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Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello Tim here, and we've got a classic episode

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Speaker 1: of Cautionary Tales for you this week while I'm on

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Speaker 1: my summer holidays office hell the demise of the playful workspace.

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Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, maybe

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Speaker 1: head over to Pushkin Plus because this Tuesday there'll be

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Speaker 1: a brand new episode, another cautionary tale about a disastrous

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Speaker 1: invention that shaped the office of Today. To subscribe, head

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Speaker 1: to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts,

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Speaker 1: or go to pushkin dot fm slash plus. As well

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Speaker 1: as an exclusive show every month, you also get all

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Speaker 1: episodes add free. Next week here on the main feed,

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Speaker 1: we are back in action with a brand new episode

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Speaker 1: of Cautionary Tales, all about the worst poet in the world.

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Speaker 1: See you then. By the end of the nineteen eighties,

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Speaker 1: shyat Day was the most fashionable advertising agency on the planet.

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Speaker 1: Then commissioned a short film by the director of Blade

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Speaker 1: Runner Ridley Scott to launch the Apple Mac pioneered the

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Speaker 1: idea of using Super Bowl spots to create news and

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Speaker 1: made an unforgettable series of adverts in which the Energizer

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Speaker 1: Bunny kept crashing through ads for other products, but an

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Speaker 1: ad agency always needs to keep things fresh, and so

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Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety three, the agency's boss, Jay Shyatt, announced

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Speaker 1: a radical plan to give Shyat Day a jolt of

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Speaker 1: creative renewal. Jay Shyatt was going to sweep away corner

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Speaker 1: offices and cubicles and even desks. Armed with the best

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Speaker 1: mobile technology that nineteen ninety three had to offer, Shayat

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Speaker 1: Day employees would roam free in open space, winning sales

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Speaker 1: and creating great ads wherever they wished. What's more, these

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Speaker 1: spaces would be playful, zany and stylish. Shayat hired the

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Speaker 1: legendary architect Frank Gerry to work on the Los Angeles office,

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Speaker 1: which boasted a four story sculpture for a pair of binoculars.

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Speaker 1: Curvacious two seater pods from fairground rides were installed with

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Speaker 1: the hope that people would sit together in them and

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Speaker 1: think creative thoughts. The New York office was designed by

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Speaker 1: Gaetan No Peschet. It had a mural of a vast

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Speaker 1: red pair of lips and a luminous, multi colored floor

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Speaker 1: with hieroglyphs all over it. Eschet had a boyish sense

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Speaker 1: of humor. The floor in front of the men's room

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Speaker 1: had an illustration of a man urinating. His conference tables

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Speaker 1: were made of a silicone resin that would amusingly grab

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Speaker 1: and hold important papers during important meetings. Some of his

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Speaker 1: chairs had instead of feet, springs, and they would wobble

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Speaker 1: and tip back. Not so much fun if you happen

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Speaker 1: to be wearing a skirt. But hey, creativity right from

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Speaker 1: a distance. People loved the shayat Day offices. Design magazines

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Speaker 1: raved about the futuristic spaces. The agency even started charging

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Speaker 1: to give paid tours of their offices. The New York

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Speaker 1: Times architecture critic called the Manhattan office the apotheosis of

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Speaker 1: the dream factory and declared that the agency staff were

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Speaker 1: happily at home inside. The dream Time magazine added thoroughly

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Speaker 1: armed with a modern weaponry of the road warrior. The

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Speaker 1: telecommuters of Shayat Day are among the forerunners of employment

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Speaker 1: in the information age. That's not wrong, laptops and mobile phones,

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Speaker 1: hot desks in zany offices. Shayat Day really was ahead

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Speaker 1: of its time. But the closer you got to that

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Speaker 1: cutting edge of workplace design, the more likely you were

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Speaker 1: to get hurt. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to

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Speaker 1: cautionary tales. At first, the radically playful workspace seemed so brilliant.

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Speaker 1: Jay Shyatt had been visionary in hiring Frank Garry a

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Speaker 1: few years before he became the most famous architect on

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Speaker 1: the planet. Equally visionary was Shyatt's idea that the office

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Speaker 1: should be like a university campus. The idea is you

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Speaker 1: go to lecture, gather information, but you do your work

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Speaker 1: wherever you like, said Jay Shyatt. That idea is so

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Speaker 1: influential that it's now a cliche. Microsoft has a campus,

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Speaker 1: Pixar has a campus, Google has a campus, and many

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Speaker 1: of the offices which regard themselves as cool today mimic

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Speaker 1: Gaetano Peschet's bright colors, different architectural zones, and clusters of

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Speaker 1: couches interspersed with large tables. Shayat Day's free range office

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Speaker 1: really was ahead of its time. But even before the

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Speaker 1: full majesty of the shayat Day vision was unveiled, problems

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Speaker 1: started to emerge. The agency had experimented by removing a

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Speaker 1: few people's desks to see what would happen. Unfortunately, when

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Speaker 1: what happened happened, they didn't seem to care. One of

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Speaker 1: the Guinea Pigs was an associate director called Monica Miller.

