https://youtu.be/LvorRF-e2UQ
Lawrence Armstrong, Chairman of Ware Malcomb, is driven by a mission to help leaders layer their leadership by integrating creativity, strategy, and empowerment to build resilient, innovative organizations.
We learn about Lawrence’s journey from architect to CEO, how he transformed Ware Malcomb into a leading international design firm, and why he developed the Layered Leadership framework. Inspired by architectural design, he explains how leadership, like architecture, involves synthesizing different layers—Light, Sound, Emotion, and Thought—to build strong, visionary organizations. He shares how leaders can apply these 4 Layers of Leadership to inspire teams, create strategic clarity, and drive sustainable growth. He also introduces the Visible Light Spectrum metaphor for business diversification, discusses the importance of fostering a culture of innovation, and offers insights on making tough leadership decisions.
---
Layer Your Leadership with Lawrence Armstrong
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest is Lawrence Armstrong, Chairman of Ware Malcomb, a leading international design firm. He's also an accomplished business leader, architect, artist, and the author of Layered Leadership. Larry, welcome to the show.
Oh, Steve, thanks. Thanks for having me on.
Well, what a bio, what a CV. I'm proud of having you on this show. So, we'll get into all of what you are doing, but let's start with why you're doing it. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your different business, and I guess authorship is part of artistic activities?
Thanks. Well, I think I wrote the book and pretty much everything else I'm doing right now is trying to help people. We had a great time building our company and I'm involved in a lot of other pursuits at this point. Some of the ideas and the creativity we brought to leadership I thought could really help people build their organizations.
So, let’s plunge right in. When you talk about leadership, what is your experience about it, and what made you want to write a book about it?
Yeah, I think that I have a little bit of a different take on leadership than maybe most people do. So that's why I wrote it. The idea behind Layered Leadership is this conceptual idea of the way I see the world. Architects think of layers when they design space and buildings and different aspects of a building. And so I've sort of tried to expand that thinking to different concepts and different inspirations and how we can utilize inspirations in our life and turn them into strategies to build an organization and to inspire growth. And so using that creative thought, whether it be a business, a concept in a business book or a metaphor for a physics lesson from high school or a discussion about the example set by Leonardo da Vinci, would bring different ideas together and synthesize those into strategies to build an organization.Share on X And so I feel like it's a little different take on this idea of leadership.
So, what does layered leadership look like? I mean, are there like figurative layers that you have to build in order to be a great leader? How does it work?
Yeah. So it's sort of the baseline of, first of all, understanding your company and where you want to go and what you're trying to do. And then inspiring your people to help build it. And so, the various aspects are understanding your company, what it does, what it does not do, I think is very important. And then how you want to expand it, how you leverage and encourage your people and empower your people to help get there, and how you build those people and how you encourage them by empowering them and training them, and then just infusing different concepts that inspire in a creative way to build up.
So, Larry, in our earlier discussion, you told me that this layered concept or layered vision, you also call it, this comes from the architectural design process, and I think you talked about light, sound, emotion, thought. How do these inform an architect? And then how can you transform these or transfer these concepts into leadership? What are the representative analogies in leadership for them?
Yeah. So these are great analogies. You think about, especially in a very abstract way, some of the art I produce is all based on conceptual layers, and layers occur physically in the built environment and physically in the unbuilt environment and in natural environment in a different way, sort of an orderly versus a chaotic type of layers of space. And it occurs in light, in shadow and sound, and layers of sound, layers of instruments and music, layers of thought and emotion when you're in a room of people. And so it's a very conceptual way to think about the space-time. Then if you transfer that into how can we synthesize various layers of learning and creativity and concepts, and put them to work as strategies to build your company or your organization. So it's kind of a very conceptual idea, but it really works once you start taking these different types of input that you might be inspired by and adapting them to a strategy to inspire your people and build your company.
Okay. That sounds super intriguing. So can you give me examples of maybe each? So, we talked about light, sound, emotion, thought. How do you practically turn them into strategies?
Yeah, so for example, we are a design firm that specializes in commercial real estate. Well, when we started, we were an architectural firm in Southern California that specialized in industrial and office building design for commercial developers. That was our specialty. Very vulnerable to the shocks of the economy. So we set out to diversify our company, both from a geographic standpoint, from a product standpoint, and a service standpoint. So early on, we were trying to figure out, okay, we don't want to try and do everything, so how do we diversify and protect ourselves from the ups and downs of the economy at least a little bit more than we are? And so I used a metaphor from high school physics class called the visible light spectrum. And so the visible light spectrum is the colors of the rainbow. Outside of the visible light spectrum are infrared on one side and ultraviolet on the other side, and you can't see them. So, when we were discussing, okay, how do we diversify but stay in business that we can dominate and we can lead? So, we needed to stay within commercial real estate, but we could add retail. We could add medical office buildings. We could add advanced manufacturing. We could add high-tech facilities. We could add interior design. We could add branding and building measurement and we could add a whole series of offices in important geographic locations that were important to our clients, but we were not going to design stadiums. We're not going to design a military bases. We're not going to design custom homes or churches, and so the visible light spectrum was a metaphor that we've used for many years, actually, to define our diversification so we could build our company. So that's just one way that we've used kind of an inspirational input to design a whole strategy for our company.Share on X And there are many more in the book, and they're very different from that particular one. But that's an example.
That's interesting. So I guess you can brainstorm around this. Okay. What are the visible lights? How do we stay inside the rainbow, but diversify into different activities so that we reduce our shock exposure, I guess. Well, the other thing that you say on your website is that building a culture is an artistic expression. What do you mean by this and how do you build artistically a culture and what are the elements of it?
Well, I think that design firms tend to think artistically all the time about the work we do, the actual services we produce. But, we want to sort of infuse that same creativity into building our company and how do we do it. So one way we have done it, is to inspire all of our people to think creatively about how we can improve our company. So we conceived this idea called WM3.0 several years ago where we solicited ideas from everyone in the company around three broad categories and encouraged them to think creatively and come up with ideas that would really improve the company. Some of them were small and easy to implement. Some of them were bigger and needed some cultural shifts to make happen. But we got over a thousand ideas and they were amazing. And so we had working teams in different categories to study, prioritize, and implement some of these ideas. I mean, we didn't implement every one, but we got a lot of great ideas out of it, and it really improved our company. So we've done that several times after that, and we continue to have that process in our company today.
That is very interesting. I heard about a similar process, and I think the Japanese companies, when they have this idea box, and then they have these committees studying the ideas and giving feedback and even the lean approach to have people innovate in their own areas and kind of create a culture of continuous innovation. One thing you mentioned, you mentioned the word several times and it's kind of one of my favorite words, you say inspire, you have to inspire people, you have to create a culture that inspires people. You are very empathetic about inspiration. So how do you inspire people in different ways? What inspires people to be a great organization?
Yeah, so I found that if you create a culture that empowers people, encourages them to take risk, encourages them to make sure we understand where they want to go in their career and then spend time and resources mentoring and coaching people and building people up. We kind of call ourselves a leadership academy here.
