I enjoyed, for a moment, Michael Idov’s recent lament in the Wall Street Journal over the death of cafe culture. My enjoyment was not over the death of places for a great cup of coffee and some conversation, but with Idov’s list of the world’s great coffee houses. I’ve never been in any of them, but something in literature, movies and other arts has built an expectation in my mind, and Idov’s article evokes a sweet nostalgia for imagined experiences, now apparently passing.
Imagno/Getty Images via WSJ
Associated Press via WSJ
Idov credits the loss of cafe culture to politeness, which, I think is polite of him. Instead of rogue revolutionary foment, Idov now hears only the tap of keyboards. I hear the tap of keyboards as the evidence of a revolution in work, corporate investment, and the notion of “brand.” None of it seems well resolved, yet.
Among the key concepts at the center of “workplace transformation” is the enabling and acceptance of mobility. I think much of this transformation has been very good. I feel liberated from the heaviness of the technology anchor that kept me chained to my desk and that, as a consequence, formalized and scheduled all of my interactions with clients and colleagues. I feel liberated by the new metrics of a more mobile workplace, with what I do now more valuable than my mere attendance. I am certainly more productive and more creative, since the lightness of technology and its untethering from the specifics of place and time have now allowed me to join others at will, to capture opportunity as it arises, to shape ideas on the run.
With this liberation has also come the definition and exploitation of the “third place.” Most frequently illustrated by the term “Starbucks,” the implication is a place between home and the office where the liberated among us meet, idealistically and romantically, in the manifestation and development of a sense of community. The Seattle model made us feel we were in the socially hip centers of life of “Friends” and “Fraser” even though we may have nowhere urban at all.
As the workplace began to evolve in a dawning recognition of its inherently social nature, the vending machines alcoves and utility kitchens began to learn from the coffee house. The office began to have a place where there was a recognition that “work” looked different now, and that whether in the beneficial development of a shared culture or in the productive generation and development of innovation, the conversations on the stools around the cafe counters were actually fulfilling the purposes and missions of organizations.
Now, however, there’s been a general transformation of the work place – the place of work – without an understanding of the role of place in work.
As corporations became more comfortable with third places as places where work might actually get done, the concept moved from the break from work to the place for work. The cafe became not just the symbol of but the place for the company’s productive collaboration. The commercial cafe was a manager’s delight in erasing the boundaries of time and freeing the corporation from the carrying costs of its own real estate.
The third place, then, also began to morph from social to selfish. Growing competition in an over-saturated market caused an evolving brand self-centeredness of Starbucks and others whose strategies caused a shift in focus from the customer to the coffee. And, as more and more cafes sought more and more locations, their market segments became smaller. With fewer people to serve in each store, there was less need for places to sit, and the support for the social nature of the place disappeared. Both in its occupancy profile and directly through the strategies of its owners, the modern coffee house became a place of production, not of imagination.
The recession and the resulting compression of the place of work and the loss of its social space has meant to short of a life for a workstyle and workplace that was just beginning to have its impact on innovation, creativity, leadership and performance. Moving the social space outside of the workplace moved it to a place where shifting strategies took its social purpose away. Now, neither the office nor the third place provides the setting for essentially casual but importantly purposeful interaction.
I suspect that the tapping of the keyboards that signals the death of cafe culture for Idov may be the tapping of those who, spun out from the office, have lost among other things a connection with their colleagues, a sense of the comparative measures of innovation, opportunities for uncovering opportunities for leadership, speed and efficacy in communications, perceptions of diversity and diversity of perceptions, and the benefits and pleasures of working with and through others.
The short life and death of the cafe in the life of the organization may signal a shorter life for the organization.
But Idov offers optimism –
Perhaps the economic downturn will untie our tongues and restart the conversation. With rents going down, the next Café Abraco or Café Regular may be able to afford a larger space and have some money left for tables and chairs. And the new Lost Generation of creative strivers is already here to fill these chairs.
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A couple of apparently unrelated things appearing this week, to keep things moving in the meantime.
The (un)Professionals and outrunning change
A couple of articles in the New York Times today about the unintended consequences of pricing plans were interesting in the quickening stream of business model redesigns.
In his article, “Is There a Method in Cellphone Madness? Saul Hansell reflects on the apparent inversion in the philosophy of pricing in cellphone plans that appear to cost the best customers the most. There’s a psychology at work. He quotes one consultant – “You give people a really good bargain on this bucket of minutes,” explained Roger Entner, a senior vice president for telecommunications research at Nielsen. “People are risk averse, so you have a relatively high overage charge, which gets people to overbuy. You also get really predictable revenue out of it, which Wall Street loves.”
