It’s an event many leaders in the contract furniture industry wait all winter for – the BIFMA 360 Leadership Conference. At the end of each January, members of the Business Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Association (BIFMA) gather for three days in a typically fair-weathered location to hear from a series of speakers arranged around a theme.
This year we headed down to South Beach, Miami, for a stay at the sunny Loews Miami Beach Hotel.
2018’s conference theme, entitled “YOU [leadership, reputation, creativity]”, is quite a 180 degree turn from 2017’s theme of Aftershock, giving a name to the enormous impact of disruption from all corners of the world affecting our industry along with many others. 2018 ventured into a completely new direction – one of self-examination and introspection.
The 2018 conference notes expanded on this “YOU” theme: “Leaders demonstrate a distinct set of behaviors. How we do our work informs what our clients and markets think of us. While much of our work is programmatic, thinking the unexpected and understanding both industry and ourselves is required for great leadership. The 2018 360° will explore the roles we play, what those roles mean, and what new thinking will help us to be better leaders. The 2018 360° is about YOU as a leader and as a person.”
Following a new tradition started at last year’s conference, the BIFMA team appointed an official conference emcee/host. This year that host was Martin Flaherty, president of Pencilbox, a corporate strategy, branding and sustainability consultancy. One point Mr. Flaherty came back to time and again is the strength of the relationship building that is possible at this event.

“When I started coming to this event 10 years ago, I noticed a change in my relationships in the industry,” said Mr. Flaherty. “There is an ease and a warmth in the interactions that happen here, even between veterans and first-time attendees. It’s an honor and a pleasure to be here.”
BIFMA 360’s 2018 edition featured, as usual, an intriguing blend of speakers, each centered on the ideas and actions leaders can use to more strategically impact their teams’ and companies’ creativity, productivity and reputation.
Marshall Goldsmith. Educator, Coach, Author, and Leadership Expert
Mr. Goldsmith made the point that ego and pride are the source of most of our challenges in leadership, not to mention in life in general. Our culture and most cultures around the world, place a premium on winning; it’s the ultimate sign of success. But it’s not always the right goal.

Successful leaders are conditioned to win, and that conditioning often doesn’t stop on command. Always being right and winning too much – for instance, when you’re trying to delegate and need to trust others to come through – is a bad thing.
“We are conditioned our entire lives to win and to prove how we’re right. It’s a hard transition to make away from that mentality.”
Mr. Goldsmith also had a few notes on coaching, from a leader’s perspective:
The most important factor for successful change is the client, not the coach – don’t let your ego get in the way of your being a great coach. Successful coaching is also about setting yourself up for success. Don’t invest in a losing battle by working with the wrong client.
“If they don’t care, don’t waste your time. If you don’t care, don’t waste your time.”
Many of the things Mr. Goldsmith’s touched on were broad topics applicable at work and at home – simple, but difficult tweaks to make for a more successful life.
Ken Schmidt. Brand Visionary
Speaking at BIFMA 360 for the second time, Ken Schmidt is most known for his role as the director of communications for the Harley-Davidson Motor Company, leading one of the most celebrated turnarounds in corporate history there.

