278: Layer Your Leadership with Lawrence Armstrong

https://youtu.be/LvorRF-e2UQ Lawrence Armstrong, Chairman of Ware Malcomb, is driven by a mission to help leaders layer their leadership by integrating creativity, strategy, and empowerment to build resilient, innovative organizations. We learn about Lawrence’s journey from architect to CEO, how he transformed Ware Malcomb into a leading international design firm, and why he developed the Layered Leadership framework. Inspired by architectural design, he explains how leadership, like architecture, involves synthesizing different layers—Light, Sound, Emotion, and Thought—to build strong, visionary organizations. He shares how leaders can apply these 4 Layers of Leadership to inspire teams, create strategic clarity, and drive sustainable growth. He also introduces the Visible Light Spectrum metaphor for business diversification, discusses the importance of fostering a culture of innovation, and offers insights on making tough leadership decisions. --- Layer Your Leadership with Lawrence Armstrong Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest is Lawrence Armstrong, Chairman of Ware Malcomb, a leading international design firm. He's also an accomplished business leader, architect, artist, and the author of Layered Leadership. Larry, welcome to the show. Oh, Steve, thanks. Thanks for having me on. Well, what a bio, what a CV. I'm proud of having you on this show. So, we'll get into all of what you are doing, but let's start with why you're doing it. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your different business, and I guess authorship is part of artistic activities? Thanks. Well, I think I wrote the book and pretty much everything else I'm doing right now is trying to help people. We had a great time building our company and I'm involved in a lot of other pursuits at this point. Some of the ideas and the creativity we brought to leadership I thought could really help people build their organizations. So, let’s plunge right in. When you talk about leadership, what is your experience about it, and what made you want to write a book about it? Yeah, I think that I have a little bit of a different take on leadership than maybe most people do. So that's why I wrote it. The idea behind Layered Leadership is this conceptual idea of the way I see the world. Architects think of layers when they design space and buildings and different aspects of a building. And so I've sort of tried to expand that thinking to different concepts and different inspirations and how we can utilize inspirations in our life and turn them into strategies to build an organization and to inspire growth. And so using that creative thought, whether it be a business, a concept in a business book or a metaphor for a physics lesson from high school or a discussion about the example set by Leonardo da Vinci, would bring different ideas together and synthesize those into strategies to build an organization.Share on X And so I feel like it's a little different take on this idea of leadership. So, what does layered leadership look like? I mean, are there like figurative layers that you have to build in order to be a great leader? How does it work? Yeah. So it's sort of the baseline of, first of all, understanding your company and where you want to go and what you're trying to do. And then inspiring your people to help build it. And so, the various aspects are understanding your company, what it does, what it does not do, I think is very important. And then how you want to expand it, how you leverage and encourage your people and empower your people to help get there, and how you build those people and how you encourage them by empowering them and training them, and then just infusing different concepts that inspire in a creative way to build up. So, Larry, in our earlier discussion, you told me that this layered concept or layered vision,