the Onda

My old office was above a gas station, in a repurposed low income building where some zoning genius realized that living right above gas tanks was not a life-prolonguing move. There were free roaming mice and occasionally there were water issues. But we had distinct working spaces, large common areas, and the definite feel that it was uniquely ours.

I now work in HP's Marlboro facility, specifically a cube inside the great human veal farm that is at section 18.4 of MRO1, floor 2. Outside of some tweaks that the local real estate crew made on our behalf last year, it's cubesville as far as the eye can see. And from what I've been able to gather from other folks at other big cos, it is pretty much standard for the whole tech industry. This real estate philosophy has accelerated the shift to "remote working" that most of the half million or so workers at HP, IBM, Intel, etc. are taking on to avoid shrinking veal pens (some other genius recently decided that 8x8 feet is spacious and that 6x6 is just fine and that much more affordable).

I paint this bleak picture not to complain, but as a introduction to a great short interview with Brad Bird of Pixar which I came across on GigaOm this weekend. In enumerating the "lessons for fostering innovation," number 6 stuck with me:

Brad Bird: If you walk around downstairs in the animation area, you’ll see that it is unhinged. People are allowed to create whatever front to their office they want. One guy might build a front that’s like a Western town. Someone else might do something that looks like Hawaii…John [Lasseter] believes that if you have a loose, free kind of atmosphere, it helps creativity.

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

It strikes me that he is spot on, and that for any creative endeavor the constant physical contact is paramount. However, from what I've learned over this last year, the veal farm model of big companies hurts in two distinct ways: first, the packing of people into tight spaces usually extends into miserable common spaces or "efficient" decisions made around bathroom/kitchen locations that are just not conducive to the right type of bumping into each other. More importantly though, making real estate a cost-center to be managed as non-value add creates such a miserable environment that "working from home" becomes a very attractive alternative. And no matter what telecommuting technologies you favor, like porn, the 2d version is never as good as the real thing.

Pour in a little "offshore fever" and its hard to see how you get back to innovation fueled by creativity in these environs.

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