“Culture is a reflection of leadership, and reputation is not a function of leadership. Reputation is leadership.”
How do you build reputation? One of Mr. Schmidt’s clients, Bausch & Lomb, found a more pointed way of asking that question: “How do we extend our story in the market beyond our product?”
“The old pillars of business rely on a company’s “good quality product,” said Mr. Schmidt. “But, a ‘good quality product’ is a given now. It’s not relevant in a conversation about what it means for a business to succeed today. Companies that use their product as their competitive lever will fall behind. We have to transcend the product. It’s not about the hardware. It’s what people believe to be true about the hardware.”
Mr. Schmidt hit on the human need for validation; we need to feel good about ourselves.
“That need for validation – why shouldn’t we weaponize that for our own purposes in creating a positive brand?”
He also touched on a strength that many analysts associate with President Donald Trump’s success:
“Doing things differently attracts customers, simply because it’s different. Tell people what they expect, and they don’t repeat it. Tell people what they don’t expect, and they do repeat it. If I can’t remember what you just told me, what did you just say? Jack shit.”
Mr. Schmidt notes that tolerating disengaged employees is one of the biggest leadership blunders a leader can make.
“Visible passion is one of the most magnetic human traits. It’s the most mirrored behavior. At Harley Davidson we said, “Every time we create more space between us and a potential new member of our family of riders, we fail.”
And he asks leaders to focus on the behavioral side.
>What are people saying? [About us]
>What do we want them to say?
>What are we doing to get them to say it?
In 1985, Harley Davidson filed for bankruptcy. The company had a reputation built around motorcycle riders who are thugs, outlaws, drug-runners and bad news.
“We were relying on the message that, ‘Our products aren’t as shitty as you think they are.’ The market said we were shitty, so we effectively were. When no positive story is told, no brand is built.”
Under Mr. Schmidt’s direction, Harley Davidson morphed into a company with a point of view. The company breathed new life into everything from the workforce – taking an extreme focus on attracting the right employees, to a complete transformation of the historically unwelcoming, eyesore Harley Davidson shops.
“In 1986, we began glorifying the person, not the product.”
Gabor George Burt. Author and Strategist
Mr. Burt, one of the creators of the Blue Ocean Strategy, spoke about harnessing creativity, and how businesses might separate themselves in a VUCA World: a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

The Blue Ocean Strategy is all about creating your own marketplace; it’s a huge undertaking, viewed by many companies as too risky, and so distant in the future that leaders aren’t willing to take a big enough leap to achieve it. So, Mr. Burt created the Slingshot Framework, an approach like Blue Ocean, but intending to make the creative innovation process more approachable.
Mr. Burt shared a quote by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman:
“The human equation is to multiply joy and divide pain. Pain shared is pain divided. Joy shared is joy multiplied.”
Mr. Burt framed creativity as a given: “creativity is a natural resource we all have.” If you choose to tap into it, you’re going to have more fun and be more innovative.
Every company’s goal should be to share joy – and to turn pain points into points of delight. Mr. Burt provided an example from Amazon, noting how the company solved the so-called “wrap rage” problem – referring to customers’ frustrations with undoing shipping and packaging materials to get to their purchase. Amazon dedicated significant resources to developing frustration-free packaging, something their customers now regularly write about in their Amazon purchasing reviews.
“Clients and customers are becoming much more knowledgeable and informed, and less tolerant.”
Mr. Burt also called attention to the art of recombination, or cross-selling. More and more, companies in seemingly unrelated markets are teaming up to offer their customers something new – along with an evolving sense of what their company does.
“People are working together to expand their definitions of what they do.”
An example: Ford Motor Company and Heinz joined forces in a unique partnership that had Ford repurposing tomato remains into bioplastics for use in its car parts. This type of partnership creates entirely new combinations of already existing components.
Laura Kane. Chief Communications Officer, Public Relations Society of America, Inc.
Ms. Kane spoke on how your corporate story drives your reputation. Companies typically spend 5% or less (and often less) on public relations. Ms. Kane says they can make the best use of this budget by finding ways to create their story from scratch and then continuing to expand that story.

“Great storytelling can begin with anything – leadership, products and services, innovation, performance, governance, corporate citizenship. Which ones you tell more frequently depends on the nuances of your industry, in addition to things like the current political and social landscapes.”
A few tips our marketing and PR departments can rely on when creating stories:
>Interview employees, customers and vendors to find the best stories. Find relatable characters
>Identify a challenge they (your customers) need to overcome
>Show how your product, employees or company solves the problem
And companies must get in the habit of repurposing their strongest stories to reach different audiences.
“Find ways to repurpose your best content. Find a way to snowball one story into many stories. Spend 60% of your time promoting your stories, and less time writing them.”
Deborah Wince-Smith. President & CEO, Council on Competitiveness
In her role on the Council of Competitiveness, Ms. Wince-Smith studies how we can become more competitive given the current market landscape and disruptors; then she does just that – works with organizations and companies to leverage competitiveness that then has a trickle-down effect on the greater public.

