Blog With Columns & Isotope

I have seen a number of interesting discussions debating employee freedom vs the importance of building an office culture through proximity.  What bothers me about that is the “vs” part….why not both?  The basic assumption of the “vs” argument is that if you want proximity you have to force it and that just isn’t true.  Retail and Hospitality have long used the physical space and programming to draw people to them.  As the freedom of choosing when and where to work moves from employer to employee, the design of offices need to focus on providing the amenities, look, and feel […]

  This diagram was drawn by Paul Baran and his team at the Rand Corporation in the mid 1960’s.  It was used to illustrate the idea of a  communications system that would survive in the case of damage from a nuclear war.  This diagram and the resultant technology became the architecture of the internet as we know it today. There is more to the story of course but what fascinates me about this image is the number of times I have seen it in business books and articles recently.  The diagram on the left is the old centralized business organization. […]

I am just leaving Austin where I spent the last two days at GCUC the Global Coworking Unconference (pronounced “juicy”).  The first day consisted of a series of panels populated by 45 people from all over the world with representation ranging from researcher to corporate leader to freelancer to real estate.  The audience consisted of bearded hippies, suits and ties, tech geeks, real estate professionals, coworking space owners, with a huge range of ages 16 to 67, all gathered to discuss the coworking phenomenon, and it is a phenomenon! The first coworking space launched in San Francisco in 2005.  It […]

A couple of years ago Regus began telling the story of how they had actually launched coworking through their worldwide proliferation of executive suite options.  The coworking community rose up and loudly rejected this version of history.  In the mainstream media this played out like a clash of younger and older generations but it runs deeper than that.  Both Regus and coworking spaces rent desks by the day or month. Both can offer the same equipment, facilities, and amenities, but at its heart what great coworking spaces are actually selling is not the desk space, it is community.  This might […]

You are probably aware of the exponential growth in solo and micropreneurs.  Technology, the economic downturn, and Gen Y philosophies are turning everyone into an entrepreneur of sorts.  We are all running our own businesses or careers, working on “brand you”, building our own networks, and creating our own path forward.  The most extreme example of this is the Blueseed project, a cruise ship that is being retrofitted into offices.  It will float 12 miles off the coast of Silicon Valley in international waters and provide those entrepreneurs without work visas the opportunity to live in San Francisco (on a […]

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