business builder partnering
How not to get
lost in glare of
superstar partners
by Carey Brendalen
TWO OF THE MOST IMPORTANT new civic buildings in Minneapolis opened to the public this spring — the new Minneapolis Central Library and the new Guthrie Theater overlooking the Mississippi River.
How did our local architectural company partner with two internationally renowned designers, Cesar Pelli on the library and Jean Nouvel on the Guthrie, to create a pair of spectacularly diverse buildings without losing our own identity?
Even more important, what lessons can other Minnesota business owners learn from Architectural Alliance’s affiliation with two superstars? From a business perspective, how can your company successfully align itself with the Targets, General Mills and other big dogs of business?
1. Pick your partners carefully. Trust your gut when exploring an alliance with a higher profile or larger company. In the case of our firm’s courtship with Cesar Pelli’s office in Connecticut and Jean Nouvel’s in Paris, we discovered that our corporate cultures seemed compatible. We all valued a team environment and candid communication, for example. These signs and more pointed toward potentially successful affiliations.
You also need to know if and when it makes sense to back away from a potential partner. We don’t approach other architects with widely known prima donna reputations to explore partnerships, because we do not want to subject our staff to carrying such an architect’s water for the duration of a project.
2. From the very beginning, approach your affiliation as an equal. You have an expertise or specialty that the more celebrated company needs. Our firm never pushed our abilities on Pelli or Nouvel. We understood that Pelli and Nouvel are the star designers, and, when appropriate, we made our opinion known and were always strong in our convictions, but knew when to back off.
3. Understanding each partner’s role is critical to the success of any collaboration.In Architectural Alliance’s case, there was no ambiguity about our role versus that of Pelli’s or Nouvel’s, as they were spelled out in the contracts.
Pelli and Nouvel were hired specifically to design the Minneapolis Central Library and Guthrie Theater respectively. We were brought to the dance to turn those designs into reality. In other cases, however, much up front coordination is required so that collaboration doesn’t devolve into competition.
4. Communication always has been, and will be, the lynchpin to making any business partnership successful, regardless of the partners’ disproportionate scale of fame.
Both parties must commit to open, honest communication. Clearly delineate who will report to whom, and if you short-circuit the process, know how you will close the loop. If there are issues, make sure you are up front about them.
If your partner is half a country away (Pelli’s office is in Connecticut) or half a world away (Nouvel is in Paris), employ every bit of technology you can to facilitate the communication process. Of course, the phone still works pretty well, as does e-mail. But you can add video conferencing capabilities and FTP Web sites for sharing large documents. This technology is available to any small business with the need to communicate over long distances.
5. Forming a human bond with the other party is fundamental to maintaining the partnership. This requires good, old-fashioned face-to-face interaction, breaking bread, taking time to develop mutual respect. No rushing in and dashing out, but developing an understanding that all parties are in the soup together.
Partners must have a dispute resolution process in place — before disputes arise, as you know they will. Tactics for dispute resolution to keep in mind: Agree to disagree. To maintain a reasonable level of harmony, business partners at any level must recognize that agreeing on every issue is unrealistic.
6. Fight battles worth fighting. Who hasn’t ever defended an irrational position just for the sake of presenting the other side of the argument? However, consider the heavy emotional price we pay for engaging in this type of “intellectual” discourse.
When you do go into battle, do so from a point of logic rather than emotion. For example, one early design feature proposed for the Guthrie incorporated reflecting pools on the roofscapes. Really cool idea, although we expressed concern about the practicality of the pools, given our extreme winters.
The designers in Nouvel’s office were understandably loathe to give up the exciting feature and it stayed in the drawings for a long time, until it was priced. Once it was clear what the budget impacts of the feature would be, it was easier for everyone at the table to set it aside.
7. Be mature and set aside the ego. Sometimes you have to remind yourself what your defined roles are. Whether you’ve developed a memo of understanding or another document to delineate those roles, reacquaint yourself with that document. We knew, for instance, that we were on the Guthrie and Library projects precisely because we aligned ourselves with Nouvel and Pelli. We kept our egos in check.
Innovation comes out of bringing diversity to the table. Boundaries are pushed, so keep an open mind. For example, some of the most controversial design aspects for the Library and Guthrie are the most astonishing and memorable.
Achieving successful business collaborations — whether it’s you and another small business or you and your industry’s behemoth — is a tremendous amount of hard work. There is no shortcut. Yet, that hard work can pay off a hundred-fold.
[contact] Carey Brendalen, is a principal at Architectural Alliance in Minneapolis, which provides planning, architecture and interior design services: 612.874.4128; cbrendalen@archalliance.com; www.archalliance.com
