Randy Wilburn [14:39] So you're kind of a contemporary of mine. I might have you by a couple of years. I'm 52. But when you got into the design industry, it was a lot different than it is today. [CS: Oh, yeah]. Now would you imagine that it has become what it is today versus what it was like in the 90s? I talk to people about the 90s and the design industry, whether you are a civil engineering or engineering firm, or whether you are an architectural firm, and I say this all the time, so anybody listening to this podcast has heard this expression, it was an old wineskin mentality for the industry in terms of how things are done and that's not how we do things. It is so drastically different. I'm sure when you tell the young heads and explain to them that you guys don't know what it was like in the 90s, or maybe even the early 2000s, for that matter. So much has changed in the design industry space, yet so much has stayed the same from a good perspective in the sense of design sensibility and understanding. So a lot of the old stuff that may be needed to go away went away, but a lot of the new stuff, along with the traditional abilities to design and create really wonderful things have remained.
David Shove-Brown [15:52] Well, there are still some of those 1990s early 2000s firms out there and people out…
Randy Wilburn [15:58] There are but listen, they're not recruiting well. And trust me when I say this, that's the biggest challenge right now. And that's why firms have to physically think about how they do things and where change needs to be made. Some of them are being pulled, kicking, and screaming into the 2020s.
David Shove-Brown [16:19] Well, the hardest thing, I think, for people to understand is that you have to be sometimes critical of yourself. You have to be able to say, I don't know the answer to this, but I've got this person over here in the office that's really good at that sort of thing. Letting them run and not being the micromanager. Not being the person that dictates design. The philosophy is that anybody in the office can have a good idea. I don't care what your title is. And I learned this in academia that a lot of times people had sort of feelings of themselves based on their degree, and quite frankly, I don't give a damn. For me, it's how you are as a human. How are you? What do you think about? What's the thought process? What's the process for design? How do you treat the people around you? That to me ends up telling me way more about how you are as an employee, or as a team member than whatever your portfolio looks like. So you have to be able to say to yourself, okay, I'm really good at this sort of thing, but not so good at that thing, and balance them out.
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