Speaker 1: Pushkin. As far as the nurse was concerned, the behavior
Speaker 1: seemed odd and distinctly unnerving that fellow, who had been
Speaker 1: bedridden for weeks with a slip disc he just kept
Speaker 1: staring at everyone and scribbling in his notebook, and staring
Speaker 1: some more, and writing some more. The nurse reported the
Speaker 1: suspicious activity to an administrator, who dropped by the patient's
Speaker 1: bedside to investigate what did he think he was playing at.
Speaker 1: The patient was delighted to be asked. He took out
Speaker 1: the notebook and began to explain he had been making
Speaker 1: a careful time and motion study of the hospital staff
Speaker 1: and had observed everything, all the inefficient movements, the squandered energy,
Speaker 1: and the wasted time. It could all be done so
Speaker 1: much better. The patient's name was Robert Proops, and Robert
Speaker 1: Proops was a genius. His colleagues certainly thought so. In
Speaker 1: one hour, he would reinvent the world. His mind went
Speaker 1: off like fireworks. Proops had been a sculptor, painter, and
Speaker 1: professor of art. He'd invented everything from playground equipment to
Speaker 1: an artificial heart valve to a machine readable livestock tag.
Speaker 1: His formal training was as a chemical engineer, not that
Speaker 1: he let his formal training constrain him. During the Second
Speaker 1: World War, he'd managed Beachhead Logistics in the South Pacific.
Speaker 1: But in the nineteen sixties Robert Pruf would invent an
Speaker 1: object that has shaped the everyday lives of tens of millions,
Speaker 1: perhaps hundreds of millions of people. But when I say
Speaker 1: that his invention shaped our lives, what sort of shape exactly?
Speaker 1: I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. In
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty eight, the Herman Miller Company, a maker of
Speaker 1: office furniture, hired Robert proopst His mission was to deploy
Speaker 1: his brand of spirited, cross disciplinary creativity to help Herman
Speaker 1: Miller diversify away from the potentially stayed world of filing cabinets, desks,
Speaker 1: and swivel chairs. Proops wasn't a designer, but maybe that
Speaker 1: was a good thing. He would dream big, think deep thoughts,
Speaker 1: and take Herman Miller in new directions. Proops started by
Speaker 1: setting up a research studio in the college town of
Speaker 1: ann Arbor, Michigan. That decision would have been easily explicable
Speaker 1: had Herman Miller itself not been located one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty miles away in Zealand. It would be a bold
Speaker 1: step even in today's era of remote work. In the
Speaker 1: pre internet world of nineteen fifty eight, his decision demonstrated
Speaker 1: that Proops valued the cerebral yet convivial atmosphere of a
Speaker 1: college town and that he wanted an extraordinary amount of
Speaker 1: independence from head office. It also showed that what he wanted,
Speaker 1: he got. Herman Miller gave him a free hand. There
Speaker 1: were only three rules. The first rule, don't design anything
Speaker 1: purely ornamental, make useful things. The second rule, don't make
Speaker 1: anything for the military. And the third rule, don't make
Speaker 1: office furniture. The first two rules he respected. Robert Proops
Speaker 1: wasn't a man whose creativity could easily be constrained or directed.
Speaker 1: Herman Miller was trying to break out of its traditional
Speaker 1: business of office furniture, and Proops seemed like the perfect
Speaker 1: man to help with that. But asking a free spirit
Speaker 1: like Proops not to think about office furniture simply encouraged
Speaker 1: him to think about office furniture even harder. After all,
Speaker 1: thinking about office furniture meant thinking about everything, mind, body,
Speaker 1: and soul. He carefully observed office dwellers at work. He
Speaker 1: read the latest ideas from management thinkers, explaining that the
Speaker 1: economy of the future would revolve around a new kind
Speaker 1: of worker, the knowledge worker, and he hungrily consumed ideas
Speaker 1: from psychology, sociology, and anthropology. All this grand talk about
Speaker 1: knowledge workers rather obscures the question of what exactly a
Speaker 1: knowledge worker is. There's a black and white photograph of
Speaker 1: just such a worker, using furniture designed by Robert Prout's
Speaker 1: research team. Next to him is a computer display teen
Speaker 1: sixty eight style. It's on a pivot and casters for
Speaker 1: easy tilting and swiveling and movement. The knowledge worker himself
Speaker 1: is wearing the standard office clothes of the day, white shirt,
Speaker 1: dark tie, smart dark suit pants. He looks intensely relaxed,
Speaker 1: calmly focused on the work in his lap, leaning back
Speaker 1: in an elegant Eames chair with his feet up on
Speaker 1: a little circular conference table. And that work in his
Speaker 1: lap a large computer interface supported by modifications to the chair,
Speaker 1: an all in one module with a keyboard, a computer mouse,
Speaker 1: and other controllers. And if nineteen sixty eight seems a
Speaker 1: bit early to have a laptop, keyboard and a computer mouse, well,
Speaker 1: the knowledge worker's name was Douglas Engelbart as a Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley pioneer. He invented the computer mouse. When Robert Proops
Speaker 1: was reading about knowledge workers, he was thinking of people
Speaker 1: like Douglas Engelbart, the top people, the most brilliant people,
Speaker 1: people who couldn't be put in boxes, people like himself.
