Designing a World-Class Architecture Firm. Patrick MacLeamy

Introduction

      When I became CEO of HOK, people would often ask me, “Now that you're an executive, do you miss designing buildings?” I would always reply, “No, because now I'm designing a firm.” That answer, so often repeated, became the inspiration for the title of this book: Designing a World-Class Architecture Firm. Of course, I was not HOK's original designer.

HOK's founders—George Hellmuth, Gyo Obata, and George Kassabaum—were visionaries who set out to establish a new kind of architecture firm that would outlast them all. They succeeded—and then some. Today, 65 years later, HOK is one of the largest architecture and engineering firms in the world.¹ This book tells the inside story of how they did it. However, it's not just a history of HOK, even if that history is fascinating—and often funny. Instead, I have used HOK's story as a vehicle for sharing lessons we learned along the way that will be beneficial to other architects, designers—and really anyone in a creative or service business.

      Most architecture books are about a firm's design work, but not this one. I have included some significant projects to illustrate milestones in HOK's growth and development, but that is not the main thrust of the book. Instead, as the subtitle says, I have written about the people, stories, and strategies behind HOK because they are stories worth sharing with lessons worth learning.

      People. Let's start with the people. Founder George Hellmuth watched his father's architecture practice repeatedly go boom and bust throughout his childhood. How did that inform his efforts to build a “depression-proof” firm? George Kassabaum drafted the atomic bomb rack for the Enola Gay aircraft. Did that have anything to do with his unofficial motto? He often told us: “Do the right thing, always.” Gyo Obata served in the U.S. Army, even though his Japanese-American family was interned during World War II. Perhaps, that character-building experience helped him set aside his own ego, listen carefully to each client, and come up with the best design solution just for them—a hallmark of HOK's work.

Stories. HOK's stories were my original inspiration for writing this book. Whenever HOK people would gather for a bull session swapping our firm's very own folklore, someone would always say, “We should write down these stories. They're funny and insightful at the same time.” There were humorous stories, like the time one of our early leaders was mistaken for royalty in Saudi Arabia. There were inspiring stories, such as the weekend HOK's St. Louis office went up in flames and devoted employees managed to set up a new office and re-create crucial lost work by Monday morning. And there were harrowing stories, like the double crisis when our investors threatened to pull their funding and our bank threatened to call our loan—both on the same day—either of which would have bankrupted HOK.

      Strategies. The founders were children of the Great Depression and deployed multiple strategies to help HOK not only thrive during good times but also survive during bad times. Later leaders layered on their own insightful strategies for success. Of course, sometimes we improvised emergency tactics on the fly, in response to mistakes or even disasters. I share all the lessons we learned along the way, whether from our successes or our failures. Those lessons apply if your firm wants to get bigger—or just better. There is relatable, actionable advice in every chapter, such as: