James L Adams—People and Products

Creativity, Space, and Neatness, Part 2 - The Open Office Fad—Enlightenment or Delusion?

Stanford University has fallen prey to the “open office” philosophy recently, with sometimes questionable results.  In many of the new buildings, including the one in which my office is located, professors are allowed separate offices.   That is reasonable, since part of professing requires thinking about difficult things and talking privately with students about not only academic, but personal matters.  Also, at least I work better in a space that seems my own.  As I mentioned in my last post, I need space and limited interruptions. 

 But non-professors do not get separate offices.  The two photos below show a portion of a long hall in the building.  On one side are the professor’s offices.  The first one shows a section of the long other side, which was initially not broken by a barrier.  The architect’s drawings showed this  side with tables which included electric outlets for computers and Ph.D. students sitting in the chairs facing the wall across from the professor supervising their work.  The architects perhaps did not realize that Ph.D. students need their own turf and quiet to do their work, that professors are seldom in their offices, and that sitting in rows facing the wall is associated with such things as military basic training and wearing dunce caps.

 

The second photo shows the end of this wall where one of our administrators has frantically attempted to get some quiet and privacy to do her work by erecting various temporary screens.

 The third photo was taken in a new building that functions as the headquarters of the Engineering School.  It also shows a workspace  for Ph.D. students.  This time they do not have to sit in rows facing the wall, but they have little room to store material, are on display behind glass to people passing down the hall, have limited space to lock up such things as computers and peripheral equipment,  and would have to be disciplined enough to do their difficult work in the midst of a large group of people.  But being bright (they are after all Ph.D. students), they solve these problems by doing their work in their dorm rooms or homes.

 The last of the photos is the domain of Tim Keely, a good friend of mine , who is an outstanding IT manager in the school.  As part of this he typically has a large amount of computer equipment on which he is working —but no office space, because he is not a professor.  He works crammed in a niche in the corner of the Ph.D. space, and worries about who  will steal what equipment.  But he at least has a niche.  Unfortunately, he is about to be moved into an “open office” with the other administrators in the department.  He is not happy. 

 I believe in cross disciplinary workand lots of interaction, but not at the expense of a closable space of one’s own in which to work and keep all of the material necessary to do that work.  Open space to meet is fine when it helps accomplish the goal, but not for all people and not for all of the time.  And woe be unto you, should you be good at computers and in an open office, since you will spend all of  your time with the line of your office partners at your desk seeking your help.

 Even though they are cheaper, and these days there is much attraction to the “interaction” component, the open-office fad will pass.  There is ever-increasing negative feelings about such space at Stanford and elsewhere.  There was an amusing tirade in the Jobs section of the September 20^th New York times written by Phyllis Korkky, entitled "Modern Offices, Chock-Full of Offenses".  It is here.  It draws from personal opinion, and also Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, who has written a book with her son that apparently contains observations bemoaning the loss of traditional offices— “Walls and doors can no longer protect workers from unwanted visits, along with various odors, shouts, coughs, sneezes, popping of gum, belching and spitting” (Stanford people, of course, do not belch and spit — but I admit I do pay a lot of unasked for visits to people).  As another quote, “Forget all this business about making everybody love everybody else, It is taking up time that could be spent getting work done, and it’s a drain on people’s finances and personal lives”.

 Happily over time all of this carefully architected glass, steel. And concrete space at Stanford will be humanized by its occupants, despite the efforts of the building managers and  walls that resist hanging up exciting, entertaining, and even useful material.   

 

Creativity, Space, and "Neatness", Part 1

Creativity must be balanced with control in order to make exciting things happen.  If one is starting a company, one must be able to balance the two.  In a larger organization, it is possible to have people who lean toward creativity, and others who lean toward control.  This often correlates with their work.  We therefore find the “creatives” and the “suits” in ad agencies, the designers and the executives at Ford, and the faculty and students and the administrators in universities. 