Speaker 1: Robert Proops didn't like to be called a designer, or
Speaker 1: even a searcher, with its connotations of looking back to
Speaker 1: dig up old ideas. He preferred to be called a searcher.
Speaker 1: So what if he could make the perfect office for
Speaker 1: searchers like Douglas Engelbart and like Proops himself. At the time,
Speaker 1: the typical American office space had a large open area
Speaker 1: with neat rows of typists and secretaries and clerks in
Speaker 1: the middle, surrounded by offices with closable doors. Today's office
Speaker 1: is a wasteland, wrote Proops in nineteen sixty. Its SAPs vitality,
Speaker 1: blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of
Speaker 1: unfulfilled intentions and failed effort. But there was a hopeful
Speaker 1: development over in Germany. The bureau land shaft or office landscape,
Speaker 1: designed by two brothers at the consulting firm Quickborner Bureau
Speaker 1: land Shaft threw everything into the air. There would be
Speaker 1: one huge room with groups of desks artfully arranged to
Speaker 1: appear haphazard, sinuous routes between them like paths through a
Speaker 1: rock garden, and everything dotted with soft acou stick screens
Speaker 1: and pot plants. It was flexible. If the needs of
Speaker 1: the office changed, he just moved the desks around. Thick
Speaker 1: carpet absorbed noise. There were break rooms rather than a
Speaker 1: trundling tea trolley. There were no offices and no obvious hierarchy.
Speaker 1: Proops loved this new trend, but he could do so
Speaker 1: much better than those inefficient flat table desks and the
Speaker 1: endless sitting no good for your back, and Proops was
Speaker 1: a man who well understood the agonies of a bad back.
Speaker 1: Proops wanted to design a system which accommodated movement, a
Speaker 1: system with verticality stand up, sit down, spin round. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four, Herman Miller revealed Robert Proops's brainchild to
Speaker 1: the world. It was called simply Action Office. According to
Speaker 1: the design historian Jennifer Kaufman Buehler, Action Office would upend
Speaker 1: the American office furniture industry through the nineteen seventies. But
Speaker 1: as we'll see, it did much more than that. Action
Speaker 1: office was built around the idea of the workstation. One
Speaker 1: sits at a desk like a secretary, but one sits
Speaker 1: in a workstation like a fighter pilot sits in a
Speaker 1: cockpit surrounded by a variety of achingly cool freestanding furniture
Speaker 1: units located in the arena center, explained proops. You are
Speaker 1: free to turn and use a suitable work surface, console
Speaker 1: or conference expression. Yes, indeed, everything you need is within
Speaker 1: vision as you spin your stylish rotating chair. Your files
Speaker 1: are color coded, sitting on a shelf at eye level,
Speaker 1: perfectly adjustable, and mounted on a soundproof divider above your
Speaker 1: equally adjustable desk, maybe a low coffee table where a
Speaker 1: couple of coffee cups sit empty after an impromptu brainstorm
Speaker 1: with a colleague espresso cups. Of course, there's a pin
Speaker 1: board full of your creative ideas. Do you need to
Speaker 1: discreetly lock them away? No problem, The board folds down
Speaker 1: to provide a secure cover over a side desk. Of course,
Speaker 1: you also have a large, angled architect's desk with a
Speaker 1: swivel stool you can stand at it or sit, moving
Speaker 1: around dynamically from idea to idea, from chair to stool
Speaker 1: to standing at your pinboard. You are active, You are creative.