Her session was eye opening for the sheer breadth of issues she addressed.
“We are in the middle of a data tsunami, a data revolution that will open up new worlds. We’ve entered an Age of Illumination.”
A summary of her market movers:
>Three sectors are accounting for our decrease in productivity in our economy: healthcare, education and housing.
>With the shale oil and gas boom, we have moved from being energy weak to very energy strong, and it’s causing major geopolitical structural implications.
>Manufacturing’s narrative used to read dumb, dirty, dangerous and disappearing. It has remade itself to be smart, sustainable, safe and surging. The 20th century production model is effectively gone, and right now manufacturing stands at a critical crossroads. We’re experiencing a back-to-the-future moment; the top five 20th century manufacturing leaders are now advancing back to the top. China leads the pack for now, but Germany and the U.K. along with the U.S. will reclaim leadership positions in the future.
>Global wage arbitrage is coming to an end. China and other similarly positioned countries are now paying their workers closer to what they’re worth. Energy efficiency, sustainability and productivity are all increasing as well.
>The U.S. is reducing the corporate tax rate and shifting to a territorial tax code. Ms. Wince-Smith sees this as a big shift that will position the country to be innovation-ready instead of innovation-hostile.
>Addressing the BIFMA crowd, Ms. Wince-Smith noted that the various standards our industry has in place, sustainability and otherwise, are a great investment because they will become global standards.
>Emerging manufacturing leaders include: Malaysia, India, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam
>The U.S. remains the largest investor in R&D in the world. We have an incredible national stock of research scientists from the country over. But the share of these investments by the federal government is decreasing. Ms. Wince-Smith notes that our ability to keep up in tech knowledge sectors will suffer if this downward trend continues.
>Unemployment is currently low, and entrepreneurship is at a high. We have no shortage of start-ups, but they need to figure out how to go from start-up to scale-up more efficiently and more often. Tech advancements are helping them do so.
>Don’t forget Japan. It’s the third largest economy in the world, and it’s also become a test-bed for how to manage an aging population.
>Cyber attacks coming from Chinese sites are having a major impact on the U.S. companies. If China would implement laws to protect against theft of intellectual property, the U.S. would see a significant bump in GDP growth.
Jane Hallinan & Alissa Wehmueller. Ms. Hallinan, Interior Designer, Perkins Eastman / Ms. Wehmueller, Principal, Helix Architecture + Design
These two young designers from Pittsburgh (Ms. Hallinan) and Kansas City (Alissa Wehmueller) treated audiences to “the designer’s perspective.” One might think that time spent with interior designers is relatively easy to get, but any manufacturer will tell you that quality time is more difficult to come by than meets the eye.

