Coalesse recently hosted an event at the Steelcase WorkLife Center in Santa Monica to introduce their new indoor/outdoor furniture collection - EMU.
As an active member of Upward Gravity, I attended Community Day at Environmental Charter High School and spent a couple of hours touring their campus and learning about what and how they learn. I was truly inspired!
For several days this winter, mine has been cold, dark and rainy. As we approach Valentine's Day, red and pink abound! Color sets a mood. Color influences our emotions. We respond to color whether in fashion, healthcare environments, personal electronics or office furnishings. Do these colors chronicle our current time, reflect our recent past or influence our future? Each year Pantone ® designates a Color of the Year. Here is a look at the Pantone ® Color of the Year for the past five years:
KPCC was a project that started long ago in the world of custom office furniture. It was four years ago when I first attended a meeting at the architecture firm, Chu + Gooding. When I arrived at their office I could barely concentrate on the task at hand due to the lollapalooza of interesting mock-ups, posters, magazine images and samples that adorned the walls of their studio. I may have appeared distracted or come across as rude, but it was a feast for the eyes and mind.
As we worked our way through the design concept, Annie pushed for a creative way to combine the functional items required in a workstation. The client had requested overhead cabinets. These usually end up creating an oppressive, heavy datum line that dominates the space. So to reduce this effect, we designed the spine panels so that our installation crew could install the overheads at random, varying heights. This created an undulating cityscape appearance in the space.
So much for the holidays! It's on to 2010. We were traveling just before Christmas. On a business trip to Oakland the week before, I saw this graffiti on the men's room wall at Luka's, a really wonderful local taproom (Anything with roasted beets there is fabulous. It is an oasis.). The three key ingredients of a successful holiday season were there on the wall: make it merry, make sure you tip and Michigan rules! Well, two out of three. I know I felt merrier after reading it. I suppose the blurred 'I heart...' phrase could represent goodwill - but that might be stretching it.
'Twas the night before New Year's
The Griswolds...you know, the family from the movie who brought holiday decorations to a whole new level - every neighborhood has them. Sometimes the "Griswolds" can turn a whole street into enough of a Wonderland that a full legal disclosure is needed when a family purchases a property on that street!
One of the business consultants I work with just sent me an email under the above title. I love it! It was in the context of his trip back to the Midwest at the onset of the current winter storm out there, but for me it is a metaphor. I told you, I get inspired by the ordinary sometimes.
So, the holiday season is upon us here at Tangram Interiors. Parties, corporate gifts or statements of benevolent intent are almost daily events now. Those two gold antelopes on the B&B Italia table in our foyer at work. 'Tis the season!
So, are you in the season? Are you decorating, or not? There is a wave of illness this year, with every fifth person I come across being severely under the weather. How are you holding up? Does your inside match the festive outside, or vice versa?
This season brings added pressures to us in business. How’s retail doing? What are the seasonal indicators up to? Can I get checks out of that customer before the holidays? How is my own business doing? And then, there is the idea that we are suddenly supposed to have Norman Rockwellian perfect family lives at the holidays. In the midst of work, commuting, economic challenges and fears and an ever-encroaching workload. Happy holidays!
So, there is an edge this time of year and you see it everywhere. Watch for it! This season gives us a glimpse into sides of our associates, staff, customers and vendors that we may rarely see. The pressures of the holiday bring the daily griefs, despairs, joys and triumphs to the surface much more quickly and you can see people in a clearer light. Opportunities will arise to build quality relationships if we are willing to engage others with honesty and compassion.
I have learned to not take the holiday season at face value, but to use this time to notice opportunities for strengthening bonds and creating new relationships. All it takes is a little openness and honesty.
What is your top salesperson up to? Your top customer? Your staff? Watch for the signals, and look for the chance to be there for them.
After all the holidays only come once a year!
There is one of those old stories about the company President and the young, new manager. The young guy asks the senior guy how to be successful, and the President says, “Good decisions” and glares back at him. Awkward pause. The young guy thinks about it and ask back, “Excuse me, sir, but how do I learn to make good decisions?”. The President fires back, “Bad decisions!”.
I just got back to the Studio from an afternoon of prototyping felt tack panels at our upholsterer. For one of our current custom office furniture projects, the architect has a desire to create interior tack panels with horizontal stripes. 
We arrived at a possible solution. Gustavo, the factory manager, refurbishes old vintage cars. He suggested we treat the felt panels like vintage car seats - curved, detailed stitching, piping - picture a 1959 Impala or a 1965 Falcon. We landed on a 3/4" diameter piping strip stacked horizontally with a felt cover. Gustavo and I set out to the sewing machines to see if this would work. By horizontally stacking the piping and stitching it between two layers of felt I think we have a close facsimile to the British carpet!
This last week has been intense. I am not usually the guy out entertaining in our office furnishings company, but this week I had several evening events plus the usual deadlines to get to.
So, by Friday, I was ready for some down-time over the weekend. Winston Churchill said that it is not enough to just not do what you do all week to unwind. You need to DO something different. So I slept in, did mindless tasks around the house, took a yoga class with my wife, got some surf, wandered around Home Depot and Trader Joe’s, and came home to create dinner. For me, that is unwinding. I put the Food Network on in the background.