Speaker 1: You look fabulous. You are the knowledge worker, the beating heart,
Speaker 1: and the pulsing brain of Action Office. The concept was
Speaker 1: by Proofs, the stylish design by his colleague George Nelson. Nelson,
Speaker 1: director of design at Herman Miller, was no passenger on
Speaker 1: this adventure. Nelson was one of the taste makers of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, working with iconic figures such as Charles
Speaker 1: and ray Eames or Isamunugucci. And Nelson's designs for the
Speaker 1: Action Office units were so cool that Stanley Kubrick used
Speaker 1: the Action Office on a space station in two thousand
Speaker 1: and one a Space Odyssey. This was the kind of
Speaker 1: furniture people would have in the future in space right.
Speaker 1: Some executives bought it for their own homes. The reviews
Speaker 1: were delirious.
Speaker 2: Seeing these designs, one wonders why office workers have put
Speaker 2: up with their incompatible, unproductive, uncomfortable environment for so long.
Speaker 1: There's an answer to that, and we'll hear it after
Speaker 1: the break. Why did office workers put up with an incompatible, unproductive,
Speaker 1: uncomfortable environment for so long. The answer is simple, they
Speaker 1: didn't have any choice. When Proops set out the action
Speaker 1: off his concept, he was imagining men like himself. Yes,
Speaker 1: men of course, who saw themselves as highly paid, highly
Speaker 1: creative free spirits. But their bosses may have seen things
Speaker 1: rather differently. And it was their bosses who chose the
Speaker 1: office design, which raised the question why would they pay
Speaker 1: for the action office? Action office cost five hundred dollars
Speaker 1: for the simplest component. Relative to the wages of the day,
Speaker 1: that would be more like ten thousand dollars today. The
Speaker 1: first rule for anyone seeking to sell equipment for workers,
Speaker 1: surely is to remember who buys equipment for workers. It's
Speaker 1: not the workers, it's the managers. And while the workers
Speaker 1: might dream of climbing into the cockpit of their own
Speaker 1: productivity plane, the managers are focused on efficiency. This is
Speaker 1: an old story going back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the
Speaker 1: founder of scientific management, watching manual workers with a stopwattion,
Speaker 1: calculating the most efficient movements and the optimal equipment, even
Speaker 1: the ideal size of shovel to give to a laborer
Speaker 1: digging a ditch, which might differ from the ideal shovel
Speaker 1: for a laborer shoveling coal, and since this was scientifically
Speaker 1: determined what the laborer himself thought of, it didn't much matter.
Speaker 1: Robert proopst didn't think in terms of shovels, but he
Speaker 1: certainly understood the appeal of time and motion studies, as
Speaker 1: the nurses caring for his bad back could have attested.
Speaker 1: And while Proops dreamed of creating the perfect working environment
Speaker 1: for the Douglas Engelbarts of the world, perhaps the dividing
Speaker 1: line between an inventor like Douglas Engelbart and a worker
Speaker 1: digging a ditch isn't as clear as he might have imagined.
Speaker 1: Once the bosses started thinking about efficiency, Sure, Douglas Engelbart
Speaker 1: is a knowledge worker, but are the secretaries. Maybe, but
Speaker 1: corporate bosses weren't lavishing thousands of dollars on designer furniture
Speaker 1: for the secretaries, which explains why, despite being a critical
Speaker 1: and cultural success, the Action Office was a commercial failure.
Speaker 1: So what were bosses buying in a nutshell? Better and
Speaker 1: better stop botches? The bosses have always been particularly keen
Speaker 1: to use technology to monitor what workers get up to
Speaker 1: so they can squeeze more work out of them. That's
Speaker 1: been true from the punch clock of one hundred years
Speaker 1: ago that records you arriving at or leaving work, right
Speaker 1: up to the complex technologies of today. While Robert Proopst
Speaker 1: and George Nelson were making space age furniture at Interplanetary, says,
Speaker 1: the bosses were more interested in squeezing workers, which is
Speaker 1: how we got to now with workers constantly being watched.