 Although everyone mixes creativity and control in their life, in more extreme cases values and lifestyles diverge, as do preferred working environments.  In my experience, it is not unusual that people preferring and working on problems requiring a high degree of creativity, especially if these problems include tangible products, have and perhaps need work spaces that are less structured, formal, and “neat”, than those whose job is concerned with control.  In the last two weeks, two articles have appeared in the New York Times, discussing studies that have borne this out.  The first by Kathleen Voss in the September 15, 2013 edition, is  "It’s Not ‘Mess’. It’s Creativity"and is here.  The second, by Gretchen Reynolds, appears in the magazine section on September 22, 2013, and is entitled "Clean Up You Desk! (But Not if You’re Looking to be Creative)" and is here.

 Both of these refer to controlled experiments in which people were asked to do tasks, one group in extremely neat office space, and one in messy office space.  Those working in the messy offices were judged as considerably more creative.  The numbers are in the articles.

 To me, the interesting thing about these conclusions are that they are surprising to people, because I have spent most of my life experiencing this phenomena. CEO’s of established companies (a control job) often not only have extremely neat offices but live in houses that do not appear to be very lived in —I call this the Architectural Digest phenomenon (a magazine that is  about interior design more than architecture, and is full of beautiful photos of house interiors in which there is no sign of human habitation—no magazines, no dirty dishes in the kitchen, not even any indentations on the couches— a fantasy of control}.  Chief Financial Officers, Financial Consultants, and School Principles often have extraordinarily clean and orderly offices.  On the other hand, the game designers at Electronic Arts, the designers at IDEO, and the design engineers at JPL have offices that are loaded with prototypes, irreverent wall hangings, and piles of  incomplete work and reference material.  And studios of artists are often full of works in all stages of completion and stimulating objects and graphics.

 I must admit a bias.  The photo is a corner of my home office, which is full not only of material I need on the projects upon  which I am working, but also of material that keeps me happy and stimulated.  I happen to know that many people consider it messy, but I have found out over many years that it is consistent with doing my best work.  In particular I have found that I am a member of a large slice of humanity that keeps track of things by where they are.  From the photo you can see that I like lots of icons on my computer more than lists. And their location is important.  And I like stacks of paper, because I can find things in them faster than in my computer memory. 

 As far as organization,  of course there are other slices of humanity,  two of which are common.  People in one of these  keep track of things according to when they occurred—they like chronological lists rather than alphabetical ones, diaries, and past schedules. 

Perhaps the most righteous slice of people keep track of things by title, author, or other words— they like filing cabinets, alphabetizing, and hierarchies.  And they have presumptuously decided that they are more organized than people like me.  But I have had many years experience with administrators who decide to take good care of me and in the process “organize” my material in ways such that I can not find it when I want it.  So I quietly accept their negative judgment, secure in the knowledge that I am not an anal-compulsive.

 This difference in styles of organizing and working leads to some problems with the present “open office” phenomenon, about which I will have several things to say in my next post.

Noise, People, and Good Products

I have recently noticed an uptick in media concern with noise.  An article enabled “The sound of Silence” in the last issue of the Economist is an indication. It is here.

 It is about time.  I read a prediction recently that due to expanding population and economic trends by 2050 6.5 billion people will be living in cities.  That was approximately the entire world’s population in 2005.  People make noise, and if you pack them together (New York City) you have a lot of it, especially with the injection of police, fire, rescue, and commercial and amateur observation drones that are being projected—undoubtedly they will be propelled by two cycle engines and try to fly low so that the advertising banners they are towing are more easily readable.  I realize I should have emphasized noise more in my Good Products, Bad Products book. 

 The Stanford campus where I live is a good example, as well as the campus itself.  It used to be called "the farm".  It should now be called "the city".  It is in an extended growth and building period, and in addition the local area is doing a large amount of road work, including installing a  large new gas main to replace the one which caused an explosion and a fire in a town north of us.  One of the wonderful features of my home at one time was the quiet. No more. 