One of the TV chefs was contrasting the French way of creating a meal with the American. In France, you go to the market, find what is fresh, buy it and create something wonderful from it. In America, you start with a recipe, make a list, then go to the market and go crazy trying to find everything on the list so you can cook from the recipe.
This was one of those realizations. I mean you can do both, but look at the power that is released when you notice what is going on around you and use it to create something better. In management, I see a lot of frustration around things not turning out the way people want. To be successful, it should LOOK a certain way. We read books, copy other people’s recipes for corporate cultures and superimpose them on our culture at work. And then are frustrated when we don’t get the results we wanted. How much more powerful it is to mine the natural energy that is going on around us?
A manager I worked with once was deciding about whether to replace an assistant manager. While replacing the role might have been the obvious choice, any of us who have done that know the feeling of having to take on the extra work of that role while we are trying to interview, recruit and train a replacement. Add Murphy’s Law and a spike in business volume and you have a recipe for crazy. We talked about the pros and cons and looked at what the real need for the role was. What functions did the role perform? What are some other ways those functions could be done, using who was already in place? She came up with four names and some suggestions about what each could do, in the context of what they were already doing. Without any additional expense, she just divided up the workload and created a whole lot of new empowerment for four employees. Each one was delighted to rise to the challenge. Instead of the drain of trying to get it all done on her own, she found the thrill of having people come up with creative alternatives for their new responsibilities. A few weeks into it and people in the department and outside were noticing and commenting. There is a new energy.
Diana Vreeland said, “Don't look back. Just go ahead. Give ideas away. Under every idea there's a new idea waiting to be born.”
Rather than be frustrated by the demands of the recipe, she was inspired by what was right in front of her - and created something wonderful.
Recently, a design consultant and I were working on a project for a fairly conservative client. The designer had proposed incorporating a fair amount of lavender into the scheme. Given the conservative nature of the client, introducing lavender (which elicits a strong and not always favorable response in the realm of office space design) was cause for concern. While Bottega Veneta and Fendi have splashed lavender across their fall 2009 collections and this has trickled down to H&M, it’s not common in the cubicle filled world of office furniture design…yet. I am not sure if it was the ads or the strategically placed Bergdorf’s bag that validated our scheme, but I did see a flicker of victory cross the designers face!
Do you have any stories about incorporating something wild or unusual into an office design layout?
After I got my first position in management at the bank where I was working, it dawned on me that although I now was a manager, I had no training or worse, idea, of what being a manager or a leader was. I just knew that whatever that was, I was not it. I was good at what I was doing before, but now I had a team to run and all I had was a sense of guilt and the examples of a few managers around me.
They were not good examples.
One day, I got an ad across my desk from the Harvard Business Review, and in the ad I noticed the phrase that ‘managers are made, not born’. I heaved a sigh of relief. I could learn to become better, I didn’t have to be born to it. There was still the vast gulf of what I did not know, and there wasn’t a whole lot of training available. And what do I do in the meantime? I still had a department to run. One I was the ‘leader’ of. As John Maxwell says, "the only thing a title can buy is a little time..." so I quickly had to decide how honest I was going to be. Was I going to pretend I knew more than I did and take the risk of being exposed, or would I be honest and admit what I didn’t know and be thirsty for all the information and guidance I could find, wherever that would be?
Well, nothing is ever clear cut. I did both, of course and had plenty of interesting outcomes as a result. But more on that later.
There is an old saying that ‘when the pupil is ready, the teacher appears’. So, throughout my career, my own leadership style has been informed by many diverse voices. There were professors in the school where I got my MBA. There were authors of great management books. There were the colloquial sources. Managers who did well. More interestingly, managers who did poorly. The New Yorker cartoons, which are indispensable. Then, an eclectic assortment of people, voices and objects from all aspects of life, whether a movie marquis, someone I meet in the surf lineup, something totally out of left field. Suddenly, I am inspired. Then, just being who I am influences the culture at work.
One of the managers I did admire at the bank was a young executive who was over the retail operations of the bank. In one of our brief meetings, he told me that afternoon he was following the M.B.W.A. plan. This was one of those moments when I had to decide how honest I was going to be. I knew about M.B.O. plans, which were trendy then. Management by Objective, a team collaboration tool where you co-create goals with your employee. But I hadn’t heard about M.B.W.A., so I asked him what it meant. He said, “management by wandering around”. He wandered around through the organization, having informal meetings conversations with staff and customers, seeing what came up. Very powerful. I later found out that this method was used as early as the 1940's at Hewlett Packard and popularized in 1980 by Tom Peters in his book In Search of Excellence. Interestingly, today M.B.W.A. is being re-discovered as a relevant tool for organizations, especially those in states of change.
In coaching, we talk about ‘being’ with people, experiencing them as they are, without judgment. Just taking them in. Since leadership in the workplace is all about people, this is the most important step. We can invent a new initiative and immortalize it in procedure and code, but if we aren’t reading the signals of those who the initiative affects, we might not get the results we want.
So now I notice things. Little things, big things. I listen. I look for patterns. I ask, and I gain insight. This informs my process of leading. It opens possibilities for things to get done, perhaps in unconventional ways, but done. This blog is about realizing the possibilities that can open up in the course of leading an inspired life. I hope to challenge you to welcome inspiration into your life, your career and your management style and so to transform your own workplace environment.
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