Work House III: Making Movies

This is part three of a three part series on the past, present, and future, of the home as a workspace. Part one is here, and two, here.

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If you were a traveller in rural Oregon in the 1970s, and took the wrong turn in the hotel you were staying in, you’d risk ending up in a slightly strange room.

In it would be six blokes screaming at each other about running shoes.

These were Nike’s first leadership retreats. They called them buttfaces. Phil Knight, Nike founder, explains the name in his his memoir Shoe Dog:

“[Jeff] Johnson coined the phrase, we think. At one of our earliest retreats he muttered: “How many multi-million-dollar companies can you yell out, ‘Hey Buttface,’ and the entire management team turns around?” It got a laugh. And then it stuck. “

He goes on to give a good sense of the flavour of the gatherings:

“Buttface referred to both the retreat and the retreaters, and it not only captured the informal mood of these retreats, where no idea was too sacred to be mocked, and no person was too important to be ridiculed, it also summed up the company spirit, mission and ethos.”

As well as their value:

“The problems confronting us were grave, complex, seemingly insurmountable…Yet we were always laughing. Sometimes after a really cathartic guffaw, I’d look around the table and feel overcome by emotion. Camaraderie, loyalty, gratitude. Even love. Surely love.”

Doordash and Tinder

Reading this, it’s difficult not to feel misty eyed about the value of teams spending time together.

If you feel this way, you’re in good company, including with the biggest advocates of remote work .

Here’s Alvin Toffler, Mr Electronic Cottage himself:

“it would be a mistake to underestimate the need for direct face-to-face contact in business, and all the subliminal and nonverbal communication that accompanies that contact.”

And Matt Mullenweg, early pioneer of distributed teams at Automattic:

“There’s nothing, no technology, VR or otherwise, that has the same effect of breaking bread across the table or sharing a drink with someone, for building trust, for building communication, for getting to know someone.”

This, I think, is the final great unlock that comes from embracing home working.

It frees up the other spaces of working life to focus on what they are great at: getting people together.

The power of time spent together is particularly evident when it comes to the early stages of idea generation.

A 2022 study found that whilst there was no difference in performance when participants were asked to select from a list of ideas whilst in in-person and remote environments, there was a marked difference when they were asked to come up with the ideas in the first place.

It’s the same too with teams - such as in sales - that rely on camaraderie and celebrating shared wins, as well as the moments in a company’s life when communication really does have to be instantaneous.

The case for great spaces to work away from the home isn’t just about efficacy, either.

A world where both work and life happens entirely at home is, for most, not much of a life at all. Marc Andreessen glumly summarised the pitch for an all-remote world in an interview last year:

“You get to sit in your studio apartment, in front of your laptop, cut off from everything else. You’ve got Doordash, and Tinder, and that’s your life.”

It was this insight that led to the final prediction Jensen Huang made in his Venturebeat interview four years ago:

“And I think that there’ll be a lot of our employees who will choose to want to work from home many days during the week, and they would still want to go in because maybe they’ll have co-op meetings. Maybe there is some really close collaboration meetings that they’d have to do. Maybe go into a lab or just go hang out, take a day off. Ha, we’ll take a day off of work and go to the office.”

Right now however, we’re very far from offices you’d want to take a day off work to visit.

The drinks cabinets, long lunches and late nights that once characterised the hey-day of office life are gone. As Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, Rory Sutherland put it recently:

“I am the vice chairman of a large ad agency. In the 1970s, I would have had an office worthy of Mussolini, with a walk-in humidor and my own personal mixologist. Now I walk into the office and am given a power socket and a chair, and not even the same chair I had the previous day.”

Most offices are a hermetic recreation of what an office once was, but half-empty and shorn of all the fun.

By accepting that the home is the right place to get your solo reps in, it frees up offices to cater specifically to time spent together.

The most innovative companies do this already, with offices that look more like social clubs and third spaces than the cubicled offices of the past.

Voyager, Nvidia’s new office that opened earlier this year, is a 750k sq-ft space designed specifically to facilitate collaboration, gatherings, and events.

