class that this is the Autocrat style of management. It is much different than what I have been used to in the past. I do have to say that this office thrives while all similar ones around us are struggling with shortened hours and layoffs. My warning to anyone who practices this is that it will be very difficult to keep the seats filled in an expanding economy.

[John.Dallinga]

A quick thought on the MBA issue…

I was required to take two semesters of professional practice in my fifth year and was taught by two very different people (one who was my boss at the time). The first was aimed more at architects and was taught by an MBA with little or no design experience, but heads up large institutional projects such as the Philadelphia Convention Center Addition. The latter was one of the founding principal of a small LA firm with much more small business experience.

The biggest difference between the two was the size of the firms they ran. When you have four or five principals to handle clients and management “underlings”, it can be helpful to have someone there to “keep score” and make sure things stay on track. When you are in a smaller office and a principal is handling marketing, project management, payroll, and quality control in addition to initiating projects, a generalist is needed to be able to contribute, especially when faced with heavy competition for work and a depleting workload in-house.

[Andrew Garulay, RLA]

Very true.

There is so much diversity that there are so many things that can fit or conflict from one office to another.

[Author]

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