Everything I Needed to Know About Business ... I Learned from a Canadian

Leonard Brody, David Raffa

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470738658
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

"If you want to read about...fascinating can-do business builders by two razor-sharp doers themselves, this is the book. If you want to disprove the ugly myth that 'Canada' and 'entrepreneurial' do not compute in a single sentence, this is also the book. Open it up and get acquainted with a bevy of compelling characters who reveal how they've don it and get their tips on how you can do it, too."
— Edward Greenspon, Editor-in-Chief, The Globe and Mail

"I am neither a businessman an entrepreneur, but this book gave me practical ideas on how to better cope in an industry that, like so many others, is changing at the speed of light. Brody and Raffa chronicle some amazing and inspirational Canadian success stories and in doing so offer valuable lessons on how to harness teamwork, creativity and - above all - passion into any workplace."
— Scott White, Editor-in-Chief, The Canadian Press

LEARN THE FINE ART OF MANAGEMENT FROM LEADERS ADN ENTREPRENEURS AROUND THE WORLD...
...ALL OF WHOM HAPPEN TO BE CANADIAN.

Lessons on teamwork from Homer Simpson? World-renowned architect, Moshe Safdie, on organizational design? Joe Boxer, guerilla marketer? How can vision turn a single Toronto motel into the global luxury Four Seasons chain? Isadore Sharp shares his insights. How can anybody sell a multimillion-dollar pharmaceutical company in just one week? Leslie Dan Tells you how he did it.

Everything I Needed to Know About Business...I Learned From a Canadian offers first-hand insights, experience, and best practices from twenty-four business and culture leaders, all of whom have achieved excellence in a particular area of business, at home and on the world stage. Some are household names, others are barely known outside their own industry, but they all share the secrets of their amazing success. New to this Second Edition are four brand new chapters on luminaries such as Stewart Butterfield, the mind behind Flickr; and Graydon Carter, Editor-in-Chief of Vanity Fair. With additional mini-profiles of four entrepreneurial up-and comers, this new edition offers more advice and inspiration than ever.

Each chapter features "5 Things You Need to Know" - the essential lessons from the leaders and entrepreneurs who have been there and done it all. You'll learn the best of business wisdom, get practical advice on company building, and discover how to prosper in one of the most challenging market environments in history. This book offers management lessons that are as entertaining as they are instructive, all built around the deep thoughts and insights of leaders who are the best in business.

The authors are graciously donating all of their profits from the sale of this book in Canada to young Canadian entrepreneurs who are trying to make our world a better place.

PART ONE

First Period

Learning to Skate

CHAPTER ONE

Within These Walls Place, Harmony and Organizational Design

FEATURING THE WISDOM OF MOSHE SAFDIE

Most new ventures begin with a loose organizational structure to accommodate flexibility and uncertainty. In fact, at the outset, many companies don’t put much thought into the subject at all. At some point, however, organizational design becomes necessary in order for a company to function effectively as a mature entity.

Where better to look for inspiration about that structure than among architects, who design the spaces where people live and work every day? Their creations—which foster harmony, inspire creativity and, most important, build community—reflect design principles that also apply to companies.

Moshe Safdie is a world-renowned architect, and has spent his life developing his body of work. In 1967 his student thesis became the Habitat building at the World Exposition in Montreal. The tiered and stacked structure of living spaces, which still holds iconic status, included in its landscape a series of open spaces where residents could gather and talk. Evoking images of the plazas and bazaars of the ancient cities of the Middle East, Habitat shook the architecture world and set Safdie on a course that would see him design many of the world’s foremost structures.

In his career, Moshe Sadfie has designed everything from houses to office buildings, libraries to giant scientific laboratories, even entire cities. In all his designs, he has incorporated the “linear centre”—his signature theme—a place where people can meet and feel comfortable enough to exchange ideas. It is the architectural form of home.

To Safdie, a linear centre is a must-have for every community. Since businesses are, in essence, communities, Safdie’s linear centre concept can also be applied to the building of organizations. Safdie’s emphasis on individuals’ needs for positive interaction—whether in buildings, cities or companies—is essential thinking for all business managers who wish to maximize their human resources.

Update: Moshe is currently working on several projects that will be completed in 2009. These include the Marina Bay Sands project in Singapore, the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh, and the United States Institute for Peace headquarters in Washington D.C.

When a painter begins to design a work of art, he or she usually starts by applying a group of design principles to the piece and then favours one or two to fulfill its purpose. In Rembrandt’s case, for example, it was a balance of light and dark to evoke a sense of mystery. When Beethoven composed a symphony, he favoured repetition of a signature refrain to create a series of aural crescendos.

