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By Matt Cooper | The gap between struggling and high-performing AEC firms often comes down to seven operational levers leaders can control.

A firm’s parking lot can reveal more about its culture than any mission statement posted inside the office.

By Jeremy Clarke | Most governance problems are not execution failures but clarity failures around who owns decisions and who is accountable.

By Mark Zweig | Firms that ignore AI will look slower, more expensive, and harder to work with.

By Srividhya Viswanathan | By prioritizing leadership, trust, and accountability, organizations can build teams that not only achieve their goals but thrive together.

By Mark Zweig | Focus on these things to be more effective when it comes to raising standards for performance.

By Mark Zweig | AEC firms today still struggle with the same old organizational issues that undermine clarity, accountability, and leadership.

By Mark Zweig | Don’t turn yours into a joke by getting the wrong help and taking the wrong direction with revising your strategic plan.

By Janki DePalma | Small, consistent habits and incremental improvements create sustainable long-term success and personal growth.

By Eric Tuthill & Jordan Wilson | It’s become increasingly apparent that Section 174 may be around longer than anyone believed possible.

By Mark Zweig | These 10 things will make a difference if you are serious about making your people more entrepreneurial.

By Earl Bennett | Working within a safety-conscious culture contributes to the health and well-being of both employees and the organization.

By Mark Zweig | These are the practical implications of defining the culture you want and then making that a reality.

By Miles Gullingsrud | When leaders take the time to invest in the development ambition of staff, they can create a system that supports people’s personal and professional sustainability.

By Janki DePalma | Pay attention to who apologizes and when, and work to create an environment of psychological safety within your firm.

By Mark Zweig | What really makes people take responsibility for something and give it their all – to truly be accountable?

By Mitchell Shope | Leveraging reinforcement theory will connect the action to the reward and bolster your firm’s morale and cultural identity.

“There is no question that after working as long as I have in the A/E industry with so many firms throughout the land, certain common undeniable truths present themselves.”

“A lot of managers in AEC firms – design and technical people who have become managers – need to learn a few supervisory basics.”

Change can be difficult, and sometimes it can feel punitive, but it’s crucial to the process of leaving those bad yesterdays behind. I’m a student of Lyndon B. Johnson. Being the father of a seventh-generation...

When you have an AEC or environmental firm – or any business, for that matter – there is always a question about how strict your policies can or should be. Generally speaking, I am not...

Zweig Group’s research data shows us that fast growth/high profit firms have a higher number of hours in their average work week. It makes sense – more hours put in by salaried people equates to...

Blame is a form of punishment that rarely works, and removing it from a firm’s environment will increase productivity and collaboration. Would you rather have an employee change her behavior, become more motivated, or make...

Being human, we all have opportunities to learn (and re-learn) valuable truths for dealing with others. You’re never too old to learn, if you keep your mind open to it. I have found over the...

Sometimes I think people in our business forget that the culture of the organization guides the behavior of its members. Sure— you can always have a bad apple who exhibits some crazy or bad behavior....

Although there have been many compensation-related articles over the years in the pages of The Zweig Letter, I thought perhaps it was time to clearly articulate my own strategies for compensating employees in A/E/P and...

As someone who has worked, studied, and written about this business for 28 years now, I thought today is as good as any day to share some of what I’ve learned. Here it goes: What...

I was in a board meeting recently with a quality, old-line engineering/architecture/consulting firm where one of the primary topics was business development. We spent several hours talking about it and how they are changing their...

Somewhere in the journalistic masterpiece known as USA Today during the week of July 17 is a small blurb about business ethics. It was one of their polls that they regularly take. Forgive me for...

Not many architects I’ve known, and even fewer engineers and scientists, appreciate the importance of company culture. How can I say this? Because they are still trying to manage their companies by creating rules and...

Yesterday was one of those perfect days. It was so nice that I almost felt guilty about it. I really should have been at my office getting ready for the next semester or working on...

I should be reading now, sitting here in my tight blue “pleather” Northwest Airlines seat on my umpteenth flight this month. But I’m not. Instead, I just wasted a half hour on “Brick Breaker,” a...

When I first got out of graduate school with my MBA back in 1980, I went to work for a consulting/recruiting firm in St. Louis that specialized in serving the construction and real estate development...

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...

As A/E/P or environmental consulting firms, we love to tell our clients that we can meet the schedule, stay within the budget, and provide high quality. Then under our breath, we mutter: “Pick any two,...

You’re all aware of it. The “circular theory,” otherwise known as “what goes around comes around.” It’s one of nature’s laws that seems to hold true as much as the laws of physics. If you’re...