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By Jeremy Clarke | Micromanagement is hated, but accountability often wears that label when underperformance finally meets real leadership attention.

By Liisa Andreassen | Vice president of Morrison-Shipley Halff (Richardson, TX), a consulting firm with a passion for providing smarter solutions with a distinctly human touch.

Managing partner at Method Architecture (Houston, TX), a firm that practices ego-free architecture, creatively solves problems, and provides unparalleled customer service.

By Mark Zweig | When people are demotivated they become negative and cynical, and can pollute the attitudes of their co-workers. And if they’re really demotivated, they may quit.

If you lead an AEC firm, you have a lot of tough questions to ask yourself, and the answers aren’t always pretty. But ask and answer you must. In a romanticized view of the business...

We’re seeing more and more multi-office A/E/P and environmental firms wrestle with this issue: should branch offices be profit centers or not? Or should some other organization units be the place where we measure profitts...

Every so often I have a number of disconnected thoughts for our readers, none of which merits all of my allotted space, but each of which could prove valuable. This is one of those weeks....

When J. Peter Devereaux joined the Detroit-based firm in 1985, there were nine employees. Today, Harley Ellis Devereaux (Hot Firm #23 for 2016) has 324 employees and has undergone a series of evolutions. After working...

Conference confirms that when people like their jobs, the firm is usually more profitable; here are some things to consider. On September 3 and 4, I had the pleasure of being at our annual Hot...

A test of your staff’s commitment to you so you know what to fix. Architects and engineers are seeing increased activity in the marketplace and firms are hiring. This is not news to most of...

Being treated as a second class employee, independent of rank, is very demoralizing, Mark Zweig writes. The other day I stopped to talk with ZweigWhite’s CPA, who was meeting with our in-house accountant – a...

I cannot recall any recent editorial in The Zweig Letter that drew the amount of inquiries my piece on open book management did (Issue 774, August 11, 2008). Because there is so much interest in...

It seems to me that I am running into a greater number of pissed off people working in client organizations as of late. Maybe it’s the winter blues. Or maybe it’s war threat induced economic...

In some previous articles we’ve talked about principals who are too involved and wreak havoc on budgets and schedules due to their last minute involvement on projects. But there’s another problem, and it may be...

If you look at the effect the events of September 11 had on everyone in this country, it’s really pretty amazing. The collective funk that ensued hurt businesses of all types in an unprecedented way....

We’re seeing more and more multi-office A/E/P and environmental firms wrestle with this issue: should branch offices be profit centers or not? Or should some other organization units be the place where we measure profits...

I gave a talk last week at a meeting one of our clients had for all their market sector leaders. This is a successful company that we do quite a bit of work for, and...

What’s the best way to motivate staff people? When faced with that question, most firm principals think about what to give them. The experts tell us to pay spot bonuses for an effort that goes...

Too many people are unhappy— unhappy with the way we’re running our country and unhappy with the way we’re running our firms. The presidential elections to be held on November 3rd and the issues facing...