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I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this spring. Have you ate, revisits, some favorite episodes?
“Yeah, I think I want to know why she made my life so different.”
If she had some kind of thing against me. Plus, we check back in with our guests to see what's changed in the years since. How long has it been? Things have transpired.
Yeah, the last 10 years. Everything's changed.
Listen to heavyweight wherever you get your podcast. Pushkin. As far as the nurse was concerned, the behaviour seemed odd and distinctly unnerving. That fellow who'd been bedridden for weeks for the slipped disc.
He just kept staring at everyone and scribbling in his notebook. And staring some more and writing some more. The nurse reported the suspicious activity to
“an administrator who dropped by the patient's bedside to investigate.”
What did he think he was playing at? The patient was delighted to be asked. He took out the notebook and began to explain. He'd been making a careful time and motion study of the hospital staff and had observed everything. All the inefficient movements,
the squandered energy and the wasted time. It could all be done so much better. The patient's name was Robert Proubst, and Robert Proubst was a genius. His colleagues certainly thought so.
In one hour, he would reinvent the world. His mind went off like fireworks. Proubst had been a sculptor, painter and professor of art.
“He'd invented everything from playground equipment”
to an artificial heart valve to a machine readable livestock tag. His formal training was as a chemical engineer, not that he let his formal training constrain him.
During the Second World War, he'd managed beach head logistics in the South Pacific.
But in the 1960s, Robert Proubst would invent an object that has shaped the everyday lives of tens of millions perhaps hundreds of millions of people. But when I say that his invention shaped our lives, what sort of shape exactly?
I'm Tim Hartford, and you're listening to caution retounds. In 1958, the Herman Miller Company, a maker of office furniture, hired Robert Proubst. His mission was to deploy his brand of free spirited cross-disciplinary creativity to help Herman Miller diversify away
from the potentially stayed world of filing cabinets, desks, and swivel chairs. Proubst wasn't a designer, but maybe that was a good thing. He would dream big, think deep thoughts, and take Herman Miller in new directions.
Proubst started by setting up a research studio in the college town of Ann Arba, Michigan. That decision would have been easily explicable had Herman Miller itself, not been located 150 miles away in Zeeland.
It would be a bold step even in today's era of remote work. In the pre-internet world of 1958, his decision demonstrated that Proubst valued the cerebral yet convivial atmosphere of a college town, and that he wanted an extraordinary amount of independence
from head office. It also showed that what he wanted, he got.
Herman Miller gave him a free hand.
There were only three rules.
“The first rule, don't design anything purely ornamental,”
make useful things.
The second rule, don't make anything for the military.
And the third rule, don't make office furniture. The first two rules he respected. Robert Proubst wasn't a man whose creativity could easily be constrained or directed. Herman Miller was trying to break out of its traditional business
of office furniture, and Proubst seemed like the perfect man to help with that. But asking a free spirit like Proubst, not to think about office furniture, simply encouraged him to think about office furniture,
even harder. After all, thinking about office furniture, meant thinking about everything. Mind, body, and soul.
“He carefully observed office dwellers at work.”
He read the latest ideas from management thinkers,
explaining that the economy of the future would revolve around a new kind of worker. The knowledge worker, and he hungraly consumed ideas from psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
All this grand talk about knowledge workers, rather obscures the question of what exactly a knowledge worker is. There's a black and white photograph of just such a worker, using furniture designed by Robert Proubst's research team. Next to him is a computer display,
1968 style. It's on a pivot and cast as foot, easy tilting and swivelling and movement. The knowledge worker himself is wearing the standard office clothes of the day.
White shirt, dark tie, smart, dark suit pants.
He looks intensely relaxed, calmly focused on the work in his lap, leaning back in an elegant, eams chair
“with his feet up on a little circular conference table.”
And that work in his lap, a large computer interface, supported by modifications to the chair, an all-in-one module with a keyboard, a computer mouse and other controllers.
