Jan Chipchase is the Jason Bourne of the design industry. He ditched his executive director role at Frog Design, the 600-person San Francisco-based design company known for their work with Steve Jobs and the Apple IIc computer, and now works for himself at Studio D Radiodrurans with no permanent office and no full-time staff. Chipchase has perfected the art of ethnographic research made famous by Xerox in 1979 spending weeks or months in the most remote areas of Somaliland for the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to understand the adoption of mobile money services, in Riyadh to learn what it means to be Saudi youth for Saudi Telecom, or in Myanmar to learn how rice farmers use their smartphones.
What has intrigued me about Chipchase’s story, aside from the fact that he had to invent a duffle bag that minimises radio frequency tracking while holding $1M in used bank notes as an indispensable tool of trade, is the fact that he has opted to go it alone while likely declining generous and numerous offers from the world’s top design firms. He has cast aside big-name design studios where he became frustrated by “bloated cost structures and distorted priorities” and now lives in a world based upon solid relationships with clients who feel they are getting good value for great output.
Chipchase’s success has much to do with his own unique talents as a qualitative researcher, strategist and designer, but I can’t help but hear echoed the output of my own research with pharmaceutical, medical device, animal health and agriculture clients who resoundingly expressed a strong preference for the “little guy” when it comes to selecting agency and strategic partners over their larger, multinational, household named brethren. The perception of better value, the peace of mind of working with the founder, and the white-glove service associated with being one of just a few clients were the main reasons cited for their penchant for the one and two-man shops.
As an independent consultant, I have to agree that being freed of bait-and-switch staffing mandates, sales quotas that inhibit the building of genuine relationships, and hope-for-the-best deliverable development after hoisting a mountain of work on the newest junior really does enable my best work to come through. Of course scale and breadth of expertise will remain factors but are easily addressed with a bench of solid partners and, more challenging, saying no to opportunities that just aren’t the right fit.
The one-man-band model is something we just might be seeing more of as the millennials enter the workforce (estimated to comprise 75% of the workforce by 2025). They are more likely to work for themselves compared to any other generation. Why? Unlike Chipchase, it is not so much that they want to work for themselves; it’s that they don’t want to work for other people who they find to be too demanding and unappreciative of their self-inflated estimation of their talents and capabilities. Dr. Tomas Chammorro-Permuzie, University College London professor of business psychology, says “self-employment is just a coping strategy for avoiding boring or tedious work; and a shot at fulfilling somewhat grandiose aspirations.”
The DIY model in the service sector seems to have struck a chord with large and small clients alike probably because those of us in those roles have paid our dues in larger institutions and have an unwavering client-first mentality. It will be interesting to see the how the millennial generation can side-step the hard bits and take their place in the world of the self-employed. We’ll just have to wait for the selfies to show us how they did it.
