Good morning!
First, some exciting awards news: In addition to Time Sensitive being named a finalist in this year’s Signal Awards (thanks to all of you who voted for us on the “Listener’s Choice” platform the other week!), I’m pleased to share that we’re also a finalist in the “Education, Art & Culture Podcast” category in this year’s Anthem Awards, which includes a “Community Voice” option where you can vote for us. We’ve also just been named the recipient of three gold Davey Awards—one for Time Sensitive as a series, and two for our episodes featuring the novelist Min Jin Lee and the sculptor Thaddeus Mosley, respectively.
As noted in our last newsletter, I also wanted to share that the live conversation I had with the architect Billie Tsien at the New York City showroom of the Swedish rug-maker Kasthall earlier this month is now available to watch and listen to. If you’re interested in the subjects of craft and architecture, then this is for you. In perhaps my favorite moment of the interview, Billie talks about the sculptural qualities of the currently-under-construction Obama Presidential Center in Chicago that her firm designed, explaining how it shares certain links to the sculptures of Constantin Brâncuși and Isamu Noguchi.
As for this week’s Time Sensitive, I sit down with the lighting designer Lindsey Adelman, who, shortly have recording the episode, made the announcement that after nearly 20 years in business she will soon be shifting her company away from a large-scale production operation and toward a smaller, more intimate “studio” model, moving the majority of in-house production to external partners in order to free up more time for her to explore her creativity and artistry. This radical reset—or rightsizing, as I see it—was a big reason why I wanted to have her on the show. It aligns with the sort of “fewer, better things” ethos I’ve been thinking about and espousing now for years (hat tip here to Glenn Adamson and his great book of the same name).
In our prevailing capitalist culture of bigger, wider, taller, faster, more, more, more, so often it feels like we’re drinking from a firehose. Lindsey understands the pitfalls of this. A pathbreaker in her field, Lindsey scaled her business into a formidable operation. Yet even as her company has reached new heights, she still has the strength of vision to not just keep scaling for the sake of it, but to, as she has put it so beautifully, “let go in order to expand.”
The world needs more Lindseys—business operators who are willing to take a long view on leadership, embrace a polytemporal worldview, and keep their creativity and craft at the forefront. There can indeed be, as Tina Roth Eisenberg would put it, a “heart-centered” approach to running a business. Hopefully, Lindsey’s path can serve as a model for many others.
—Spencer