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Speaker 1: She took her desk away. She got hold of a

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Speaker 1: little red wagon, the classic children's toy. She described to

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Speaker 1: the journalist Warren Berger how every morning should pile the

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Speaker 1: little red wagon high with documents and files, then walk

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Speaker 1: up and down the hallways of shy At Day looking

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Speaker 1: for a desk left temporarily vacant. Everyone thought it was

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Speaker 1: so cute, she said. I'd be trudging down the hall

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Speaker 1: and they'd laugh and say, oh, look, here she comes

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Speaker 1: with that little red wagon. It was like a bad dream,

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Speaker 1: like a bad dream. Well, the New York Times did

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Speaker 1: call it a dream factory. The laugh would be on

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Speaker 1: those mocking colleagues soon enough. When they returned from their

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Speaker 1: holiday break at the start of nineteen ninety four, the

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Speaker 1: hot desking era had begun. They were confronted with row

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Speaker 1: upon row of lockers, less college campus, more junior high school.

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Speaker 1: Jay Shyat had sneered dismissively that the lockers would be

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Speaker 1: for people's dog pictures or whatever, But there wasn't room

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Speaker 1: for much. People started hauling armfuls of paperwork along with

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Speaker 1: their clunky laptops. Monica Miller, of course, had her little

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Speaker 1: red wagon. Every day there'd be these frantic email messages

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Speaker 1: like has anybody seen my binder? Does anyone know where

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Speaker 1: my files are? She recalled. It was a colossal headache.

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Speaker 1: Part of the problem was simply that Jay Shyat's cutting

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Speaker 1: edge idea had been so badly executed. Using a laptop

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Speaker 1: and a portable phone seems mundane today, but back in

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Speaker 1: the early nineteen nineties that sort of gear was expensive, temperamental,

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Speaker 1: and clunky. Staff wouldn't take their phones or computers home. Instead,

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Speaker 1: they'd sign them out each morning and return them to

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Speaker 1: a concierge when they went home at night, and to

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Speaker 1: save money, shay at Day didn't buy enough for all

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Speaker 1: of the one hundred and fifty staff who worked in

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Speaker 1: the Manhattan office. Instead, ill tempered cues formed like breadlines

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Speaker 1: each morning at the concierge desk. Staff who lived near

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Speaker 1: the office would show up at dawn, sign out a

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Speaker 1: precious computer and phone, hide them somewhere, and then go

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Speaker 1: back to bed for a couple of hours. Senior staff

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Speaker 1: would enlist their assistance to rise early and secure their kit.

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Speaker 1: Damned if I was going to get up at six

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Speaker 1: in the morning to get a phone recalled one. I

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Speaker 1: had to put my foot down. I told my assistant,

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Speaker 1: go in there at six in the morning, get me

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Speaker 1: a phone in a computer, and hide it till I

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Speaker 1: get there. I'm not sure that's what putting my foot

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Speaker 1: down really means, but you get the gist. Rather than

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Speaker 1: freeing people to work anywhere and any time that suited them,

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Speaker 1: shy at Day's campus had staff queuing before daybreak, a

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Speaker 1: basic equipment. In the Los Angeles office, people started using

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Speaker 1: the trunks of their cars as filing cabinets, their head

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Speaker 1: out to the parking lot whenever they needed a new document.

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Speaker 1: Staff in the Manhattan office, of course, could only dream

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Speaker 1: of using cars as filing cabinets. The boss, Jay Shyatt,

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Speaker 1: seemed to be in denial about how much paper and

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Speaker 1: advertising agency needed. Paper was something he frowned on. He'd

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Speaker 1: send emails around reminding staff that shyat Day was a

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Speaker 1: paperless office. One creative director remembers Jay mocking the paper

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Speaker 1: storyboards and demanding the removal of posters showing the agency's

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Speaker 1: latest ads. But the truth was that paper was still

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Speaker 1: an essential part of the creative flow. That was doubly

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Speaker 1: true at an organization where people had to queue in

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Speaker 1: the hope of scoring a laptop for the day, who

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Speaker 1: would switch to digital in a world where they couldn't

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Speaker 1: even be sure of getting a computer. The execution of

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Speaker 1: Hyatt Day's new office was disastrously bad, making false economies

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Speaker 1: with clunky equipment. But Jay Schiatt made another mistake, one

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Speaker 1: that was more serious, more fundamental, and much much more common.

