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.

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.
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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, you also call it, this comes from the architectural design process, and I think you talked about light, sound, emotion, thought. How do these inform an architect? And then how can you transform these or transfer these concepts into leadership? What are the representative analogies in leadership for them?

Yeah. So these are great analogies. You think about, especially in a very abstract way, some of the art I produce is all based on conceptual layers, and layers occur physically in the built environment and physically in the unbuilt environment and in natural environment in a different way, sort of an orderly versus a chaotic type of layers of space. And it occurs in light, in shadow and sound, and layers of sound, layers of instruments and music, layers of thought and emotion when you’re in a room of people. And so it’s a very conceptual way to think about the space-time. Then if you transfer that into how can we synthesize various layers of learning and creativity and concepts, and put them to work as strategies to build your company or your organization. So it’s kind of a very conceptual idea, but it really works once you start taking these different types of input that you might be inspired by and adapting them to a strategy to inspire your people and build your company.

Okay. That sounds super intriguing. So can you give me examples of maybe each? So, we talked about light, sound, emotion, thought. How do you practically turn them into strategies?

Yeah, so for example, we are a design firm that specializes in commercial real estate. Well, when we started, we were an architectural firm in Southern California that specialized in industrial and office building design for commercial developers. That was our specialty. Very vulnerable to the shocks of the economy. So we set out to diversify our company, both from a geographic standpoint, from a product standpoint, and a service standpoint. So early on, we were trying to figure out, okay, we don’t want to try and do everything, so how do we diversify and protect ourselves from the ups and downs of the economy at least a little bit more than we are? And so I used a metaphor from high school physics class called the visible light spectrum. And so the visible light spectrum is the colors of the rainbow. Outside of the visible light spectrum are infrared on one side and ultraviolet on the other side, and you can’t see them. So, when we were discussing, okay, how do we diversify but stay in business that we can dominate and we can lead? So, we needed to stay within commercial real estate, but we could add retail. We could add medical office buildings. We could add advanced manufacturing. We could add high-tech facilities. We could add interior design. We could add branding and building measurement and we could add a whole series of offices in important geographic locations that were important to our clients, but we were not going to design stadiums. We’re not going to design a military bases. We’re not going to design custom homes or churches, and so the visible light spectrum was a metaphor that we’ve used for many years, actually, to define our diversification so we could build our company. So that’s just one way that we’ve used

kind of an inspirational input to design a whole strategy for our company.
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That’s interesting. So I guess you can brainstorm around this. Okay. What are the visible lights? How do we stay inside the rainbow, but diversify into different activities so that we reduce our shock exposure, I guess. Well, the other thing that you say on your website is that building a culture is an artistic expression. What do you mean by this and how do you build artistically a culture and what are the elements of it?

Well, I think that design firms tend to think artistically all the time about the work we do, the actual services we produce. But, we want to sort of infuse that same creativity into building our company and how do we do it. So one way we have done it, is to inspire all of our people to think creatively about how we can improve our company. So we conceived this idea called WM3.0 several years ago where we solicited ideas from everyone in the company around three broad categories and encouraged them to think creatively and come up with ideas that would really improve the company. Some of them were small and easy to implement. Some of them were bigger and needed some cultural shifts to make happen. But we got over a thousand ideas and they were amazing. And so we had working teams in different categories to study, prioritize, and implement some of these ideas. I mean, we didn’t implement every one, but we got a lot of great ideas out of it, and it really improved our company. So we’ve done that several times after that, and we continue to have that process in our company today.

That is very interesting. I heard about a similar process, and I think the Japanese companies, when they have this idea box, and then they have these committees studying the ideas and giving feedback and even the lean approach to have people innovate in their own areas and kind of create a culture of continuous innovation. One thing you mentioned, you mentioned the word several times and it’s kind of one of my favorite words, you say inspire, you have to inspire people, you have to create a culture that inspires people. You are very empathetic about inspiration. So how do you inspire people in different ways? What inspires people to be a great organization?

Yeah, so I found that if you create a culture that empowers people, encourages them to take risk, encourages them to make sure we understand where they want to go in their career and then spend time and resources mentoring and coaching people and building people up. We kind of call ourselves a leadership academy here. We spend an awful lot of time encouraging our people and training them. We have a program called WMU, different classes they can take, different subjects that affect our business. We have a formal mentoring and a formal coaching program, and we have all kinds of leadership training. We have big leadership meetings three times a year. So, we have built our company in the model of Jack Welch that he did at GE, which was an inspiration, by the way, to build a leadership academy so that, as we grow, we have people that are growing in their careers to fill the leadership positions that we need in our company. So, we found that by encouraging our people and inspiring this idea of empowerment and growth it just creates this culture of inspiration and excitement.

Yeah, it’s kind of interesting that you brought up Jack Welch because he was also called Neutron Jack. So he wasn’t always in an inspiring mood, sometimes he was in a firing mood. So I wonder if the inspiration of Jack Welch, is it just because of the academy or there are other things that he did that inspired you?

Jack Welch has taken some criticism over time, which is understandable, but I think that in total, he built GE into an amazing company. So you can take inspiration from different things. I mean, obviously his performance, at least for me, was amazing. Obviously he had to make some tough decisions.

Part of leadership is sometimes you got to make tough decisions. I think that's a good lesson that he taught us as well.
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Yeah, I agree. He was an amazing leader. He was the son of an Irish railway conductor and then he 20x the market cap of GE and became the biggest company in the world. So definitely, we can’t take anything away from him. So talking about tough decisions, you mentioned that that’s one of the things that good leaders have to do. They have to do tough decisions. So what is the hardest decision that you have ever had to make in your business?

