A Pang of Creativity
I just saw something that knocked my socks off and that only happens occasionally. After 6+ years of working on the New York Wheel and trying to marshal all the creative energy I could muster from the people who build things like that, I got involved with a similar project in Dallas that wanted to do the same thing. I spent a fair bit of time episodically on the project and recommended a creative guy who has been a friend for 15 years and who, for various personal reasons, needed a job.
That friend is an amazing photographer and a creative sort who has a decidedly right-brain orientation that is impressively creative in an artistic sense. He had worked on the NYW project with me for several years and done some fine promotional work. However, I had several run-ins with him over what I would characterize as process failures. I sort of shrugged and felt it was his lack of a left-brain set of skills that caused the problem. I’m sure that had I debated it with him he would have disagreed, but I was confident in my diagnosis and felt it was what it was.
About eighteen months ago I recommended him to my friends in Dallas, who were in desperate need of a project manager and didn’t have a very robust budget. My friend needed a job and I felt that It might be a good fit for the early, “promotional” stage of the project. I had my doubts about how long it would hold his interest (I lost my interest in the NY Wheel after a short six years on task), but mostly I didn’t think his “flat sides” of detailed project management and all the various follow-up tasks that are needed in this sort of project management were his forte. In fact, he had virtually no construction experience (at least I had run a development company for two years before taking on the Wheel), so it seemed obvious to me that there were limits to the amount of time he would fit into the project needs.
As expected, he took to the initial task with a degree of gusto and optimism, pulling together the loose threads of a lightly-managed project that needed much more disciplined management if it was going anywhere. My Dallas friends were pleased with him but were still skeptical of his broader skills. They treated him like a junior team member.
One of the key steps in a major project like this is the local approvals. As you can imagine, there are always constituents that are very positive about a project and there are those that are cool at best about it if not downright negative. Dallas as a community seemed to have a more neutral to negative bias than we had encountered in New York. My friend jumped right into the mix and started meeting the various factions and figuring out how to turn them from negative to positive. While I would not call that an impossible task in an objective sense, it cannot be called easy. It requires a degree of interpersonal skills, a degree of empathy in understanding people’s needs, and a conviction and persistence that must be applied with a deft touch. Community relations is a very touchy game. My friend pulled it off with great finesse. I had always thought him a personable guy, but he has a certain hipness that might not work for everyday people in areas like Dallas. Not so, he did what was needed and did it well.
That brought him a much higher degree of respect from the senior team in Dallas. He was still their employee, but they had come to realize that the project’s prospects were more in my friend’s hands than they had originally thought. That was a good thing and they were happy about everything. Now there was a need to advance the project with investors and that required both money and a degree of progress that could give confidence in feasibility.
The problem with large wheels is that they are much harder to build than small or medium-sized wheels. Recent problems with several projects (including the one I worked on) made it clear that there was a significant execution risk involved in wheel-building. There was also an issue which I had perceived for some time, which was that simply building another wheel that does not distinguish itself in some way was an increasingly important thing to attract people’s interest. Size is the easy solution, but there is an exponential increase in cost and execution difficulty that comes with size. I had come to suggest to people that wheels were at their limit of physics and metallurgy (at least with the current state of the art).
My involvement with the Dallas project waned over the last year, at least compared to the prior few years. The truth was that they were forced to look for local capital (which I had not ability to assist) and my friend seemed to be handling all the project logistics just fine. Since I have a vestigial economic interest in the project, I do try to check in now and again to see what’s happening. I tend to do that through my friend since the Dallas boys are otherwise focused in other directions and need me less now that my friend is fully engaged.
Quite a bit of time has passed, and I noticed him on Facebook traipsing around Europe, so I pinged him to find out what was happening. I half expected him to tell me the project had died a natural unfunded death. He said otherwise and sent me a video and a deck of his updated concept that was being used in the fundraising efforts.
That’s what knocked my socks off. After six years of wheel work, I thought I had seen it all. But I was wrong. My friend had worked with some design professionals and construction professionals to come up with a totally unique concept that was visually different, thematically relevant (sustainable and thus very hip) and stunningly aesthetic and additive to the Dallas skyline. I looked at the budget and that’s when the brilliance really came through. He had found a way to solve the problem of building something stunningly unique, still very much in the observation wheel genre, and cost-effective. My trained eye told me that he had solved many of the construction/erection problems that plagued us and others for years and he had done it with this new design that broke the old molds.
If you had asked me yesterday (people ask me every other day) I would have said I was done with wheels. I am done. But when I saw this new Dallas project design, I got a distinct pang. It was a pang of pride and creativity envy all rolled into one. The pride was that I had put my friend in this place where his full capabilities could blossom. The envy came in the way we are all envious of brilliance. In this case it was pure right-brain brilliance that yield left-brain results. Wow. Now I just hope his financing partners can come through.