Reflections: The ROI Model for Career Optimization
THE FUNDAMENTAL GOAL OF THIS BOOK is to assist the reader in making good career choices. Richard Saul Wurman has famously observed that all design professionals face divergent paths in their careers, a choice between looking good and being good. In the Foreword to this book he reiterates the story of Mies van der Rohe’s pronouncement: “Do good work.” Clearly, to capitalize on this advice, the designer must form a working personal definition of “good” as it applies to his or her design and talents.
The astute reader will have noticed by now that the advice offered by the interviewees, and conclusions drawn by the author, are full of contradictions. This is actually very encouraging. While some of the quotations are universal, not all the advice offered works for every person, every career, or even for the same person at different stages of career development. Every career journey involves numerous personal choices. The decisions made by individuals of extraordinary talent—while they may be fascinating—will not work for the majority of professionals. The intent of the narrative has been to provide a set of tools and ideas from which to make the best possible individual choices.
There is, happily, much to be learned from the weighing of advice—analysis and reflection are valuable decision-making tools, whether a given aphorism is discarded or taken to heart. In reflecting on the aha moments, I took a lesson from my mentor Richard Saul Wurman and set about categorizing them. They fall into three broad categories: relationships, other-centered (communications), and individual-centered (professional development). These conveniently form the acronym ROI.
Closer examination of the ROI model suggests eleven categories of career management tools.
Relationships
Client Relationships
Considerable discussion revolves around finding and nurturing client relationships that result in good work. From the mentors I surveyed, one constant emerges: Productive relationships are as individual as the designer and the client. Ivan Chermayeff observes that each client has a unique “value matrix.” James Craig suggests that designers develop their individualized “recipe” for a good design opportunity. Saul Bass suggests that saying no to certain relationships is the only real leverage the creative professional can exert. Roberto Goizueta’s concept of the designer as a “creative friend” is rather open-ended, but designers ultimately supply value by balancing a broad range of visual, experiential, emotional, and informational issues.
Employer Relationships
An employer is a special category of client to whom the designer says yes every day, but the opportunity to say “no” occurs only rarely. Employers are also a special category of mentor; working closely with an accomplished master can be transformational. Learning to think like the boss—the Bertoli toggle is an example—and to navigate office politics are often the first lessons in deep empathy experienced by rising creative professionals. Following Lou Dorfsman’s lead and cultivating one’s detractors as well as one’s supporters requires patience, persistence, diplomacy, and maturity.
Mentoring
Seeking the criteria for selecting “good”—good design, good opportunity, good advice—can be befuddling. Mentoring connects personal passion with a wider base of experience. Mentoring offers not only an external view of the decision-making process, but also the courage to make the right decisions. One is never too old to seek mentoring, nor too young to give it. Mentoring relationships are characterized by an implicit agreement to be utterly frank. Because mentoring is offered in the spirit of enthusiastic support, there’s an understanding that offense is never intended or taken. It’s rare to find an excellent designer who is not also valued by many mentees and deeply grateful to many teachers and mentors.
Peer & Community
The narrative makes frequent reference to AIGA, an organization that I find especially rewarding to work with. Obviously, many professional associations exist; the important point is to develop a wide and deep network through one or several such associations. Caroline Hightower’s remark about designers needing a safe zone describes a special kind of community, where all resources may be shared. In general, sharing techniques and experience with others strengthens all practitioners, in part by improving individual specialization. Lawrence Gellerstedt’s observation that the way you treat people is your best marketing tool applies doubly to professional peer relationships.
Other-Centered (communication)
Marketing and Evangelizing (Portfolio)
The central aha moment from these interviews is the realization that a straightforward dialogue with an audience is infinitely more effective than an entertaining monologue. A portfolio is a conversation starter. Find ways to cultivate serendipity and personal connection in interviews. The mark of a maturing career is transcending your portfolio and being hired for expertise rather than price. Successful marketing requires passion: “Welcome to the greatest marketing organization on Earth.” And passion is required to continue to refresh and revitalize your portfolio. Your ten best pieces are all you need to show, except in a mentoring situation.
Approvals
Relatively few customers know great design when they first see it. They gauge the quality of the work presented by the passion and intensity of the presenter. The focus on being good—carried to its logical extreme—is the best ticket to a smooth approval process. This means that the more carefully researched and articulated the background is, the more concrete the criteria for judgment and approval will be. George Nelson explains a novel method for approvals: the telephone sketch. He describes how he proposed the Chrysler world’s fair booth not with drawings or models, but by describing it to his client by phone, then asking, “What do you think about this idea?”
The genius of this method is that the client begins visualizing on his or her own, early in the process, so that multiple variations can be discussed and eliminated before any budget is expended on expensive visual media. It is especially effective when budget and deadline are pressing. Remember Ray Eames’ suggestion to work out ideas as cheaply as possible, and save the budget for production. Quick expression is the designer’s salvation. Big ideas frequently face inertia—resistance to change.
Leadership
Design is not a technicality. In its best sense, design is a special category of leadership. The word “architect” is derived from “chief worker” or “first builder.”
Leadership is developing people. Leadership is a love-hate relationship with details: you need details to manage, but you need the largest possible field of vision to lead effectively. Leadership is about taking risks, but minimizing risk until your idea and your team are ready for prime time. Leadership may mean being unpopular, as visionaries like Victor Papanek and Buckminster Fuller sometimes were, or it may mean coping with adulation of the type that forced Herb Lubalin and other marquee names to limit their accessibility. Great leaders value articulate employees. Great leaders are democratic at the beginning of the project, collecting input and consensus, but know when the moment for autocracy arrives. When someone steps forward to ask for responsibility, give them a shot. You can pick up experience more easily than motivation.
