Transition

Most design firms whether graphic, product, or architectural, have grown from the creative and entrepreneurial energy of an individual or two or three partners. Historically, only one or two out of thousands of firms have ever continued into a second generation. The design-driven offices of George Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames, and Eliot Noyes disappeared with the death of their founders. Practically the only design firms to survive beyond the first gen-eration have been marketing-driven companies like Lippincott & Margulies and Walter Dorwin Teague. Yet if you consider dominant names in other service industries, Arthur Andersen or Peat Marwick in accounting, for example, or McKinsey or Deloitte in management consultancy, they have all reached their second or third generation. The size and success of these organi-zations make it hard to relate their experience to relatively minuscule design firms, but I believe we still have something to learn from them. The challenge is to run what we believe to be an excellent design-driven firm into a second generation. This is an excerpt, for the full text view the attached pdf. From Professional Practices in Graphic Design, Tad Crawford, ed. Allworth Press, 1998. Re-printed with permission of author