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Speaker 1: Pushkin. As far as the nurse was concerned, the behavior

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Speaker 1: seemed odd and distinctly unnerving that fellow, who had been

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Speaker 1: bedridden for weeks with a slip disc he just kept

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Speaker 1: staring at everyone and scribbling in his notebook, and staring

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Speaker 1: some more, and writing some more. The nurse reported the

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Speaker 1: suspicious activity to an administrator, who dropped by the patient's

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Speaker 1: bedside to investigate what did he think he was playing at.

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Speaker 1: The patient was delighted to be asked. He took out

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Speaker 1: the notebook and began to explain he had been making

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Speaker 1: a careful time and motion study of the hospital staff

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Speaker 1: and had observed everything, all the inefficient movements, the squandered energy,

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Speaker 1: and the wasted time. It could all be done so

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Speaker 1: much better. The patient's name was Robert Proops, and Robert

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Speaker 1: Proops was a genius. His colleagues certainly thought so. In

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Speaker 1: one hour, he would reinvent the world. His mind went

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Speaker 1: off like fireworks. Proops had been a sculptor, painter, and

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Speaker 1: professor of art. He'd invented everything from playground equipment to

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Speaker 1: an artificial heart valve to a machine readable livestock tag.

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Speaker 1: His formal training was as a chemical engineer, not that

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Speaker 1: he let his formal training constrain him. During the Second

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Speaker 1: World War, he'd managed Beachhead Logistics in the South Pacific.

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Speaker 1: But in the nineteen sixties Robert Pruf would invent an

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Speaker 1: object that has shaped the everyday lives of tens of millions,

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Speaker 1: perhaps hundreds of millions of people. But when I say

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Speaker 1: that his invention shaped our lives, what sort of shape exactly?

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Speaker 1: I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. In

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Speaker 1: nineteen fifty eight, the Herman Miller Company, a maker of

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Speaker 1: office furniture, hired Robert proopst His mission was to deploy

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Speaker 1: his brand of spirited, cross disciplinary creativity to help Herman

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Speaker 1: Miller diversify away from the potentially stayed world of filing cabinets, desks,

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Speaker 1: and swivel chairs. Proops wasn't a designer, but maybe that

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Speaker 1: was a good thing. He would dream big, think deep thoughts,

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Speaker 1: and take Herman Miller in new directions. Proops started by

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Speaker 1: setting up a research studio in the college town of

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Speaker 1: ann Arbor, Michigan. That decision would have been easily explicable

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Speaker 1: had Herman Miller itself not been located one hundred and

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Speaker 1: fifty miles away in Zealand. It would be a bold

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Speaker 1: step even in today's era of remote work. In the

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Speaker 1: pre internet world of nineteen fifty eight, his decision demonstrated

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Speaker 1: that Proops valued the cerebral yet convivial atmosphere of a

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Speaker 1: college town and that he wanted an extraordinary amount of

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Speaker 1: independence from head office. It also showed that what he wanted,

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Speaker 1: he got. Herman Miller gave him a free hand. There

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Speaker 1: were only three rules. The first rule, don't design anything

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Speaker 1: purely ornamental, make useful things. The second rule, don't make

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Speaker 1: anything for the military. And the third rule, don't make

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Speaker 1: office furniture. The first two rules he respected. Robert Proops

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Speaker 1: wasn't a man whose creativity could easily be constrained or directed.

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Speaker 1: Herman Miller was trying to break out of its traditional

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Speaker 1: business of office furniture, and Proops seemed like the perfect

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Speaker 1: man to help with that. But asking a free spirit

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Speaker 1: like Proops not to think about office furniture simply encouraged

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Speaker 1: him to think about office furniture even harder. After all,

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Speaker 1: thinking about office furniture meant thinking about everything, mind, body,

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Speaker 1: and soul. He carefully observed office dwellers at work. He

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Speaker 1: read the latest ideas from management thinkers, explaining that the

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Speaker 1: economy of the future would revolve around a new kind

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Speaker 1: of worker, the knowledge worker, and he hungrily consumed ideas

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Speaker 1: from psychology, sociology, and anthropology. All this grand talk about

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Speaker 1: knowledge workers rather obscures the question of what exactly a

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Speaker 1: knowledge worker is. There's a black and white photograph of

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Speaker 1: just such a worker, using furniture designed by Robert Prout's

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Speaker 1: research team. Next to him is a computer display teen

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Speaker 1: sixty eight style. It's on a pivot and casters for

