207 - TZL - Burke Pemberton

firms, a lot of your peer firms out there that are behind the eight ball when it comes to this and hasn't come up with a way to transfer this information. I love the lunch and learn idea. I think firms should consistently and always be professionally and personally developing all of their staff. Aside from the fact that it's a great retention tool, you just want to put the best product out there and because people are your product, you want to make sure that you're putting the best people out there in front of the client, that they are well informed, and that they know what's going on. As you said, we're lulled into this sense of false security because we have these devices. And for those of you that are listening, I'm holding up my Apple iPhone 12 or 13, or I don't know, whatever it is, pick the latest phone, and we have those, but there's so much more that needs to come and a lot of it is transferred individual to individual, not a phone to individual or data or technology to individual, but it's transferred from one to another. And I think the firms that are going to find success in the future is going to really take knowledge transfer very seriously and make sure that they have a system in place to afford everyone the opportunity to gain as much knowledge and understanding as they can within their area of expertise and knowledge. Burke Pemberton [47:41] Yeah, and I think what you've probably seen in our industry that's pretty common is as a lot of these AC industry firms grow, you see that sort of principle led regional model, where there's not a sort of a central brain, which in a biomimetic system like the starfish, you chop off a spider said, instead, you chop off the starfish’s arm, and it's fine, it grows back, and I think there's a lot to be said for that sort of agility of that model. There are certain systems that need to be centralized. And I think marketing, knowledge management, and HR, for sure need to be central. And I would say finances as well, just because the data is so valuable. And so, when you've got all these different offices operating on all these different systems, there's a lot of inefficiencies there. And then like you said, there's a lot of knowledge loss, because you're not archiving it in a central way so I think there is an argument there for some central governance and some centralized standardization. Randy Wilburn [48:45] Without a doubt. I always ask this question, because I really do want design firm leadership to be thinking about this all the time because it is one of the challenges that we face. It's one of those questions that you need to be asking early and often as opposed to randomly during some breakout session that you have once every two years.

Burke Pemberton [49:14] Why bother? You just get everybody's hopes up and then go back to the old way.

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