Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [126]
The culture that Kelley built at IDEO frees its designers both to do their best work and to have fun. And some of these designers have helped build similar, though more limited, cultures at client companies such as P&G, making it easier for their researchers and designers to produce and implement new ideas. But these clients aren’t trying to radically restructure their whole corporate organizations—they are trying to develop environments and tools for a specific type of employee—one whose job it is to innovate and generate new ideas. And in “how” companies, this is a tiny subset of the whole. Even at IDEO, not everyone is a designer, so the question arises: Is IDEO a playground for its cherished designers, but Dilbert-land for everyone else? The litmus test of a liberated culture is whether it touches everyone—beginning with the receptionist and the janitor.
IDEO needs these people, too. But at IDEO these “support” functions have been organized into a work group called the “experience team.” It’s composed of several dozen employees responsible for receiving calls and visitors, accepting and shipping goods and mail, catering, setting up and breaking down project spaces, maintaining conference-room equipment, and even processing expense reports. In some companies “you see them feeling like victims,” said David Haywood, IDEO’s vice president for business development and a self-appointed guide to IDEO culture.15 But at IDEO they work as a team with the mission of organizing coworkers’ and visitors’ experience of “living, working, and visiting here.” What’s more, they were trained in IDEO’s creative design methodology to observe, invent, and prototype the best possible experience coworkers and visitors could have. One of the resulting ideas was to provide fresh bagels, cream cheese, coffee, and fruit every morning in the cafeteria. That way, people who came to pick up their mail—which is delivered to the cafeteria on purpose—would have a great experience while “talking to their friends.” Every year the team even goes for a two-day off-site of the sort reserved for the big-time salesmen at some other companies. They rent a beach house, bring in meals and beer, and spend time brainstorming and designing unique experiences for coworkers and visitors.
Joani Ichiki is a member of the experience team who serves as a receptionist and food planner. When asked what makes working for IDEO different from other companies at which she’s worked, she struggled at first with how to express her thought. “It’s just different,” she said. “I mean, I’ve worked at what, four other [companies], and it’s just, I can’t even explain it. It’s not corporate.”16 Was this because the people who worked at IDEO were friendly? “It’s more than that,” Ichiki replied. “I think here, if you have the initiative to try something different, they let you try and you can do it.” IDEO provides all of its people—from Kelley to designers to the experience team—with a methodology for finding solutions that better the corporate environment. And then it gives them the freedom to build that environment.
IDEO is a design firm, so the interconnections between Kelley’s activities as a designer of products and a designer of cultures are especially easy to see. IDEO’s openness about how the company is run is clearly closely related to how the company designs for its clients—the same processes and the same sorts of interactions are required in both spheres. This relationship between organizational and professional openness is a vital feature of all