The Pentagram Papers

Is this the best partnership ever? Meet the most smoothly functioning collection of prima donnas on the planet

Who wouldn't have envied James Biber? As an architect, as a business owner--heck, as a guy with a life--Biber had it made.

Just 38, he had already built a healthy architectural practice designing offices for ad agencies and graphic designers, clients he loved working for. He'd done glamorous projects such as Manhattan's Gotham Bar and Grill. He was making good money. And he was doing it from a studio in New York's SoHo, which he shared with his graphic-designer wife and an illustrator. It was the kind of relaxed, creative place he could bring his dog to--"almost like another home." With smart clients, challenging work, and independence, Biber had just about everything a designer craves.

And then he gave it all up.

That's how it might have looked, anyway, to an observer watching Biber in 1991 as he shut down his successful business to join, of all things, a partnership. A big partnership, even--one with, at the time, 15 full-partner graphic designers, product designers, and architects, plus another 150 staffers, spread from London to New York to San Francisco. The firm is called Pentagram, and the reasons Biber and many other design-scene luminaries have abandoned independence to join it may help answer two questions on every CEO's mind. In this age of stifling labor shortages, how can a company get and keep the most valuable employees of all--the industry stars? And at a time when the intensity and complexity of business make teaming up with partners a smart way to cope, how do you make a partnership--that most emotionally unstable of organizational arrangements--actually work?

Pentagram's answer to each question is the same. Its secret to attracting stars, thriving as a partnership, and rising to international acclaim in its industry can be described in a single phrase: make work better. Create an organization in which even Biber and his ilk can find more-fulfilling work than what they could find on their own--work that's more interesting, more fun. Pentagram has managed that feat with a carefully calibrated partnership agreement and some long-held operating principles, which together enable partners to work collaboratively and yet preserve their identities as individual artists.

"They're more themselves in that partnership than many directors of design businesses are in their own businesses," says Michael Wolff, a graphic designer at the Fourth Room, a renowned London firm. When Biber joined Pentagram, it wasn't without trepidation. He'll say now, though, that he really didn't give up anything. Instead, he found a better way to be Jim Biber.

Which is what good work design is all about.

To really understand what's different about Pentagram, first one has to understand what life is like for a designer running his or her own shop, alone or with a partner or two. To begin with, there's a practical limit to how much an independent designer can take on. Biber says he could handle just a few moderately sized projects at a time on his own: an office, a restaurant, a house in East Hampton. Then there are the limits imposed by the perceptions of would-be clients: Pentagram partner Paula Scher recalls that potential clients with large jobs would visit her previous, two-partner firm "and see a girly design firm, not a lot of bodies at desks, and think I wasn't up to the job."

For independents, cash flow can be erratic, especially for architectural work. Also, independents often find it hard to try something new, since "you can't have experience on a variety of projects when you're by yourself," says Pentagram partner Lowell Williams, who had his own graphic-design firm in Houston for 15 years. Nor do the boundaries between, say, architecture and graphic design blur very much, since few small firms have a mix of disciplines.

And finally, independents are vulnerable to acute professional loneliness: a truly solo designer--one with no partners at all--may have a team of twentysomething assistants but no real peers available to consult or communicate with.

Of course, a lot of designers are happy to work that way. What they get in return is freedom, their name on the door, and the profits from everything that they produce.

But then there's Pentagram. Size-wise, with 160 employees and $25 million in annual revenues, it occupies a middle ground between independent designers and much-larger, corporate firms, such as Landor Associates, Fitch Inc., and Interbrand Group, which are often subsidiaries of ad agencies. In other ways, Pentagram is in a class by itself. At the design world's highest levels, a cadre of about 10 firms compete regularly for the same high-profile projects, estimates William Drenttel, former president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). "At the top of the heap, if you're talking about power and clout and prestige, is Pentagram," he says. Pentagram partners win awards with dizzying monotony. Pentagram's client list includes familiar brands such as United Airlines, Hewlett-Packard, Swatch, and Anne Klein, and blue-chip cultural institutions such as the Tate Gallery in London and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. If you've ordered from a Williams-Sonoma catalog, operated a Kenwood mixer, viewed a poster for New York's Public Theater, filled out an application for an account at J.P. Morgan, or shopped at a Gymboree store, you've already seen, touched, or used a Pentagram design.

Yet a so-called Pentagram style does not exist. Each of Pentagram's partners (there are now 17) remains a formidable design presence in his or her own right. "It's unusual to hear someone say, 'That's clearly a Pentagram project,' " says AIGA executive director Ric Grefe. "He would say, 'That's clearly a Paula Scher project.' Or '...a Michael Bierut project.' Or '...a Woody Pirtle project.' "

Founded in London in 1962 as Fletcher Forbes Gill by three men bearing those names, the firm became Pentagram when the fourth and fifth partners joined, in 1972. In 1978 Pentagram opened a New York City office, and two more American offices followed: San Francisco in 1986 and Austin in 1993.