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was flattered and worked there for some time. Later, they redesigned it again, this time as a meeting space with an oceanside ambience. This unorthodox conference room echoes SOL’s “summer cottage,” designed by SOL’s employees to add a lakeside ambience to their meetings. IDEO’s workplace may, in fact, look something like a hippie hangout, and Kelley does nothing to disconfirm the impression, saying that some people have brought in not only dogs and turtles but snakes—big snakes. However, Kelley added, before making decisions that can affect a colleague—bringing in a huge snake, for example—the person consults with that colleague. If the colleague is affected negatively in his work, the envisaged decision is not carried out—a principle common to all freedom-based environments.

This principle of consulting with the affected applies not only to wildlife but also to moving, for example, to a different building. In the early days, IDEO occupied a series of small offices in downtown Palo Alto. As the company expanded, everyone agreed that it would be better and more economical to work in one bigger space. They moved into a four-story building, and then—surprise—employees didn’t like it. Kelley laughed when recalling the episode: “It was too much like a corporate building…. Some of the freedom that people feel is that they can leave the building and walk around. And so if presently you walk between buildings, nobody says, ‘Are you goofing off? Are you wasting your time?’ ‘No, I’m walking between buildings.’” But if you’re all in the same building, you can’t do that. So they moved back to the small buildings, nine of them today, in downtown Palo Alto.

At the time, downtown Palo Alto office rents were among the highest in the nation, which even for a successful company like IDEO, with clients waiting in line, was too expensive. So Kelley continued to look for more economical office space. Eventually he found a series of buildings renting for much less near the freeway. Happy with his discovery but following the principle of consulting on decisions that may affect others, he described his plan and added a sweetener. Instead of pocketing the savings on rent, he would distribute it as a significant salary increase to employees. At many companies, this would have been a no-brainer. But not at IDEO. Kelley’s employees refused the move and the raise. They felt that it was important for their work as designers of consumer experiences to live among consumers: “We want to be able to see people: women pushing baby carriages; we want to be able to see moms, we want to be able to see everything.” Then they added an argument that appealed to Kelley a great deal: They didn’t want to move down by the freeway; that would make them too much like a traditional company. It takes guts to turn down a substantial raise for the sake of preserving your work environment. But Kelley’s friends were not just any employees—they were liberated people who clearly felt they got more out of their jobs than simply a paycheck. And when they looked at what that raise would cost them—a cost that would never show up on any company balance sheet—they wisely turned it down.

FUN, HAPPINESS, AND THE GOOD LIFE

AT THE WORKPLACE?

Kelley, in fact, touched upon the question of wisdom early in our conversation and without any prompting. He called the core of what he has built and is maintaining at IDEO “an attitude of wisdom,” a notion coined for IDEO by two Stanford researchers. Robert Sutton and Andrew Hargadon studied the company’s creative methodology back in the mid-1990s. Their view of wisdom—“acting with knowledge while doubting what one knows”6—derives from the Socratic view that a wise man knows the limits of his knowledge. Philosophers call this “epistemic humility.”7 As Kelley explained, IDEO’s culture helps employees acquire this attitude of wisdom because it “supports people to allow them to express their ideas without being…hindered.” It also helped them question the ideas brought forward by other people on the team. In contrast to the conventional notion