desired outcome.
range of unique signs, symbols, and shared references. For instance, the term “fish” referred to any Razorfish employee, leading to clichés such as “flying fish” to indicate a visiting coworker from another. Bags, hats and t-shirts branded with our logos and colors abounded and were worn with pride. Don’t get me wrong: we weren’t drinking the Kool-Aid of a mad leader. The culture was strong, but never over the top.
The dotcom bubble soon burst, and the company went into a tail spin. Razorfish had three locations in Germany at its height, with over 80 people in the Hamburg office alone, where I was. The numbers dwindled even more rapidly than they grew. Within a year there were only about a dozen of us in the Hamburg office. That’s when I heard the term “pink slip” party for the first time: people celebrated getting canned. It was kinda like pulling out a lounge chair on the Titanic to watch the thing slowly go under. The majority of the fish were young, and moving on professionally was not unusual either in those days. Not that anyone really likes to get fired; in many cases it just wasn’t a sur-prise when it happened.
It was the beginning of the end. But the management struggled and contrived to keep the boat afloat. Razorfish then split into Razorfish US and Razorfish Europe, which meant we were competing with our former American colleagues for some accounts. That didn’t last long either, and Razorfish Europe split further after shutting down many office locations completely. Left over were Razorfish Germany and Razorfish Amsterdam.
Razorfish Germany then went bankrupt, but was kept alive in a new company form. The Frankfurt office closed, and the company was managed from the Munich office. We were now only three people in Hamburg—two IAs and the Design Director—forcing the company to conduct projects virtually. The centrally located downtown Hamburg office—also famous for its monthly parties, by the way—was forced to
move, and the remaining trio of fish shacked up in a shared office space of another much smaller digital agency in Hamburg.
Not only was all the magic gone, it was embarrassing for the once lead-ing agency in Hamburg to have its office in a corner of the office of a B-level agency. Our fancy quarters with an all-glass conference room (called the “fish tank”) and exposed brick walls were gone, and we now sat in a drab warehouse in the middle of an industrial area of Hamburg.
The multi-million dollar accounts also dried up in a wave of über-conservative client spending that the dotcom bust wrought on online industry, and we found ourselves pitching for the smallest of projects.
Razorfish went bankrupt again. Though the management wanted to keep the company alive in yet another organizational form, I’d had enough.
That was the spring of 2003. Coincidentally, an ex-fish colleague con-tacted me and asked if I’d like to take a position with LexisNexis. Of course, as a student of library and information science, I was very famil-iar with LexisNexis, one of the leading providers of legal information for professionals and a true pioneer of online database searching. So, I didn’t really have to scramble to find a new job—it found me. Good timing.
The Missing Nexus
In April 2003 I started at LexisNexis. Since I’m still there, I don’t want to get into hot water with my employer by revealing too many gory details here. Suffice it to say that the experience has been much different from what I had at ID Media and Razorfish.
LexisNexis is a large, traditional organization. It has been providing online information to legal professionals (e.g., lawyers, paralegals, etc.) for 40 years. It’s a multi-million dollar company in the multi-billion
dol-lar industry of legal information publishing. LexisNexis has over 13,000 employees around the world.
Not surprisingly, a fairly deep management structure is ingrained in the basic DNA of LexisNexis. And I landed at the very bottom of this struc-ture, in an engineering-led product development department. The user experience team was small when I started, and it has since grown. Our reach and influence is limited, even to this day, at least compared to ID Media and Razorfish, where design and user experience ruled the day.
There are advantages and disadvantages to a large, traditional organiza-tion. On the plus side, the overall business is fairly stable. Salaries and benefits are generous. LexisNexis is also a truly international company, which means I can work from my home office in Hamburg, supple-mented with considerable travel. (I recently did a short stint in our Sydney office, for example—not too shabby a place to get sent for work.) And of course, the network of colleagues worldwide provides a source of energy and inspiration as well.
On the downside, the weight of the hierarchy at LexisNexis proves to be crushing much of the time, particularly for creative design activi-ties. Innovative ideas, no matter how small, get squeezed through layers of filters for “approval” and come out the other side mangled beyond recognition, thereby squashing out any inkling of the original vision be-hind the idea. It’s quite a sober atmosphere, for sure.
Suffering from this weighty structure and, at times, political subter-fuge is creativity and design innovation, I believe. While ID Media and Razorfish bathed in out-of-the-box thinking, LexisNexis usually prefers to take a safer path. Pushing the boundaries of what’s possible is simply harder within such organizations as LexisNexis.
A Broader Field Vision
So after over a decade of professional experience in various types of teams and companies, I’m left asking myself, is there a relationship be-tween organizational rigidness and creativity? Do chaos and transpar-ency breed innovative outcomes? My personal experience of moving from ID Media and Razorfish to LexisNexis seems to suggest so.
More importantly, I feel that at ID Media and Razorfish, both at the company level and on each individual project, the sense of a common mission was the real driver of our creativity and innovation. Perhaps personal relationships aren’t the best for a working environment, but those common bonds were missing for me at LexisNexis as a whole.
So how can something like user experience design have a chance to make a difference or even survive in an organization like LexisNexis?
This is an interesting challenge the user experience group at LexisNexis faces. And we’re working on it, brick by brick, trying to change stagnant mindsets and make a difference. Other such companies face this chal-lenge as well.
The answer, I believe, lies in a strong shared vision. Unless you have a “Steve Jobs” at your company, a vision needs to be actively forged and nurtured along the way.
Creating a vision, however, doesn’t just mean creating a vision statement after a cou-ple of minutes’ thought and moving on. A vision should
be something that is alive, and it should pervade every action of every employee and guide their thinking in general. It has to be a clearly and widely understood ethos across teams and departments—a veritable way of life.