Speaker 1: Amazon tracks our every move, explains Wendy Taylor. She works
Speaker 1: as a packer at an Amazon warehouse in Missouri, and
Speaker 1: was one of a group of workers who filed a
Speaker 1: complaint against Amazon in May of twenty twenty four. They
Speaker 1: know every move you make when you're working. When you're
Speaker 1: not working, they surveil you with their cameras. Managers survail
Speaker 1: you with their laptops because they can pull up your
Speaker 1: profile and a bar changes a certain color. When you're
Speaker 1: not active, every move you make is being tracked. Another
Speaker 1: worker who was worried about surveillance was Carol Kramer. Unlike
Speaker 1: Wendy Taylor, Kramer had a desk based job. She had
Speaker 1: a camera pointed at her throughout the working day, taking snapshots.
Speaker 1: Both of her face and her computer screen to verify
Speaker 1: that she was being productive. Her pay was regularly docked
Speaker 1: because the system decided she wasn't working, even though she
Speaker 1: might have been mentoring a colleague, or making notes with
Speaker 1: Pensiland paper that the camera didn't track, or, for that matter,
Speaker 1: just taking a bathroom break. That might all sound familiar
Speaker 1: to the likes of warehouse packers like Wendy Taylor, but
Speaker 1: Carol Kramer wasn't a low paid administrator or call center worker.
Speaker 1: She was a corporate vice president, managing a team of
Speaker 1: twelve people and being paid two hundred dollars an hour.
Speaker 1: Workplaced surveillance wasn't just for the factory floor or the warehouse.
Speaker 1: It was coming for managers like Carol Kramer. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, four years after Action Office was such a
Speaker 1: cultural triumph and such a commercial failure, Robert Proops tried again.
Speaker 1: He published a manifesto titled The Office, a Facility based
Speaker 1: on Change. More importantly, he offered a less costly, more
Speaker 1: compact version of the Action Office concept. George Nelson and
Speaker 1: his iconic designs had been jettisoned, but Action Office two
Speaker 1: still organized space vertically as well as horizontally, still offered
Speaker 1: multiple work surfaces, still used dividers to absorb sound and
Speaker 1: organize and display materials in use, and still sought to
Speaker 1: offer privacy without isolation. The system was modular, flexible, and
Speaker 1: easily adapted. The dividers snapped together at a variety of angles,
Speaker 1: but Proops favored three dividers per worker with a hunter
Speaker 1: dred and twenty degree angle, which creates a half hexagon
Speaker 1: space packed with ideas. Action Office two was a lot
Speaker 1: cheaper than its predecessor, and it looked a lot cheaper too,
Speaker 1: But still it was practical and a bit funky, especially
Speaker 1: those hexagons. The new system got good reviews. Sylvia Porter,
Speaker 1: a columnist at the New York Post, called it a revolution,
Speaker 1: adding I find the concept entirely appealing. I particularly like
Speaker 1: the idea of sit down or stand up workstations. She
Speaker 1: loved the way Proops described workers as human performers, and
Speaker 1: yet looking at publicity photographs of the system, you can't
Speaker 1: help but notice one difference. The Action Office one system
Speaker 1: tended to be photographed as a collection of unique components
Speaker 1: designed to equip a single knowledge worker, a genius like
Speaker 1: Douglas Engelbart right and that seemed to be how proops
Speaker 1: envisaged them. An early sketch biproops shows all the cool components,
Speaker 1: the swivel chairs, the roll top desk, the shelving, the
Speaker 1: coffee table, the angle drawing board. They are quite clearly
Speaker 1: located in a spacious private office space. But the Action
Speaker 1: Office two system wasn't designed to be installed in an office,
Speaker 1: but to replace one, or more likely a whole row
Speaker 1: of offices. Photographs showed Action Office two units in multiples,
Speaker 1: not one half hexagon workstation, but three clipped together for
Speaker 1: three workers to sit close together. The honeycomb was starting
Speaker 1: to take shape from the corporate garden that was bureau
Speaker 1: land shaft get busy worker bees. Action Office too took
Speaker 1: off in a way that its pricey predecessor never had.
Speaker 1: It was inexpensive, practical, compact, and it got a little
Speaker 1: boost from the government too. The US tax code changed,
Speaker 1: giving a nice tax break to companies which bought rapidly
Speaker 1: depreciating equipment such as furniture rather than long lasting office
Speaker 1: fixtures such as doors and internal walls, which meant if
Speaker 1: you could buy furniture instead of building offices, Uncle Sam
Speaker 1: would reward you Action Office too, had looked cheap before,
Speaker 1: now it looked really cheap in more ways than one.
