Henton: guide for planners
Leaders/managers:
responsible, not going to please everybody, but listen to everyone first.
Gary Hack
What we are really talking about today is managing complex organizations and networks. Gary Hack has managed Penn and through his consulting work he's been inolved in complex planning projects such as the Hudson River Park.
Gary's lead a number of different companies and organizations. He harbors beliefs about flat/anti hierarchical management organization. But he's found that people look for someone to take the lead and guide them. What was wrong with his conception was that he saw leaders in a particular way--command and control type of regulation. Its a contextual issue.
Anecdote:
In the 1980s he was the head of a planning consulting firm in Boston and was given the west side redevelopment project in Manhattan.
Uses Burnham as an exampe of comiling ideas that are sitting out there in the public.
What got implemented rested on their ability to create organizations/commissions that carried out the stuff.
Making a plan is making an implementation plan for that plan.
Every week Burnham held a luncheon. They would eat and then he would role out his plan and talk to everyone and listen to their opinions.
Leadership is to listen to the ideas and then persuade everyone to believe in your compilation and then come up with committees to carry it out-->orchestration
leading from the middle: you realize you are not going to be the star in the organization. your job is to make the star people stars.
Five important things that effective leaders learn how to do:
- Get agreement and buy in to the essentials
- have a shared view of all the people in terms of goals and strategies
- naming and framing
- Read and make judgments of the environment and your expertise
- Be able to explain the purposes, reasing and strategy.
- stump speech
- You should never have more than five things tha you are doing at one time.
- You have to be able to parce the world into short term things we have to do.
- The leader of the organization can do almost nothing by his/herself
- get to know the people you work with
- recognize their accomplishments
- recognizing their birthdays and families
- sending them unexpected notes and emails
- we need a better fine arts department
- we need to go digital
- international
- the strength of penn is that we always have strong practitioners as faculty members
- studios/dual degrees/interdisciplinary resources
have views on what makes good architecture
have some ideas of a good approach
research former ideas