Dropbox, too, have taken a similar approach, replacing their offices with what they call Dropbox Studios:

“While remote work is now the primary mode for day-to-day interactions at Dropbox, we recognized that human connection can’t be fully recreated virtually. That need presented a unique opportunity to completely rethink the purpose of our offices, so we spent the past few months redesigning them into collaborative spaces called Studios. Studios are meant for in-person teamwork and strengthening connections with colleagues.”

It makes sense: the phrase you hear most used by hardcore proponents of in-person work is “watercooler moment.”

So why not just make the office a place solely for watercooler moments?

Ko'olau Ranch

That’s all great, but for me, it’s not where the real productivity unlock lies.

We need a final type of space, for a very different type of thinking.

And to find it, we have to go back to the Buttfaces in the hills of Oregon.

Because the dictum that the office is a bad space for focussed, intense thinking - particularly at an inflection point or critical moment - applies just as much for teams, as it does for individuals.

And getting together in the office, or during a working day, is very different to getting away together, out of the routine, for multiple days.

It’s the same principle as the studio in music: how many times have you seen a photo of an entire band, locked in, recording an album in a late night session?

There’s a rich evidential backing to the idea that a change in our environment changes how we think (psychologists call it dishabituation).

My favourite study in this space found that people who had their routine disrupted produced 58% more ideas than their counterparts: not just during the disruption, but in the three weeks afterwards.

It’s something most of us have experienced in our lives in more casual ways as well. Take the power of just getting out and going for a walk when we’re stuck on something.

It worked for Mozart:

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer; say travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.”

And it’ll probably work for us too, with a recent Stanford study finding that a person's creative output increased by an average of 60% when walking.

I can cite a billion other studies, but I think it’s something most of us get instinctively.

When faced with a big challenge, sometimes it’s best to just get together, and throw out the routine. As Chris Bakke puts it:

“For many hard problems, there is no replacement for throwing schedules out the window and being in the same room and just riffing for hours.”

When teams not only get together, but go away together, conversations can continue over morning walks, or late night drinks.

Instead of mentally checking out at 4pm and thinking about the commute, teams can develop ideas over a number of days, discussing new insights whenever they emerge.

This approach to team retreats isn’t particularly new.

I’ve already mentioned the Buttfaces, and the value Knight found to their small, focussed getaways.

Another devotee is Mark Zuckerberg. His ranch in Hawaii (home of cattle farming project, amongst other things) has 30 bedrooms, and has been constructed to be just as much a place for bringing Meta’s leadership teams together as it is a place for living from.

Ko'olau Ranch has another thing going for it as well: its location.

Because where you work matters too: one study found a 50% improvement in creative reasoning through multi-day immersion in natural settings.

Or simply take it from Pliny. Here’s a letter to his friend about the time he took his tablet and stylus on a boar hunt:

“Besides the sylvan solitude with which one is surrounded, the very silence which is observed on these occasions, strongly incline the mind to meditation. For the future therefore let me advise you, whenever you hunt, to take along with you your tablets, as well as your basket and bottle: for be assured you will find Minerva as fond of roaming the hills as Diana.”

Fortunately technology now enables this. Innovations such as Starlink allow us to work in locations once unthinkably remote.

Rather than relying – as the Buttfaces did – on a dated conference room in a commuter belt hotel, you can now go to the world’s most beautiful places to get away, and do great work.

Companies have recognised this, and it’s why we’ve seen the recent rise of the company offsite.

But in almost all cases, the teams involved are too large to work in the candid, punchy way the Buttfaces did. Here, it pays to keep things small.

The optimal unit for the offsite is not the company, but the team.

Which brings the home back into the equation: becoming not only a space for an individual’s best work; but also a best-in-class getaway for intense, co-located retreats.

Receiving Hours

There is however a flipside.

In the same way companies need to build a strong culture that bakes in regular, intentional, time together, there needs to be an equivalently strong culture prioritising time spent apart.

Harsh as it may seem, sometimes to do great work you have to shut out your colleagues, rather than let them in.

Because a dangerous side effect of spending a meaningful amount of time working outside an office is that other people don’t know what you’re doing. Nor do you know what they're doing.