Speaker 1: Every office furniture company in North America scrambled to copy
Speaker 1: the idea. Soon they were Steelcase, Soonar Gnol, They were
Speaker 1: all making modular office furniture systems. One of the Sonar
Speaker 1: designers went to admire the installation of their modular system
Speaker 1: at a large government office in Canada. Excited to see
Speaker 1: the dynamic new system in action, he came back looking
Speaker 1: as pale as a beige partition. It was awful, one
Speaker 1: of the worst installations I'd ever seen, he said. Sonar
Speaker 1: had installed dividing panels that were seventy inches tall, not
Speaker 1: tall enough to be a proper wall, but high enough
Speaker 1: to block all line of sight. They'd seemed to make
Speaker 1: sense on the drawing board, but en mass they were oppressive.
Speaker 1: While the original bureau land shaft concept felt like strolling
Speaker 1: through a shrubbery, this new installation was more like a
Speaker 1: sterile labyrinth, with workers trapped behind a maze of Hessian
Speaker 1: wrapped walls. At the time, the designer didn't have the
Speaker 1: right words to describe the horror of it all. It
Speaker 1: was only years later that the culture started to provide them.
Speaker 1: Looking back, the designer summed it up, I'd failed to
Speaker 1: visualize what it would look like when there were so
Speaker 1: many of them. It was Dilbertville. The designer of Action
Speaker 1: Office one, George Nelson wouldn't have been surprised at how
Speaker 1: grim these new modular furniture systems looked. Furious at being
Speaker 1: discarded from the Action Office project, he wrote to his
Speaker 1: boss at the Herman Miller Company, Tearing into Action Office III,
Speaker 1: complaining that the whole idea treated people as less than human.
Speaker 1: This dehumanizing characteristic is not an accident, but the inevitable
Speaker 1: expression of a concept which views people as links in
Speaker 1: a corporate system for handling paper, or as input output
Speaker 1: organisms whose efficiency has been a matter of nervous concern
Speaker 1: for the past half century. People do indeed function in
Speaker 1: such roles, but this is not what people are, merely
Speaker 1: a description of what they doing certain hours. Nelson's point
Speaker 1: was powerful. If you treat people like components in a machine,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter how excited you are about their dynamism
Speaker 1: or movement or flexibility, or how they can mesh together
Speaker 1: to produce remarkable results. Ultimately, you have forgotten that they
Speaker 1: are human and don't be surprised if that lapse has
Speaker 1: consequences action office too, continued Nelson is definitely not a
Speaker 1: system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general,
Speaker 1: and then comes the prophetic next line. But it is
Speaker 1: admirable for planners looking for ways of cramming in a
Speaker 1: maximum number of bodies for employees as against individuals for personnel,
Speaker 1: corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority, a large
Speaker 1: market ouch. But George Nelson had put his finger on
Speaker 1: the problem. While Robert Proops wanted workers to be able
Speaker 1: to adapt, to move around, and above all, to be
Speaker 1: in control of their own knowledge work benches, George Nelson
Speaker 1: realized that it didn't matter what Robert Proops wanted, and
Speaker 1: it didn't matter what the workers wanted. Managers were in charge,
Speaker 1: and managers had their own agenda. Cautionary tales will be
Speaker 1: back after the break. The conflict between Nelson and Proops
Speaker 1: shouldn't have come as a surprise. Proops could be intellectually
Speaker 1: stubborn and intolerant of people who disagreed. He believed his
Speaker 1: way was the right way, said a colleague, and he
Speaker 1: was usually right. But there was more than that stubbornness
Speaker 1: to the falling out. Nelson had highlighted a contradiction in
Speaker 1: Proopst's thinking. Proops spoke of human performers, but what if
Speaker 1: there was a tension between job performance and simply being human?
