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VISIONARY KEYNOTE SPEECH ABOUT PROBABLE DEVELOPMENTS OVER THE COURSE OF THE
NEXT FIVE YEARS
Peter Ziehan, who is a business consultant, New York Times best-selling author and futurist, last year presented a visionary keynote speech about probable developments over the course of the next five years at a conference sponsored by Kansas City based Burns & McDonnell, a 6.9 billion dollar per year AE firm based in Kansas City, Missouri. It was 90 minutes long, but covered a lot of very sobering events he sees as coming to pass, and I made a summary of his presentation, linked below:
Peter Ziehan Keynote Speech Presentation
Tagged at the end of this summary are my own visions of what I see happening in the AE industry over the next five years.
Some of it in the AE industry is already happening. Economic pressures are and will increasingly compel AE firms like yours, indeed all business enterprises, to make significant changes in order to thrive, indeed just to survive. Distance work and online wide area networks will gradually displace traditional and conventional workplaces. Strategic partnerships, mobilized and liquidated on wide area network project by project bases, will gradually displace our currently familiar business models. This is not just about drafting and modeling. The functions of professionals of record are beginning to be placed on international trading blocks. Architectural practice is becoming fully and internationally commoditized. You will eventually be compelled, if you want to stay in the game, to take on professional partners in other countries where office billing rates today are in the US$20 to US$30 per person hour range, offered by professionals who are as good as you, or better, at what they do. As physical workplaces become obsolete, people and businesses are leaving and going elsewhere to work. People are increasingly working from laptops and smartphones wherever and whenever it is convenient for them, NOT the businesses for whom they work. We are already seeing rising vacancies in office buildings to the point where these properties are shutting down or being repurposed. Your business model will be forced to change significantly if you want to remain in business, and sooner or later you will be compelled to vacate your physical premises. You will work in wide area networks, initially comprised of your former internal personnel but making a transition to working with independent contractors worldwide, who are all available on just-in-time bases, offering world-class work product at the lowest worldwide available compensation, project by project by project.
This is precisely the way Archline.com works now, and we have been working in this manner for many years for architects and projects throughout the United States. It would be a pleasure to visit you in more detail about how we work with you and why what we are doing I think will increasingly be the way building project construction documents will be produced as we progress in the twenty-first century.
Best regards,
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