Which means a corresponding inflation in check-ins, messages, and meetings.

Once the proliferation starts it’s difficult to stop. Microsoft’s best guess right now is that since 2020, the time spent in meetings for the average worker has tripled.

Lose control of your time, and you lose the benefits that home working unlocks.

Our working ancestors were alive to this problem.

Indeed, it was one of the great obsessions of the builders of the Roman domus: in a society where homes were much more like public spaces than they are today, they wanted to protect the private spaces that were important not just for family life, but for doing great work.

It meant a pretty judicious obsession with doorkeepers. Here’s a bit from a letter from Fronto, Roman orator, dated between 157 and 161 AD:

“For each of us private men, if their door keeper did not guard the doors and was not wholly alert, excluding from entrance those not invited, but allowing the inhabitants to walk outside freely whenever they want, then he would not be guarding the house properly.”

It was probably in the Barings’ world of 1760s London that this problem reached its peak. At this point houses were not only open, but there were strong social consequences that came from turning people away.

It’s why, for example, in Jane Austen’s Emma, Miss Bates’ habit of turning up unannounced, and at the worst possible times, must be indulged by the Woodhouse family at all costs.

They solved this problem by developing receiving hours: a set of social norms about how, and when, you would be open to receiving people at your home.

Most people nowadays don’t have the problem of constant uninvited guests turning up at their house.

But remote work presents constant interruptions, from Slack notifications, to last minute Zoom invites, to standing meetings.

A recent lament from Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures will resonate with many:

“I let meetings take over my life. For reasons that I might get into some other time I said yes to way too many meetings. My schedule became ever more packed, often running back-to-back for entire days. It became harder and harder to find time to read, think, and write. I also had virtually no time to deal with emergencies when those came up. My attention was no longer mine to direct. It had been hijacked by meetings.”

Like the uninvited caller in a Regency novel, these things interrupt our time, break our flow, and monopolise our attention – and there’s a social cost to ignoring them.

The most successful people are already pushing back on this, recognising it’s detrimental to achieving great things.

Ed Sheeran hasn’t had a phone since 2015. Woody Harrelson recently ditched his, decrying the tyranny of being “readily available to any human being at any time.”

But this isn’t just a fringe concern of the rich and famous. It should bother all of us who want to do great work.

It’s only by moving away from a world of ambient, constant, accessibility, that we will truly be able to realise the benefits of the home as a workspace.

Making Movies

This leads us, I think, to three tools that any modern company now needs to do great work: a home; an office; and a space to think together.

Some companies are already doing this, and in so doing, finishing what 2020 started.

Take Dropbox, a company I’ve already mentioned.

Their approach is “Virtual First” (as opposed to virtual only): where alongside time spent working at home or in a Dropbox Studio, they let teams book three different types of co-located working:

The first they call traditional offsites: held usually in a Studio, or other on-demand spaces, built around strategy and planning sessions.

The second they call retreats: held away from cities, to help teams do their deepest thinking, and come up with their best ideas.

The final is straightforward coworking, where teams make a plan to work together in a Studio for a set period of time, to get something very specific done.

It’s a heavy duty part of how they run themselves: there’s a dedicated in-person planning team, and for good reason: around 70 of these gatherings were held in the first half of this year.

Nvidia works similarly. Shortly after Jensen’s 2020 interview they moved permanently to an “employee’s choice” model: combining remote work with deeply intentional time spent in-person.

As I’m typing this they’re now the third largest company on earth by market cap, so haven’t done too badly since.

It’s that word, intentional, that I think matters the most here.

Technology has enabled us to return to a much older – home-based – way of working. But the world that will emerge won’t look like that of the Barings of Mincing Lane, or the offices of the 20th century. It’ll look like something completely new.

In the interview with Ben Thompson I’ve mentioned a few time now, Matt Mullenweg, the Automattic CEO, uses a great analogy for the transition so far:

“It’s kind of like when they first came out with movies and people would just do plays on the screen, they wouldn’t actually make a movie.”

The future belongs to the companies who make movies.

aled@ashore.io