In another place in the same day’s paper, Nicolas Carr reflects on “The Price of Free” in internet-accessed entertainment. “With broadband becoming the norm and connection speeds continuing to quicken, what has happened to music companies and newspapers is beginning to happen to broadcast networks and cable companies. People like me are using the Net to bypass the customary providers of television programming, along with the ads they show and the fees they collect.,” he says, and worries that higher-cost, higher value programs will disappear.
Somewhere in the midst of all this (and reported on in the same day’s paper) was Apple (!), quietly seeking a patent on a technology that would make watching ads on any medium, any technology, compulsory.
Closer to home, but in the same vein, was a posting on BuildBlog expressing concern about the consequences of fee pressures, including free work and “dealing with reality later,” brought to the architectural and design professions.
There are, of course, many other data points in this conversation, but it is interesting to note the acceleration of the conversation brought by technological change and impacts on business and the professions from the Great Compression overall. I think that what people are calling (again) the “New Normal” is really not yet defined. Gary Hamel’s avoidance of book writing, and his advisory on adaptability here and here seems right in the middle of this stream.
Apocalypse chic
I attended an event in Detroit earlier this week centering on the media and Detroit, or more specifically, potential roles for “new media” in and about Detroit. A panel of “new media” people provided insights. These things are always great rah-rah’s but always very unsettling at the same time.
The panel was made of six people who were generally presented as, and accepted the creds of, being Detroiters. Their voice was generally the type that says, “if you want the story told in a different way, tell it yourself,” with the either direct or implied, “like me.” (This tone, even, from one of the chief popularizers of ruin porn.) If I recall correctly, five out of the six came from somewhere else, recently. There seems to be a number of significant implications in this stat, but not now.
Instead, these concurrences on the condition of Detroit and shared aspects American urbanism –
- In Design Observer, Mark Dery writes about the “Dawn of the Dead Mall” and reflects on the architectural fiction of their remaking and revival. “As we cling by our hangnails to the historical precipice, with ecotastrophe on one side and econopocalypse on the other, that consumer fantasyland is an economic indulgence and an environmental obscenity we can’t afford — the dead end of an economic philosophy tied to manic overdevelopment…”
- Richard Brich does a nice job of exploring what’s left after a city designed for autos in his article, “A Void Paved Over with Concrete.” “Our cities are dead zones with small pods of life barricaded between the elements that support the passage, storage and care of cars. In our most densely trafficked sidewalks, it is a hundred feet between businesses whose windows have a chance of being interesting to look in at while walking past. Throw in a bank or two and one has to take a taxi to get between shops where people congregate over a cup of coffee or buy a shirt.”
- Steven Malanga, writing on the City Journal blog about “Feral Detroit” references a must read from the Harvard Institute for Economic Research by Ed Glaeser in which he details the intentional policies of Mayor Coleman Young to empty the city of Detroit. “Though some blame Detroit’s population losses on larger economic forces, economists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer argue in a groundbreaking paper that the city’s problems are mostly self-inflicted. (The paper, called “The Curley Effect,” gets its name from legendary Boston mayor James Curley, who favored Irish residents and pushed other groups out.) After winning election in 1973, Detroit’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, consolidated his power, driving white residents, who had voted against him, out of the city by withdrawing services from their neighborhoods. Eventually, Glaeser and Shleifer write, Detroit became “an overwhelmingly black city mired in poverty and social problems”—and shrinking fast.”
- Detroit figures prominently as Brian Finocki reflects on the use of space for political aims in his article, “The Ruin Machine.” “For example, Detroiters are often accused of being in a state of denial about their situation (they are perceived as being victims of nostalgia by longing for what was once a booming city and by operating under the illusion that one day those factories will return operative and a prosperous life will resume.) Yet the media’s predisposition is to reduce the conversation around Detroit to photo ops of abandoned buildings and glossy infographics highlighting the statistical extremities of vacancy achieved by the city. How hypocritical is this? Who is perpetuating nostalgia here?”
- A piece (also reflecting on the “zillions of pictures to illustrate the vast emptiness of Detroit) in the Urbanophile blog by Aaron Renn on “Detroit as the New American Frontier” was resurrected in the New York Times and Time magazine. “One thing this massive failure has made possible is ability to come up with radical ideas for the city, and potentially to even implement some of them. Places like Flint and Youngstown might be attracting new ideas and moving forward, but it is big cities that inspire the big, audacious dreams. And that is Detroit.”
