The Zweig Letter

A couple weeks ago, a motley group of A/E firm principals and I went on a 700+ mile ride on two-lane roads through some beautiful countryside in New Hampshire, Vermont, and just a little bit...

For each of the past five years since we created The Zweig Letter Hot Firm List, there have always been readers out there who write in to ask why we are so obsessed with growth...

My theory is that no firm is completely happy with how it handles project management. There are always problems. And one of the common complaints heard is, “We don’t have enough good project managers.” While...

If you listen to Tony Soprano talking to his therapist about his rage in recent episodes of “The Sopranos” on HBO, he complains about all the B.S. It just makes him mad. And when he...

Everyone in the A/E or environmental consulting business wants to turn their technical people into sellers. Not a week goes by that the desire to do this isn’t mentioned to me by someone in this...

For whatever reason— and I have seen it countless times— sometimes the work environment just goes bad. Like fruit that sits in the bowl too long, it rots, it molds, and it becomes intolerable. Just...

Last Saturday morning a friend of mine, Peter Sisk, called to see if he could stop by my house on his way out of town to visit his aging parents in Hartford. He had the...

“Take this job and shove it” was a phrase popularized by country singer Johnny Paycheck back in the 1970s. The song told a story about a hard-working factory man whose wife left him, so he...

It’s one of those certainties, like death and taxes. Managers are supposed to hold those who work for them accountable to reaching certain goals or achieving certain performance metrics. It sounds good to say, “I...

On the one hand, it would be easy to get negative and discouraged about the current business climate. The war efforts are dragging on with no clear end in sight. The Middle East, in general,...

I was talking with a client of ours the other day— a very successful founder and CEO of a mid-sized engineering, planning, and surveying firm. I asked him the typical pleasantries such as, “How are...

I’ve written before in The Zweig Letter about the need for passion. Anyone who is going to be truly successful in an A/E or environmental firm has to have it. You have to LOVE what...

When you are young, you do things just because you want to. “Fun” is an important part of your life. Too many people forget that when they get older, however. The responsibilities grow and grow,...

I recently agreed to serve as an outside member on the board of directors (BOD) for one of our client companies. This is not the first (nor probably the last) time I have done this....

Last week, I took my oldest daughter Christy (she’s a high school junior) and one of her friends on a day of college tours. We went to three schools and took the guided tour at...

It’s kind of funny. I was out visiting a firm the other day— a rapidly growing, multi-office, multi-service firm— that is apparently beating the pants off of its larger, more established competitors. I’ve seen it...

I can’t tell you how many business planning meetings I have sat in on in large firms where someone comes up with the novel idea of checking all project deliverables before they go out. It’s...

Paul Weir, president and CEO of Weir-Sofein Architects and Engineers in Albany, New York, had a problem. He and his primary business partner, Wolfgang Sofein, usually saw eye-to-eye. There was a long history of mutual...

While I can’t be bound by convention and from this point forward be forced into matching my weekly missive with the focus of other articles in The Zweig Letter, this week’s issue got me thinking...

Human resources people are big on job descriptions. I was never that fond of them because it seems that they can always be used against you somehow. Here are some examples: “I meet the requirements...

Air travel is at an all-time high for me. It’s always frustrating... so I couldn’t resist the opportunity to share some of my recent thoughts and observations: E-tickets. It always amazes me when I see...

The fact of the matter is that design and environmental firms are not easy organizations to lead. Their cultures are fragmented. The people who work in them are all too smart, their egos too big,...

As anyone who’s read any business books in the last decade can tell you, Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” is a classic that will be talked about for years to come. In the book, Collins...

Last week, we held our first-ever conference on mergers and acquisitions, the 2003 AEC Mergers & Acquisitions Summit, at the Omni Parker House in Boston. It was a successful event with a wide range of...