Yves Besançon: How do you to let design quality and good architecture prevail within the complexity of this system without getting lost in the inherent pressures of every great organization? There is a board that decides which way the company goes, assisted by a management committee that implements the guidelines. Then there is a global design committee led by two people, I am one of them. But it is something that necessarily changes, due to the workload. We also have an organization that promotes entrepreneurship; there is no superstar, but a constellation of stars. Gensler is made up of many talented professionals, from 25 to 70 years old. In a way we work as a laboratory where architects can come and practice their craft and architectural style, we encourage entrepreneurship and allow people to fail because we believe that we learn from failure. If someone wants to develop a project, does not succeed and we end up losing money with it, we do not retaliate, what we do is try to find out what happened, guide the person towards what should have been done and then we all move on. At Gensler we ourselves look for our replacements. In my team there are six architects who are my potential replacements and they are preparing all the time. The secret is to hire people who are smarter and better than you are, because they will take your place.
Carlos Alberto Urzua: More than an office Gensler is a great organization dedicated to architecture. How does this great company work with 5000 employees and 46 offices worldwide? The firm was founded in San Francisco 50 years ago with three people: Arthur Gensler, Drue Gensler, his wife, and James Follet. Since then it has grown organically, we have never bought an architectural firm. Our clients take us to different cities and countries. 80% of our work is with recurring clients, and where they go they take us. We have a very unique culture, the offices do not compete with each other, they work together, all profits go to one center and from there are distributed. We are all the same firm. We allocate our best talent for each project, regardless of whether that talent lives in Asia or the United States. The firm has vast resources, we have no bank debt and in 30 years we have never asked for a bank loan, allowing us to better assign resources to each project.
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