Anyway, what I think I liked better this week were these two responses to the growing urban portfolio with similar sets of conditions –
- Bruce Mau returns home to think differently about Sudbury
- David Barrie calls for a new narrative for urban regeneration saying, “enterprise in all of its many forms – social, as well as mercantile – is a key route to progress.”
Updates 11/16/09
In Detroit, Agencies Compete to Sell City as a Creative Haven
and
Apple and Bloomberg: Old Champions in the New Economy
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The good news in Wilbur Ross’s bad news about real estate? Radical “Attraction strategies”
In double-barrel bad news accompanying the drop in the market today, both Wilbur Ross and George Soros offered dismal outlooks for commercial real estate, each stating that the U.S. sector is in the beginning of a huge, perhaps unprecedented, decline.
“All of the components of real estate value are going in the wrong direction simultaneously,” said Ross… “Occupancy rates are going down. Rent rates are going down and the capitalization rate — the return that investors are demanding to buy a property — are going up.”
(via Bloomberg, 10/30/9)
The principal drivers of this are interlinked, with investment conditions and business demand influencing each other, and all of this is bad news. On the other hand, in way too fast of a reaction, I thought I’d try a draft of an approach Ross himself uses. Quoted in the Bloomberg article, Ross said,
“Our methodology is to make a great big list: What’s every thing we can think of that’s either wrong with the industry or that we just plain don’t like about it…Then we start work on another list. If we had control of this industry, what would we do to fix each one of those problems? Once we feel that there is a reasonable likelihood that the second chart kind of equals the first chart, that’s when we get ready to do something.”
I’d (over-) characterize almost every commission I’ve been part of for the millions of square feet of corporate space we’ve planned, designed and built or built-out over the past decade or more as driven by a set of values only nominally connected to what actually drives the performance of our clients’ businesses. Through most of this time, our profession has made extensive use of programs and metrics around efficiency, productivity, effectiveness, and performance, yet with little reflection of a core understanding of the underlying businesses and with primary measurements related to amount of
space.
In the happiest of cases, we’ve built new buildings under an optimism around business growth and scaled both by planning standards and credit equations. In more stressful times, we’ve made new workspaces driven by integrations, consolidations, and revised standards generated primarily by an interest in occupancy cost reductions. In relatively informed times, we’ve put together strategies and implemented programs to leverage potentials in technology advancements and acknowledge trends and benefits in mobility. In the best of cases, although these were very few, our projects were driven by an appropriately appreciated definition of sustainability for both the business and the property.
Now, I wonder, if this unfolding new collapse could present the critical conditions for a dramatic change in the way we think about occupying space for work? What might be the new answers to questions like these –
- Could work look different now? The “look” of work has been shape by management concepts about command and control, attendance, entitlement, and hierarchy and made physical by cubes. The reality of work in most leading companies looks like teams and networks, visibility and activity, and its physical presence changes the definition of what “work” is. Will the predicted second wave collapse cause a closer examination of what the workplace is? What “activates” value?
- Will there be a C(B)D anymore? With ongoing and building momentum reshaping how and where work is done, can we any longer zone for work separately from lifestyle? What will be the attributes of a building reprofiled for recovery after the crash, and can it have the same attributes, configurations and approach to tenants as now? Can a building be planned simply within its site, or will collaborative and coordinated community-based planning approaches provide a richer, more robust, more sustainable and more attractive domain for how work is done?
- Will we care more about quality in cities? Will quality of environment mean the end of economic incentives to attract development to cities? That is, will owners, developers and cities work together to find the means to promote a broader perception of the value of place? Will quality of place demand a premium that outweighs any incentive intended to overcome the negatives? What will define quality? Will this example be a model in other places? Is this model relevant anymore?
Will this be end of “exit strategies” and the beginning of radical and aggressively positive “attraction strategies”?
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In recent months, I’ve felt that one of the best things we could do as designers, architects, and consultants is to work with our clients in a mode of group therapy.
I’ve had the feeling that each of us and our clients are in a continuing state of concern about the economy and what recovery means and, for each of us, a move forward feels still a bit lonely, even a bit daring, maybe even threatening. And certainly, focused on the continuing issues of survival, recovery, competition, changing value, shifting markets and many other dynamics, it appears that it’s also been difficult for many to raise their heads out of the daily demand and become aware of and even engaged in the seeds of development germinating in other places.
The idea, then, of acting as an agent to get a group together to just see, hear and understand better the context that all are in had the optimistic sense that if we all act together we may be able to act sooner and more robustly.