And if 1968 seems a bit early to have a laptop keyboard and a computer mouse, well, the knowledge worker's name was Douglas Engelbart. He was a Silicon Valley pioneer. He invented the computer mouse.
When Robert Proubst was reading about knowledge workers, he was thinking of people like Douglas Engelbart, the top people, the most brilliant people, people who couldn't be put in boxes,
people like himself. Robert Proubst didn't like to be called a designer or even a researcher with its connotations of looking back to dig up old ideas. He preferred to be called a searcher.
So what if he could make the perfect office for searches like Douglas Engelbart and like Proubst himself? At the time, the typical American office space had a large open area with neat rows of typists and secretaries and clerks in the middle,
surrounded by offices with plausible doors. Today's office is a wasteland, road proubst in 1960. It saps vitality, blocks talent,
frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort. But there was a hopeful development over in Germany. The Bureau Landschaft or Office Landscape
designed by two brothers at the consulting firm, Quick Bona. Bureau Landschaft through everything into the air. There would be one huge room with groups of desks aren't fully arranged to appear haphazard.
Sinuous routes between them, like paths through a rock garden. And everything dotted with soft acoustic screens and potplugs. It was flexible. If the needs of the office changed,
you just moved the desks around. Thick carpet absorbed noise. There were break rooms rather than a trundling tea trolley.
There were no offices.
And no obvious hierarchy.
Proubst loved this new trend.
“But he could do so much better than those inefficient,”
flat, table desks. And the endless sitting, no good for your back. And Proubst was a man who well understood the agonies of a bad back.
Proubst wanted to design a system which accommodated movement. A system with verticality. Stand up, sit down, spin round. In 1964, Herman Miller revealed Robert Proubst's
brainchild to the world. It was called simply action office.
According to the design historian Jennifer Corfunbuna,
action office would append the American office furniture industry through the 1970s. But as we'll see, it did much more than that. Action office was built around the idea of the work station. Once it's at a desk, like a secretary,
but once it's in a work station, like a fighter pilot sits in a cockpit, surrounded by a variety of achingly cool, freestanding furniture units. Located in the Arena Centre,
explained Proubst, "You are free to turn and use a suitable work surface, console or conference expression." Yes indeed, everything you need is within vision
as you spin your stylish rotating chair.
Your files are colour coded, sitting on a shelf at eye level, perfectly adjustable, mounted on a soundproof divider, above your equally adjustable desk. Maybe a low coffee table?
Where a couple of coffee cups sit empty after an impromptu brainstorm with a colleague? Espresso cups of course. There's a pinboard full of your creative ideas.
“Do you need to discreetly lock them away?”
No problem. The board folds down to provide a secure cover over a side desk. Of course, you also have a large, angled architect desk with a swivel stool.
You can stand at it or sit. Moving around dynamically from idea to idea, from chair to stool to standing at your pinboard, you are active, you are creative, you look fabulous.
You are the knowledge worker that beating heart and the pulsing brain of action office. The concept was by Proubst. The stylish design by his colleague George Nelson. Nelson, director of design at Herman Miller,
was now passenger on this adventure. Nelson was one of the taste makers of the 20th century, working with iconic figures, such as Charles and Ray Eams or Isamunoguchi. And Nelson's designs for the action office units
were so cool that Stanley Kubrick used the action office on a space station in 2001 a space auditing. This was the kind of furniture people would have in the future, in space, right? Some executives bought it for their own homes.
The reviews were delirious. Seeing these designs, one wonders why office workers have put up with their incompatible, unproductive, uncomfortable environment for so long. There's an answer to that, and we'll hear it.
Off the break. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcast than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.
And as the number one podcaster, I Heart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only I Heart can extend your message to audiences
across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think I Heart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I Heart to get started.
That's 844-844-I Heart. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this spring heavyweight revisits some favorite episodes.
