london.edu © LONDON BUSINESS SCHOOL rE vIE w ISSUE 1 - 2015 55

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LLThe way we work

Office spaceTiago Correia, of the growth consultancy Bow & Arrow, opens his office doors

oho Square is one of London’s creative hubs. It is a haven of green amid the excitable urban hum of commerce. All

creative life is within walking distance o f t h e o f f i c e s o f t h e g row t h consultancy, Bow & Arrow, which nestle in the corner of the square.

Previously this eight-storey office block (resembling a wedding cake from an aerial view) was the home of England’s Football Association. It was from here that sundry England football managers were hired and ingloriously fired, and from here that errant players bolted into waiting taxis as they were handed down Draconian fines for their misdemeanours.

Now, after a refit to bring the building into the 21st century, it is a suitably fashionable home for the consultancy Bow & Arrow, which boasts some stellar corporate names as customers, including Google, Spotify, DixonsCarphone and News Corp.

Tiago Correia, originally from Portugal, joined the company in 2013 after doing a Masters in Management at London Business School. Previously, he had worked at PwC, Amazon and CNN, and had also found the time to launch a consulting startup business offering business students as a low-cost alternative to mainstream consultants. The startup continues to thrive, but Tiago Correia is now firmly at home in central London after nearly 18 months with Bow & Arrow.

“We describe ourselves as a growth and innovation consultancy,” he says. “We provide clients with growth opportunities. We don’t simply cut costs or look for efficiencies. Our business is about working with clients to create new products and services, to discover new consumers and to allow them to find growth from within their customer base. We combine strategy, product development and design thinking.”

Bow & Arrow is the antidote to the traditional strategy consulting firm.

There is none of the hierarchical stuffiness you might encounter elsewhere. The fifth-floor office, designed by the firm’s creative partner Natasha Chetiyawardana and SLATE – Design & Build, is open plan. Music is playing – somehow democratically decided on among the 35 people. The walls are decorated with projects in progress, statements of the company’s values and logos of all the companies Bow & Arrow has worked with.

“It is a very open and collaborative workspace,” explains Correia. “There is a mix of strategists – like me – and

creatives. We all work closely together. At the moment I sit opposite two creatives. We all have our own desks but we like to spice things up by having a complete reshuffle every three months so everyone moves around. It is important to keep things fresh.

“I actually work here most of the time. We visit clients and meet consumers, but we don’t operate on client sites the way traditional firms often do. Indeed, the opposite tends to happen. We often have clients who ask to work here because they like the atmosphere.”

We like to spice things up by having a reshuffle every three months

Office tourAesthetic minimalism Bow & Arrow preaches and practices the eradication of the superfluous. Correia’s desk is clear apart from a desktop screen, laptop, notebook and a pile of business books on everything from design-driven innovation to building a great organisation by hiring strange people. Gimmickry RIP “There is a tendency to make workspaces interesting and happy with pool tables and so on. But we don’t believe in gimmicks. We pride ourselves on being a high performance organisation and our workspace is a reflection of that. We are a young tight-knit group of friends. We are open and transparent. If I need to talk to a partner I can walk across the room and talk to one. There is no open door policy because there are no doors!”Paperwork “I mostly use Muji notebooks with ‘Tiago’s Notes’ written on the front! And I use Muji gel pens, which quickly disappear from all our desks as they are so good.”

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