TEDxDetroit was a good, and large, example of this and, judging from the spirit there and a sense of action in communications afterwords, it seems to have initiated some of the effect I would look for in this group idea. Modeled on the TED concept, but independently sponsored, TEDxDetroit offered a jam-packed day of presentations and entertainment illuminating a great portfolio of locally-developing companies, talent and innovations.
Others have commented on some of the more spirited pieces of the day – great and surprising personal stories, commitments and influences in the community, and otherwise hidden musical talent. I thought I might reflect a bit on some things that interested me from the domains of business that were presented there.
Richard Sheridan
I hadn’t expected Sheridan’s presentation, and appreciated the insights. His story was about user experience, more specifically user-centered design, and most relevantly the practice of observing and engaging the user of what will be proposed.
These practices and processes are still rare in architectural and workspace design where the nature of the selection process, the quality of the design brief, the client’s management of process and the spareness of resources all usually mean a significant separation of designer from user. (Joe Duffy’s frustration and resolution referenced in my earlier post is a good example of the implications of this process.)
User-centered practice seems to be a well-developed discipline in product and interface design, where there are many stories of great products, corporate growth and satisfied customers achievable only through processes informed by ethnographic disciplines.What benefits might be uncovered through wider use of these methods in the planning and design of facilities?
Fabienne Munch
Fabienne focused on the characteristics of corporate culture, with some interesting insights into the role of ambiguity and inconsistency in shaping cultures with high levels of innovation.
She spoke of the culture “genome” at Herman Miller as having consistently been one of design expressed generally in terms such as, “it’s about what you make,” “you decide what to make,” and “design is at the core” of the business. Herman Miller’s evolving culture allows the apparent inconsistencies of, “it’s about how you make it,” “the market decides what you make,” and “business is an integral part of design.”
I liked especially her simple formulation to guide decisions about organizational culture – “what or who would you take from here into the future?”
Dawn White
Dawn’s was the first of a number of presentations during the day exhibiting a different kind of thinking about business, with social purpose solidly at the core of the plan.
Dawn White presented a simple business and product concept questioning the paradigm of generating power by things that go around. Rather than powered generators, or even windmills, her company has developed a technology that generates electricity by wind movement passing by tubes that are stationary, silent and modular.
As interesting as the technology concept was her manufacturing concept. Her technology generates 1 kilowatt of electricity over each 640 inches of tubing that cost about 1 cent per foot to fabricate on a machine generating 300 feet per minute of tubing. The arithmetic represents a significant potential capture of underutilized plant space in the Detroit region and a great base for employing the people here who know how to engineer and fabricate metal well.
Her story was a good example of transitional thinking for the area, considering talent more than labor, for example, and seeking ways to uncover and utilize capacity in new ways.
Paul Schutt
Paul’s company is significantly changing the perception of the economy, innovation and development in Detroit (and other places) as well as offering a new model for media, in general.
Paul referenced the context of the Michigan Cool Cities initiative and its formulation of the TIDE model – that a balanced performance across talent, innovation, diversity and environment was essential to make the kind of high demand place that is attractive to people and generates growth because of that attractiveness.
Paul expressed his company’s interest in people “who are more than one thing” – uncovering, employing and writing about people who were achieving great things in their jobs, and also influential and engaged in other endeavors as well.
His media company is operating with the observation that frequently “narrative does not match the place.” That is, that in cities like Detroit, there is more going on than is recognized and that the surprise generated by these stories is a generator of interest and economic growth.
He spoke of the role of data to shape their own perceptions and therefore their approach to stories about place. One example – 76% of households in Michigan are without children – helps overcome paradigms about the lifestyles that have traditionally shaped the design of cities and strategies for marketing, economic development and promotion.
So, group therapy, of sorts – an opportunity to hear about how others are moving forward with enthusiasm, creativity and energy, overcoming past perceptions and even current conditions, to think innovatively, take action and influence a different future in the region.
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In another of those days of interesting intersections of random readings from other places (the fast scan of the RSS reader) came this cluster, reminders of how the seismic shift in the economy set an emerging, but latent, shift in values into a more prominent position in thinking, doing and practicing, illuminating both their possibilities and the clutter in the way of gaining momentum. My interest is not so much in the specifics of these references, but with the sense that all of these moves in other places are indicators of need and potential illuminations of lags in other places.
