Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [76]
Every IT vendor said that building a totally paperless office—with all computers linked and all incoming and internal documents electronically stored—was impossible. But like USAA’s Robert McDermott two decades before him, Kolind succeeded: Hewlett-Packard and Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) took up the challenge. And to make sure people would use all that technology—only 10 percent to 15 percent of the staff were familiar with PCs—the company bought a computer for each one of them for Christmas in 1990, complete with office software and games, to be used both for work and for leisure. From there, things really got rolling.
People were allowed to organize their own work schedules. The new office furniture consisted of identical drawerless desks that could be used by anyone and rolling caddies to hold a few files and personal items, which could easily be moved to any desk (and to a storage room if a person was traveling). To make the furniture changes easier, the company’s old furniture—in particular, senior managers’ desks, sofas, lamps, and antique clocks—were put up for auction internally. All were bought up cheaply by employees on one summer day in 1991. Other design features included conference rooms without chairs, and meeting spaces—such as around a coffee bar—also without chairs. A survey had shown that development engineers spent 75 percent of their time on administrative tasks—and meetings. So making people stand for meetings—or at least, not staring at the table but at their colleagues—promised to reduce the time spent in them.
Then, like Jefferson, Kolind decided to show off his project, unfinished though it was. He dubbed it “The Company of the Future” and invited in the media and fellow businessmen. In the week following Kolind’s press conference, Danish newspapers and magazines all ran articles on Oticon’s “spaghetti organization.” Oticon was still several months away from even completing the construction on the office, but the stream of visitors was constant—eventually they would reach five thousand a year.
In the meantime, however, as at UVA, the unfinished project ran out of money. But unlike Jefferson, who successfully appealed to the government of Virginia, Kolind found his reception before Oticon’s board unsympathetic—they had begun to question the wisdom of the whole enterprise. So Kolind proposed a different solution: He would raise the money to finish the construction from the employees. It worked: Even the union representatives, after consulting with their base, invested. Most of them, including Kolind, took out personal loans to do so.
Then came the grand opening. On August 8, 1991, to the surprise of Oticon employees, the event was covered not only by the Danish media, but by major international news outlets, too, including CNN. All of them filmed the new building’s most spectacular feature: a big glass tube descending from the first floor mail room through the ground floor company restaurant and to the basement recycling container. In the mail room, all incoming mail was scanned and then shredded, “feeding” the glass tube. Through it, the bits of paper fell like snowflakes as a constant reminder