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Speaker 1: easy tilting and swiveling and movement. The knowledge worker himself

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Speaker 1: is wearing the standard office clothes of the day, white shirt,

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Speaker 1: dark tie, smart dark suit pants. He looks intensely relaxed,

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Speaker 1: calmly focused on the work in his lap, leaning back

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Speaker 1: in an elegant Eames chair with his feet up on

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Speaker 1: a little circular conference table. And that work in his

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Speaker 1: lap a large computer interface supported by modifications to the chair,

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Speaker 1: an all in one module with a keyboard, a computer mouse,

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Speaker 1: and other controllers. And if nineteen sixty eight seems a

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Speaker 1: bit early to have a laptop, keyboard and a computer mouse, well,

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Speaker 1: the knowledge worker's name was Douglas Engelbart as a Silicon

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Speaker 1: Valley pioneer. He invented the computer mouse. When Robert Proops

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Speaker 1: was reading about knowledge workers, he was thinking of people

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Speaker 1: like Douglas Engelbart, the top people, the most brilliant people,

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Speaker 1: people who couldn't be put in boxes, people like himself.

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Speaker 1: Robert Proops didn't like to be called a designer, or

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Speaker 1: even a searcher, with its connotations of looking back to

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Speaker 1: dig up old ideas. He preferred to be called a searcher.

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Speaker 1: So what if he could make the perfect office for

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Speaker 1: searchers like Douglas Engelbart and like Proops himself. At the time,

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Speaker 1: the typical American office space had a large open area

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Speaker 1: with neat rows of typists and secretaries and clerks in

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Speaker 1: the middle, surrounded by offices with closable doors. Today's office

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Speaker 1: is a wasteland, wrote Proops in nineteen sixty. Its SAPs vitality,

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Speaker 1: blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of

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Speaker 1: unfulfilled intentions and failed effort. But there was a hopeful

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Speaker 1: development over in Germany. The bureau land shaft or office landscape,

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Speaker 1: designed by two brothers at the consulting firm Quickborner Bureau

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Speaker 1: land Shaft threw everything into the air. There would be

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Speaker 1: one huge room with groups of desks artfully arranged to

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Speaker 1: appear haphazard, sinuous routes between them like paths through a

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Speaker 1: rock garden, and everything dotted with soft acou stick screens

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Speaker 1: and pot plants. It was flexible. If the needs of

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Speaker 1: the office changed, he just moved the desks around. Thick

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Speaker 1: carpet absorbed noise. There were break rooms rather than a

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Speaker 1: trundling tea trolley. There were no offices and no obvious hierarchy.

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Speaker 1: Proops loved this new trend, but he could do so

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Speaker 1: much better than those inefficient flat table desks and the

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Speaker 1: endless sitting no good for your back, and Proops was

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Speaker 1: a man who well understood the agonies of a bad back.

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Speaker 1: Proops wanted to design a system which accommodated movement, a

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Speaker 1: system with verticality stand up, sit down, spin round. In

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Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four, Herman Miller revealed Robert Proops's brainchild to

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Speaker 1: the world. It was called simply Action Office. According to

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Speaker 1: the design historian Jennifer Kaufman Buehler, Action Office would upend

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Speaker 1: the American office furniture industry through the nineteen seventies. But

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Speaker 1: as we'll see, it did much more than that. Action

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Speaker 1: office was built around the idea of the workstation. One

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Speaker 1: sits at a desk like a secretary, but one sits

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Speaker 1: in a workstation like a fighter pilot sits in a

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Speaker 1: cockpit surrounded by a variety of achingly cool freestanding furniture

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Speaker 1: units located in the arena center, explained proops. You are

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Speaker 1: free to turn and use a suitable work surface, console

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Speaker 1: or conference expression. Yes, indeed, everything you need is within

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Speaker 1: vision as you spin your stylish rotating chair. Your files

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Speaker 1: are color coded, sitting on a shelf at eye level,

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Speaker 1: perfectly adjustable, and mounted on a soundproof divider above your

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Speaker 1: equally adjustable desk, maybe a low coffee table where a

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Speaker 1: couple of coffee cups sit empty after an impromptu brainstorm

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Speaker 1: with a colleague espresso cups. Of course, there's a pin

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Speaker 1: board full of your creative ideas. Do you need to

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Speaker 1: discreetly lock them away? No problem, The board folds down

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Speaker 1: to provide a secure cover over a side desk. Of course,

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Speaker 1: you also have a large, angled architect's desk with a

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Speaker 1: swivel stool you can stand at it or sit, moving

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Speaker 1: around dynamically from idea to idea, from chair to stool

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Speaker 1: to standing at your pinboard. You are active, You are creative.