So, in a few minutes of scanning on Monday morning, these –
Alice Rawsthorn reflected on opportunities for new thinking in automotive design, and expressed concerns about missed opportunities. She observes that the car companies have been traditionally focused first on the propulsion system, and then on exterior rather than interior styling. Combined with the closed culture that creates and sustains automotive designers, and the risk-averse culture reflected in corporate product development decisions, the resulting designs for a new breed of car – the electric vehicle – lack inspiration and motivation. Despite a dramatic shift in the nature of the problem, the response is largely conventional.
It’s one of the most exciting design challenges of our time. It’s a
(very) rare opportunity to reinvent a ubiquitous object that is the
most expensive — and, often, most emotive — thing that many people will
ever buy except for their homes.
Almost as if in response, Dwell presented this video interview with a San Francisco design team, Mike and Maaike, and some of their thinking on personal transportation. A fantasy scenario – and a wish – for the family car of 2040, their concept is a reflection on autonomous commuting and a mobile lifestyle. In a shft of thinking from the driver experience to the passenger experience, and from propulsion to lifestyle continuity, they sketch an entirely different sense of shape, enclosure, visibility, and even directionality. (Images from mikeandmaaike.com)
Their vision seemed to be also an anticipation of Joe Duffy’s lament and exhortation – Stop going to work! – in his FastCompany blog. “I don’t believe that inspiration is sufficiently served up in even the most compelling office environments,” he writes, pointing to the importance of escape, exposure to new things, changing perspectives and other environmental influences on innovative and creative thinking.
It’s this last one that is closest to our practice and an indicator of a substantial shift in thinking about the design of the workplace. For a decade, or more, there have been a number of influences that have been slowly shaping how we and our clients think about the world of work. In many cases, while relevant to emerging workplace culture changes, they have been influences from outside – considerations about differing behaviors and values in cultures, genders and generations, potentials for mobility generated by technology, global networking, and, of course, cost reduction. It has been rare, however, that a client has invited us to advise them on how to shape their workspace in consideration of the experiences of their employees and the potential benefits to be gained from the quality of those experiences.
Each of these cited references are particles in a stream of reflections here and by others that the dissatisfactions with what went before are the emerging opportunities for design thinking and design strategie now. Rawsthorn’s thesis is about shifting the focus from what propels us to us. Mike and Maaike remove propulsion form the equation altogether; their wish, I expect, is not about styling but about a transportation mode that is not selfishly demanding attention to itself. And Duffy’s lament is very similar – if you want something from me that gives value to what we are all doing, don’t preoccupy me with products and practices (propulsion systems) that reinforce a different set of metrics and values.
I look forward to going to the office now that I don’t consider it
“going to work.” For me it’s actually the more social aspect of
creating design. Because I’m not going there out of habit or for the
sake of appearances, it’s just another interesting facet of everyday
life and it helps keep things in balance.Balance = happy = creative = productive. Repeat.
So some basic questions –
Why is it so difficult to change when change means survival?
Why so difficult to uncover and articulate a vision for change?
Is centralized management over?
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The practice of architecture has traditionally based design solutions on what we call the “program.” At its least accomplishment, it’s a statement of the client’s functional requirements to be satisfied in the design. Better practice includes more complete examinations and analysis of what the client wants to achieve and why and with what resources, etc. There is a craft in writing them (I’m a fan of Problem Seeking), and for many building projects, the program becomes a large and complex document.
Recently, the term “design brief,” borrowed from other design disciplines, has crept into the architect’s vocabulary. We’ve periodically searched around for examples of best practice to inform how we can improve our problem statements.
Since we are also now also beginning to hear the term from clients, we’ve become a bit more attentive. So when this showed up today, referenced in the Planner Reads blog and originating from @hellomuller, we immediately raised it to the top of the list of aspirational achievements. Enjoy!
We’ll be attending TEDx Detroit on October 21st. Although we’ll certainly be open and ready to listen first, we thought we’d be prepared with a few questions for the presenters who are scheduled to be there.
Here are some initial formulations. If you’d like to help frame our questions, or if you’d like to ask your own, note them in the comments!
Richard B. Sheridan
President, CEO and co-founder of Menlo Innovations
In your company website, you speak of “creative destruction” as a core value. In a recent post on the Harvard Business School blogs site, Umair Haque posed some challenges to venture capitalists and the concept of creative destruction, arguing that risk aversion made a mirror image of Wall Street and Sand Hill Road – Wall Street underinvested in destruction and Sand Hill underinvested in creation.