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Speaker 1: But he wasn't the first, not by a long way.

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Speaker 1: A century ago, a French industrialist, Henri Fruges commissioned a

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Speaker 1: rising star in the field of architecture to design some

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Speaker 1: radical new homes for factory workers in Paysack, near Bordeaux.

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Speaker 1: The architect's name was Charles Edoin Genert Grig. Today we

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Speaker 1: know him as Lokobousier. The Kabousier designed Cite Fruges to Paysack,

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Speaker 1: a set of modern cubes stacked into family homes. The Korbuzier,

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Speaker 1: of course, was the archmodernist, a man who dealt in

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Speaker 1: minimalism and concrete. His vision couldn't be more opposed to

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Speaker 1: the spring loaded chairs or four story sculptures of binoculars

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Speaker 1: that adorned the offices of Shayat Day One creative director

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Speaker 1: of Shayat Day described the experience of working in Gaetano

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Speaker 1: Peschet's radical office as like sitting inside of a migraine.

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Speaker 1: How he must have yearned for the pared down minimalism

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Speaker 1: of Lokorbusier. We are tired of decorps. What we need

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Speaker 1: is a good visual laxative. Lukorbuzier once explained bare walls,

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Speaker 1: total simplicity, that is how to restore our visual sense.

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Speaker 1: And yet the humble factory workers didn't seem to see

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Speaker 1: l Korbusier's vision quite like that. They hated it and

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Speaker 1: they refused to move in. It was terrible, said one.

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Speaker 1: I felt as if I was being sent to prison.

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Speaker 1: If you focus on the design, this seems paradoxical. Gary

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Speaker 1: and Peschet and Jay Shiat were offering the workforce a

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Speaker 1: playfully riotous explosion of visual stimulation or refuges, and Lokalbousier

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Speaker 1: were offering the workforce bare walls and total simplicity. The

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Speaker 1: design ideas were radically different. The reaction was the same.

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Speaker 1: People hated it. Cautionary tales will return after the break.

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Speaker 1: In two thousand and ten, two psychologists at the University

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Speaker 1: of Exeter Alex Haslam and Craig Knight conducted an experiment

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Speaker 1: to test the impact of different office spaces on how

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Speaker 1: much people got done and how they felt about it.

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Speaker 1: Haslam and Knight recruited experimental subjects to spend an hour

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Speaker 1: on administrative tasks such as checking documents, and randomly assigned

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Speaker 1: these subjects to different kinds of office. There were four

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Speaker 1: office layouts in the experiment. First was the minimalist office,

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Speaker 1: a clean and spartan space with a bare desk, swivel chair,

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Speaker 1: pencil and paper. Many people in Haslem and Knight's experiments

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Speaker 1: found the sheer tidiness of the minimalist office oppressive. It

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Speaker 1: just felt like a show space with nothing out of place,

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Speaker 1: commented one participant, adding you couldn't relax in it. The

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Speaker 1: second office layout was nothing radical, no binocular sculptures or

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Speaker 1: fairground pods. It was just the simple minimalist office with

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Speaker 1: a few tasteful additions, some potted plants, some large framed

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Speaker 1: prints hanging on the wall. The prince showed close up

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Speaker 1: photographs of plants, vaguely evoking a Georgia O'Keefe painting. All

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Speaker 1: simple enough, but people liked it. In the experiment, workers

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Speaker 1: preferred the decorated office space to the minimalist one, and

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Speaker 1: they got more and better work done there too. But

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Speaker 1: this experiment wasn't really about the effect of having some

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Speaker 1: greenery or a few pictures on the wall. What really

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Speaker 1: interested haslamon Knight wasn't pot plants. It was power. And

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Speaker 1: so the final two office layouts used the same components

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Speaker 1: as the decorated office. Visually, they seemed much the same,

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Speaker 1: but there was an invisible distinction, something that made all

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Speaker 1: all the difference between a pleasant space and a hellhole.

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Speaker 1: That invisible distinction was all about autonomy. The most successful

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Speaker 1: office space offered the same tasteful prints and the same

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Speaker 1: little shrubs, but it offered something else to control over

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Speaker 1: the space. Participants were invited to spend some time arranging

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Speaker 1: those decorations however they saw fit, or even having them

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Speaker 1: removed to perfectly mimic the minimalist space if that's what

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Speaker 1: they wanted. The researchers called this arrangement the empowered office.