Speaker 1: Proops embodied that tension. One day, he's setting up a
Speaker 1: research studio one hundred and fifty miles away from head office,
Speaker 1: insisting on his freedom to innovate and to skip boring
Speaker 1: corporate meetings. Another day, he's a hospital patient, making minute
Speaker 1: observations on all the ways that the nurses around him
Speaker 1: could move more efficiently. Time and studies are fun if
Speaker 1: you're the one holding the stopwatch and the clipboard. Action
Speaker 1: Office imagined a class of people like Proops himself, or
Speaker 1: like Douglas Engelbart, whose performance depended on the fullest exercise
Speaker 1: of their human freedom and human creativity. But Action Office
Speaker 1: too didn't appeal to the boss class because it encouraged
Speaker 1: human freedom and human creativity, but because it was efficient
Speaker 1: and the inevitable next step they would try to make
Speaker 1: it more efficient. Still. The great architect Frank Duffy described
Speaker 1: that awful realization. To the writer and office historian Nikil Saval,
Speaker 1: there was a moment when the orthogonal came in. Someone
Speaker 1: figured out that you didn't need the one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty degree and it went click. That was a bad day.
Speaker 1: It took only five seconds for Action Office to turn
Speaker 1: into a box. Robert Proops had shaped our lives, and
Speaker 1: that shape was a cube. Proops had been ahead of
Speaker 1: his time in emphasizing flexibility, worker autonomy, and movement away
Speaker 1: from the sedentary desk. Indeed, he hated the very word desk.
Speaker 1: For Proops, knowledge workers were like artisans at their workbenches,
Speaker 1: tools organized close at hand rather than hidden away, everything
Speaker 1: in motion, vibrant rather than austere. And yet somehow he
Speaker 1: had invented the hated cubicle. Less a dynamic cockpit for
Speaker 1: a knowledge pilot, more a cage in an administrative factory farm.
Speaker 1: The beij cage multiplied across American offices. In nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: nearly three decades after Action Office III was launched, it
Speaker 1: was estimated that more than three quarters of white collar
Speaker 1: workers were working in cubicles. The average cubicle had also
Speaker 1: halved in size between nineteen eighty seven and nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 1: Workers were packed in like eggs in cartons. The office
Speaker 1: has come a long way since the punch clock. In
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, The New York Times reported that eight
Speaker 1: of the ten largest private sector employers in the US
Speaker 1: were carefully tracked king productivity metrics for individual workers, often
Speaker 1: in real time. There were Amazon Warehouse packers, ups, drivers,
Speaker 1: cashiers at Kroger, but there were also people who previously
Speaker 1: had been viewed as too skilled and perhaps too high
Speaker 1: status to subject to second by second surveillance. The workers
Speaker 1: have noticed two One long running research project in the
Speaker 1: UK concludes that back in nineteen ninety, almost two thirds
Speaker 1: of employees felt that they were empowered to make decisions
Speaker 1: about the tasks right in front of them. By twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four, that proportion had fallen dramatically to one third.
Speaker 1: Workers don't decide how to spend their time from minute
Speaker 1: to minute anymore. The computer does. The Times found that
Speaker 1: this sort of bosswear often seemed counterproductive. Grocery cashiers found
Speaker 1: themselves getting impatient with elderly customers for slowing down the
Speaker 1: checkout scan. Social workers who were counseling patients in drug
Speaker 1: treatment facilities found themselves marketers idle because they weren't sending emails.
Speaker 1: Middle managers at United Health knew the tracking system was flawed,
Speaker 1: but couldn't fix it. According to the Times, they told
Speaker 1: employees to jiggle their mice during online meetings and training sessions.
Speaker 1: What Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, would have
Speaker 1: made of all that? I do not know. But the
Speaker 1: more fundamental problem with workplace surveillance is the same as
Speaker 1: the problem George Nelson identified with Action Office I. Workplace
Speaker 1: surveillance treats workers as components in a system, and, as
Speaker 1: Nelson had complained back in the late nineteen sixties, that
Speaker 1: might indeed be what people did, but it wasn't what
Speaker 1: people were. Carol Kramer was one of these unwilling components.
Speaker 1: She was the corporate vice president manager of a team
Speaker 1: of a dozen people, who found her employer had installed
Speaker 1: bosswear to take frequent snapshots of her screen and her
Speaker 1: chair to check that she was actually working. That raised
Speaker 1: all the usual questions about whether the software was really
Speaker 1: rewarding the right behavior. Did a conversation about workover coffee
Speaker 1: with a subordinate count? Did jotting some ideas on a
Speaker 1: piece of paper?