Underinvesting in creation seems to be at the core of Detroit’s problems, both by the auto companies and their suppliers, and perhaps as well by outsiders who might otherwise have been expected to be disruptive “angel interveners.” Haque pointed to Detroit’s problems, saying, “Here’s how pervasive the venture economy’s failure is: Detroit’s dying – but we don’t have a better auto industry, let alone better energy to power it.”
From where you sit, is the challenge more about finding the resources to develop new ideas, or getting the invitation from clients to get creative?
Dan Izzo
Training Leader at Bizdom U
Dan, your organization is an interesting component of Quicken Loans, and we look forward to its HQ move into downtown Detroit, and encourage continuing consideration of the broader urban development ideas your team had on its way to this decision.
In your Blunt on Business blog you recently considered the question of mandatory course work for entrepreneurs, and concluded that self-motivation is critical. “Nothing mandatory, everything expected” was your conclusion. In other places, however, the nature of business education is being challenged and rethought. There is a great concern about integrity, transparency, global cultural awareness, and the development and contribution of real value.
Bizdom U commits to the development of Detroit-based entrepreneurs who will not follow traditional business classroom education. When the leading business schools are apparently developing mandatory curricula in response to scandals and collapses, how will your students develop a social, moral and sustainable values mix in self-guided education?
Fabienne Münch
Director of Ideation Office at Herman Miller
Fabienne, your mission is to “create new contexts for people to change and thrive.” Although Herman Miller has historically, and continues, to innovate in the design of innovative products and environments in the world of work, there certainly has not been much adoption of change in the American workspace and, certainly, not much is thriving right now.
When we know that a different kind of environment is such a strong factor in nurturing the culture and performance of companies, why have we been so unsuccessful in motivating change? And how can this agenda be advanced in the atmosphere of a global economic collapse? Perhaps more pointedly, what’s missing in the offices of our locally headquartered global organizations who, apparently, are the biggest losers in the new economy?
Chazz Miller
Founder and Muralist at Public Art Workz
Chazz, your mission is “to revitalize Northwest Detroit into a world class Public Art Showcase using Murals as the catalyst for change.”
The graffiti murals in the Dequindre Cut have been lauded as “fostering and promoting an essential link between contemporary art and contemporary society.” In many cases, however, graffiti is seen as vandalism and presents a tremendous cost to owners of buildings and the public authorities and private companies who manage transportation systems, for example. Malcolm Gladwell has also made a clear linkage between the presence graffiti and the presence of urban crime.
I get the sense that the art that you promote is nothing like graffiti. Could you comment, then, on the influence that organizations like the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, the College for Creative Studies, the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (and Mocad) may, with their sponsorship of graffiti art, have on the kids you are trying to develop?
Terry Barclay
President and Chief Executive Officer of Inforum Michigan
Terry, first of all, thanks for sustaining such a great organization in our region. I have had the opportunity to attend a couple of your programs and find them to be among the best economic forums I’ve attended.
You will be talking about “how women are changing the world.” It would be great to hear how women in Detroit are changing the world, and hope you will tell us some good stories. In this bastion of industrial production, it’s be safe to assume that opportunities for women have not been particularly strong compared to other regions in the country, and to also assume that the collapse of the industrial economy here does not improve that condition at all. Is this true, or do you see that the yearning for a transformation to a new economy here may, in fact, present better opportunities for women?
Dawn White
Co-founder and President of Accio Energy
Dawn, it will be great to hear about the unique technology at the heart of your wind energy system (or will even we, at TEDx Detroit, have to wait until late 2010 for you to unveil your secret?).
But my question is in another direction. You are a serial innovator and a great model for the transformation of the region not only from autos to other manufactured systems, and from conventional utility to new energy, but also from an older typology of engineering and labor. It appears that the sustainability of our region is dependent on new skills drawn from other places but also derived from a more local industrial craft base. It also appears that the New Economy Initiative has ambitious and exemplary goals along this line. Are you a member of the initiative, and can you comment on what you believe its success and influence will be?
Lee Thomas
Anchor/Entertainment Reporter on FOX Detroit and Author of Turning White
Lee, I am sure we will all be very interested in hearing your compelling personal story, especially in light of the attention and misunderstanding that Michael Jackson drew.
But excuse me for stepping to the side for a moment to suggest that I am very surprised to see the TED brand and the FOX brand in the same forum. Could you clarify for us?
Paul Schutt
CO-CEO of Issue Media Group
Hi, Paul. And simply, thank you very much for the online publications you have brought to our area. I think they are a super model for what might otherwise have been the venue for print media, and are great vehicles for promoting what is happening in the region.