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Speaker 1: You look fabulous. You are the knowledge worker, the beating heart,

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Speaker 1: and the pulsing brain of Action Office. The concept was

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Speaker 1: by Proofs, the stylish design by his colleague George Nelson. Nelson,

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Speaker 1: director of design at Herman Miller, was no passenger on

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Speaker 1: this adventure. Nelson was one of the taste makers of

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Speaker 1: the twentieth century, working with iconic figures such as Charles

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Speaker 1: and ray Eames or Isamunugucci. And Nelson's designs for the

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Speaker 1: Action Office units were so cool that Stanley Kubrick used

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Speaker 1: the Action Office on a space station in two thousand

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Speaker 1: and one a Space Odyssey. This was the kind of

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Speaker 1: furniture people would have in the future in space right.

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Speaker 1: Some executives bought it for their own homes. The reviews

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Speaker 1: were delirious.

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Speaker 2: Seeing these designs, one wonders why office workers have put

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Speaker 2: up with their incompatible, unproductive, uncomfortable environment for so long.

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Speaker 1: There's an answer to that, and we'll hear it after

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Speaker 1: the break. Why did office workers put up with an incompatible, unproductive,

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Speaker 1: uncomfortable environment for so long. The answer is simple, they

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Speaker 1: didn't have any choice. When Proops set out the action

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Speaker 1: off his concept, he was imagining men like himself. Yes,

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Speaker 1: men of course, who saw themselves as highly paid, highly

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Speaker 1: creative free spirits. But their bosses may have seen things

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Speaker 1: rather differently. And it was their bosses who chose the

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Speaker 1: office design, which raised the question why would they pay

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Speaker 1: for the action office? Action office cost five hundred dollars

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Speaker 1: for the simplest component. Relative to the wages of the day,

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Speaker 1: that would be more like ten thousand dollars today. The

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Speaker 1: first rule for anyone seeking to sell equipment for workers,

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Speaker 1: surely is to remember who buys equipment for workers. It's

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Speaker 1: not the workers, it's the managers. And while the workers

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Speaker 1: might dream of climbing into the cockpit of their own

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Speaker 1: productivity plane, the managers are focused on efficiency. This is

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Speaker 1: an old story going back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the

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Speaker 1: founder of scientific management, watching manual workers with a stopwattion,

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Speaker 1: calculating the most efficient movements and the optimal equipment, even

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Speaker 1: the ideal size of shovel to give to a laborer

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Speaker 1: digging a ditch, which might differ from the ideal shovel

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Speaker 1: for a laborer shoveling coal, and since this was scientifically

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Speaker 1: determined what the laborer himself thought of, it didn't much matter.

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Speaker 1: Robert proopst didn't think in terms of shovels, but he

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Speaker 1: certainly understood the appeal of time and motion studies, as

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Speaker 1: the nurses caring for his bad back could have attested.

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Speaker 1: And while Proops dreamed of creating the perfect working environment

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Speaker 1: for the Douglas Engelbarts of the world, perhaps the dividing

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Speaker 1: line between an inventor like Douglas Engelbart and a worker

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Speaker 1: digging a ditch isn't as clear as he might have imagined.

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Speaker 1: Once the bosses started thinking about efficiency, Sure, Douglas Engelbart

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Speaker 1: is a knowledge worker, but are the secretaries. Maybe, but

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Speaker 1: corporate bosses weren't lavishing thousands of dollars on designer furniture

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Speaker 1: for the secretaries, which explains why, despite being a critical

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Speaker 1: and cultural success, the Action Office was a commercial failure.

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Speaker 1: So what were bosses buying in a nutshell? Better and

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Speaker 1: better stop botches? The bosses have always been particularly keen

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Speaker 1: to use technology to monitor what workers get up to

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Speaker 1: so they can squeeze more work out of them. That's

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Speaker 1: been true from the punch clock of one hundred years

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Speaker 1: ago that records you arriving at or leaving work, right

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Speaker 1: up to the complex technologies of today. While Robert Proopst

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Speaker 1: and George Nelson were making space age furniture at Interplanetary, says,

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Speaker 1: the bosses were more interested in squeezing workers, which is

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Speaker 1: how we got to now with workers constantly being watched.

