Premeditated Thought

Open Plan Office Arguments, Revisited

The debate over whether open plan offices beat private offices or cubicles has been reunited in the computer industry.  Well-respected companies are experimenting with open plans to spur creativity and innovation.  A recent New York Times Article (You Won't Find Me in My Office, I'm Working) reports

Technology companies are eliminating assigned space for open floor plans. Cisco Systems, Google and Sun Microsystems have already knocked down partitions. This month, Intel began testing alternative floor plans at three locations — creating open work areas with clusters of armchairs, library-style tables with laptop plugs, electronic white boards where inspired doodles can be transferred to e-mail, and a variety of conference rooms when privacy is needed.

It is not just the high-tech firms that are becoming cozier. The creative industries — such as advertising and design — are embracing the approach, too. At ?What If! (yes, that is really the name, punctuation and all) an “innovations company” (that seems to mean marketing) with a Manhattan outpost, employees never sit in the same place two days in a row. This is known as “hot desking,” said Nina Powell, the managing director of the United States office, and the purpose is to give workers a perspective that changes with the task.

When the work requires collaboration and interaction, she said, the communal tables are the place to be. When the work is more introspective, there are cafe-style booths providing quiet and privacy.

I first visited this debate in February of this year (Private Offices, Bullpens Or Cubes).  I remain a passionate hater of cubicles and cubicle culture.  Going to an office with cubicles is stifling.  My office's maze of cubes, with each row sparsely populated and indistinguishable from the next, conjures up the most deadening suburban subdivision. 

Lost in the debate is what kind of office a person will be happy in.  Despite well-reasoned calls for private offices by many workers (you can see some intelligent discussion of the merits of the private office in Anne Zelenka's WebWorker Daily blog posting and reader's comments), I suspect open plans  re-invigorate work places.  Work is an inherently social activity.  When the social aspect of work is removed, I would just as soon work from home.

When I worked in an open office at a tech startup, I was able to find my own personal space when I needed to - not by moving from my desk, but by focusing on my work.  Other people used headphones for the same purpose.  Personally, I find email and instant messaging as distracting as anything that happens in an open office. 

I know not many people agree with me.  Companies, faced with the trade-off of workers' preference for private space vs. high costs of private offices choose the middle ground. The result is cubicle culture.

Can Meditation Help be a Better Listener?

Meditation has long been recommended for those of looking to reduce stress or improve conentration.  But can it also be used to improve our ability to let go of fleeting reactions quicker to enable us to be better, more attentive listeners?  A study reported by Sandra Blakeslee in The York Times indicates it can.

According to a study published today in the online edition of the journal PloS Biology, three months of rigorous training in this kind of meditation leads to a profound shift in how the brain allocates attention.

It appears that the ability to release thoughts that pop into mind frees the brain to attend to more rapidly changing things and events in the world at large, said the study’s lead author, Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Expert meditators, he said, are better than other people at detecting such fast-changing stimuli, like emotional facial expressions.

Recent research has shown that meditation is good for the brain. It appears to increase gray matter, improve the immune system, reduce stress and promote a sense of well-being. But Dr. Davidson said this was the first study to examine how meditation affects attention.

The study exploited a brain phenomenon called the attentional blink. Say pictures of a St. Bernard and a Scottish terrier are flashed before one’s eyes half a second apart, embedded in a series of 20 pictures of cats. In that sequence, most people fail to see the second dog. Their brains have “blinked.”

Scientists explain this blindness as a misallocation of attention. Things are happening too fast for the brain to detect the second stimulus. Consciousness is somehow suppressed.

But the blink is not an inevitable bottleneck, Dr. Davidson said. Most people can identify the second target some of the time. Thus it may be possible to exert some control, which need not be voluntary, over the allocation of attention.

The attentional blink was thought to be a fixed property of the nervous system, Dr. Davidson said. But this study shows that it can change with practice. Attention is a flexible, trainable skill.

Just ask Daniel Levison, a staff researcher in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin who meditated for three months as part of the study. “I’m a much better listener,” he said. “I don’t get lost in my own personal reaction to what people are saying.”

