In a weak moment, I wondered if I could go back to work. I
didn’t really want to go back to work; I was just curious. What would it be
like? Could I adapt? It didn’t take much research to figure out I wouldn’t fit in;
I wouldn’t know how to live in a modern office. I wouldn’t be comfortable in
the modern tech spaces they call offices. Excuse me, workspaces.
There was a certain comfort knowing that each morning I
could head to my own office to do whatever it was I did; a functional desk, a
couple of chairs, a bookcase, maybe even carpet on the floor. If you were
lucky, the spaces got bigger, the carpet thicker, the desk nicer, a couch
filling one wall, and a small conference table for meetings. Some folks called
it working in silos. Marketing had its silo, Research had its silo, and
Accounting had its silo. The Legal department had its silo, but they wouldn’t
tell you what they did. The executives had their silos as far from the troops
as possible; usually on a different floor. Today’s workspaces have all those
people working at the same table or in the same workspace. How productive can
that be? Well …
For reasons unknown, items about office design flooded my
computer monitor recently. Always curious, I did a deep dive into office
layouts, furniture sketches, workplace expectations, and work processes. I’m
reasonably adaptable, but this stuff is over the top. The modern office looks
like a place to rest a laptop. Long, high tables with bar stools seem to be the
norm; eight or ten people sitting side by side; they call them teams. Conference
tables appear in open spaces rather than in rooms. And the colors! Who wants to
work in an environment filled with lime green, orange, yellow, and gray? It makes
mid-century Danish-modern and shag carpeting positively inviting. But that
isn’t the half of it.
One day in these workspaces would give me away. What do I
know about Slack software? It’s some kind of intra-office messaging, email,
voice mail, conversation gathering, and filing system. They invented it because
regular text messaging and email is too slow for today’s work teams. OK, I
could learn to use it, but why. In a few months, they will replace it with
something faster. I could fake it until then.
Work isn’t what it used to be. Teams are much more
interactive than in the past. Collaboration is very much needed to scale a
business, but so is amazing technology. Companies used to concentrate on
growth; if you stopped growing and your competitors didn’t, you would find
yourself on the south side of market share. It worked then, but not anymore.
Today’s companies are all about scale; how you scale a company
is completely different from how you grow a company. Scaling is about
increasing a customer base exponentially without increasing cost and doing it
quickly. A well-designed piece of software can accommodate one million
customers for about the same costs as one hundred customers.
Airbnb, founded eleven years ago has 150 million users in
191 countries that make nearly 70 million reservations a month. Uber, with
three million drivers and 91 million users provides about 75 million rides a
month. Slack, mentioned earlier, has 10 million daily users in 85,000
companies. It is ten years old. For comparison, the telephone took 75 years to
reach 50 million users worldwide. Ma Bell grew up but Uber, Airbnb, and Slack
scaled up.
The way companies work today, and the way the people in
them work reverberates with the incessant drumbeat of technology in all work
environments. We know that AI is becoming a strategic weapon both economically
and militarily. We know we’re not ready for that onslaught and it’s only just
begun. We know that G4, only a few years old, which allowed the Smartphone,
introduced in 2007, to do its magic is being replaced already by G5. These two
technologies and those we do not know about yet will change the world of work
even more and likely in a shorter time.
I see myself slowing down a bit and the work world speeding
up - at a furious pace. I’ll stick to reading, writing, and golf. Work sounds
too fast, too data-driven and too …
It’s not for me this year. I’ll think about it next year.