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Speaker 1: Amazon tracks our every move, explains Wendy Taylor. She works

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Speaker 1: as a packer at an Amazon warehouse in Missouri, and

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Speaker 1: was one of a group of workers who filed a

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Speaker 1: complaint against Amazon in May of twenty twenty four. They

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Speaker 1: know every move you make when you're working. When you're

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Speaker 1: not working, they surveil you with their cameras. Managers survail

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Speaker 1: you with their laptops because they can pull up your

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Speaker 1: profile and a bar changes a certain color. When you're

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Speaker 1: not active, every move you make is being tracked. Another

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Speaker 1: worker who was worried about surveillance was Carol Kramer. Unlike

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Speaker 1: Wendy Taylor, Kramer had a desk based job. She had

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Speaker 1: a camera pointed at her throughout the working day, taking snapshots.

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Speaker 1: Both of her face and her computer screen to verify

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Speaker 1: that she was being productive. Her pay was regularly docked

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Speaker 1: because the system decided she wasn't working, even though she

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Speaker 1: might have been mentoring a colleague, or making notes with

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Speaker 1: Pensiland paper that the camera didn't track, or, for that matter,

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Speaker 1: just taking a bathroom break. That might all sound familiar

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Speaker 1: to the likes of warehouse packers like Wendy Taylor, but

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Speaker 1: Carol Kramer wasn't a low paid administrator or call center worker.

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Speaker 1: She was a corporate vice president, managing a team of

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Speaker 1: twelve people and being paid two hundred dollars an hour.

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Speaker 1: Workplaced surveillance wasn't just for the factory floor or the warehouse.

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Speaker 1: It was coming for managers like Carol Kramer. In nineteen

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Speaker 1: sixty eight, four years after Action Office was such a

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Speaker 1: cultural triumph and such a commercial failure, Robert Proops tried again.

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Speaker 1: He published a manifesto titled The Office, a Facility based

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Speaker 1: on Change. More importantly, he offered a less costly, more

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Speaker 1: compact version of the Action Office concept. George Nelson and

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Speaker 1: his iconic designs had been jettisoned, but Action Office two

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Speaker 1: still organized space vertically as well as horizontally, still offered

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Speaker 1: multiple work surfaces, still used dividers to absorb sound and

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Speaker 1: organize and display materials in use, and still sought to

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Speaker 1: offer privacy without isolation. The system was modular, flexible, and

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Speaker 1: easily adapted. The dividers snapped together at a variety of angles,

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Speaker 1: but Proops favored three dividers per worker with a hunter

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Speaker 1: dred and twenty degree angle, which creates a half hexagon

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Speaker 1: space packed with ideas. Action Office two was a lot

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Speaker 1: cheaper than its predecessor, and it looked a lot cheaper too,

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Speaker 1: But still it was practical and a bit funky, especially

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Speaker 1: those hexagons. The new system got good reviews. Sylvia Porter,

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Speaker 1: a columnist at the New York Post, called it a revolution,

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Speaker 1: adding I find the concept entirely appealing. I particularly like

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Speaker 1: the idea of sit down or stand up workstations. She

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Speaker 1: loved the way Proops described workers as human performers, and

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Speaker 1: yet looking at publicity photographs of the system, you can't

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Speaker 1: help but notice one difference. The Action Office one system

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Speaker 1: tended to be photographed as a collection of unique components

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Speaker 1: designed to equip a single knowledge worker, a genius like

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Speaker 1: Douglas Engelbart right and that seemed to be how proops

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Speaker 1: envisaged them. An early sketch biproops shows all the cool components,

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Speaker 1: the swivel chairs, the roll top desk, the shelving, the

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Speaker 1: coffee table, the angle drawing board. They are quite clearly

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Speaker 1: located in a spacious private office space. But the Action

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Speaker 1: Office two system wasn't designed to be installed in an office,

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Speaker 1: but to replace one, or more likely a whole row

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Speaker 1: of offices. Photographs showed Action Office two units in multiples,

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Speaker 1: not one half hexagon workstation, but three clipped together for

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Speaker 1: three workers to sit close together. The honeycomb was starting

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Speaker 1: to take shape from the corporate garden that was bureau

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Speaker 1: land shaft get busy worker bees. Action Office too took

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Speaker 1: off in a way that its pricey predecessor never had.