Unlimited Vacation At Netflix

Ryan Blitstein writes in today's Mercury News that Netflix gives its 300+ salaried workers unlimited vacation time every year.  See "Vacation Time at Netflix: Take as much as you want" for the full story.  The 300+ salaried workers include deal makers, programmers, web site designers, and managers.   The 1000 hourly customer service representatives do not receive this benefit (but they do get a free Netflix membership and DVD player after three months on the job).

Employees at the online movie retailer often leave for three, four, even five weeks at a time and never clock in or out. Vacation limits and face-time requirements, says Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings, are "a relic of the industrial age."

"The worst thing is for a manager to come in and tell me: `Let's give Susie a huge raise because she's always in the office.' What do I care? I want managers to come to me and say: `Let's give a really big raise to Sally because she's getting a lot done' - not because she's chained to her desk."

  Netflix's time off rules - or lack thereof - are part of a broad culture of employee autonomy instilled in the company when Hastings founded it a decade ago. The executives trust staffers to make their own decisions on everything - from whether to bring their dog to the office to how much of their salary they want in cash and how much in stock options. Workers are treated, as Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord likes to say, as adults.

   "We want our employees to have great freedom - freedom to be brilliant or freedom to make mistakes," Hastings said. 

That may sound ike executive blather, but to hear employees tell it, on the way to almost $1 billion in sales last year, Netflix has made good on its promises to workers.

"There's an inverse relationship between how often a company talks about its values and how much those values are actually reflected in the workplace," said Heather McIlhany, a Netflix online marketing manager who took a three-week vacation to South Africa in November, just nine months after joining the company. "At Netflix... the freedom is inherent in how we work," McIlhany said.

This is exactly the kind of trusting environment where the most well-motivated, creative, and talented thrive.  If you are truly rewarded for performance, it is hard to game the system.  It is certainly better than paying someone to play SecondLife all day.

According to Blitstein "Microsoft tried with executives in the 1990's, but few managers used more than a few weeks."  Isn't that the sign of success?  The no-limit policy may have not had an impact on how many vacation, but I'm sure they appreciated the trust. Of course, Microsoft executives are at a different stage of their career than most Netflix employees.  We expect them to be motivated and competitive.  The trick is getting them to take vacation at all.

Still, if Netflix can truly implement pay for performance while showing genuine trust, our work culture is headed in the right direction.

Career Pandemonium

While looking for some much needed support for my previous post, I stumbled onto Career Pandemonium: Realigning Organizations and Individuals by Kenneth R. Brousseau, Michael J. Driver, Kristina Eneroth, and Rikard Larsson (Academy of Management Executive, 1996).

Widespread internal changes in organizations are wreaking havoc on traditional careers. Many people are experiencing major difficulties in their attempts to adapt to the uncertainties of career life. Observing these difficulties, writers on careers have begun to advise individuals to take personal control over their careers by becoming more versatile in their skills, accepting of change, and proactive in shaping their life at work. Increasingly, organizations are seen as freed from the responsibility of managing careers in their efforts to remain flexible and ready to shift with environmental changes. However, both individuals and organizations have needs for stability and for change. Organizations are better advised to adopt a pluralistic approach to career management that embraces different definitions of career success. In so doing, organizations will be better able to support the diverse needs of their employees and, simultaneously, enable the organization to reward and maintain diverse competencies in their workforces.

The article describes four types of careers:

1. Linear: upward movement focused on power and achievement.
2. Expert: little movement, focused on expertise and security.
3. Spiral: lateral movement focused on personal growth and creativity.  That would be me so far.
4. Transitory: lateral movement focused on variety and independence.

The article discusses how these career cultures affect organizations and what organizations should do about it.  A good read.   

Self-Identity and Adaptability

Rick Miller, in a case I read for my change management class at NYU this week, is forced by external circumstances to make major career choices.  Having been CFO at RCA, he opted to take a line management position to gain operations experience, where he was on the fast track toward CEO.  Miller was caught unaware when his division was sold to GE (wounding his pride in the process, since he was not involved in the negotiation).  Despite realizing he had little chance to become CEO of GE, he took the challenge of rebuilding GE's consumer electronics division.  After just nine months on the job, Jack Welch surprised him by announcing that Thomson, a French company, had made an offer for GE's consumer electronics division.  "I don't even know the French national anthem," Miller said to himself while contemplating whether to follow his division to Thomson.