Right away, Ms. Hallinan and Ms. Wehmueller noted the growing importance of coworking companies like WeWork in the A&D market.
“They’ve mastered the art of cranking out spaces with real estate constraints at a fast pace,” said Ms. Hallinan. “But, they often take out many of the pieces of our design process – things that are the soul of what we do.”
Clients are being armed with more information and doing their knowledge gathering, including from sources like the user-centered platform Pinterest. Pinterest doesn’t filter out or categorize furnishings according to industry nuances and standards, and that bothers interior designers just as much as it does contract manufacturers.
“We, too, specify ancillary items from retail providers on occasion, particularly when we see budgetary limitations,” said Ms. Wehmueller. “But we do so cautiously, and only when necessary. Our clients have all of these residential brands and stores at their fingertips. Everyone’s a designer now. And they’re asking themselves, ‘Do I want or need to go through this traditional design process or not?’”
“People are also making decisions regarding furniture, thinking that they only expect the furniture to last a few [3-5] years. And we believe that’s a really unhealthy way of thinking.”
A new market disruptor is addressing this concern.
Swivelfly is positioning itself as a smart alternative to office furniture rental or purchasing. On a monthly subscription basis, its customers receive office furniture as they need it. The model puts much of the power in the hands of end users.
“The Swivelfly FaaS model provides higher-quality office furniture at a lower price point than would normally be available to most customers. Office furniture distributors use complicated, volume-based discounts. Big box alternatives are less expensive, but flimsy. Swivelfly provides on-trend, high-quality, ergonomic furniture to help you create a work environment that looks good and is comfortable. Just the kind of place you want to ensure employee well being and happiness.”
“We do see a few issues with Swivelfly, and their model might not be perfect,” said Ms. Hallinan. “But someone’s going to get this model right, and it’s only a matter of time before they do.”
Are dealer and designer roles becoming larger or smaller, in relation to the two parties at either end of the equation – manufacturers and end users/clients? Ms. Hallinan and Ms. Wehmueller noted the volatility at play in trying to answer that question. In that discussion, they touched on the role of the media, citing some frustration with mixed messages and misinformation.
“What’s the right message we, and you, should be sending, and they [clients] should be hearing? There are more options, faster turnaround, better pricing – we’re asking for that. The fashion industry has already plunged into this struggle, with disruptive companies like Zara and Forever 21. We want, and our clients want, more simplicity in the buying process, more transparency, and consistent messaging.”
But, they want that transparency to come with some care built in:
“Transparency tools for clients are great!” said Ms. Hallinan. “But, please make sure you are empowering designers, and the designers’ role.”
The pair cited a few disruptive business models that put transparency and the social good front and center:
>Everlane, an affordable luxury clothing brand that lays out exactly how and where each piece of clothing was made, with a pricing model that forgoes the dicey markups common in retail and apparel merchandising.
>Warby Parker, the affordable, fashionable eyewear company that donates a pair of glasses for every pair purchased.
>Hem, a furniture design studio based in Stockholm.
The two designers challenged BIFMA to form a relationship with designers at the student level, and also issued a challenge to the A&D comunity:
“The interior design industry does not have the quantity of interior design leaders it needs. People become reps, go to work for dealers, get into facility management, and other career paths. We need to foster our own future through career mentorship”
Mentoring in the interior design field is suffering badly, if not flat-out failing. Young designers rely solely on chance when starting their career, hoping blindly to find someone at their firm who can show them the ropes.
Todd Simmons. Vice President, Brand Experience & Design, International Business Machines (IBM)
Mr. Simmons spoke on “Designing Decisions” – and the alignment between design and business decisions – walking the audience through his body of work as a series of case studies.
As head of creative at the celebrated brand agency Wolff Olins, Mr. Simmons has helped define the experience people have at countless clothing and product brands, including Gap,

Adidas, Nike, Living Proof beauty and 3M to name only a few.
He’s the design brain behind Microsoft’s modern identity (think Microsoft Surface and Office 365), as well as the London Olympic Games in 2012, whose logo got raked over the coals for its frenetic, seizure-inducing look.
Of the London Olympics logo, he said, “We wanted absolutely no nostalgia, flames, leaping, ribbons, or Big Ben – or we wouldn’t do it.”
Instead of obvious influencers, much of Wolff Olins’, and Mr. Simmons’ work is grounded in a sense of unwavering purpose.
“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should,” noted Mr. Simmons. “Be about solving problems.”
The problem at Microsoft was one of identity:
“There is nothing ‘micro’ or ‘soft’ about Microsoft. They are big and hard. But they have a slow speed to market, and from a brand side, they had no self-esteem. Our work for them was very systematic – we created something that could be implemented all over the world, in every language, very easily.”
Mr. Simmons’ buzzworthy move to IBM is one instance of a larger shift of design professionals entering into newly created leadership positions in other fields – most notably in software and finance.
He reiterated the power consumers have over a brand: “Your brand is exactly what anyone says about it at any given time. But you do get to direct it.”
IBM has always been about solving a need. When he began at the company, Mr. Simmons is starting to get people to ask, “What are we designing?”
“IBM tries to get people from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ We are simply trying to get someone or something from one place to another. And creating an aesthetic for IBM – that’s not about the look, the vibe, the feel. It’s about questioning every event, digital and physical experience – every single thing that underpins what IBM does.”
He also called attention to an interesting problem uncommon in the furnishings and A&D community – anonymity.
“Software designers have an identity problem. We don’t know the top software designers like we know the top designers in furniture. We have no idea who they are.”
Mr. Simmons is tasking himself with putting a face and a name to the software designer persona.