My first job out of CCS was designing for GM - the worst and most valuable experience I’ve had as a designer. The headquarters at the time was our campus, the Warren Tech Center where you’d regularly see the Presidents arriving in Ferrarri’s, Porsche’s, Aston’s and ZR1’s while the place was blowing money like a Country that had just found a gold and diamond mine in it’s yard. I designed a door handle for a Pontiac, an exhibit for GM Europe and a design strategy project for brand awareness and development. Meanwhile, I watched LOTS of people walking around doing nothing while I tried to figure out how on earth the company could afford the way they did business (obviously, they couldn’t!! lol).
Anyway, the value of that experience is that I am far more aware of our productivity and my own level of risk-taking and how it could affect our business, good or bad. Oh, and after that experience I decided NOT to have mahogany walled hallways, chrome sculptures, a two story designer library (with every periodical on earth arriving weekly), granite floors and about ten times too many people walking around. 