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Speaker 1: The empowered office could be just like the minimalist office,

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Speaker 1: or exactly like the decorated office, or it could be

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Speaker 1: something else. The point was that the person working in

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Speaker 1: the office had the choice. The empowered office was a

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Speaker 1: great success. People got much more done there than either

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Speaker 1: the minimalist or the decorated office, and they liked it

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Speaker 1: more too. And you can guess what Alex Haslam and

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Speaker 1: Craig Knight did to produce a hated environment. They simply

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Speaker 1: said they were offering people control and then took the

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Speaker 1: control away. They invited people to arrange the prints and

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Speaker 1: the plants, but then at the last minute a researcher

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Speaker 1: returned and undid all that personalization, instead setting everything up

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Speaker 1: as it was in the decorated office. If they were

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Speaker 1: questioned or challenged, they simply said that the previous arrangement

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Speaker 1: hadn't been suitable for the experiment. The scientists called this

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Speaker 1: condition the disempowered office. People loathed it. I wanted to

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Speaker 1: hit you, one participant told the researchers later, after the

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Speaker 1: experiment had been explained, several people felt physically unwell. And remember,

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Speaker 1: there was nothing actually wrong with the physical design of

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Speaker 1: the disempowered office. It was exactly like the decorated office,

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Speaker 1: which people had found perfectly pleasant. What mattered was the

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Speaker 1: sense of powerlessness of implicitly being told that you'd done

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Speaker 1: it wrong, that you weren't in charge, that you didn't matter.

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Speaker 1: The lesson office design doesn't matter nearly as much as

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Speaker 1: letting people design their offices, and this explains why the

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Speaker 1: simple clean homes that Enrive Fuge's commissioned for his workforce

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Speaker 1: met with much the same revulsion as the crazy, chaotic

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Speaker 1: workspace that Jay Shyat commissioned for his It wasn't a

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Speaker 1: response to the esthetics themselves. It was a response to

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Speaker 1: being powerless as those esthetics were imposed by an overconfident employer.

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Speaker 1: As one of J. Shyatt's deputies recalled, Jay didn't listen

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Speaker 1: to anybody. He just did it. But this study doesn't

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Speaker 1: tell us everything about why Jay Shyatt's experiment failed. The

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Speaker 1: scientists looked only at how office aesthetics affected a worker's

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Speaker 1: productivity on an administrative task, and people didn't just do

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Speaker 1: admin At Shyat day, they came up with creative ideas.

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Speaker 1: When Gaetano Peschet and Jay Shyat swept away the cubicle

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Speaker 1: farms and the office doors, they were trying to stimulate

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Speaker 1: a certain kind of serendipitous, imaginative way of working together.

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Speaker 1: Peschet thought that office doors and cubicle walls were just

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Speaker 1: barriers to that creative teamwork. You don't need the office,

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Speaker 1: he recalled in an interview with the Planet Money podcast.

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Speaker 1: His vision was different, somewhere that would encourage collaborative chat.

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Speaker 1: It was an open space with a lot of corners,

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Speaker 1: with a sofa, comfortable chair, with a coffee shop, because

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Speaker 1: I think people when they meet, they'd like to have

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Speaker 1: a drink. You can see the logic. A coffee shop

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Speaker 1: is just the kind of place where you might serendipitously

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Speaker 1: bump into a random colleague and unexpectedly have a creative conversation.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes you just want some peace and quiet. You felt

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Speaker 1: totally exposed, recalled one executive at SHIAT day. There would

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Speaker 1: be six conversations going on around you. I'd try to think,

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Speaker 1: and I couldn't. We were the laughing stock of the industry.

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Speaker 1: It was weird. You just had no idea where you

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Speaker 1: should go. There was a rush for the only enclosed

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Speaker 1: spaces in the place, the meeting rooms. The rooms would

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Speaker 1: quickly fill up with people and then they'd say to

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Speaker 1: everyone else, get out, this is mine. And what about

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Speaker 1: when you wanted to talk to someone in particular and

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Speaker 1: you just couldn't find them. When the journalist Warren Berger

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Speaker 1: wrote an epic magazine feature about the Shayat day experiment,

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Speaker 1: he titled it Lost in Space. I can remember coming

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Speaker 1: back from a presentation and being unable to find my

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Speaker 1: creative department for two days, complained one creative director. Another

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Speaker 1: developed what he called the three time around rule. If

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Speaker 1: he walked around the entire office three times and he

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Speaker 1: still couldn't find the person he wanted, he'd walk back

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Speaker 1: to the concierge, hand back his laptop and his phone,

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Speaker 1: and go home. And if someone needed me, they could

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Speaker 1: find me on my virtual couch. It's hard to bump

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Speaker 1: into random colleagues when everyone's given up and gone home.