In fact, when they begin their works, designers from all disciplines apply a standard set of principles that have been recognized for centuries. Invariably they take some combination of the seven design elements—balance, repetition, gradation, contrast, harmony, dominance and unity—to form a finished work emphasizing one or two of the elements to give it a unique signature.

While they may not consider themselves artists in the traditional sense, entrepreneurs and managers alike are designers of a sort when it comes to the composition of their businesses. Like artistic design, organizational design involves the combination of several elements to form a cohesive and powerful whole—in this case a company. The difference between entrepreneurs and designers, however, is that entrepreneurs rarely recognize the greater purpose their design serves.

This failure is the downfall of most organizational architects. Enveloped in examining revenues, profit and loss, and other metrics, managers tend to take a structural, instead of a holistic, point of view. A business, however, is not just an organization geared toward financial gain; it is a medium built around the people who are its sum.

Many businesses survive as small entrepreneurial entities without any forethought into organizational planning. But as an enterprise grows, functions demand an increasingly intricate structure to correlate and harness those diverse tasks and division of labour. Companies must be purposely designed, instead of merely being roughly structured, before they can be trusted to grow organically.

Unfortunately, once systems are required, they might morph into bureaucracies that force compartmentalization in order to operate “efficiently.” But this can result in smothering human interaction and stifling the creativity that was the reason for the organization’s existence in the first place. (Often what is done to create efficiency is itself inefficient.) Further, badly designed enterprises can subvert the ongoing work. Organizational design must be planned for so that managers can control it. The injection of design into the creation of an enterprise has led many theorists to refer to it by another term—“organizational architecture.”

This name was coined by authors David A. Nadler and Marc S. Gerstein. Their article “What Is Organizational Architecture?” advanced the premise that “the design of social systems such as organizations is fundamentally similar to the design of physical artifacts such as buildings. If architecture is the art of shaping physical space to meet human needs and aspirations, then organizational architecture is the art of shaping ‘behavioural’ space to meet the needs and aspirations of a business.” ¹

Architecture, they explained, involves four components that must fit together to make an effective building. They defined these as purpose, structural materials, style and collateral technology. This same component fit could be applied to organizational design, they added. “Just as designing buildings presents architects with fundamental questions about purpose, structural materials, style and collateral technologies, designing organizations poses a parallel set of questions for senior managers.

“The chief role of the CEO in the corporation of the future will be to imbue a company’s design with clarity of purpose, to ensure that the design can fulfill the strategic requirements of the business (since even flawless execution cannot compensate for limitations of basic architecture) and to utilize the most appropriate organizational building materials.”²

While the authors were pioneers in advancing this theory, some critics were quick to point out flaws in their thinking: buildings cannot be metaphors for organizations because buildings are static and organizations are dynamic. However, this challenge does not destroy the theory in principle; it merely requires a better understanding of what an architect actually does.

Certainly, architecture, at its root, is the design of buildings. But if the task is broken down, architecture also involves the design of physical spaces as they relate to people. In short, it is a design schema that relates to people’s collective physical senses, much as a painting is a design scenario that relates to people’s visual senses. Architecture therefore involves the design not only of buildings but also of communities, which are collectives of individual people who come together for a common purpose. That is why many architects are now designing not only buildings, but also entire villages, towns and other urban settings—the physical spaces in which communities are contained and thrive.

The encyclopedia Wikipedia defines a community as a “set of people with some shared element. The origin of the word community comes from the Latin munus, which means the gift, and cum, which means together, among each other, so community could be defined as a group of people who share gifts which they provide to all. When there is a clearly shared interest (economic or otherwise) among a set of people, the people collectively might be called community.”³

According to social psychologists, there are four elements that contribute to a sense of community:

• membership;

• influence;

• integration and fulfillment of needs;

• shared emotional connection.⁴

Communities defined by physical space or shared interests exhibit all of these attributes and, interestingly, so do most healthy businesses. From an architectural point of view, every floor and room creates a smaller community within a larger community of buildings. From an organizational point of view, a business is a community that is often composed of several smaller communities, or departments. In both cases, people come together in groups to share interests and exchange ideas in a form of cross-fertilization, thereby helping each other in the pursuit of those interests.

Organizational design theory has been changing to encompass this view, just as architectural and artistic theory is beginning to filter into the study of organizational behaviour. In particular, some architects are now specializing in the organizational design of communities, physical and corporate. It is in this body of knowledge that companies can learn how to better structure themselves. This has been increasingly recognized by corporate North America, most notably in the technology sector, where traditional boxy closed-door floor plans have often given way to open and individualized workspaces that beget creative interaction.