 We seem to be in the traffic patterns for both San Francisco and San Jose’s airports, We seem to be the only homeowners that do our own gardening (a hobby of my wife), so we are surrounded by professional mow and blow teams that often use multiple two-cycle engines at the same time.  In At 100 yards on one side of us is an increasingly busy campus road lined with fraternities that are the scene of parties featuring bands with ever more powerful amplifiers, and 100 yards on the other side is an increasingly busy road that has been the sight of gas main work for at least a year.  Even as I write this an even larger and louder garbage truck has stopped outside our house and our neighbor’s mow and blow team and contractor are at work.

 Will there be an end to what is sometimes called the noise pollution?  There will certainly be more regulations.  Past ones have caused vehicles to be quieter and rock bands to have decibel limits (difficult to police).  The university gardeners now use quieter equipment, such as four cycle generators to power electrical yard machines.  A few companies are now advertising the relative lack of noise from their products.

 And maybe the construction in the Stanford area will slow down some time—or maybe we are like an airport and are doomed to constant “improvements” accomplished by heavy equipment.

 My experience is that producers and consumers of products worry more about appearance and function than sound.  Maybe the time has come when populations have increased to the point where more attention needs to be placed on sound. Actually, this has been slowly happening for years.  When I was in high school we could drive our cars around with hardly any muffler (if you are old enough, you remember” straight pipes”.)  No longer.  When I was in high school the population of my home town (not my high school town) was 1200.  Now it is over 100,000.  That would be a lot of barely muffled cars. 

But as population grows, so does noise,  Cars seem to have dealt with being quieter.  In fact in The Economist article the author admits that maybe electric cars need to make a bit more noise.  Motorcycles lived through the requirement of being muffled.  At least heavy equipment is used to raze buildings and dig up pavement rather than explosives. But how about private planes and small internal combustion engines.  And how about more extreme punishment for people who use their automobile horns to express anger, rather than give warnings. 

 And I think that one contributor to the increasing noise problem is the present fad of “open office” architecture.  More about that in my next post.  But to get you thinking, Facebook is about to build a ten-acre open office for 2800 engineers (see Forbes article here)  Not for engineers like me!   

Insights into the Middle East, and Changes in the Technology of War

Once again, due to attention being paid to Syria, the Middle East is  all over the U.S. media and should be in everyone’s mind.  A valuable perspective is in a very well researched and book by Scott Anderson, entitled Lawrence In Arabia: War Deceit, Imperial Volley and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Doubleday, New York, 2013—more details by clicking the icon at the right).

 The book covers World War I in the middle east, with a focus on four characters:  William Yale, raised as an aristocrat, an employee of Standard Oil Company, and the only American field intelligence office in the Middle east during World War, who was to strongly influence American opinion about the Middle East after the war, Aaron Aaronsohn, a Jewish scientist who was a fervent champion for creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine and established a spy-ring in Turkey to help fulfill his goal, Curt Prufer, a German scholar who sought to foment an Islamic Jihad against the western colonial powers, and of course T.E. Lawrence, who, although a loyal British subject, acted to help the Arabs remain independent of the colonial powers, believing that such an outcome would be preferable both to the area and to Britain. 

 Lawrence became famous by “going native” and leading successful guerrilla forays which accomplished things that the British army, weighed down by tradition and lack of knowledge of the area and its people, could not.  Interestingly enough, he was a fan of  “The Art of War”, by Sun Tsu.  The  photo at the left, taken from his Wikipedia page shows him in his British army garb.  The second shows him in his preferred fighting configuration. 

 As the book beautifully argues, the results of the Paris Peace Conference, — major control by the British and French in the area, decreased power for the Arabs, encouragement for Jewish  immigration into Palestine with no agreement about what that might mean, were the precursors of present problems.  As the author states in the epilogue to the book “Certainly blame for all this (the unrest in the Mid East) doesn’t rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted.  Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialization, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated—indeed feverishly nurtured— by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people’s anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is “the great Satan”, or the “illegitimate Zionist entity” or Western music playing on the streets.”

 Read the book.  It will help you understand where we are.

