Space For Spontaneous Meetings

One of my favorite passages of Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" is where Steve describes the rationale behind the unique elements of Pixar's headquarters in Emeryville. Reflections on the implications on mid-COVID innovation follow.

"Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. 'Theres a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,' he said. 'That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say, "Wow," and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas.'

"So he had the Pixar building designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. 'If a building doesn't encourage that, you'll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that's sparked by serendipity,' he said. 'So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.' The front doors and main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium, the cafe and the mailboxes were there, the conference rooms had windows that looked out onto it, and the six-hundred-seat theater and two smaller screening rooms all spilled into it. 'Steve's theory worked from day one,' Lasseter recalled. 'I kept running into people I hadn't seen for months. I've never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.'

"Jobs even went so far as to decree that there be only two huge bathrooms in the building, one for each gender, connected to the atrium."

Obviously, this leaves me wondering about the state of innovation in American workplaces. How are these spontaneous interactions happening, if at all? My friend Michael Arena, former head of HR at General Motors, wrote a fascinating study recently on COVID's impact on the various types of relationships required to deliver innovation. Check it out here. The short of it is that existing relationships (which help incubate new ideas) have been strengthened, which weaker relationships (which help spark new ideas, and help spread ideas in an organization) have grown weaker.

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