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Speaker 1: And that's a proper because Shayat and Peschet weren't wrong

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Speaker 1: about the need for personal proximity to spark creative conversations.

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Speaker 1: Back in the nineteen seventies, a management professor named Thomas

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Speaker 1: Allen measured how communication between workers dropped off exponentially as

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Speaker 1: their desks were further and further away from each other

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Speaker 1: fifty yards apart. And it was like they were in

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Speaker 1: different states, different floors or buildings. They might as well

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Speaker 1: have been different planets. Let's leave Jay Shyatt's unhappy nomads

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Speaker 1: behind for a while and travel forward in time five

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Speaker 1: or six years to another employer with a strong esthetic sensibility,

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Speaker 1: a clear sense that he was right about everything, and

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Speaker 1: a creative, collaborative office space to design. He needs no

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Speaker 1: introduction because Steve Jobs is one of the most famous

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Speaker 1: entrepreneurs in history. He was the force behind the Apple Mac,

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Speaker 1: the iPhone, those little round glasses. But for our purposes,

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Speaker 1: he was the force behind the headquarters of Pixar, the

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Speaker 1: animation studio that's produced films from Toy Story to Wally.

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Speaker 1: Steve Jobs was a man who hated ugliness and demanded

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Speaker 1: beauty everywhere he looked. In Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs,

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Speaker 1: one of the saddest and most eloquent stories, describes Jobs

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Speaker 1: semi conscious after receiving a liver transplant, ripping off his

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Speaker 1: oxygen mask because it was ugly, and demanding that the

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Speaker 1: medical team bring him five alternative designs so that he

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Speaker 1: could pick the best. In happier times, he had much

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Speaker 1: more to say about Pixar's headquarters. Construction budget was almost unlimited,

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Speaker 1: and the building set in Emeryville, near Oakland and San

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Speaker 1: Francisco was crafted in an industrial style, full of exposed steel,

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Speaker 1: wood and brick, with Jobs obsessing over every detail. He

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Speaker 1: poured over samples of steel from across the country and

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Speaker 1: selected a particular steel mill in Arkansas, which he judged

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Speaker 1: to have the best color and texture. He insisted that

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Speaker 1: the girders were bolted rather than welded, and the bolts

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Speaker 1: were designed with circular caps to look like rivets, even

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Speaker 1: though rivets hadn't been much used for half a century.

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Speaker 1: Jobs commissioned a brick manufacturer from Washington State and told

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Speaker 1: them to precisely match the bricks on the Hills Brother's

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Speaker 1: coffee plant across the bay on the San Francisco waterfront.

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Speaker 1: Then Jobs kept sending back samples, insisting they didn't match

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Speaker 1: the exact color palette he had in mind, until the

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Speaker 1: manufacturer threatened to quit. Steve Jobs was one of a kind,

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Speaker 1: but when it came to dictating how his underling's office

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Speaker 1: spaces should look, you can draw a direct line from

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Speaker 1: Henrifuges and Lokalbousier, through shayat Gary and Peschet to Steve Jobs.

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Speaker 1: That Pixar and Steve Jobs didn't limit himself to the

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Speaker 1: patina on the steels and the palette of the bricks.

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Speaker 1: Like Jay Shyat and Gaetano Peschet, Jobs had become fascinated

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Speaker 1: by the idea of random meetings sparking creative conversations. Pixar's

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Speaker 1: president Ed Catmill explained, Steve had this firm belief that

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Speaker 1: the right kind of building can do great things for

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Speaker 1: a culture. Steve wanted the building to support our work

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Speaker 1: by enhancing our ability to collaborate. Jobs hit upon a plan.

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Speaker 1: Headquarters should have just a single pair of large restrooms

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Speaker 1: off the main lobby. People would make new connections or

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Speaker 1: revive old ones because everybody would have to head to

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Speaker 1: the lobby, brought together by a shared human need to urinate.

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Speaker 1: It starts with the most benevolent aims, doesn't it. One

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Speaker 1: moment you're trying to make a place that looks elegant

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Speaker 1: and beautiful, the next you're trying to control people by

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Speaker 1: manipulating their bladders. The road to office hell is paved

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Speaker 1: with precisely the right color palette of good intentions. Cautionary

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Speaker 1: tales will return in a moment. Localbousier had demanded a

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Speaker 1: visual laxative with bare walls and total simplicity. The eventual

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Speaker 1: residents of Paysack did not agree. They added old fashioned

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Speaker 1: shutters and windows. They erected pitched roofs over the flat ones.

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Speaker 1: They put up flowery wallpaper over the uninterrupted monochrome walls,

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Speaker 1: and marked out little blocks of garden with wooden picket fences.

