The Grove Thoughts from and for The Grove Worldwide Network

Bob Horn, our visual scout from MacroMedia, sent us a link to this county-by-county view of unemployement. You can actually see some interesting areas of low unemployment–like North Carolina, New Orleans, parts of Texas, the break basket, etc. I would bet somewhere there is an even more fine grained view that would show disparities within counties. Click here to see the map animated from 2007-2009. Unemployment by County.

I met up with Bryce Pearsall in Vancouver BC for the annual Dean’s Forum of the Large Firm Roundtable where I facilitate 15 Large firm partners talking with 15 deans of architectural schools each year. Bryce is Chair this year, and a long-term Grove client with his own architecture/ engineering firm DLR Group (The post before this about DLRU is about his firm). In the context of talking about the economy and the rough time A&E firms are having, he forwarded me a link to a very compelling graphic treatment of job gains and losses in the US over the last 4 years. Click through the whole presentation from the beginning and see the monthly stats change in graphic form. It’s a smart use of graphic language and a pretty shocking picture of what has happened since mid 2008. Click “The Geography of Jobs” to see the map.

Geography of Jobs Map

The Grove is facilitating DLR Group’s third, five-year strategic visioning process this year and adding an exciting new element – the involvement of their emerging leadership in helping facilitate the process. With DLR’s permission, we’d like to share a bit of the design.

In 2000 we helped this growing architectural/engineering firm’s 40 partners envision their goals for 2005 and key initiatives, using a classic Strategic Visioning process. In 2004 the process repeated and involved about 70 leaders, projecting out to 2010. This year the firm is focusing on 2015 and involving the whole organization.

An earlier goal was to develop a leadership culture within the organization, now in 11 offices in North America. The downturn is hitting architecture firms VERY hard, especially the big ones focusing mostly on corporate work, but DLR Group diversified early and is doing relatively well. In the midst of all of this year’s challenges they are making additional investment in leadership development. They think it’s more important now than ever. (more…)