I expect you may address certain issues and opportunities about the transformation of media, and, since your publications are about growth and investment, you’ll have comments about how that is best promoted. You do, however, operate in some of the more innovative, attractive and business-friendly cities on the continent. You must have some observations about the cultural and economic differences between Detroit and those other cities. How about commenting on the content differentials between your publications and offer some insights on what they might indicate about the future for Detroit’s growth and opportunities to attract investment in a tough and competitively restoring economy?
Pj Jacokes
Producer/Lead Instructor at Go Comedy! Improv Theater & GoU: The Improv Academy
Pj, although I always enjoy a good laugh, I’ve never found myself in a comedy club. What am I missing?
Instructor of MSU’s New Media Drivers License program and CEO of Ingenex Digital Marketing.
Derek, this program presents you as “passionate about helping companies and individuals embrace digital technology.”
But holy smokes, Derek!!! Here we are driving down the road – newly defensive to try to avoid the follies of inattentive cell phone talkers and in-another-world texting drivers – and yet you’ve branded your program as a “new media drivers license program”??!? And, sheesh! – your MSU web site advises students to “Get your license to drive new media.”
Well, I guess I needn’t go any further…you know the question!
COO/CSO of Enliven Software
Matt, your blog promotes the move of power companies to paperless systems as a “green” move. I assume there may be a number of challengers to this equation who believe that saving trees in many cases only fuels the demand for more power and pollution.
Your company is a leader in moving accounting and other corporate operations to paperless systems. Do you have a process to evaluate a company’s shift in energy demand throughout the supply chain in order to confidently promote these systems as “green” systems?
Founder of Prism Learning Solution and author of Personal Takeover
Dr. Gabel, Matt Crawford recently spoke to an audience at the College for Creative Studies here. Matt, as you may know, is author of the best selling book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. He does not have good things to say about white collar culture and is certainly negative on the goals and values of American corporate management. I expect he’d be uniquely cynical, as he retreats into the domain of his motorcycle repair shop, of your work and the promise to orient individuals into high performance teams.
Are you familiar with Crawford’s work, and what might you say to him about his disaffection with corporate culture and managerial performance? In this regional domain of blue collar work, how do you tune your message to bring the disaffected back into the workforce and make them optimistic about their ability to grow and contribute?
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photo by Marvin Shaouni
I was in Detroit last night and had the opportunity to go to Matt Crawford’s lecture at the College for Creative Studies. Matt is the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work which has received a lot of recent attention.
By the time he was halfway into his theme, I was feeling a certain unease. His talk felt out of place, perhaps unsympathetic, and maybe even destructive on a campus of creative artistic and craft endeavor and in a community with a collapse of labor.
Although aware of Crawford and his thesis, I went expecting a connection between his appreciation of hand work and the craft basis for the local industry, the evolution of CCS’s mission, and the interests of its students. Matt, however, made no such connection. He presented, in effect, a restatement of his New York Times essay and, although denying he was the voice of a “movement,” he nonetheless repeated his uncomfortable segmentation of the white collar world and critical contempt for the paradigms of modern managerial practice. His presentation of the apparent nobility of “individual agency” and its qualities opposed to the experiences of mindlessness in corporations seems very much like a manifesto, and very faulted in the selective comparison.
Matt, although clearly capable of invention (he has a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago and holds a position as a fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia), seems to instead feel more comfortable in the domain of the disaffected. His first job after graduating was on K Street, in effect rephrasing the works and authorship of others and accepting rather than changing an inappropriate production-minded management at a think tank. Now, of course, he revels in his motorcycle repair shop, again withdrawn from a position of influence in innovation and engineering, and exploiting the fruits of others’ invention and cloaking it in apparent humble nobility.
The reason this felt so odd was, of course, his lack of recognition of the role that entitlement and opposition has played in the economy of the region where he spoke, and in its stark contrast with the transformational work of efforts such as the New Economy Initiative for Southeastern Michigan. Funded by the Kauffman Foundation, the initiative seeks to start-up more than 400 new businesses in the next three years and, in the process, transform the local capabilities and capacity from the diminished scope of the auto industry into innovations in newer industries such as aerospace, defense and alternative energies.
The goal of the initiative is to “accelerate the transition of metro Detroit to an innovation-based economy that expands opportunity for all.”