One such individual who has turned his mind to the organizational design of communities is world-renowned architect Moshe Safdie. A Canadian, Israeli and U.S. citizen, Safdie turned his student thesis into the revolutionary Habitat housing project at Expo 67 in Montreal. Habitat launched a distinguished career of designing some of the most impressive structures in the world. The list includes the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Vancouver’s Library Square, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and the Eleanor Roosevelt College at the University of California in San Diego. Safdie was also deeply involved with the rebuilding of sections of Jerusalem, taking responsibility for major segments of the restoration of the Old City and the reconstruction of the new centre, thereby linking the Old and New Cities. Also in Israel, where he maintains an office (as he does in Toronto), Safdie was involved in the design of the new city of Modi’in, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and the Rabin Memorial Center.

Safdie, 67, has also been active with projects in the developing world and has designed two airports, the Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto (in a joint venture with Canada’s Adamson Associates and New York architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) and the Ben Gurion International Airport in Israel. Safdie has served as Director of Urban Design and Ian Woodner Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in addition to teaching at various other universities.

In his work Safdie has shown a marked desire to apply modern architectural thought to historical structures, and to design spaces that reflect change while preserving the values of community, particularly citizen interaction. Many of his large-scale projects, such as his first work, Habitat, and the rebuilding of sections of Jerusalem, involve stacking living spaces around central plazas to encourage public interaction—in his mind, the heart of community life. Similarly, his public buildings, such as libraries in Vancouver and Salt Lake City, prominently feature public squares where people can assemble.

Safdie advocates the need to recognize the requirements of community in urban design. He is the author of several books on architecture and urban planning, especially The City After the Automobile, which introduced his concept of a “linear centre”—a central area of concentrated development that serves as a public arena and gathering place. This public arena, or plaza—a place where people can interact and exchange ideas—is central to almost all of Safdie’s work. He believes public interaction is essential to urban life if people are to thrive. This explains why crowded city centres often have a sense of kinship while (largely suburban) areas ruled by the automobile do not.

Similarly, Safdie feels that just as urban areas and buildings should be constructed around linear centres, every organization that wants to thrive must incorporate this concept of community into their day-to-day affairs. The overarching principle that governs Safdie’s designs strongly applies to the architecture of an organization. The formation of a structure that encourages human interaction, idea exchange and creativity is as needed within the walls of business as it is within a city.

“I translate the linear centre to business by asking, ‘How do you make a business capable of growing and expanding while maintaining its integrity and organic wholesomeness?’” he says. “By organic wholesomeness, I mean that the very parts that make the business healthy and effective are able to maintain a positive relationship to each other, and are able to expand and change as they maintain mutually supportive relationships with each other. It means more people can be absorbed into a business, and communications systems continue to work in a way that does not regress into a business that requires an enormous bureaucracy that is counterproductive.”

Although Safdie also uses artistic design principles in architecture, he takes the concept a step further by applying those principles to communities. Anyone designing an organization of any kind should do the same. In fact, Safdie encourages the application of artistic thinking to organizational or business design because he feels it may help right many of the wrongs he believes exist in the business world today. The main problem he sees through his architect’s eye is the breakdown of integrity—a word most think means only moral values, but artists usually take to also mean soundness or, as the dictionary defines it, “a condition that is unimpaired.”

“In a sense, the unmitigated marketplace economy means maximization of profit, which is also associated with maximization of growth because so much of profit today has to do with growth,” he explains. “[But] a fundamental issue that faces business communities today is the capacity to maintain integrity deep in their minds and hearts, and not succumb to moves which might appear to be profitable short term, but which fundamentally compromise the integrity of what they’re doing.”

It is Safdie’s view that organizations are often badly designed because those responsible think only in terms of function at the outset. This is likely because organizational design principles are often based on the interrelationship of elements that work together to support efficient operations. The basic organizational model involves a combination of:

• systems—methods for allocating and controlling resources;

• climate—the emotional state of the organization’s members;

• culture—the mix of behaviours, thoughts, beliefs, symbols and artifacts of an organization;

• strategy—a plan for success in the marketplace;

• policies and procedures—formal rules that define how a company does business;

• structure—a hierarchy of authority.⁵

A PLACE WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME

All structures, including businesses, need a centre, or core. In organizational design, this core comprises the people who are its genetic makeup. To c...