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Speaker 1: It was inexpensive, practical, compact, and it got a little

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Speaker 1: boost from the government too. The US tax code changed,

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Speaker 1: giving a nice tax break to companies which bought rapidly

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Speaker 1: depreciating equipment such as furniture rather than long lasting office

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Speaker 1: fixtures such as doors and internal walls, which meant if

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Speaker 1: you could buy furniture instead of building offices, Uncle Sam

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Speaker 1: would reward you Action Office too, had looked cheap before,

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Speaker 1: now it looked really cheap in more ways than one.

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Speaker 1: Every office furniture company in North America scrambled to copy

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Speaker 1: the idea. Soon they were Steelcase, Soonar Gnol, They were

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Speaker 1: all making modular office furniture systems. One of the Sonar

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Speaker 1: designers went to admire the installation of their modular system

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Speaker 1: at a large government office in Canada. Excited to see

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Speaker 1: the dynamic new system in action, he came back looking

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Speaker 1: as pale as a beige partition. It was awful, one

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Speaker 1: of the worst installations I'd ever seen, he said. Sonar

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Speaker 1: had installed dividing panels that were seventy inches tall, not

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Speaker 1: tall enough to be a proper wall, but high enough

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Speaker 1: to block all line of sight. They'd seemed to make

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Speaker 1: sense on the drawing board, but en mass they were oppressive.

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Speaker 1: While the original bureau land shaft concept felt like strolling

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Speaker 1: through a shrubbery, this new installation was more like a

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Speaker 1: sterile labyrinth, with workers trapped behind a maze of Hessian

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Speaker 1: wrapped walls. At the time, the designer didn't have the

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Speaker 1: right words to describe the horror of it all. It

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Speaker 1: was only years later that the culture started to provide them.

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Speaker 1: Looking back, the designer summed it up, I'd failed to

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Speaker 1: visualize what it would look like when there were so

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Speaker 1: many of them. It was Dilbertville. The designer of Action

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Speaker 1: Office one, George Nelson wouldn't have been surprised at how

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Speaker 1: grim these new modular furniture systems looked. Furious at being

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Speaker 1: discarded from the Action Office project, he wrote to his

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Speaker 1: boss at the Herman Miller Company, Tearing into Action Office III,

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Speaker 1: complaining that the whole idea treated people as less than human.

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Speaker 1: This dehumanizing characteristic is not an accident, but the inevitable

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Speaker 1: expression of a concept which views people as links in

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Speaker 1: a corporate system for handling paper, or as input output

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Speaker 1: organisms whose efficiency has been a matter of nervous concern

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Speaker 1: for the past half century. People do indeed function in

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Speaker 1: such roles, but this is not what people are, merely

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Speaker 1: a description of what they doing certain hours. Nelson's point

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Speaker 1: was powerful. If you treat people like components in a machine,

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Speaker 1: it doesn't matter how excited you are about their dynamism

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Speaker 1: or movement or flexibility, or how they can mesh together

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Speaker 1: to produce remarkable results. Ultimately, you have forgotten that they

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Speaker 1: are human and don't be surprised if that lapse has

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Speaker 1: consequences action office too, continued Nelson is definitely not a

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Speaker 1: system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general,

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Speaker 1: and then comes the prophetic next line. But it is

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Speaker 1: admirable for planners looking for ways of cramming in a

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00:27:00,650 --> 00:27:07,090
Speaker 1: maximum number of bodies for employees as against individuals for personnel,

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Speaker 1: corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority, a large

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Speaker 1: market ouch. But George Nelson had put his finger on

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Speaker 1: the problem. While Robert Proops wanted workers to be able

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Speaker 1: to adapt, to move around, and above all, to be

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Speaker 1: in control of their own knowledge work benches, George Nelson

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Speaker 1: realized that it didn't matter what Robert Proops wanted, and

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Speaker 1: it didn't matter what the workers wanted. Managers were in charge,

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Speaker 1: and managers had their own agenda. Cautionary tales will be

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Speaker 1: back after the break. The conflict between Nelson and Proops

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00:28:04,210 --> 00:28:09,090
Speaker 1: shouldn't have come as a surprise. Proops could be intellectually

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Speaker 1: stubborn and intolerant of people who disagreed. He believed his

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Speaker 1: way was the right way, said a colleague, and he

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00:28:17,650 --> 00:28:22,730
Speaker 1: was usually right. But there was more than that stubbornness

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Speaker 1: to the falling out. Nelson had highlighted a contradiction in

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Speaker 1: Proopst's thinking. Proops spoke of human performers, but what if

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Speaker 1: there was a tension between job performance and simply being human?

