Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

Last year, while browsing the shelves of an old book store near the University of Arkansas, I found a small paperback by the late, incomparable R. Buckminster Fuller called I Seem to Be a Verb. One of great lines in the book is "Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it."

I feel the same way about most offices. I once described them as hell with a floor plan. Well, I found a kindred spirit in Paul Graham -- an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb.

Years ago he wrote a wonderful article (which I am happy is floating around the internet) "What Business Can Learn from Open Source"

I am going to quote liberally from the original text because frankly, paraphrasing Graham is like fact-checking Dr.Suess -- it's impossible. What's important to me is that we have all inherited the trappings of what the corporate would should look like -- and forget to apply creativity to the environment and to how the work can best be accomplished. Enjoy.

"Another thing blogs and open source software have in common is that they're often made by people working at home. That may not seem surprising. But it should be. It's the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. Companies spend millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes, which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive.

This proves something a lot of us have suspected. The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.

The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. And it's not just the way offices look that's bleak. The way people act is just as bad.
Things are different in a startup. Often as not a startup begins in an apartment. Instead of matching beige cubicles they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. They look at whatever they want online without worrying whether
it's "work safe."

The cheery, bland language of the office is replaced by wicked humor. And you know what? The
company at this stage is probably the most productive it's ever going to be. Maybe it's not a coincidence. Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net loss. To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you're supposed to be there at certain times.

There are usually a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can't measure their productivity. The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.

If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn't need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a
certain amount. Otherwise we don't care.

That may seem utopian, but it's what we told people who came to work for our company. There were no fixed office hours. I never showed up before 11 in the morning. But we weren't saying this to be benevolent. We were saying: if you work here we expect you to get a lot done.

Don't try to fool us just by being here a lot.

The problem with the facetime model is not just that it's demoralizing, but that the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working. I'm convinced the facetime model is the main reason large organizations have so many meetings. Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little.

"...The other problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the
time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase-- this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this in most
offices, with everyone else looking busy.

It's hard to see how bad some practice is till you have something to compare it to. And that's one reason open source, and even blogging in some cases, are so important. They show us what real work looks like. We're funding eight new startups at the moment. A friend asked what they were doing for office space, and seemed surprised when I said we expected them to work out of whatever apartments they found to live in. But we didn't propose that to save money. We did it because we want
their software to be good. Working in crappy informal spaces is one of the things startups do right without realizing it. As soon as you get into an office, work and life start to drift
apart.

That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life are supposed to be separate. But that part, I'm convinced, is a mistake."

Thanks for stepping out of the circle Paul.