Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [107]
So Richards got creative. In a traditional ad agency, accounts and creatives have their own turf—and their own floors wherever possible. This keeps them well insulated from each other. And so this is where Richards struck first. From the earliest days, he decided that people would be assigned seats more or less randomly—accounts would sit next to creatives and vice versa—but with one constraint. Richards didn’t want a creative and an account executive who were working for the same client to sit side by side. In fact, he wanted them separated whenever possible. So a creative and an accounts person might be cheek by jowl, but they wouldn’t be working on the same things at all. If you needed to talk to your accounts guy, you were going to have to walk.
The way Richards saw it, this arrangement had a number of advantages. By mixing everyone up, he was emphasizing that they were all in the same boat; it would minimize the us versus them dynamic found at many agencies. Familiarity, in Richards’s view, would breed respect.
But Richards’s plan was even more devious than that. By using desk assignments to encourage people to wander the halls, he was nudging his people to mingle. He wanted them to bump into one another, see other people, and maybe learn a little about what others did at the agency.
Richards was so serious about the virtues of people walking around that when he needed to rent a second floor to house his growing firm, he knocked a huge hole in the ceiling and built an open atrium with a staircase to connect the two. He didn’t want to lose the unity of space that his jumbling of different departments had accomplished, or create a new, separate floor that could develop into somebody’s little fief. Later, he did it again, and then again, creating a dramatic four-story atrium in the heart of his office space. He wanted to do it a fourth time, but the fire code prohibited it. So he grudgingly ran his fourth staircase up to a fire door instead of to a balcony, like on the lower floors.
And while people are not forbidden to take the elevator between floors, when they do somebody might well inquire jokingly whether they broke their leg over the weekend. Because the stairwell is a light, airy, open, and pleasant space, it’s not hard to get people moving through there—and naturally bouncing ideas and information along the way. None of this bumping would occur, of course, if people simply took the elevators. Office etiquette everywhere dictates that impromptu meetings are never held in elevators. “Well, that was a true danger,” Richards recognized. He compares stepping into the elevator to visit another department at most agencies to passing through “Checkpoint Charlie,” the spot in Berlin during the Cold War through which visitors between East and West Berlin had to pass.3 Richards’s stairwell is, by contrast, an open border.
Richards played with traditional uses of office space in other ways, too. The workrooms in most offices are dark, windowless “dungeons,” in Richards’s words, where the unfortunate are sent to “copy and collate and put things together.” The Richards Group’s workrooms—the ones with the copiers and the staplers and the rest—are on the outside, with large windows, plenty of natural light, and a nice view. As Richards put it, any one of them “could be a CEO’s office.”
He explained: “The whole idea is to send a clear signal to anyone who comes in here to do the routine work that we need to do, that there are no unimportant people, there are no unimportant functions, and that everybody in this organization will be treated with the highest level of respect in everything that we do. Now, it’s not a big investment to take a nice piece of space and turn it into a working place. And it comes back to benefit us a hundredfold, because what happens is, everybody