“Yeah, I think I want to know why she made my life so difficult”
if she had some kind of thing against me. Plus, we check back in with our guests
To see what's changed in the years since.
How long has it been? Things have transpired.
Yeah, the last 10 years. Everything's changed.
Listen to heavyweight wherever you get your podcast. Why did office workers put up with an incompatible, unproductive, uncomfortable environment for so long? The answer is simple.
They didn't have any choice. When poopsed set out the action office concept, he was imagining men like himself. Yes, men, of course, who saw themselves as highly paid, highly creative free spirits.
But their bosses may have seen things rather differently. And it was their bosses who chose the office design.
“Which raised the question, why would they pay for the action office?”
Action office. Action office cost $500 for the simplest component. Relative to the wages of the day, that would be more like $10,000 today.
The first rule for anyone seeking to sell equipment for workers
surely is to remember who buys equipment for workers. It's not the workers, it's the managers. And while the workers might dream of climbing into the cockpit of their own productivity plane, the managers are focused on efficiency.
This is an old story. Going back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the founder of Scientific Management, watching manual workers with a stop option, calculating the most efficient movements,
and the optimal equipment,
“even the ideal size of shovel to give to a labourer a digging a ditch,”
which might differ from the ideal shovel for a labourer a shoveling coal. And since this was scientifically determined, what the labourer himself thought of it didn't much matter. Robert Proubst didn't think in terms of shovels, but he certainly understood the appeal of time and motion studies
as the nurses carrying for his bad back could have tested. And while Proubst dreamed of creating the perfect working environment for the Douglas Engelbarts of the world, perhaps the dividing line between an inventor like Douglas Engelbart and a worker digging a ditch isn't as clear as he might have imagined
once the bosses started thinking about efficiency. Sure, Douglas Engelbart is a knowledge worker, but are the secretaries? Maybe, but corporate bosses weren't lavishing thousands of dollars on design a furniture for the secretaries,
which explains why,
“despite being a critical and cultural success,”
the action office was a commercial failure. So what were bosses buying? In a nutshell, better and better, stop-watches.
The bosses have always been particularly keen to use technology
to monitor what workers get up to, so they can squeeze more work out of them. That's been true from the punch clock of 100 years ago that records you arriving at or leaving work, right up to the complex technologies of today.
While Robert Proops and George Nelson were making space-age furniture at interplanetary prices, the bosses were more interested in squeezing workers, which is how we got to now, with workers constantly being watched.
Amazon tracks our every move, explains Wendy Taylor. She works as a packer at an Amazon warehouse in Missouri and was one of a group of workers who filed a complaint against Amazon in May of 2024.
They know every move you make, when you're working, when you're not working, they surveil you with their cameras, manages surveil you with their laptops because they can pull up your profile
and a bar changes a certain colour when you're not active. Every move you make is being tracked. Another worker who was worried about surveillance was Carole Kramer. Unlike Wendy Taylor, Kramer had a desk-based job. She had a camera pointed at her throughout the working day,
taking snapshots both of her face and her computer screen, to verify that she was being productive. Her pay was regularly docked, because the system decided she wasn't working. Even though she might have been mentoring a colleague,
Or making notes with pencil and paper,
that the camera didn't track,
“or for that matter, just taking a bathroom break.”
That might all sound familiar to the likes of warehouse packers like Wendy Taylor, but Carole Kramer wasn't a low paid administrator or call centre worker. She was a corporate vice president,
managing a team of 12 people, and being paid $200 an hour. The place surveillance wasn't just for the factory floor or the warehouse. It was coming for managers like Carole Kramer.
In 1968, four years after action office
was such a cultural triumph,
and such a commercial failure, Robert Prooopsed tried again. He published a manifesto titled,
“"The Office", a facility based on change.”