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Speaker 1: Their gardens were decorated with gnomes. I can't imagine anything

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Speaker 1: that Steve Jobs would have hated more than a garden gnome.

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00:26:43,090 --> 00:26:48,210
Speaker 1: Like Paysack's residents, Jay Shiatt's employees gradually began to chip

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Speaker 1: away at the purity of his vision. They figured out

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Speaker 1: a system where you could sign up in advance to

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Speaker 1: reserve a particular place. Rather than queuing each morning for

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Speaker 1: laptops and phones, they'd store them overnight in their lockers.

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00:27:03,370 --> 00:27:09,410
Speaker 1: Makeshift desks started to appear, and before long desktop computers too.

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00:27:10,530 --> 00:27:16,290
Speaker 1: Hyatt Day's dream factory, like LeCorbusier's Paesak, was steadily being

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00:27:16,410 --> 00:27:19,250
Speaker 1: retrofitted by the people who had to live with it

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Speaker 1: every day. These twentieth century cautionary tales feel to me

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Speaker 1: like they have lessons to teach us about work life.

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Speaker 1: In the twenty twenties, On one hand, knowledge workers are

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Speaker 1: finally equipped with genuinely portable computing technology, the kind of

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Speaker 1: thing that might actually make a functional workspace out of

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Speaker 1: Gaetano Peschet's cool sofas, hot desks, and nowhere to put

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Speaker 1: your dog pictures. On the other hand, this technology means

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Speaker 1: we could easily work from home during the pandemic, and

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Speaker 1: much of the office workforce has since been in no

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Speaker 1: rush to get back to the office. In the United States,

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Speaker 1: for example, nearly half of all paid working days in

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Speaker 1: twenty twenty one were worked from home. The figure barely

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00:28:10,210 --> 00:28:14,090
Speaker 1: shifted as effective vaccines were made available to everyone who

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Speaker 1: wanted them. Instead of eagerly returning to their creative office

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Speaker 1: spaces to boldly strut from one collaborative huddle to another,

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00:28:23,130 --> 00:28:29,570
Speaker 1: people preferred to stay at home zoom call. Homeworking isn't

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Speaker 1: always fun writing emails on a laptop while perched on

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Speaker 1: a bed, or trying to stop the kids from crying

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Speaker 1: during a client meeting. But many people noticed one thing

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Speaker 1: that more than makes up for all these strains and

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Speaker 1: sorrows at home. Nobody complains if you leave your dog

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Speaker 1: pictures on your desk. People got a taste of control

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Speaker 1: over their own space, and they didn't want to give

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Speaker 1: it up. In surveys, one of the leading reasons that

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Speaker 1: people give for working from home is the autonomy. Alex

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00:29:03,770 --> 00:29:07,490
Speaker 1: Haslam and Craig Knight could have predicted that it is

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00:29:07,690 --> 00:29:12,690
Speaker 1: no small thing to be the undisputed boss of your

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Speaker 1: own desk, but that's a problem for serendipity. Zoom is

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Speaker 1: fine for the meetings we plan, but it's hopeless at

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Speaker 1: facilitating chance encounters with colleagues we don't know so well.

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Speaker 1: A large study at Microsoft during the first wave of

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Speaker 1: the pandemic found that virtual workers tended to connect only

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Speaker 1: to people that had already been close to And when

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Speaker 1: we need to urinate, we're going to feel something very

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Speaker 1: far from serendipitous to light if we bump into a

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Speaker 1: random coworker outside our own bathroom door. When Steve Jobs

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Speaker 1: got an important idea in his head, it wasn't easy

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Speaker 1: to dissuade him. His plan to impose a single pair

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Speaker 1: of serendipity inducing mega bathrooms on Pixar seemed to be

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Speaker 1: a very important idea. Indeed, simity mattered, thought Jobs, and

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Speaker 1: he was right, And what better way to ensure that

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Speaker 1: different people from different departments spent some time in close

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Speaker 1: proximity than by forcing them all to go through the

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Speaker 1: atrium several times a day at intervals governed by the

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Speaker 1: call of nature. He felt that very very strongly, says

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Speaker 1: Pam Kerwin, Pixar's general manager. So Jobs explained his idea

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Speaker 1: to Pixar staff at an off site meeting, and the

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Speaker 1: staff didn't like it at all. As Kerwin recalls, one

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Speaker 1: pregnant woman said she shouldn't be forced to walk for

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Speaker 1: ten minutes just to go to the bathroom, and that

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00:30:52,610 --> 00:30:57,730
Speaker 1: led to a big fight. Some senior Pixar staff stood

