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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