Individual (professional development)
Craft, Technique, & Skill
Mentoring, while it may ultimately be about career, philosophy, client relationships, and war stories, frequently begins with “how did you do that?” Massimo Vignelli’s interest in my lettering, and my interest in Ed Gottschall’s book in progress—to name just two examples—laid the foundation for deeper discussions. While the availability of interactive and mobile training makes technical information more readily accessible, there’s still nothing quite like the intensity of hearing and seeing firsthand a grand master at work. Push for speed; this forces you to internalize and compress actions. Develop your own library of things that ignite passion—drawings, photographs, lettering, notes—the connections and purpose will appear later. Use yourself up! Don’t die with a single good idea left inside. Adversity should never be an excuse for bad work. The public doesn’t see the excuses, only the finished work. Don’t think your way to doing it right, rather, do your way to right thinking.
Passion
The passion that defines so many designers is both our greatest strength and our Achilles heel. George Bernard Shaw famously remarked that “youth is wasted on the young.” I’m sure that my first clients and employers lamented as I expended precious energy on petty projects out of sheer undisciplined enthusiasm. I found James Craig’s mentoring provided a crucial aha moment in my professional development; it taught me to save my best for projects that could benefit and to develop a professional distance so I could work quickly and intelligently on many projects. Hermann Zapf’s observation that “when you get serious, you push for speed” is doubly valuable. Speed allows balance in life and saves stamina for those projects that require extended concentration. Speed also improves the overall quality of the output, and makes the designer more valuable to employer and employee alike.
Art vs. Design
Fred Schneider, my boss and mentor, referred to Franz Kline’s belief that “truth is so complex that it must be—can only be—stated as a conundrum, a dynamic balance of opposing forces.” This idea extends to many aspects of design thinking. The key to a productive career is discovering where it is on the continuum between beauty and utility that your own skills and desires are in perfect balance. What distinguishes art from design is the person doing the work; internally driven versus other-centered. I doubt that Saul Bass realized his brief comments about being at peace with being a designer and needing the intensity of a relationship with a great team would be so profound for the stranger he coached on a San Francisco street corner. Design is more complex than art.
Professionalism
Craig said to me, “If you throw yourself into every project as though it were a gold medal candidate, you will dash yourself to pieces.” Professionalism is the counterbalance that allows passion to become productive. Professionalism in design is a result of training, discipline, experience, and maturity. Ruedi Rüegg’s remark that only complete discipline brings complete freedom undoubtedly goes back many centuries. For Heinz Edelmann, destroying his portfolio to goad himself to new creative heights was a professional discipline few other practitioners would have the courage to embrace. For Zapf, the ability to teach and entertain while performing calligraphic legerdemain at a chalkboard was one of the many standards he set for his professional life. As a business proposition, a recognizable style is salable. As an innovator, style can become confining. The construction, by each individual designer, of high professional and creative standards is both an enormous challenge and the bulwark and strength of our industry. Professional standards can apply to both business practice and evaluation of the results.
Take-Aways
“Looking Good” is a Byproduct of “Doing Good Work”
Looking good as a goal is self-limiting. Fuller distinguishes between method and result: “I never set out to design something beautiful, but when I am done designing, if the result is not beautiful, I know I have done something wrong.” Doing good work is, in turn, the outcome of a quest to make work that benefits people, that makes their lives and life choices easier. Take, for example, Ian Ballantine’s dialogue with the book-buying public through his many experiments with genre covers, or Papanek’s tin can radio, which users so loved that they provided their own decoration. Neither designer was striving for beauty, but both had clear criteria for the good work they needed to do. A successful designer maintains a repertoire of stories about the benefits of good design. George Nelson rarely spoke to audiences about design; he made a greater impact by telling stories and highlighting benefits.
Know the Goal, Make the Sacrifice
“Good” for designers is actually not nebulous or illusive. When Kline says, “To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in,” he asserts that every individual is capable of excelling at something that makes them happy, but the process of discovering and developing that capability takes tremendous focus and effort. Schneider made courageous sacrifices for a dream, living a spartan life to test his talent as a painter. Then, with Kline’s help, he made the equally courageous sacrifice of that dream to become a very fine art director. He used his considerable talents in service to the community of authors and scholars at Oxford, rather than becoming a merely good painter. That courage and those decisions made the mentor-ship I received from him particularly valuable. Similarly, Walter Herdeg’s decision to exalt graphic design was a very other-centered choice: he sublimated his own creative impulses to a magazine, a vessel, to feature and promote outstanding work. Somewhere in that decision Herdeg may have decided that he was not capable of world-class creative work, but realized that he was uniquely qualified to create a forum for celebrating world-class work.
Balance the ROI
For business leaders, ROI stands for Return On Investment. For design leaders, the “investment” in a small but regular amount of career time reviewing and balancing the ROI elements described above—Relationships, Other-Centered and Individual (or Inner-Centered)—pays big returns. One constant among the Creative Legends is that they are alert to opportunities to express what they find most intensely interesting. They are always working, in Zapf’s words, to “play their soul’s music.” The order of the ROI elements is significant: “Individual” is last. This is why Charles and Ray Eames emphasized “connections” as a theme in their work, and why Roberto Goizueta’s term “creative friend” is a useful model. With those two categories of “good” defined, the possibility of Relationships opens up, cultivating audiences and constituencies who benefit from our creative work.
This elliptical definition, a paraphrase (from an Eric Gill’s 1933 essay Beauty Takes Care of Herself, though probably dating to antiquity) is perhaps the best capstone for these dialogues. The creative process is not the exclusive territory of artists and designers. Rather, the goal is to bring out the creativity innate in every individual, every team, and every culture. Design thinking is a way of provisioning a better life for all inhabitants of Spaceship Earth.
“The artist is not a special kind of person. Every person is a special kind of artist.”