Speaker 2: Count?
Speaker 1: Did going for a walk to think about a business
Speaker 1: problem in a new environment.
Speaker 2: Count.
Speaker 1: Of course, they all should count, but they didn't. Carol
Speaker 1: Kramer found that she was getting her pay doct for
Speaker 1: failure to work in a way that satisfied the bosswear,
Speaker 1: which was annoying in more ways than one. Yes, she
Speaker 1: felt cheated and pressured to work in a counterproductive way,
Speaker 1: but there was also the question of whether she was
Speaker 1: being treated as a human being. You're supposed to be
Speaker 1: a trusted member of your team, but there was never
Speaker 1: any trust that you were working for the team, she complained.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just that the boss war could be stupid
Speaker 1: and blinkered. It was the whole idea that Carol couldn't
Speaker 1: be trusted to use her own judgment about how to work,
Speaker 1: when to work, and even shockingly, when there was more
Speaker 1: to life than working, working.
Speaker 2: Working working.
Speaker 1: The data backs up these anecdotes. In twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: three experts on workplace psychology performed a statistical analysis of
Speaker 1: more than fifty studies of electronic workplace monitoring. They found
Speaker 1: that such monitoring reduces job satisfaction, increases stress, and prompts
Speaker 1: counterproductive behavior. It has no measurable impact on job performance.
Speaker 1: The only people who'll be surprised at that are the bosses.
Speaker 1: Those bosses had treated Carol Kramer like an organizational component
Speaker 1: they'd forgotten, but she was also a human being. She quit.
Speaker 1: Robert Proops kept searching, with designs ranging from a hospital
Speaker 1: furniture system called costruck to a gigantic vertical timber harvester
Speaker 1: that looks like a modified mechanical excavator. He earned one
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty patents, but by far his most
Speaker 1: important invention is the one that came to horrify him,
Speaker 1: the cubicle. At the age of seventy seven, he gave
Speaker 1: an interview which has now become infamous. Not all organizations
Speaker 1: are intelligent and progressive lots are run by crass people.
Speaker 1: They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them,
Speaker 1: barren rat hole places, barren rat hole places. The interview
Speaker 1: conveyed the bitter regret of a man who saw his
Speaker 1: life's vision twisted by avaricious fools. But should we really
Speaker 1: be surprised? George Nelson wasn't He saw it all coming,
Speaker 1: but Robert proopst didn't want to hear it. And when
Speaker 1: George Nelson was proved right, Proops didn't seem to realize
Speaker 1: that the bosses who packed workers into cubicles hadn't twisted
Speaker 1: his vision at all, They had simply taken it to
Speaker 1: its logical conclusion. Two years later, he was dead. Proopst
Speaker 1: had loved the idea of the creative knowledge workers physically dynamic,
Speaker 1: always searching for new ideas, empowered by the workplace around them.
Speaker 1: But he had also been a man who hated the
Speaker 1: thought of a wasted or inefficient movement so much that
Speaker 1: he'd laid in a hospital bed with a notebook conducting
Speaker 1: a time and motion study of the nurses who were
Speaker 1: caring for him. Would those nurses really have provided better
Speaker 1: care if they'd been rushing about on an optimized schedule.
Speaker 1: Despite Nelson's warning, Proops never did seem to realize that
Speaker 1: there might be a conflict between helping workers to be
Speaker 1: empowered and creative and helping them to be maximally efficient.
Speaker 1: There's only one word for his well intentioned mistake, tragedy.
Speaker 1: Essential sources for this episode were Nikhil Saval's book Cubed
Speaker 1: and Jennifer Kaufman Buhler's book Open Plan, a design history
Speaker 1: of the American Office. For a full list of our
Speaker 1: sources see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary
Speaker 1: Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright,
Speaker 1: Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills
Speaker 1: and Marilyn Rusk. The sound design and original music are
Speaker 1: the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by
Speaker 1: Carlos san Juan at Brain Audio. Bend A Dafhaffrey edited
Speaker 1: the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
Speaker 1: the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohene, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is
Speaker 1: a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,
Speaker 1: please remember to share, rate, and review. It really makes
Speaker 1: a difference to us and if you want to hear
Speaker 1: the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on
Speaker 1: the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot
Speaker 1: fm slash plus