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Speaker 1: up for the pregnant woman. Jobs was frustrated people just

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00:31:02,450 --> 00:31:06,450
Speaker 1: didn't understand the vision. They didn't get it. But then

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00:31:06,570 --> 00:31:12,290
Speaker 1: Jobs did something extraordinary and out of character. He compromised

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00:31:13,410 --> 00:31:17,770
Speaker 1: The Steve Jobs building contains not one, but four pairs

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00:31:17,770 --> 00:31:22,890
Speaker 1: of bathrooms. There is still plenty of opportunity for serendipity

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00:31:23,210 --> 00:31:26,450
Speaker 1: thanks to an atrium that focuses activity, with the main

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00:31:26,490 --> 00:31:31,050
Speaker 1: doors of the building, a cafe, a game area, the mailboxes,

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00:31:31,450 --> 00:31:36,490
Speaker 1: three theaters, conference rooms, and screening rooms all spilling into it.

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00:31:37,370 --> 00:31:41,770
Speaker 1: Pixar's bosses said that Jobs's basic instincts had been correct.

410
00:31:43,250 --> 00:31:45,610
Speaker 1: I kept running into people I hadn't seen for months.

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Speaker 1: I've never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity

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Speaker 1: as well as this one. People encountered each other all

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Speaker 1: day long. Inadvertently, you felt the energy in the building.

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Speaker 1: No doubt that's true. But the serendipity at Pixar wasn't

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00:32:02,970 --> 00:32:07,010
Speaker 1: just down to Steve Jobs's ideas, but to his willingness

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Speaker 1: to let them go. Junior staff were able to stand

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00:32:11,730 --> 00:32:16,530
Speaker 1: up to Steve Jobs, the owner, the legend, the control

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00:32:16,690 --> 00:32:21,050
Speaker 1: Freak's control freak, and get their own way about something

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00:32:21,090 --> 00:32:26,090
Speaker 1: that mattered to them, that was more important than all

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00:32:26,210 --> 00:32:32,970
Speaker 1: the bolted steel and elegant brickwork. Pixar's success could buy.

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00:32:33,570 --> 00:32:39,690
Speaker 1: Inside Jobs's beautiful building, the Pixar staff ran riot. The

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Speaker 1: most famous example is a concealed room that can be

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Speaker 1: reached only through a crawlway, in which was originally designed

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Speaker 1: merely to provide access to the air conditioning valves. Once

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00:32:50,690 --> 00:32:54,330
Speaker 1: a Pixar animator discovered the secret panel into the space,

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00:32:54,730 --> 00:32:59,650
Speaker 1: he installed Christmas lights, lava lamps, animal print furnishings, a

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00:32:59,730 --> 00:33:03,570
Speaker 1: cocktail table, a bar, and napkins printed up with the

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00:33:03,650 --> 00:33:11,490
Speaker 1: logo The Love Lounge the animators who work here are

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00:33:11,530 --> 00:33:16,370
Speaker 1: free to no encouraged to decorate their workspaces in whatever

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00:33:16,410 --> 00:33:21,370
Speaker 1: style they wish, explained the Pixar boss ed Catmore, they

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00:33:21,410 --> 00:33:25,290
Speaker 1: spend their days inside pink dollhouses whose ceilings are hung

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Speaker 1: with miniature chandeliers, tiki huts made of real bamboo, and

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00:33:30,250 --> 00:33:36,450
Speaker 1: castles whose meticulously painted fifteen foot high styrofoam turrets appear

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00:33:36,530 --> 00:33:42,850
Speaker 1: to be carved from stone. Steve Jobs apparently hated all

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00:33:42,970 --> 00:33:48,570
Speaker 1: that juvenile mess, but he let it happen, and the

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00:33:48,610 --> 00:33:52,730
Speaker 1: serendipity he craved became a daily feature of life at Pixar,

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00:33:53,530 --> 00:33:57,610
Speaker 1: even if not precisely as set out in his original blueprint.

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00:33:58,690 --> 00:34:01,930
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs wanted to create an office space that would

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Speaker 1: still be beautiful and functional in a century. Will have

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00:34:06,610 --> 00:34:10,130
Speaker 1: to wait awhile to know whether he succeeded. All we

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00:34:10,250 --> 00:34:14,890
Speaker 1: know is that Jay Shyat did not. He sold his

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00:34:14,930 --> 00:34:20,170
Speaker 1: company to a bigger advertising conglomerate, helped perhaps by all

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00:34:20,210 --> 00:34:23,610
Speaker 1: the attention that had been lavished on his radical office space.