More importantly, he offered a less costly, more compact version of the action office concept. George Nelson and his iconic designs had been jettisoned. But action office too,
still organized space vertically, as well as horizontally, still offered multiple work surfaces. Still used dividers to absorb sound organized and display materials in use,
and still sought to offer privacy without isolation. The system was modular, flexible, and easily adapted. The dividers snapped together at a variety of angles, but Prooopsed favored three dividers per worker with 120 degree angle,
“which creates a half hexagon space packed with ideas.”
Action office too was a lot cheaper than its predecessor, and it looked a lot cheaper too. But still, it was practical and a bit funky, especially those hexagons. The new system got good reviews.
Sylvia Porter, a colonist at the New York Post, called it a revolution. Adding, "I find the concept entirely appealing. I particularly like the idea of sit down or stand-up workstations. She loved the way Prooopsed described workers as human performers.
And yet, looking at publicity photographs of the system, you can't help but notice one difference. The action office one system tended to be photographed as a collection of unique components. Designed to equip a single knowledge worker.
A genius, like Douglas Engelberg, right? And that seemed to be how Prooopsed envisaged them. An early sketch by Prooopsed shows all the cool components. The swivel chairs, the roll-top desk, the shelving, the coffee table, the angled drawing board.
They are quite clearly located in a spacious, private office space. But the action office two system wasn't designed to be installed in an office. But to replace one, or more likely, a whole row of offices.
Photographs showed action office two units in multiples, not one half hexagon workstation. But three, clip together for three workers to sit close together. A honeycomb was starting to take shape and the corporate garden that was bureau landscape.
Get busy worker bees. Action office two took off in a way
that its pricey predecessor never had.
It was inexpensive. Practical, compact. And it got a little boost from the government too. The US tax code changed, giving a nice tax break to companies which bought
rapidly depreciating equipment, such as furniture, rather than long-lasting office fixtures, such as doors and internal walls. Which meant, if you could buy furniture instead of building offices,
uncle Sam would reward you. Action office two had looked cheap before. Now, it looked really cheap, in more ways than one. Every office furniture company in North America scrambled to copy the idea.
Soon, Taylor, steel case, Sooner, Knall,
they were all making modular office furniture systems.
“One of the Sooner designers went to admire”
the installation of their modular system at a large government office in Canada, excited to see the dynamic new system in action. He came back, looking as pale as a beige partition. It was awful.
One of the worst installations I'd ever seen, he said. Sooner had installed dividing panels that were 70 inches tall, not tall enough to be a proper wall, but high enough to block all line of sight. They'd seem to make sense on the drawing board,
but on mass, they were oppressive.
While the original bureau land shaft concept, felt like strolling through a shrubbery, this new installation was more like a sterile labyrinth,
“with workers trapped behind a maze of Hessian rapped walls.”
At the time, the designer didn't have the right words to describe the horror of it all. It was only years later that the culture started to provide them. Looking back, the designer summoned it up. I'd failed to visualize what it would look like
when there were so many of them. It was Dilbertville. The designer of Action Office One, George Nelson, wouldn't have been surprised at how grim these new modular furniture systems looked. Furious at being discarded from the Action Office Project,
he wrote to his boss at the Herman Miller Company, tearing into Action Office Two, complaining that the whole idea treated people as less than human. This dehumanizing characteristic is not an accident,
“but the inevitable expression of a concept which views people”
as links in a corporate system for handling paper or as input output organisms whose efficiency has been a matter of nervous concern for the past half century. People do indeed function in such roles, but this is not what people are. Nearly a description of what they do during certain hours.
Nelson's point was powerful.
If you treat people like components in a machine, it doesn't matter how excited you are about their dynamism or movement or flexibility or how they can mesh together to produce remarkable results. Ultimately, you have forgotten that they are human.
And don't be surprised if that lapse has consequences. Action Office Two, continued Nelson, is definitely not a system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general, and then comes the prophetic next line.
But it is admirable for planners looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies. For employees, as against individuals, for personnel. Corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority. A large market.
