I AM [actually] AN ARCHITECT

One thing I’ve struggled with in life is deciding how much of other people’s advice to take, and how much to ignore.

See, I’m a practical person.  So if I can avoid learning the hard way by watching other people learn the hard way, I will.  That’s why my mentors are one of my most valued resources.  

I made these important decisions by listening to other people’s good advice:

• Didn’t mess with drugs
• Went to college
• Started saving for retirement in my early 20’s
• Pursued a career I love
• Avoided people who were a bad influence and chose my friends wisely

And here are some things I wish I’d listened to people about:

• I should have taken out less student loan money, even though it sure felt like I was barely scraping by at the time
• I shouldn’t have given that certain boyfriend a 2nd chance (or 3rd or 4th)
• I should have kept in better touch with old friends and colleagues

But here’s the thing.  By definition, any time you start innovating, you stop taking the path that other people have laid.  Whenever you start innovating, you start getting a lot of people frowning, and saying, “But what about…” and otherwise just being skeptical.

Here are some things I’m glad I did despite other people’s advice:

• Went to business school.  Yeah, you can start your own business without it, but it’s a hell of a lot easier when you know how to run a business.
• Went to work for a larger firm.  Turns out it’s really nice to have admin staff, IT staff, a full library, and lots of coworkers to learn from.
• Bought a Smart Car.  Yes, it’s small.  That’s the idea.  I can park anywhere in San Francisco, and it costs $25 to fill my tank.
• Started loaning out money on Prosper.com.  No, it’s not a scam.  I’ve been doing it for a few years, with almost no defaults.  Even counting the defaults, I’ve made a return of 11% annually—without all the volatility of the stock market.

How do you know when negative feedback means your idea is bad, versus meaning you are thinking outside the box?  

One filter I’ve used to weed out when I should and shouldn’t pursue an idea that gets pushback is to look for an equivalent of my idea in another industry.

For example, I had an idea that architecture firms should do more than just architecture.  Perhaps bring engineering in-house, perhaps take on real estate development, perhaps launch a line of building-related products.  I wasn’t sure, but I felt that it wasn’t a fiscally safe policy to rely on income from only one source.

When I brought this up to very smart and experienced people, I got negative feedback.  They thought it was crazy to branch out into areas beyond our core competencies.  One person whose advice I value greatly even told me that in the 70’s a lot of architects tried doing real estate development and failed at it.  I felt discouraged and naive.

But then I learned that this is a mainstream idea outside of the architecture field.  Did you know that large companies invest money in other companies that have nothing to do with their industry all the time?  Just like how you invest your retirement savings in a risk-balanced portfolio, companies also park their extra money in stocks and bonds.  They choose uncorrelated stocks and bonds specifically to provide a diversified source of income for times when their own product/service isn’t doing well.  They are essentially owning parts of non-related companies as another source of income.  

In a different wrinkle on this idea, many large corporations have separate businesses under one umbrella.  For example, General Motors has a wing that makes cars and a separate wing that is a bank.  That’s right, a bank.  Would you think a car company knows anything about financial services?  Of course not!  They hired other people who do know about banks to run the bank wing.  The two wings of the company can operate completely independently of each other, but they also complement each other.  If you want to buy a GM car, one of your options for a car loan is GM Financial.  So it turns out I’m pretty smart, huh?

Looking at other industries to find out if my “new” idea works helps me assess whether the people around me are naysayers because they are lame or because they really know what they are talking about.

Another type of filter recently occurred to me.  By knowing where people fall on the “Adoption/Innovation Curve,” I can better tell whether a person doesn’t like my idea because they don’t like new ideas or because it’s a bad idea.  

Every new idea has to run the gauntlet of the adoption curve.

The adoption curve shows us that only about 16% of people will get new ideas right away.  Innovators love new things for the sake of new things.  Early adopters love whatever works, and aren’t sacred to jump into the pool if it seems like a good idea.

Most people aren’t Innovators or Early Adopters.  Most people are “wait-and-see-ers,” as I call them.

The Early Majority like to wait and see that something has traction, but are generally optimistic about your new idea.  Once it looks like something isn’t a fad, they’ll get into the pool.

The Late Majority are kind of pessimistic, by nature.  They’ll only get into the pool when most other people get in first.

The Laggards are just curmudgeons, and they’re only getting in the pool if the boss says, “You get in the pool or you retire.”

Keep in mind that people fall in different spots of the curve, depending on what the subject is.  For instance, I adopt technology at a different pace than I adopt business practices.  I’m not a technology lover; I still use a crappy flip phone because I think it’s crazy to pay several hundred dollars for a phone I’m just going to drop or lose.

But when I studied “green building” ten years ago, I couldn’t believe it was still under debate.  No kidding we should do what we can to stop killing the Earth.  When I learned about Design-Build, I thought that was obvious too.  When I first heard about Integrated Project Delivery, not only did I immediately get it, I formed a committee and led research on it.  When I learned what BIM is and what it can do, I decided it doesn’t make sense to do it any other way.  I don’t have the technical skills to do it myself yet, because I’m tech-challenged (see reference to flip phone above), but I do know how to build its processes into a work plan and support other people to do it.

My point is that you first have to figure out which Adoption/Innovation Curve you’re dealing with, and then you can more accurately fit your advisors into one of its categories.  When you bounce your ideas off someone, be sure to bounce new ideas off someone who falls into the first two categories.  If they think it’s a bad idea, maybe then you go back to the drawing board.