In class, we discussed Miller's dilemma mostly in terms of entitlement and complacency.  To me, it was about self-identity.  Miller defined his career in certain terms: he was going to be CEO of a major American brand and help American competitiveness in the process.   Taking a position at Thomson would mean rejecting that self-identity.

It is often said that Americans, more than other nationalities, define themselves through their career, their work, and their ambitions.  "What do you do?" is a frequent conversation starter.   Yet we are often faced with changes we cannot control.  In my career, my company has been sold (twice), my division has been spun-off (twice) and I've been laid-off.   Each change forced me to consider how I define my career.  Of course, the lay-off forced me to confront much more about my self-identity as a successful professional.

Rick Miller had specific career goal, but many people I know have an even narrower self-identity.  They may be malpractice attorneys or Unix kernel hackers, but what they have in common is a vulnerability to external forces.  Too narrow a self-identity is a straitjacket.  In this view, Resistance to change can be the result of a slim self-identity.

In fields driven by technological progress, maintaining a broad identity - being a generalist, perhaps - is increasing in importance.  In The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil says "the time to adapt new paradigms is going down by half each decade."  With the pace of change so rapid, what we started our career doing is almost certainly not what we will end up doing.  Most of us will change careers several times, sometimes within the same general field, but not always.  Even if we stay in the same field, we may be doing drastically different work than what we had anticipated - such as management instead of technical work.

To build a capacity for change, we must create a broad career self-identity.  Doing so lessens the impact of sudden unexpected shocks and provides leeway to find new positions that fit your self-image.

But to truly be flexible and less traumatized by uncontrollable career-changing events, I think we need to develop non-work identities.  Healthy relationships and hobbies - whatever floats your boat - all serve as stabilizers for unexpected turbulence.   

The Self-Actualized Manager

I first became a manager in 1996, and was immediately inspired by the challenges of leading a team to create and produce.  It is this context - during a 360-review - that I first ran across the term self-actualize.  The charge to produce results when you can no longer do the work yourself broadens how you think of yourself.  You become influencer, mentor, leader, and coach.  And so Richard Florida's narrow view of managers disappoints me in Creativity versus Control.

The way I see it is this battle between creativity and control is the defining issue of our age. It goes back several decades now. And it crystallized around the sixties when this thing first came to a head. Have a look again at Daniel Bell's classic, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. He lays it all out there. Economic growth and development is leading to a culture clash. People no longer want to keep in line with the old Protestant work ethic - slave away at their jobs, conform to expectations, save money. They want to  self-actualize, have fun, and self-express. Or as Virginia's Republican Congressman Tom Davis has taken to saying: "economic development works."  When people get richer, they demand more out of life.

The rise of self-expression challenges lots of people - middle managers for one, old-school politicians, national leaders.  For them, solution is simply to reinstate control - to squelch self-expression and creativity. Even if it costs innovation and economic growth.  We see it everyday in companies, in countries and in cities and regions.  That's what squelchers do.

In other words, the Me Generation.

To me, management is a challenge to one's maturity.  Effective management and leadership requires sharing the spotlight and giving up control, not asserting control.  If maturity is part of self-actualization, then becoming a manager can be a step toward being all you can be.  Not all managers see things this way; the one's that don't become Florida's squelchers.  The best ones, though, realize that to get the most value from their team, they need to leave room for creativity and self-expression. 

The best managers learn to harness this self-expression via a loose-tight leadership model.  This model is identified in Tom Peter's In Search of Excellence as one of the eight attributes of management excellence.  Loose refers to a more participative management style, whereas tight is more directive, command-and-control leadership.

But is this reach for self-realization blunting my pursuit of self-expression and creativity?  The blunt answer to that can be found in the existence of this blog.  The blog serves as outlet.  In response to Florida, I would say that the real tension I feel is between a broad view of self-realization and a me-first focused desire for self-expression.

