Just found this link (
IDEO’s Urban Pre-Planning | Metropolis Magazine) in my ‘todo’ blog list – it’s an interesting article about IDEO and their ‘value-add’, angle-free consulting approach:
“Williams puts it another way: “They don’t have a dog in the fight.” Unlike most urban planners (a term IDEO resists), not only does IDEO avoid the appearance of parachuting in with a vision, but their success—and billings—isn’t measured by the place that’s eventually built, or even if anything ever gets built at all…define the spirit of a place and then let others articulate that spirit—whether in bricks, mortar, tax breaks, or billboards. IDEO claims accountability only for its ideas.
And it’s patently _not_ just about making money, but retaining interesting work:
“For many firms all this blue-sky thinking would be embraced as a means to drive business to the back of the house, where the construction documents could be cranked out. But IDEO—which long ago gained a reputation for being expensive—rejects the idea. “I could have thirty interns in the back hacking out drawings,” Dust says, “but that would be fundamentally disruptive to the entire way we work as a culture…We’re accountable to the people who work here to make sure their work is interesting.”
Wow, what a fab outlook and approach to work – and their clients will really benefit from the multi-disciplined _happy_ experts that IDEO assign…
I’ve thought a lot about how I’m able to model Particpo’s work ethic/approach on this type of idea – IDEO’s another inspiration for this approach.