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00:34:24,410 --> 00:34:28,330
Speaker 1: Yet neither the Gerry offices in Los Angeles nor the

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00:34:28,450 --> 00:34:33,330
Speaker 1: riotous Gaetano Peschet offices in Manhattan survived the merger for long.

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00:34:34,330 --> 00:34:40,610
Speaker 1: The entire experiment had lasted just a few years. Jay

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00:34:40,650 --> 00:34:44,210
Speaker 1: Shyat declared that it was the only thing I ever

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00:34:44,250 --> 00:34:48,730
Speaker 1: did in business that I was satisfied with. Very few

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00:34:48,770 --> 00:34:53,210
Speaker 1: of his colleagues seemed to agree, and while the giant

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00:34:53,290 --> 00:34:58,170
Speaker 1: binocular sculpture remains in Los Angeles, the interior designs are

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00:34:58,330 --> 00:35:09,050
Speaker 1: long gone. In contrast, le Corbusier's modernist homes for work.

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00:35:09,090 --> 00:35:13,810
Speaker 1: Because at Paysack did last a century, Paysack is now

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00:35:13,930 --> 00:35:18,490
Speaker 1: viewed as something of an architectural destination. It's full of

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00:35:18,530 --> 00:35:23,410
Speaker 1: people with money and modernist tastes, people who love Lokalbousier's

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00:35:23,490 --> 00:35:27,210
Speaker 1: visual laxative, even though they're very far from being the

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00:35:27,290 --> 00:35:32,130
Speaker 1: kind of people Paysack was designed for. Long after Lokorbuzier

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00:35:32,250 --> 00:35:36,690
Speaker 1: himself had died, these new residents cleared away the picket

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00:35:36,730 --> 00:35:40,370
Speaker 1: fences and the pitch roofs and the garden gnomes and

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00:35:40,410 --> 00:35:46,650
Speaker 1: restored the purity and simplicity of his original vision. But

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00:35:46,970 --> 00:35:50,450
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a coincidence that that vision withered

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00:35:50,730 --> 00:35:55,130
Speaker 1: when it was imposed on workers, and blossomed when people

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00:35:55,130 --> 00:35:59,890
Speaker 1: who loved it got to choose. As the pandemic receded

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00:36:00,530 --> 00:36:03,610
Speaker 1: and bosses started to worry that working from home was

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00:36:03,810 --> 00:36:09,250
Speaker 1: undermining workplace serendipity. Many decided to mandate a return to

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00:36:09,330 --> 00:36:13,730
Speaker 1: the office. But maybe they should instead try harder to

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00:36:13,850 --> 00:36:18,090
Speaker 1: create the kind of office that workers will freely choose

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00:36:18,210 --> 00:36:22,490
Speaker 1: to come into. Maybe the principle for a flourishing creative

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00:36:22,530 --> 00:36:26,290
Speaker 1: space is that if we build it, they will come,

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00:36:27,250 --> 00:36:31,810
Speaker 1: provided we don't try too hard to control what happens there.

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00:36:33,490 --> 00:36:38,050
Speaker 1: The Kobuzier himself might have agreed. When he was told

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00:36:38,050 --> 00:36:41,490
Speaker 1: about the garden Gnomes of Paysack, he said something that

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00:36:41,570 --> 00:36:45,890
Speaker 1: I wish all the tasteful, powerful people like Jay Shiatt

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00:36:46,330 --> 00:36:52,210
Speaker 1: could understand. You know, life is always right. It is

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Speaker 1: the architect who is wrong. For a full list of

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00:36:59,090 --> 00:37:05,450
Speaker 1: our sources, please see the show notes at Timharford dot com.

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Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford, with and write.

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00:37:10,650 --> 00:37:14,330
Speaker 1: It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Edith Russlo.

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00:37:15,210 --> 00:37:18,010
Speaker 1: The sound design and original music is the work of

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00:37:18,090 --> 00:37:22,210
Speaker 1: Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been possible without the

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00:37:22,250 --> 00:37:26,930
Speaker 1: work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohne,

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00:37:27,050 --> 00:37:32,370
Speaker 1: Littal Millard, John Schnaz, Carli Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,

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00:37:32,650 --> 00:37:37,410
Speaker 1: Nicole Morano, and Morgan Ratner. Cautionary Tales is a production

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00:37:37,650 --> 00:37:41,410
Speaker 1: of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember

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00:37:41,490 --> 00:37:45,810
Speaker 1: to share, rate, and review. It helps us for mysterious reasons,

485
00:37:46,130 --> 00:37:48,370
Speaker 1: and if you want to hear the show, add free

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00:37:48,730 --> 00:37:51,370
Speaker 1: sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and

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00:37:51,410 --> 00:38:12,770
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, Slash plus s