SOME INFORMATION:

David Hawk is a dual professor of architecture and management at NJIT. As with most careers this composite reality is more accidental than purposeful. It is the residual of a number of unplanned events that typically come to define who we are in ways that couldn’t and perhaps shouldn’t be predicted or foreseen. It’s somewhat like episodes with spouses, friendships, enemies, courses, ideas, problems and seasons - while they change, we eventually see how they are cyclical and eventually become one.

THOUGHTS ON ARCHITECTURE
While he is very impressed with the importance of good architecture he has a great deal of difficulty relating to self-important architects who have taken the easy path of a content-free form via the arrogance that relies on ignorance. He prefers being with those who take the tougher route of demonstrating a humility that comes from struggling with content that lies beyond normal human capability to include or see. The first approach emphasizes power politics and the will to control others. The second leaves control of others to the world of aesthetics and concentrates on a will to understand others though self. He believes in the research potentials of experimenting with processes that exclude what tradition finds fundamental or critical. In architecture this can consists of such phenomena as drawings, models, design studios, mentors and paper.

THOUGHTS ON MANAGEMENT
While he is pleased with the potentials in managing the workings of symmetrical forms of economic exchange, and how to keep improving these, he has trouble accepting logical frameworks that require social asymmetries in interactions rituals. Most of his research includes the question of how best to elevate the potentials of self-management and self-governance in human affairs, and reduce the harm from hierarchical management routines. The advantage of this shift is to emphasize the taking of personal responsibility while reducing the dysfunctions and expenses of “top” management. He is not anti-management and governance but finds more promise in natural forms of internalized management and regulation. These can better link into the changing patterns of reality that allow people to become more than they are instead of insuring that they are as low as others see them. He believes in the research potentials of simply trusting that others can do what needs to be done, in dealing with adversaries by ignoring them instead of energizing them via fights, and leaving key hierarchical positions vacant.

SOME MORE: ILLUSTRATIONS

To better understand how we can do better he likes to work with and study examples that point to the great potentials in the softer side of human expression and not the well documented problems in the harder side of human thought and action. The upside is expressed through the ideas and workings of Linux software, Ikea furniture and SOL cleaning. The downside is seen in the operations of those who attempt to compete with them. Relative to governance, US EPA’s “Energy Star Program” illustrates a worthy effort at self-regulation, as well as the limits to innovation.

SOMETHING

You are sufficiently encoded with directions that you know the right thing to do. The rest is to encourage yourself to do it.

As Yogi Berra said: “When you come to a fork in the road take it.”