S7E5: George Gendron + Patrick Mitchell

George Gendron is writer in residence at MIT’s integrated design and management program. Patrick Mitchell runs Modus Operandi Design, a studio in Rockport, Massachusetts.

Both Gendron and Mitchell worked at big magazine companies. They founded the Solo Project in 2013, but the idea first came to them while working together on a 1987 cover for Inc. When it comes to independent professionals, Gendron says.

The last thing in the world they want to do is grow. And it turned out that most of them didn’t want to have any employees. And the anthem of this group was: I want to do the work.

The rewards for a job well done in large companies were more direct reports, more management responsibility, more admin responsibility, which ended up taking people further and further away from the work that they attracted them to a profession in the first place.

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By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.