The initiative will sponsor and support activities in three strategic areas: talent, innovation and culture change. Working with other partners in the region and in the state, the initiative will work to:
1. Prepare, attract and retain skilled workers in southeast Michigan (Talent)
2. Encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in new and existing enterprises in the region (Innovation)
3. Change the region’s culture to embrace learning, work and innovation (Culture Change)
While Matt celebrates the nobility of working with your hands, the initiative seems a more effective voice and tool for converting that talent to the greater benefit of others. I have the expectation that the people engaged in these emerging enterprises will be the authors, as well, of a new way of working, engaging the talent they employ and amplifying the achievements and benefits of their work.
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In a review of some of the things we’ve bookmarked this week are these trending items.
How Can We Measure What’s Most Meaningful?
GOOD magazine offers some thoughts on performance metrics for innovating organizations, suggesting that “stories are indicative of a capacity and behavior… It is this behavior that is valuable as much as the specific outcome of the innovation or project… the right behaviors lead to the most valuable outcomes.”
What Really Kills Great Companies: Inertia
In his periodic column in the Wall Street Journal, Gary Hamel continues his look at the impacts of organizational inertia. “Like a fast-spinning gyroscope that can’t be easily unbalanced, successful organizations spin around the axis of unshakeable beliefs and well-rehearsed routines—and it typically takes a dramatic outside force to destabilize the self-reinforcing system of policies and practices.”
GM and the UAW Share the Blame for Saturn’s Demise
Sometimes, of course, more active agents of destruction are at work.
Design – Redefining a Profession
TCHO
And somewhere along th
e way I came across this, one of the more delightful examples of the role of design coursing through virtually every component of a business.
The story of a start up, TCHO says there are “Lots of ways to tell the story of the 1.0s. Let’s start with dreams. Dreams of a lifetime, or, more precisely, lifetimes: co-founders Timothy Childs’s and Karl Bittong’s, the dreams that drove them to quit the Shuttle program to make chocolate, or to devote 42 years building chocolate factories around the world.”
A copy of one of their videos is over there in my sidebar, but it’s much better on their site.
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I’ve spoken frequently of my appreciation of the “white space” of the workplace. I appreciate most the power of these spaces that lie between function and interaction to energize and activate the workspace.
These places are rare in the normal allocation of space in organizational real estate, especially in times of constrained spending. Yet, perhaps because they may more authentically represent the culture of the organization, we’ve found that these are the places and spaces that evoke the commitment and engagement of staff and enhance their performance. These are places, in other words – normally cut from organizational space allocations – that allow people to more rapidly and effectively comprehend, support and achieve the organizational mission.
We are preparing proposals for an organization who sought a dramatic transformation of its culture as an essential factor in its sustainability and its ability to contribute effectively to the sustainability of its partner organizations and the communities where they do their work.
Their new “offices” – in a formerly mistreated and largely abandoned high-rise – has a model proportion of “white spaces.” These spaces – unnamed in the functional program but provided through “net-to-gross” conversion factors – support several cultural and behavioral shifts:
- From closed to open
- From assigned to free
- From entitlement to activity
- From formal to casual
- From secure to invitational
Most importantly, these spaces provide places for the staff to meet with members of partner organizations in extended occupancy – a few days or a few weeks – to work on problems and develop programs to benefit a constituency or community. What had previously been scheduled, agenda-driven and formal now can accommodate a project timeline and become appropriately and effectively extended, adaptable, resource-rich, collaborative, and focused on impact rather than time.
Now, in the last phase of their implementation and move, we are transforming our commission – develop and implement an identity and wayfinding signage program – toward a program for what we’re calling “workspace activation.”
We have generally moved away from more conventional, and commercial, concepts of “workplace branding.” We believe that the best expression of the brand of a company or organization is its work, and that the visible display of its work is much more effective than the display of corporate identity or communication of motto. We also believe that this “workspace activation” resonates into the effectiveness, influence and impact of the organization and its people.
Some emerging guiding principles include –
- You are your brand – make your work visible; display what you do and how you do it
- Make the workplace a canvas for discovery – “collaboration” so many times references production, yet a key culture of leading organizations is creating knowledge, as well; encourage communication and experience sharing
- Design for experience – allow adaptation of the workspace to enable immersion in the work by shaping the space to meet the needs of the project
We are therefore developing a palette of graphic and other resources to animate the space with color, movement, image, information, invitation and hospitality. Neither “wayfinding,” nor “branding,” nor “signage,” our program proposes a set of cues, clues, samples and examples to encourage a culture of information openness, collaborative participation, and continuous communication.
We hope to provide a canvas for uncovering potential, giving coherence to capabilities, and initiating sustaining transformation.
© Jim Meredith/MEREDITH Strategy & Design LLC
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