The three business virtues of the Industrial Revolution are entirely incapable of transporting your business into this new age, but so long as you're using them as lenses to look at the world we're now living in, that world looks impossibly wasteful and terrifyingly alien. If you're a design type that wants to thrive in this new environment, you really must be guiding your operations by the three new virtues of our day.

The Industrial Revolution virtues of quality, speed, and economy (better, faster, cheaper) remained the measuring-sticks of all sorts of disciplines right up until the Meltdown. But now, and especially if you're involved in any aspect of place-making, they don't work anymore. Here's why: if you're an architect, there simply aren't enough jobs to go around as we discussed. So if your pitch simply is that you believe in high quality, or you'll do the work quickly, or you have competitive fees, that isn't good enough anymore, because that's what everyone else is saying as well. If you don't become remarkable in some way, you're simply not likely to survive.

The first to fail will be those who have built their businesses on being the cheapest service (or product) in town. This is easy to understand, because when the firms that staked their claim on being better or faster start dropping their fees, then the cheaper firms aren't cheaper anymore. So the entire reason to hire them goes away... and their customers quickly find the door.

The next to close up shop will be those known for getting the work out more quickly than the other guys. For ages, there has been the possibility of serious economic benefit accruing from hiring people who can get your work out the door faster. But when those known for being better don't have so much work, they can be notably faster than normal. So the reason for hiring the faster firms goes away.

Firms known for doing the highest quality of work have the best short-term prognosis, but they are already suffering as well. The high fees they commanded all those years weren't just for their names. Rather, those fees allowed them to buy capacity (better employees and better equipment) that allowed them to produce that better work. The first thing to go is the new equipment budget, but they can limp along for quite some time with equipment that's not being updated. The employees are tougher, because they're an expense every payday. They may take pay cuts for awhile, but eventually, they're likely to move on. The culture of excellence developed over the years in better firms will support them for quite some time, but after a better firm has done cheaper work long enough, even that culture of excellence begins to erode, and when that happens, they're not better anymore.

The virtues of this new era are patience, generosity, and connectedness. They call for an entirely new set of business practices that, when viewed through the lenses of the old virtues, look like economic suicide. Who could possibly think about giving something away in this environment, for example? That's a strategy for flush times, isn't it? Not at all. Bear with me until the end of this series of posts, and I believe you'll see that the new strategies and practices, when viewed through the lenses of these new virtues, represents a robust pattern for thriving now.

None of the strategies we'll discuss later will succeed tomorrow. Or next week. Or next month. You'll have to persevere with them for quite some time before you see any success. It's like an old hand-pumped water well: you can pump and pump and pump with great vigor, and get no water for quite awhile. And if you quit pumping, the water goes all the way back to the bottom. But if you keep it up until the water comes, then all it takes is a good, easy stroke on the pump handle to get more water than you can possibly drink. Your followers will do exactly the same thing, following you early on in hardly a trickle. But when you hit the tipping point, you'll have more followers than you first dreamed of. People talk about being Googlicious, and the entire Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry has sprung up as a result. I'm not saying SEO is worthless, but there's nothing out there that will make you more Googlicious than a steady stream of useful content. For more background on patience, click here.

Don't confuse true generosity with teasers. A teaser today is treated with the same disdain as spam. Until you're willing to put something out there that's seriously useful on its own merits and that people can download and use for free with no further contact with you, you're not being generous. But once you are, and persist at it long enough, you'll get far more and better business than you ever would have gotten doing business the old way.

There are a range of ways of connecting with others, from simpler participation to more involved collaboration. The easiest form of participation is a tweet chat, like #letsblogoff, #aiachat, or #builtheritage. Listservs are a little more involved, but they reap greater benefits because they're populated with lots of really smart people interested in the same topics as you. You can also participate in a professional organization like AIA, or an advocacy organization like CNU. Advocacy organizations have the moral high ground, because they are viewed as supporting ideals rather than just supporting a particular profession. Full disclosure: I'm a member of both the AIA and the CNU. Collaboration also has multiple degrees. Consortiums can be a temporary or less formal form of collaboration, but the best and strongest are guilds. The New Urban Guild I founded, for example, has been able to host a number of initiatives (such as the Original Green and Project:SmartDwelling) and support a number of causes (such as Katrina Cottages) that no Guild member would have been able to do on their own.

PS: This post is part of a bigger story outlined in New Media for Design Types. The most recent piece of the story was Being Remarkable. The next piece is Brands vs. Causes.