 But I also found the book interesting because it portrays the differences and similarities of politics and war in the almost 100 year period since World War I.  In a sense international politics have not changed a great deal, despite the existence of the United Nations, increased globalization, and improved communication. It is still about perceived power and pecking order, although nations seem to be becoming a bit more thoughtful before they move from arguing to fighting.

 But we are slowly learning that our beloved “Western” theories of war no longer seem to work very well.  We in the U.S. should have learned that in our own Civil War, fought with large numbers of equally armed people confronting each other at close range.  But we didn’t, with the result that over 600,000 of our own people died.   World War I is now famous for its slaughter in the trenches and a settlement that undoubtedly played a role in causing World  War II. We certainly should  have learned it during the 20^th century.  Estimates are that 160 million people were killed in war during that period.  And what was accomplished? 

 The U.S. has been involved in several wars (police actions) since World War II, and as time goes on has learned to place less and less faith on fixed battles. The present fascination with “smart” weapons, drones, and cyber- war seems  to show an aversion to wholesale killing of non-combatants and armies of millions fighting battles of attrition.   Or maybe it just shows our love affair with technology.

 But unless strong institutions develop that are respected by all countries (international laws that are agreed upon and enforced) wars /police actions will continue. And our history in establishing such institutions has not been too impressive.  So what form will these wars/police actions take?  There are many opinions, but I am not sure anyone knows.  The “rules” for what we call traditional warfare are well known.  We are now in new territory.  Keep your eye on the U.S. response to Syria’s use of poison gas.  It may be a portent of the future.

Labor Day and a Tractor

Happy Labor Day.  This holiday was inaugurated in 1887 and was originally dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers,  Hopefully  it still is, although the type of labor originally celebrated has been radically changed by machines and computers.  But like most people, I will take any holiday I can get —which seems rather strange since I am retired— but I may be doing more “labor” now than I was when I was a professor.

 As an example, I am presently re-restoring my Best 60 (rated at 60 horsepower) tractor, shown in the photograph amid other projects in my  yard.  I rescued it some 40 years ago, apart and half buried in the Pacific Coast Range, having powered a saw mill after pulling boats out of the water and putting in its time in agriculture and forestry. When I got it unburied and moved to my yard (in itself an adventure, since it weighs over ten tons and needed to move out of the mountains and into my yard 100 miles away) I took it more apart, replaced a few broken pieces, got it running, painted it, and have been entertaining people with it ever since.  But over the years it became tired, lost its compression, quit producing sparks in its plugs, and generally was feeling neglected.

 I have now pretty much done the necessary mechanical work, re-assembled it, and will return it to aesthetic splendor. 

 This is a historical tractor.  The C.L.Best Gas Traction Company (later to be named the C.L. Best Tractor Company) of San Leandro, California, was begun in 1910 and rapidly became the chief competitor to Benjamin Holt Company of Stockton California in the making of continuous-tread tractors.  These were very popular in the logging and construction industries and in agricultural areas with soft or boggy ground, and were used as prime movers in World War I.   In fact, I have a photograph of the building of the original Stanford stadium, showing a Best 60 pulling a Fresno scraper around the field-to-be. 

 Holt had begun a small plant in Peoria Illinois in 1910 under the name of Holt Caterpillar, and in 1925 the two companies merged, named the resulting company Caterpillar, and moved to Peoria.  The Best 60 and its smaller brother, the Best 30, essentially became the Caterpillar 60 and the Caterpillar 30, and proved to be very successful. 

 Why am I spending my Labor Day working on this beautiful hulk?  Because, as I have mentioned in previous posts, I love working with my hands.  In deference to my former professor life, I am working on a book as to the centrality of hands in our evolution, and the benefits of using them even though these days, they seem to often be primarily used to push on computer keys and remote buttons.  I have many friends, who although they may earn their keep with their minds, and have the wherewithal to do what the want in their “spare” time, are fanatically involved in hobbies requiring high levels of manual dexterity and skills appropriate to the classical meaning of labor (not including that involved in delivering babies).  Most of us occasionally are called upon to explain why we do what we do in our free time.  The book will be an attempt to do that, and perhaps encourage others to do a bit more of the same.