Ouch. But George Nelson had put his finger on the problem. While Robert Proops wanted workers to be able to adapt, to move around, and above all, to be in control of their own knowledge work benches, George Nelson realized
that it didn't matter what Robert Proops wanted, and it didn't matter what the workers wanted. Managers were in charge and managers had their own agenda. Corsion details will be back after the break. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting.
Think again. More Americans listen to podcast than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, I Heart's twice as large as the next two combined.
So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only I Heart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think I Heart.
Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you it.
I Heart Advertising.
I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this spring heavyweight
revisits some favorite episodes.
“Yeah, I think I want to know why she made my life so difficult”
if she had some kind of thing against me. Plus, we check back in with our guests to see what's changed in the years since. How long has it been? Things have transpired.
Yeah, the last 10 years. Everything's changed. Listen to heavyweight, wherever you get your podcast. The conflict between Nelson and Proops
shouldn't have come as a surprise.
Proops could be intellectually stubborn and intolerant of people who disagreed. He believed his way was the right way, said a colleague, and he was usually right.
“But there was more than that stubbornness”
to the falling out. Nelson had highlighted a contradiction in Proops's thinking. Proops'd spoke of human performers. But what if there was a tension between job performance and simply being human?
Proops'd embodied that tension.
One day, he's setting up a research studio
to 150 miles away from head office, insisting on his freedom to innovate and to skip boring corporate meetings. Another day, he's a hospital patient making minute observations on all the ways that the nurse is around him could move more efficiently.
Time and motion studies are fun if you're the one holding the stopwatch and the clipboard.
“Action office imagined a class of people”
like Proops himself, or like Douglas Engelbart, whose performance depended on the fullest exercise of their human freedom and human creativity. But action office too didn't appeal to the boss class because it encouraged human freedom and human creativity,
but because it was efficient. And the inevitable next step, they would try to make it more efficient still. The great architect Frank Duffy described that awful realization to the writer and office historian,
Nikhil Savar. There was a moment when the orthogonal came in. Someone figured out that you didn't need the 120 degree angle and it went click. That was a bad day.
It took only five seconds for action office to turn into a box. Robert Proops had shaped our lives and that shape was a cube. Proops had been ahead of his time in emphasizing flexibility,
work at autonomy, and movement away from the sedentary desk. Indeed, he hated the very word desk. For Proops, knowledge workers were like artisans at their work benches. Tools organized closer to hand rather than hidden away.
Everything in motion, vibrant, rather than austere. And yet, somehow he had invented the hated cubicle. Less a dynamic cockpit for a knowledge pilot, more a cage in an administrative factory farm. The beige cage multiplied across American offices.
In 1997, nearly three decades after action office two was launched. It was estimated that more than three quarters of white collar workers were working in cubicles. The average cubicle had also halved in size between 1987 and 1997. Workers were packed in like eggs in cartons.
The office has come a long way since the punch clock. In 2022, the New York Times reported that eight of the ten largest private sector employers in the US were carefully tracking productivity metrics for individual workers often in real time. There were Amazon Warehouse Packers, UPS drivers.
Cashiers at Croger. But there were also people who previously had been viewed as too skilled
Than perhaps too high status to subject to second-by-second surveillance.
The workers have noticed too.
“One long-running research project in the UK concludes that back in 1990,”
almost two-thirds of employees felt that they were empowered to make decisions about the tasks right in front of them.
By 2024, that proportion had fallen dramatically to one-third.
Workers don't decide how to spend their time from minute to minute anymore. The computer does. The Times found that this sort of bossware often seemed counterproductive. Grocery cashiers found themselves getting impatient with elderly customers for slowing down the checkout scan. Social workers who were counseling patients in drug treatment facilities found themselves marked as idle,
because they weren't sending emails.
Middle managers at United Health knew the tracking system was flawed but couldn't fix it.
