Success Strategies for Design Professionals

As consultants with the opportunity to analyze literally hundreds of professional design firms, we have found the search for ideal management methods challenging. Each time we've observed a format that appears to work well for some or many firms, an exception has soon appeared, contradicting what looked like a good rule to follow. For example, some firms do outstanding work organized as project teams, others are very successful with a departmentalized project structure, and still others get good results with a studio format. One of the major puzzles for observers has been finding a relation between the project delivery system used by firms (that is, “how we do our worki) and how the organization itself is operated (that is, “how we structure and run the firm”). After years of study and trial and error, a model has begun to emerge that holds promise for creating some order among these issues. At the heart of this model is the recognition that although no one strategy fits all firms, there is a family of understandable principles from which almost any firm of design professionals can devise its own best strategy. We call these the SuperPositioning principles. This book sets forth the theory, a set of master strategies derived from it, and some thoughts on how to put the principles to use. We look forward to further learning in the years ahead from the experience of professionals who apply the principles in their own firms

POLITICAL TALK: THEMATIC ANALYSIS OF A POLICY ARGUMENT *

Policy and the processes that go into i t s formulation and implementation are constituted by language. In this article, a linguistic and ethnographic approach to the study of "themes" is applied to the transcripts of some oral arguments by independent truckers at the Interstate Commerce Commission. The results show a portion of the underlying logic of the argument, a logic whose structure was minimally affected by the eventual policy decision. Copyright 1983 by The Policy Studies Organization.