Yeah. So in our business, especially being tied to commercial real estate, even with diversifications, we’re still somewhat vulnerable to the ups and downs of the economy. The toughest decisions I think we’ve ever had to make is during recessions, downturns, because projects stop, so you have to get smaller as a company, because you are smaller, because you have less revenue. So along with that, you have to have fewer people to do the work, and so you have to have layoffs. And those are always the toughest decisions because you’re affecting people in their livelihood. But it has to happen and it has to happen in a timely basis if you don’t want to put your company at risk. And so those are definitely the toughest ones for sure.

Yeah. And I’ve been there as well. Not once, unfortunately. And it’s tough not just because of the people, obviously, that is very tough, but it’s also, I mean, at least I felt like I failed people. So it’s not just I hurt them, but I even failed them because I didn’t live up to the implied promise of maybe growing the business and making it successful and making it a stable place for them. And that’s really tough to face up to that personal failure.

It’s tough to face up to and it does feel like failure and it is in many regards. But on the other hand, you can control what you can control and geopolitical events in the world economy is something we normally can’t control. So I think facing the tough decisions is really the lesson. No matter how you got there, you still have to make some tough decisions sometimes.

And ultimately people can land on their feet. And if a company is suffering, it’s bad for the people as well, even if they keep their job because they know that their job is unstable and they are not succeeding. It may not be their fault and it erodes their self-confidence and their market value ultimately. So it can even be seen as a way of not hurting people.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, no good comes from delaying the tough decision. It just doesn’t make it better. It makes it worse, actually.

Yeah, I agree. That’s awesome. So before we wrap up this conversation, one final question, and maybe we can talk about your book as well. What is the most important question any entrepreneur should be asking themselves?

Well, this is a question I ask myself every day, and normally because when you’re the entrepreneur, you have the ability to affect any part of your company every day. And so usually when I get up in the morning, it’s like, okay, what can I do today to make the biggest impact on my company? And different days require different focuses depending on what’s going on. And so it could be a new proposal or a new client or a pursuit or tough decision-making time or dealing with a big contract or a big invoice or a personnel issue or a hiring opportunity. And so I think

it's important to keep your head out of the weeds when you're an entrepreneur,
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So in a practical sense, does it mean that you have to keep your desk empty and your schedule fairly open so that you can respond in real time and you can actually focus on those things that might not be in your schedule?

It’s important to not overschedule yourself. I think that that’s a trap people fall into. And so obviously you’re going to have schedule every day. You’re going to have things on your calendar, but you’re most effective if you can have that time to think and definitely you got to keep yourself organized, uncluttered, desk clean, email cleaned out, all of that stuff is important if you wanna be effective.

Yeah, Jeff Bezos said in an interview that he only wants to make three decisions each day. Nothing else, but just three important decisions and he wants to focus on it and he sleeps well, he exercises, he eats well, just to make sure that he’s in the best possible shape to make those three decisions.

That’s right. And I’ve got stuff in the book about stuff like that. I think eating right and taking care of yourself and exercising is all part of it. You have to do that. People say, I don’t have time. Well, you don’t have time not to do it. You have to do it.

Yeah, love it. So, Layered Leadership. So what’s the biggest message of the book? If people who should read it, who is looking for what?

I think any business leader or someone who is trying to build an organization of any kind, I think it can help. It gives lots of different leadership ideas, tips, goals, things that I’ve done, everything from writing a business plan to taking some of these creative initiatives to taking care of yourself the right way, to managing your finances the right way, to having a succession plan. There’s a lot in there about succession plans. So, anybody that’s trying to build a company or a business or an organization, I think hopefully there’s something in there that will help you.

Yeah. Well, definitely check it out, Layered Leadership from Lawrence Armstrong. And one more extra question. I know I said this was going to be the last one, but you’re also an accomplished artist. And I see a piece of art behind you, which may be your creation, I don’t know.

Yes. 

So, tell me a little bit about why you became an artist and how did that connect to the layered vision and the Layered Leadership idea, and how do you even have time for that?

Yeah, so I’ve been an artist my whole life. I decided 12, 13 years ago to begin showing my work, finally. And so I show in galleries all across the US and Europe and some in South America. And all of my work is abstract expressionist and studying this concept of layers. All of my work is a manifestation of that idea. And so, I can keep studying this for a long time. And it goes to the art, it goes to my company, it goes to the book, this whole idea of synthesized layers.

And why are layers important? 

It’s just the way I see the world and I see it as a way to express an understanding of the world and my application to how you build an organization.

Is it about complexity or synthesis or both, or neither? 

Yeah, I think so. The world is complex. It’s my way of trying not to make it less so by understanding different layers and how to synthesize those layers for the result you want.

So if you can articulate the layers, then you can systematically approach things perhaps. That’s awesome.

Yeah. 

All right, well, if people would like to learn more about your art, your books, your company, your future ideas and visions, where should they go?

Yeah. So you can find the book and see some podcasts, see some blogs, all that sort of stuff at www.layeredleadershipbook.com 

All right, well, Larry Armstrong, business leader, artist, author, architect, and so much more. Thanks for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom of layers. And if you enjoyed this conversation half as much as I did, then please give us a review on Amazon and follow us on YouTube and check us out on LinkedIn as well for short snippets of these episodes and stay tuned for following episodes. Thank you, Larry, for coming and thank you for listening.