According to the Times, they told employees to jiggle their mice during online meetings and training sessions. What Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, would have made of all that. I do not know. But the more fundamental problem with workplace surveillance is the same as the problem George Nelson identified with action office too. Workplace surveillance treats workers as components in a system.
And as Nelson had complained back in the late 1960s, that might indeed be what people did, but it wasn't what people were. Carol Cramer was one of these unwilling components. She was the corporate vice president, manager of a team of a dozen people who found her employer had installed bossware to take frequent snapshots of her screen and her chair to check that she was actually working. That raised all the usual questions about whether the software was really rewarding the right behavior.
“Did a conversation about work over coffee with a subordinate count? Did jotting some ideas on a piece of paper count?”
Did going through a walk to think about a business problem in a new environment count? Of course they all should count, but they didn't. Carol Cramer found that she was getting her pay docked for failure to work in a way that satisfied the bossware, which was annoying in more ways than one. Yes, she felt cheated and pressured to work in a counterproductive way. But there was also the question of whether she was being treated as a human being.
You're supposed to be a trusted member of your team, but there was never any trust that you were working for the team she complained.
It wasn't just that the bossware could be stupid and blinkered. It was the whole idea that Carol couldn't be trusted to use her own judgment about how to work, when to work, and even shockingly when there was more to life than working. The data backs up these anecdotes. In 2022, three experts on work-play psychology performed a statistical analysis of more than 50 studies of electronic workplace monitoring. They found that such monitoring reduces job satisfaction, increases stress, and prompts counterproductive behavior.
It has no measurable impact on job performance. The only people who'll be surprised at that are the bosses. Those bosses had treated Carol Cramer like an organizational component. They'd forgotten, but she was also a human being. She quit.
Robert Proubst kept searching. With designs ranging from a hospital furniture system called co-struck to a gigantic vertical timber harvester that looks like a modified mechanical excavator.
“He earned 120 patents, but by far his most important invention is the one that came to horrify him.”
The cubicle.
At the age of 77, he gave an interview which has now become infamous.
Not all organizations are intelligent and progressive, lots are run by crass people.
“They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them.”
Barron rat hole places. Barron rat hole places. The interview conveyed the bitter regret of a man who saw his life's vision twisted by avaricious fools. But should we really be surprised? George Nelson wasn't.
He saw it all coming, but Robert Proubst didn't want to hear it. And when George Nelson was proved right, Proubst didn't seem to realise that the bosses who packed workers into cubicles hadn't twisted his vision at all. They had simply taken it to its logical conclusion. Two years later, he was dead.
Proubst had loved the idea of the creative knowledge workers, physically dynamic, always searching for new ideas empowered by the workplace around them.
But he'd also been a man who hated the thought of a wasted or inefficient movement so much that he'd laid in a hospital bed with a notebook, conducting a time and motion study of the nurses who were caring for him.
“Would those nurses really have provided better care if they'd been rushing about on optimised schedule?”
Despite Nelson's warning, Proubst never did seem to realise that there might be a conflict between helping workers to be empowered and creative and helping them to be maximally efficient. There's only one word for his well-intentioned mistake, tragedy.
Essential sources for this episode were Nikhil Savals book, Cubeed and Jennifer Kaufman-Buillers book, Open Plan, a design history of the American Office.
For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at TimHalford.com. Corsionary tales are written by me, TimHalford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines and Ryan Dilly, it's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise, additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio, Ben Nadaf Haffrey edited the script. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cone, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller.
Corsionary tales are a production of pushkin industries.
“If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference to us, and if you want to hear the show add free, sign up to pushkin+”
on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this spring heavyweight revisits some favorite episodes. Yeah, I think I want to know why she made my life so difficult if she had some kind of thing against me. Plus, we check back in with our guests to see what's changed in the years since. How long has it been?
Things have transpired. Yeah, the last 10 years. Everything's changed. Listen to heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts.