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Speaker 1: Proops embodied that tension. One day, he's setting up a

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Speaker 1: research studio one hundred and fifty miles away from head office,

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Speaker 1: insisting on his freedom to innovate and to skip boring

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Speaker 1: corporate meetings. Another day, he's a hospital patient, making minute

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Speaker 1: observations on all the ways that the nurses around him

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Speaker 1: could move more efficiently. Time and studies are fun if

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Speaker 1: you're the one holding the stopwatch and the clipboard. Action

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Speaker 1: Office imagined a class of people like Proops himself, or

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Speaker 1: like Douglas Engelbart, whose performance depended on the fullest exercise

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Speaker 1: of their human freedom and human creativity. But Action Office

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Speaker 1: too didn't appeal to the boss class because it encouraged

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Speaker 1: human freedom and human creativity, but because it was efficient

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Speaker 1: and the inevitable next step they would try to make

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Speaker 1: it more efficient. Still. The great architect Frank Duffy described

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Speaker 1: that awful realization. To the writer and office historian Nikil Saval,

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Speaker 1: there was a moment when the orthogonal came in. Someone

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00:30:06,170 --> 00:30:08,130
Speaker 1: figured out that you didn't need the one hundred and

339
00:30:08,170 --> 00:30:14,050
Speaker 1: twenty degree and it went click. That was a bad day.

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Speaker 1: It took only five seconds for Action Office to turn

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Speaker 1: into a box. Robert Proops had shaped our lives, and

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Speaker 1: that shape was a cube. Proops had been ahead of

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Speaker 1: his time in emphasizing flexibility, worker autonomy, and movement away

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Speaker 1: from the sedentary desk. Indeed, he hated the very word desk.

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Speaker 1: For Proops, knowledge workers were like artisans at their workbenches,

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Speaker 1: tools organized close at hand rather than hidden away, everything

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Speaker 1: in motion, vibrant rather than austere. And yet somehow he

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00:31:03,210 --> 00:31:09,250
Speaker 1: had invented the hated cubicle. Less a dynamic cockpit for

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Speaker 1: a knowledge pilot, more a cage in an administrative factory farm.

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Speaker 1: The beij cage multiplied across American offices. In nineteen ninety seven,

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Speaker 1: nearly three decades after Action Office III was launched, it

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Speaker 1: was estimated that more than three quarters of white collar

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Speaker 1: workers were working in cubicles. The average cubicle had also

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Speaker 1: halved in size between nineteen eighty seven and nineteen ninety seven.

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Speaker 1: Workers were packed in like eggs in cartons. The office

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Speaker 1: has come a long way since the punch clock. In

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Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, The New York Times reported that eight

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Speaker 1: of the ten largest private sector employers in the US

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00:32:07,850 --> 00:32:13,370
Speaker 1: were carefully tracked king productivity metrics for individual workers, often

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Speaker 1: in real time. There were Amazon Warehouse packers, ups, drivers,

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Speaker 1: cashiers at Kroger, but there were also people who previously

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Speaker 1: had been viewed as too skilled and perhaps too high

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Speaker 1: status to subject to second by second surveillance. The workers

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Speaker 1: have noticed two One long running research project in the

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00:32:40,050 --> 00:32:45,130
Speaker 1: UK concludes that back in nineteen ninety, almost two thirds

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Speaker 1: of employees felt that they were empowered to make decisions

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Speaker 1: about the tasks right in front of them. By twenty

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Speaker 1: twenty four, that proportion had fallen dramatically to one third.

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Speaker 1: Workers don't decide how to spend their time from minute

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Speaker 1: to minute anymore. The computer does. The Times found that

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00:33:08,570 --> 00:33:15,370
Speaker 1: this sort of bosswear often seemed counterproductive. Grocery cashiers found

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Speaker 1: themselves getting impatient with elderly customers for slowing down the

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Speaker 1: checkout scan. Social workers who were counseling patients in drug

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Speaker 1: treatment facilities found themselves marketers idle because they weren't sending emails.

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Speaker 1: Middle managers at United Health knew the tracking system was flawed,

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Speaker 1: but couldn't fix it. According to the Times, they told

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Speaker 1: employees to jiggle their mice during online meetings and training sessions.

