With the 2014 ASLA conference fast approaching it is time to start setting a schedule for the educational sessions and field trips that are worth attending. As I read through this year’s options I cant help but drift back to my days of registering for Spring classes and academic prose flowing through each option. As a student I could vision the stack of notes and text books, the late hours and supplies that would be needed to navigate that semester’s exercises. As a student I could appreciate the need for elementary repetition, but often wondered what the real world application would actually entail.

Today I sit in my office rolling through the same lists of academic review, but suffer from everyday operational issues that just don’t seemed to be addressed along with the lessons on ‘how to bring migratory insects back to the desert garden”. While the topic is quite fascinating the 90 minute education does little to help me in hiring my next employee, figuring out how to drive Spring sales in the Fall or get my last project published in a national design publication.

As a community of Landscape Architects we are often times divided by our everyday design intent and academic application, but inherently linked by many of the same fundamental challenges every business faces. I have no doubt the east coast design firm perched above in a trendy loft space overlooking a urban plaza rarely operates in the same circle as the owner operator design build landscape company in southern California. If you can produce a photorealistic sketchUp rendering with a shovel in your hand, please put that skill first on your resume. Even so we still do want to know how to get those migratory insects back to the desert garden. That is ingrained in our curiosity as stewards of the land. We will be inspired to create and evolve as designers, but tracking how escalating home developments reduce bird populations that eat invasive insects that are destroying migratory nesting does nothing to help me track my lead to conversion sales rate.

Today I endeavor to bring an education and training to my staff that is equally important to the studio as it would to the corporate boardroom. On our office shelves you will find Durr’s Woody Shrubs right next to a copy of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. That was the last book I bought for my team and what we will be talking about the first half at our next staff meeting.