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O P I N I O N
O ne of the most rewarding things we do as consultants is guide a client through the strategic planning and business planning process. A transformative process If a firm is to achieve something spectacular, its leaders have to have big hearts, and they have to galvanize the entire staff.
We often spend more than 16 weeks interviewing the leadership team and the firm’s clients. Some people might have good things to say, others not so much. We conduct anonymous online surveys with the employees. We amass, review, and analyze an enormous amount of data – financial, organizational, human resources, and even past strategic plans – anything that will give us a window into the firm so we can understand it better. This effort translates into a review document that assesses, evaluates, and recommends improvements to the firm in many areas. It often is a 150-plus page document that is distributed for review prior to a two-day onsite meeting with as many as 30 people. Sometimes they approach this exercise with doubts, fears, and preconceived ideas about what will occur. Our role is to facilitate the process and turn the experience into a solid 10 for all involved. It’s exhausting and rewarding all at
the same time. The process, to be truly transformative, allows all the participants to share their thoughts and opinions, and many times, these are the very leaders who will implement the vision with the support of their studios, offices, or lines of business, taking the firm into a future that requires them to stretch out of what is comfortable and achieve the extraordinary. As we move the participants through this process, and hearing many diverse and different approaches to the practice of architecture, engineering and planning, part of the transformation that occurs is to identify what many perceive as ordinary parts of the design effort. Many elements of the work effort, due to the
See TED MAZIEJKA, page 8
THE ZWEIG LETTER May 23, 2016, ISSUE 1153
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