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Speaker 1: What Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, would have

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Speaker 1: made of all that? I do not know. But the

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Speaker 1: more fundamental problem with workplace surveillance is the same as

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00:34:01,730 --> 00:34:08,610
Speaker 1: the problem George Nelson identified with Action Office I. Workplace

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Speaker 1: surveillance treats workers as components in a system, and, as

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00:34:13,970 --> 00:34:17,970
Speaker 1: Nelson had complained back in the late nineteen sixties, that

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Speaker 1: might indeed be what people did, but it wasn't what

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00:34:21,650 --> 00:34:28,250
Speaker 1: people were. Carol Kramer was one of these unwilling components.

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Speaker 1: She was the corporate vice president manager of a team

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Speaker 1: of a dozen people, who found her employer had installed

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Speaker 1: bosswear to take frequent snapshots of her screen and her

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00:34:39,890 --> 00:34:44,050
Speaker 1: chair to check that she was actually working. That raised

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00:34:44,050 --> 00:34:48,050
Speaker 1: all the usual questions about whether the software was really

391
00:34:48,130 --> 00:34:53,370
Speaker 1: rewarding the right behavior. Did a conversation about workover coffee

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Speaker 1: with a subordinate count? Did jotting some ideas on a

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Speaker 1: piece of paper?

394
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Speaker 2: Count?

395
00:34:59,770 --> 00:35:02,410
Speaker 1: Did going for a walk to think about a business

396
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Speaker 1: problem in a new environment.

397
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Speaker 2: Count.

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00:35:05,610 --> 00:35:11,330
Speaker 1: Of course, they all should count, but they didn't. Carol

399
00:35:11,450 --> 00:35:14,170
Speaker 1: Kramer found that she was getting her pay doct for

400
00:35:14,370 --> 00:35:17,890
Speaker 1: failure to work in a way that satisfied the bosswear,

401
00:35:18,770 --> 00:35:22,810
Speaker 1: which was annoying in more ways than one. Yes, she

402
00:35:22,890 --> 00:35:27,050
Speaker 1: felt cheated and pressured to work in a counterproductive way,

403
00:35:28,170 --> 00:35:30,330
Speaker 1: but there was also the question of whether she was

404
00:35:30,410 --> 00:35:35,050
Speaker 1: being treated as a human being. You're supposed to be

405
00:35:35,090 --> 00:35:38,690
Speaker 1: a trusted member of your team, but there was never

406
00:35:38,770 --> 00:35:41,970
Speaker 1: any trust that you were working for the team, she complained.

407
00:35:42,970 --> 00:35:45,490
Speaker 1: It wasn't just that the boss war could be stupid

408
00:35:45,530 --> 00:35:49,850
Speaker 1: and blinkered. It was the whole idea that Carol couldn't

409
00:35:49,890 --> 00:35:54,010
Speaker 1: be trusted to use her own judgment about how to work,

410
00:35:54,730 --> 00:35:59,010
Speaker 1: when to work, and even shockingly, when there was more

411
00:35:59,090 --> 00:36:03,970
Speaker 1: to life than working, working.

412
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Speaker 2: Working working.

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00:36:04,370 --> 00:36:08,930
Speaker 1: The data backs up these anecdotes. In twenty twenty two,

414
00:36:09,370 --> 00:36:15,210
Speaker 1: three experts on workplace psychology performed a statistical analysis of

415
00:36:15,250 --> 00:36:20,770
Speaker 1: more than fifty studies of electronic workplace monitoring. They found

416
00:36:20,770 --> 00:36:26,850
Speaker 1: that such monitoring reduces job satisfaction, increases stress, and prompts

417
00:36:27,050 --> 00:36:33,810
Speaker 1: counterproductive behavior. It has no measurable impact on job performance.

418
00:36:35,010 --> 00:36:39,010
Speaker 1: The only people who'll be surprised at that are the bosses.

419
00:36:40,850 --> 00:36:45,890
Speaker 1: Those bosses had treated Carol Kramer like an organizational component

420
00:36:46,810 --> 00:36:52,650
Speaker 1: they'd forgotten, but she was also a human being. She quit.

421
00:36:56,690 --> 00:37:03,210
Speaker 1: Robert Proops kept searching, with designs ranging from a hospital

422
00:37:03,330 --> 00:37:09,490
Speaker 1: furniture system called costruck to a gigantic vertical timber harvester

423
00:37:09,890 --> 00:37:15,250
Speaker 1: that looks like a modified mechanical excavator. He earned one

424
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Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty patents, but by far his most

425
00:37:21,090 --> 00:37:26,650
Speaker 1: important invention is the one that came to horrify him,

426
00:37:26,690 --> 00:37:31,490
Speaker 1: the cubicle. At the age of seventy seven, he gave

427
00:37:31,490 --> 00:37:37,610
Speaker 1: an interview which has now become infamous. Not all organizations

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Speaker 1: are intelligent and progressive lots are run by crass people.