Looking Good at FT

For the second time in about a week, the Financial Times has run an article on the advantages of looking good.  I'll have to take their word for it.  See My blog entry on the earlier FT article.

In the latest article, The Beauty Contest, Chrystia Freeland says intense pressure "to be their most perfect physical selves," once felt mostly by women amid an air of sexism, has spread to men.  Or, more to the point, men have started to accept physical appearance as another resource to be used to further their success.

Handsomeness, it is true, is hardly a novel political tool – think Ronald Reagan or JFK. But what about Wall Street? When Brady Dougan recently became the first American to run Credit Suisse, all the ensuing biographical sketches mentioned his intense work-out regime, alongside photos that showed off his lantern-jawed profile and slim physique. One of the private equity chiefs currently duking it out for the top deal title told me a couple of months ago he had gone on a diet and started working out most days at 5am to avoid looking like “a fat little piggy”. A chief executive I interviewed this year is even more Spartan – he exercises at 4am.

For feminists, there is nothing surprising about women’s susceptibility to the beauty myth (we blame sexism in general, and social conditioning and economic dependence in particular). But what about all these rich and powerful men? Evolutionary biology offers one set of explanations. Despite all of those childhood lessons that beauty is only skin-deep, as a species we seem hard-wired to respond to good looks. One of the most terrifying pieces of evidence came from a study by my hometown school, the University of Alberta. Researchers found that parents devoted more attention to good-looking children, especially boys, as measured, for example, by how likely the kids were to be strapped into shopping carts at the supermarket.

You ignore this reality at your own risk.  Many people would prefer that we evaluate each other on purely objective measures.  Thus the charge in corporate America to evaluate annual job performance on pre-set objectives.  The fact is, you will also be judged on such seeming nonsense on how slim you are, how white your smile is, or what label is on your blazer.  You may think your boss is smarter than this (yes, Rich, you are), but can you say that about all the people you come in contact with that impact your ability to do your job?  Once you give in to the urge to fight this seemingly ugly reality, you can take charge of it. 

I'd like to continue, but I have to get to the gym.

A Pretty Paycheck

How much would you pay to have this man work for you? 

In Undercover Economist: Pretty Vacancies, Tim Harford of the Financial Times argues that hotties might perform their jobs better:

It is not just politicians that we prefer to be beautiful. A number of studies, many involving the American economist Daniel Hamermesh, have found that “ugly” people earn less in many walks of life, from advertising to law. The beauty premium seems to apply even in professions where there is no reason to expect that beauty counts.

This is an intriguing pattern. The obvious explanations are either that employers like to be surrounded by pretty staff (and voters like to see pretty politicians on TV), or that we irrationally conflate beauty with useful qualities such as honesty or intelligence.

There is, however, another possibility: perhaps beautiful people are better at their jobs. There is no mystery as to why we want decorative Hollywood stars, but the same logic might apply to sales staff. Even a bureaucrat might be more persuasive if he or she is good looking, and who wouldn’t want persuasive employees instead of charmless ones?

Remember, too, that beautiful people have probably been treated well all their lives. This might affect abilities that have nothing, ostensibly, to do with appearance: if handsome kids get all the attention from teacher, why would they not do better at school?

One intriguing piece of economic research, from Markus Mobius of Harvard and Tanya Rosenblat of Wesleyan University, asked volunteers to guess how good they would be at solving maze puzzles under time pressure. Then the subjects were asked to solve as many as possible. Mobius and Rosenblat found that attractive people were more self-confident, but did not actually do any better. To the extent that we can generalise from this, perhaps the self-confidence of the beautiful helps them fool employers into paying more. Alternatively, perhaps self-confidence is an inherently useful trait in many walks of life, if not while solving little puzzles.

Fortunately, my company has better looking software developers than Google.

Private Offices, Bullpens, or Cubes?

Ever wonder about office design's role creating an effective organization?  I've been an advocate of an open office layout ever since working in one at a software startup in 2001.  This preference has grown despite my occasional sitings of bear, wild-turkey, geese, and fall foliage from my windowed private office.  (Yes, I can also see route 78 when the trees are bare.)

