January 21 - 22, 2009
La Valencia Hotel, La Jolla, Calif.
Are you prepared to lead the change culture in your firm? Through small-group interactive sessions, this conference provides innovative design management models to allow you to use foresight and strategic optimism to lead critical and dynamic change.
This 1-1/2 day conference for executive and senior management design leaders focuses on change and its impact on your firm. Sessions are limited to approximately 60 participants, will be highly interactive, and will enhance your ability to let go of traditional design management models to embrace new agendas and innovative approaches. Here’s a glimpse of the provocative course content.
REINVENTING DESIGN LEADERSHIP. Explore the trends that are transforming the design professions. Each participant will receive Cramer and Simpson’s latest book, The Next Architect: A New Twist on the Future of Design. Areas covered will include:
- 50 trends sweeping the AEC industry
- New restructuring models
- New lean staffing models
- Metrics of value of best-of-class firms
- Your position in the changing marketplace
- Creating order where chaos reigns
- Determining what focusing on the client really means in the 21st century
- How to extend your enterprise’s revenue streams
- Redefining scope of services for life cycle strategic advantage.
FORESIGHT AND SCENARIO-BASED STRATEGIC PLANNING. Learn to use foresight and imaginative scenario methodology to establish strategic goals and important new ideas to lead you to new levels of success. A course workbook allows you to employ a toolbox of techniques to develop a personalized action plan.
THE CHANGING GAME OF DESIGN FIRM LEADERSHIP. Traditional leadership principles and management skills are simply not enough to meet the accelerated challenges of today’s design marketplace. A new posture needs to be developed that will be based on reintroducing the role of wisdom in leadership, on embracing the fact that in human affairs, paradox is the rule, not the exception, on re-conceiving the concepts of success and failure, and on developing the social architecture to elicit creativity and innovation. Author and psychologist Richard Farson addressses:
- Can a profession be a business? The dilemma of managing the design professions in a business climate. Tapping the larger financial resources of the future.
- Success fails and failure succeeds. Reappraising the concepts of success and failure
- Dramatic changes in the requirements of leadership. The end of management by traditional principles
- Organizing and managing to elicit innovation
- Motivating the new generation of designers
- The problems of conceiving design leadership as skill and technique
- Examining the counter-productivity of current design management practices
- Radical redesign: Developing an organization of metadesigners
Schedule
Wed., Jan. 21
1 p.m. to 5 p.m., session
5:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., cocktail reception and dinner
Thurs., Jan. 22
9 a.m. to 5 p.m., session. Lunch will be provided.
Register
For questions or to register, contact Susan Boling, (678) 879-0929.
Faculty
James P. Cramer, Hon. AIA, Hon. IIDA, CAE,is the chairman of The Greenway Group, a management consulting and research firm based in Atlanta. He is the author and co-author of several books, including Design Plus Enterprise: Seeking a New Reality in Architecture and Design, How Firms Succeed and The Next Architect. He is the publisher of the journal DesignIntelligence and co-editor of the annual Almanac of Architecture & Design. Cramer is co-chair of the Design Futures Council and former executive vice president/CEO of the American Institute of Architects. He is one of the leading foresight advisers in North America. He is a leadership fellow of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif.
Scott Simpson, FAIA, is president and CEO of KlingStubbins in Cambridge, Mass. A senior fellow and co-chair of the Design Futures Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, he is a frequent speaker at seminars and conferences, and has published more than 75 articles about innovation in the design professions. He is an editor-at-large of DesignIntelligence, a design critic at Yale University and the University of Wisconsin, and guest lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He holds degrees from Harvard and Yale and is the co-author of How Firms Succeed and The Next Architect. Simpson is a Richard Upjohn fellow of AIA.
Richard Farson, Ph.D., psychologist, author, and educator is co-founder and president of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to research, education, and advanced study in human affairs. He currently directs the Institute’s International Leadership Forum, an Internet-based think-tank addressing the critical policy issues of our time. Farson was the founding dean of the School of Design at the California Institute of the Arts, a member of the Board of Directors of the International Design Conference in Aspen, and president of Esalen Institute. He holds a doctorate in psychology from the University of Chicago, and is a senior fellow of the Design Futures Council. He is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed bestseller Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership.