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00:37:42,890 --> 00:37:46,890
Speaker 1: They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them,

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00:37:47,370 --> 00:37:55,410
Speaker 1: barren rat hole places, barren rat hole places. The interview

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00:37:55,530 --> 00:37:59,690
Speaker 1: conveyed the bitter regret of a man who saw his

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00:37:59,770 --> 00:38:07,570
Speaker 1: life's vision twisted by avaricious fools. But should we really

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00:38:07,610 --> 00:38:13,410
Speaker 1: be surprised? George Nelson wasn't He saw it all coming,

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00:38:14,210 --> 00:38:18,170
Speaker 1: but Robert proopst didn't want to hear it. And when

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00:38:18,210 --> 00:38:23,730
Speaker 1: George Nelson was proved right, Proops didn't seem to realize

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00:38:23,850 --> 00:38:28,850
Speaker 1: that the bosses who packed workers into cubicles hadn't twisted

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00:38:28,890 --> 00:38:33,370
Speaker 1: his vision at all, They had simply taken it to

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00:38:33,450 --> 00:38:46,090
Speaker 1: its logical conclusion. Two years later, he was dead. Proopst

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00:38:46,370 --> 00:38:51,330
Speaker 1: had loved the idea of the creative knowledge workers physically dynamic,

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00:38:51,730 --> 00:38:56,810
Speaker 1: always searching for new ideas, empowered by the workplace around them.

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00:38:58,010 --> 00:39:01,170
Speaker 1: But he had also been a man who hated the

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00:39:01,210 --> 00:39:05,610
Speaker 1: thought of a wasted or inefficient movement so much that

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00:39:05,690 --> 00:39:09,610
Speaker 1: he'd laid in a hospital bed with a notebook conducting

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00:39:09,610 --> 00:39:13,010
Speaker 1: a time and motion study of the nurses who were

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00:39:13,050 --> 00:39:17,810
Speaker 1: caring for him. Would those nurses really have provided better

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00:39:17,970 --> 00:39:22,290
Speaker 1: care if they'd been rushing about on an optimized schedule.

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00:39:24,290 --> 00:39:30,370
Speaker 1: Despite Nelson's warning, Proops never did seem to realize that

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00:39:30,450 --> 00:39:33,850
Speaker 1: there might be a conflict between helping workers to be

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00:39:33,890 --> 00:39:38,530
Speaker 1: empowered and creative and helping them to be maximally efficient.

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00:39:40,050 --> 00:39:50,770
Speaker 1: There's only one word for his well intentioned mistake, tragedy.

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00:39:59,450 --> 00:40:04,010
Speaker 1: Essential sources for this episode were Nikhil Saval's book Cubed

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00:40:04,570 --> 00:40:09,890
Speaker 1: and Jennifer Kaufman Buhler's book Open Plan, a design history

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00:40:10,130 --> 00:40:13,370
Speaker 1: of the American Office. For a full list of our

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00:40:13,410 --> 00:40:20,050
Speaker 1: sources see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary

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00:40:20,050 --> 00:40:22,970
Speaker 1: Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright,

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00:40:23,170 --> 00:40:27,130
Speaker 1: Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills

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00:40:27,290 --> 00:40:31,050
Speaker 1: and Marilyn Rusk. The sound design and original music are

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00:40:31,090 --> 00:40:34,650
Speaker 1: the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by

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00:40:34,730 --> 00:40:39,490
Speaker 1: Carlos san Juan at Brain Audio. Bend A Dafhaffrey edited

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00:40:39,490 --> 00:40:43,530
Speaker 1: the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without

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00:40:43,530 --> 00:40:47,930
Speaker 1: the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohene, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler,

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00:40:48,130 --> 00:40:53,250
Speaker 1: Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is

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00:40:53,290 --> 00:40:56,770
Speaker 1: a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,

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00:40:57,050 --> 00:41:00,170
Speaker 1: please remember to share, rate, and review. It really makes

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00:41:00,170 --> 00:41:01,770
Speaker 1: a difference to us and if you want to hear

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00:41:01,810 --> 00:41:05,130
Speaker 1: the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on

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00:41:05,210 --> 00:41:08,330
Speaker 1: the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot

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00:41:08,410 --> 00:41:10,170
Speaker 1: fm slash plus