The market for brilliant software developers is highly competitive and with Google opening an office in the same city, Ticketmaster needed a look and layout that would attract and retain the employees they wanted.
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Medtronic Tempe Campus serves other Medtronic divisions by providing design and manufacture of electronic components. In 2007 they began a restructuring effort that included sending all of the easy manufacturing off shore, resulting in a reduction from 1500 to 800 employees. They have 9 buildings on 31 acres, many empty or near empty. Their standard workstation is a high walled grey cube, with grey chair, on grey carpet, against grey walls. They look like what they were, a manufacturing plant at its height in another era. However, the opportunities here are stunning. Medtronic creates products that save lives, and that […]
Read more »Research shows that people are better at conceptual thinking under high ceilings and better at decision making and execution under lower ceilings. Think furniture stores where you can imagine your entire house with new furniture under high ceilings and then are guided to a counter under dropped lights or lowered ceiling alcove to select the fabric for the sofa and sign the purchase agreement. What does that mean for office design? Different job descriptions? Different tasks? Different departments? Research shows that you are significantly more likely to launch a social relationship with a stranger each time that you run into […]
Read more »I work with a variety of companies, helping them negotiate the changing physical landscape of today’s workspace. With my more conservative clients, it is almost predictable that at some point in the process someone will bring up the slide at Google’s offices. It is something that they use to illustrate the excesses of the new “play at work” landscape, something that is a perfect illustration of dumb design trends and definitely something that they do not want. No slides. This week I had the opportunity to talk to a senior level Googler and asked, ” so, what is with the […]
Read more »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 […]
Read more »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. […]
Read more »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 […]
Read more »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 […]
Read more »Everyone is all a buzz with the news of Yahoo’s HR head Marissa Mayer telling all of their telework employees to return to the office or find another job. The Yahoo Event, as I like to call it after all of the attention it has gotten, is quite likely primarily a management issue and not a commentary on the entire history and future of working remotely. The pundits are all over the place with their opinions on whether this is the end of an era or a huge mistake, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. In the best performing […]
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