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F R O M T H E F O U N D E R
Passing of an industry great
I lost one of my old motorcycling and work buddies, Ed Friedrichs, who died on May 13. He was quite successful and lived a rich and varied life, and was 77 years old at the time of his passing. Ed Friedrichs, former president and CEO of Gensler, truly understood strategy and how all the pieces of a business fit together into a cohesive whole.
Ed and I served on the board of directors of several AEC firms together. He also served as Zweig White’s BOD chair when I first got re-involved with the company (one that I started in 1988 as Mark Zweig & Associates) back in late 2010. I can’t even remember exactly how we met, but I knew Ed for quite some time. We were never what I would call close friends, although we were most certainly friends. Ed even kept two motorcycles at my house in Fayetteville for a number of years so he and I could ride when he came to town, and for he and his then-wife, Pat, to use to travel east every summer. Ed and I talked every so often, and we worked closely on some of the BODs we served on together. We had a common interest in two things: the AEC business and motorcycles. We had each also married three times. Ed was probably best known for his tenure as
architectural firm giant, Gensler’s, president and CEO, a post he held for about eight years. He joined Gensler in 1969 (Art Gensler coincidentally also passed away only days before Ed), and Ed started Gensler’s Los Angeles office in 1976. Other than working as a management consultant and outside director in his later years, Ed spent his professional career there at Gensler. In recent years, Ed moved from San Francisco to Reno, Nevada, where he immersed himself in what I would consider large-scale development and got married to his third wife, Margaret. He loved Reno and couldn’t believe how cheap and easy it was to live there compared with San Francisco. A brilliant guy by any standard, he had dual degrees in both architecture and mechanical engineering from Stanford, as well as a master of
Mark Zweig
See MARK ZWEIG, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER MAY 24, 2021, ISSUE 1393
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