A possible office move led me to think about this a little more seroiusly recently, and I went to the web to see what research was out there.  My company's standard calls for internal private offices for managers and cubicles for most other people.  The bulk of people in my office are information workers.

My research first led me to Thomas Davenport's Why Office Design Matters, which is excerpted from  Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers:

Knowledge workers prefer closed offices, but seem to communicate better in open ones. Of course there is great variation among open and closed office types, but the most extensive research in the area (from Cornell professors Frank Becker and William Sims) suggests that while most knowledge workers prefer closed offices because they are better able to concentrate, they communicate informally and build trust and social capital more easily in more open office environments (even high-walled cubicles, they say, restrict interpersonal communications). They note: "Our research, done with employees in job functions ranging from software development to marketing and business development, indicates that the more open the 'open' plan office environment, the more conducive it is to overall work effectiveness, when communication and interaction are critical elements of the work process." Becker and Sims are undeniably experts on this topic, but I feel that, like many corporate executives, they downplay the need for concentration and quiet when knowledge work is done in office environments.

I hear the last point, that private offices foster concentrated work, from many of my colleagues.  But given that many of them now telecommute (is that word outdated already?) a siginifcant portion of their time, I wonder if Becker and Sims emphasis on workplace communication is even more apropos.

In 2001, Becker and Sims published Offices that Work: Balancing Communication, Flexibility, and Cost.  The research focused on software development firms and was far-reaching.  I focused on the private-office vs. shared office vs. bullpen (open office) vs. cubicle debate.  The various choices were rated on several factors.  For individual factors, they looked at auditory and visual privacy, satisfaction, productivity, concentration, and isolation.  For team factors, they considered learning from colleagues, problem solving, sponteneous conversations, initiating conversations, and team communication and collaboration.

Cubicles are frequently seen as providing a happy medium between bullpens and private/shared offices.  Instead, the research found that "cubicles are generally the worst performers on every measure."  While workers preferred closed offices, bullpens provided better team environments.

Becker and Sims also discuss how passion influences one's view of private offices:

As we have worked in the different study sites over the past two years another factor has surfaced that influences the data, and the implications for finding practical solutions to pressing organizational dilemmas. That factor is the difference between employees who are passionate about their work, who are inspired and inspire others, and those for whom the work is just a job.

People like Linda Coventry (a pseudonym), the VP of Engineering at one of the study  spin-off firms, or Joyce Smith (a pseudonym), the Director of Marketing at another, were bursting with energy and enthusiasm. They attracted and inspired staff with these qualities. At another of our study firms, one which was an internal corporate web-initiative, the workers were bright and committed. But the embers of passion glowed faintly. These emotional states influence employees’ response to their work environment.

Passionate employees inspired by their job focus on the work, and not the work environment. They focus on how the work environment helps energize them, on the opportunities it offers to learn from others and to benefit from being in a firm that has “great people.” They pay relatively little attention to rank and status, or to office size. For those less passionate about their work, such factors seem to be more important.

The Oh-So Glamorous Business Trip

First class flights and the Executive Club.  Fabulous expense account meals.  Exotic locations.  Late nights in sexy clubs.  Escape from the brutish northeast winter and humdrum daily existence.  This is the image some people have when they learn I am off on another business trip.  And while some business trips promise lots of extracurricular fun - San Francisco or London are my favorites for easy access after work - most such trips are a bit less than glamorous.  Rather than bore you with too many words, here is the story in pics.

Monday afternoon, just arrived, check my email:

Tuesday, all day.  Wednesday, all day,  Thursday morning:

Return each day from work to view from hotel.  Two of three nights I ate a crappy meal in the hotel's restaurant.  Sleep badly, eat breakfast, work, eat lunch and work, eat dinner, work, sleep badly:

Thursday afternoon, drive to airport.  Get lost twice.  Wait on insanely screening line.  Discover plane delyaed 3 hours because of storm back east.

Spend three hours in bar bored as s***:

OK, my office location did have a nice view.  But try to guess where I am first.