Change Your Space, Change Your Culture by Miller Rex

Change Your Space, Change Your Culture by Miller Rex

Author:Miller, Rex
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118937815
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-09-29T00:00:00+00:00


Figure 7.1 Monkey Row At Zappos

Interviewed for the New York Times, Ron Bundy, chief executive for the Russell Index Group, “believes the environment has engineered a subtle but significant shift in the firm's culture, by eliminating the office as a status symbol. ‘The big benefit is that there's a whole host of really talented informal leaders in the building, and they have an opportunity to shine and have more of an impact,’ he says. ‘This has really opened up opportunities for people without formal titles.’ ”4

You hear similar stories of how changing space changed culture from W. L. Gore, Google, Alcoa, Intel, Travelocity, eBay, Morningstar, Yahoo, Facebook, Chiat\Day, Menlo Innovations, Valve, Basecamp, Carfax, and an emerging number of both “old school” and high-technology companies. It is clear that leaders are creating interactive environments to spawn innovation.

Chiat\Day broke the cubicle habit early, in 1993, and learned some hard lessons with their Virtual Office experiment. Jay Chiat saw that the days of creative “geniuses” presiding over small internal empires (as in Mad Men) were running out of steam. Competitive pressures required better and faster ideas. In Chiat's mind, that meant teams would be connected by technology, fluid and self-organizing, rather than tied to office turf.

His method to drive that new vision was to dismantle their traditional 1970s-era advertising office, with no advance warning, and replace it with one that had no personal space—an open campus. It turned out to be chaos. If we look at it through today's lens of mobile technology, that kind of shift might have felt more like a speed bump to the work routine. But back in 1993, laptops were rationed and cellphones were anything but smart. It created a riot that some say led to Chiat's sale of the firm.

“Lost in the gee-whiz coverage [of the opening of the Virtual Office], however, was a tiny detail: Almost from the get-go, Chiat's virtual office was a joke in the advertising world, ‘the laughing stock of the industry,’ recalls Steve Rabosky, a former agency creative director…the ad agency became engulfed in petty turf wars, kindergarten-variety subterfuge, incessant griping, management bullying, employee insurrections, internal chaos, and plummeting productivity.”5

Fast-forward to 1999, and you will see that TBWA\Chiat\Day continued to evolve their concepts, rooted in creating a sustainable creative culture. If you visit their West Coast headquarters, Advertising City, you will have a one-of-a-kind experience. “For clients, prospective hires, and other visitors, the design serves as an elegant summation of everything that Chiat/Day stands for. In fact, one unintended benefit of the new facility is that it has become a magnet for new talent.”6

All these stories feature leaders who see a direct connection between the environment of the office and the cultures they hope to influence. Leadership, now more than ever, is really in the culture business. Sadly, the whole culture conversation is foreign to most leaders over 45.

The television show Undercover Boss captures the epic (and now ancient) era of leaders trying to make decisions that their followers can barely relate to.



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