The reason why I mentioned the term jam session when I talked to Adam Lawrence was because I was trying to find a term for a free format exchange of ideas between people who respect and like each other outside of an employment situation.
I got thinking about this when I read a quote on one of the discussion here by Tom Doak in which he stated that he felt that his work was pushed to a next level by the creative input of all the talented people on his team.
Now he and many other firms do this in the format of a company with a leader and many employees. That is a fine structure, given that most of the capitalistic world is organized that way, but it does not work for me. The reason is that after having managed 60-80 people for an extended period in my last job I know just how much I dislike having to manage personnel. That was one of the key reasons to start my own firm and to stay a one man band. I really love having the freedom of being my own boss but, at the same time I miss the creative exchange of ideas with people of similar intelligence I used to have at university, in offshore engineering, in strategic consulting and to a lesser extent in I-banking.
Couple that with the fact that any architect who is really good in the end wants to be his own boss if he has the skills, the guts and the economic freedom to try it, and the idea then is born to find non employment ways to work together. Free form cooperation’s where you work together on a project, make sure people credit for the ideas they bring in, get paid fairly for the input deliver and try to make the best possible golf course.
In some sense it is like open source software development where the end goal of a good product is more important than the ego’s involved or the brand of the product.
That is how I thought of a jam session as a good proxy for what I was trying to describe, even though it of course doesn’t completely cover the concept. In a jam session a group of musicians who have no hierarchical relationship with each other play music together, whereby through improvisation, happenstance and group dynamics sometimes something more beautiful emerges than when the same group of players would have performed a rehearsed number as a band.
I’m lucky that I can afford to be in this business to just do the things I want to do, and to work with people I like and trust. As such I am very happy that I am working with someone as talented as Conor Walsh at de Swinkelsche, and why I invited Jeff Mingay to come and have a look and pitch in ideas during the works. And yes I would have even liked to have involved others earlier on in the routing process, say someone like Mike Nuzzo who I think is outstanding in that area from what I have seen. Or someone as nice and talented as Brian Schneider to suggest how to get the design better. Or someone with as much passion and drive for the details of designing a golf course as Tony Ristola.
I’m in this business to become as good as I can get, and the only way you learn is by interacting with and getting feedback from very talented people, be it complementary or much more useful very critical. I would love working with many talented people, and would gladly share the credit of success, if the result is that we build a much more creative and refreshing golf course as a result.
Excuse me if this has been a bit rambling, I’m planning to write an article for one of the golf magazines on this idea together with Jeff Mingay after he has visited Swinkelsche, and his writing skills are infinitely better than mine so maybe he will be able to formulate better what the idea behind the golf design “jam session” is.