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The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, Lord Aeck Sargent in collaboration with The Miller Hull Partnership. Copyright Jonathan Hillyer.
TZL: Ownership transition can be tricky, to say the least. What’s the key to ensuring a smooth passing of the baton? What’s the biggest pitfall to avoid? JG: I would certainly agree. Fortunately, LAS has been at it for a while; we have some good processes in place and are now multiple “generations” in. One key is to make it a “normal” part of the firm’s business process and evolution. There’s a delicate balance between having smooth, predictable transitions while offering sufficient growth opportunities for leadership and ownership within the firm year after year. The biggest pitfall to avoid is forgetting that this needs to be an ongoing process and that many different batons need to be passed incrementally along the way. We’ve made a recent commitment to broaden the firm ownership this year and are in that process now. “LAS recently made a conscious decision to look more intently toward the firm’s future. We work hard to incentivize and provide leadership opportunities for the next generation and we prefer to do that from within the firm rather than bringing in new senior people when possible.”
LOOK TOWARD THE FUTURE, from page 7
to look more intently toward the firm’s future. We work hard to incentivize and provide leadership opportunities for the next generation and we prefer to do that from within the firm rather than bringing in new senior people when possible. We aren’t a company that churns through people in a haphazard, knee- jerk manner and we tend to first look to try to find the right alignments for people to be successful. That isn’t to say that hard decisions don’t have to be made from time to time; it’s always a struggle to find the right balance. I’m fortunate to be leading a company with other partners who embrace the firm- first mentality and who are genuinely more concerned about the success of the firm above short-term personal gain. TZL: Does your firmwork closely with any higher education institutions to gain access to the latest technology, experience, and innovation and/or recruiting to find qualified resources? JG: We do some of this by actively partnering with institutions of higher learning. We’re involved in some university “pilot projects” and have done a number of facilities that rethink old paradigms – especially in the realm of science, preservation, and sustainability. We’d actually like to do a lot more of it on the technology side. One of LAS’s core design markets is higher education – from teaching and research to student life and everything in between. We have several staff who are active faculty and have sponsored some scholarship and intern programs in the past. We’ve found this to be a successful way to identify young talent.
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THE ZWEIG LETTER JANUARY 3, 2022, ISSUE 1422
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