Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [108]
But otherwise, getting the details right is important, and so the person who double-checks those little things, who collates the presentations for the big account pitch, that person is performing an equally vital role for the firm. And Richards wanted to signal that the agency sees the importance of this work by giving those who do it an attractive place to work.
As you will by now appreciate, changing the geometry and the geography of an office, by itself, is not enough. It may even seem manipulative—shouldn’t truly free people also be free to move about the office in the manner that suits them, and to arrange their seating according to their own preferences? We concede that there are liberating leaders who would look askance at Stan Richards’ seating policy. On the other hand, those leaders do not run advertising agencies, which come with a particular set of internecine rivalries that can be very hard to counter—particularly when each group clusters on its own floor—and which can in their own right be an obstacle to each person’s acting in the best interests of the business.
The point of liberating a workplace is not to return to some Rousseauian state of nature in which man, unchained by society, lives a radically free and individualistic existence. If such a state were either possible or desirable, we would not need firms at all. But it is not possible. And so, in the real world, we work together to the extent that it is cheaper and more efficient to do so than to work apart, as the Nobel Prize–winning economist Ronald Coase has convincingly demonstrated.4 And so, when an advertising agency squanders resources or misses opportunities because of some turf war between account managers and creative directors, that is not freedom in action. It is, rather, the result of the construction of institutional barriers to freedom: in particular, the notion peculiar to the ad world that certain questions may only be raised by creatives while others are the sole province of the account managers. No wonder Richards wrote, “Abolishing office doors and, later, walls…was probably the most profound act of cultural liberation we’ve ever undertaken.”5
Note that while this specific problem is peculiar to the ad business, it is a species of one that we have seen repeatedly faced by leaders in the companies they liberated. At FAVI, a machinist could not make repairs on his equipment—only maintenance was allowed to do that. At Harley, work rules strictly defined what workers with various job descriptions could and couldn’t do. And at USAA, they literally had one person to open the envelopes, another to remove the forms from the envelopes, a third to unfold and sort them, and so on.
Just like Zobrist, Teerlink, McDermott, and others, Richards wanted to blur those lines. And he knew enough about the existing dynamics of his industry to know that it would take more than an office party or an exhortation to work together to get that done. He needed to break up the fiefs physically in order to break down the barriers mentally.
All but the most dogmatic creative directors will admit, at least in private, that even account managers sometimes have a good creative suggestion, and vice versa. The problem that Richards faced was putting those good ideas from the “wrong” sources into action. And his solution was to force people to bump into one another—by separating them and shoving them together by turns.
At the same time, he liberated Richards