We've Seen the Future of Work and It Works, But Very Differently

When you fly into Grand Rapids, Michigan, you see it immediately: the control tower at the airport looms exactly like an oversized file cabinet. This is perfect for Grand rapids, the city that until very recently was David Letterman's official home office, the place where the night's top ten list originated. Did Letterman know how close to the truth he was?

Grand Rapids is the home office.

It is the source of the upholstered ergonomic chair, the lateral file, the credenza. The fabric-covered cubicle was invented here; in Grand Rapids you can still hear the argument that the cubicle, now almost 30 years old and the object of daily derision in "Dilbert," represents a revolutionary advance for workers.

The nation's three largest office furniture companies -- Steelcase, Haworth, and Herman Miller -- are all headquartered in Grand Rapids or within a few dozen miles. Together, they sell more than $5 billion worth of office furniture a year, about half the total market.

Grand Rapids is to office furniture what Silicon Valley is to computers -- and changing just as fast.

In Grand Rapids, they are studying the quantum mechanics of work, confident that what they know will overturn the current physics -- not just of furniture or even of the office, but of work itself. The new physics is about balance -- juggling many things in many states of development -- and about integration -- with your colleagues and their projects. Information is available anywhere; people no longer are tethered to their desks. As a consequence, they go to the office for new reasons: to be with each other, to collaborate, to learn, to socialize. The people at Haworth, Steelcase, and Herman Miller are starting to design furniture according to this new set of rules.

As furniture changes, the Big Three furniture companies are changing -- reinventing everything from their own offices to the definition of the business they're in. Furniture, it turns out, may be a by-product of their real mission: to answer the question, What is the future of work?

According to Haworth's Jeff Reuschel and Brian Alexander, the future of work is about defying gravity.

According to Herman Miller's Betty Hase, the future of work is about chaos theory.

According to Steelcase's Christine Albertini and Kathy Woronko, the future of work is about accepting the end of control.

And according to Steelcase's Bill Miller, there is a single, grand unifying theory, a General Theory of the Future of Work, which will change everything.

Stuff That Floats! Up in the Air! In a Cloud!

Jeff Reuschel and Brian Alexander seem at first like the Siskel and Ebert of office furniture -- different styles, different approaches, different attitudes. Reuschel is button-down, his hair neatly trimmed, pants pleated, desk a matrix of perfect stacks. Reuschel talks easily, in complete sentences and well-ordered paragraphs.

Alexander is quieter, more circumspect. He wears a pullover shirt and sports a ponytail and graying beard. His desk is a melange of experimental pieces. In fact, his desk is an experimental piece -- he's built it out of chunks of whiteboard, which he writes on with a green marker

. But Reuschel and Alexander, who work for Haworth, think enough alike to finish each other's sentences

. "I don't want to have to deal with horizontal surfaces," says Reuschel. "I'd like to have the stuff all floating around and be able to almost turn it off and on. I'd like to have it gone when I want it gone..."

"...to be able to walk through it," says Alexander.

Reuschel and Alexander are part of an eight-person team at Haworth called the Industrial Design Group, a kind of furniture think tank. What they think about is stuff.

Stuff like stacks of paper, folders, newspapers, clippings, Post-its, magazines, memos, notes from meetings, computer printouts. Stacks of stuff that become a source of constant, low-grade dissatisfaction -- a reproach. Still haven't dealt with that.

Office furniture, Reuschel and Alexander know, has always held out the whispered promise of control. With just the right number of baskets, slots, and drawers, with a four-drawer lateral file -- all that stuff would disappear.

But what Reuschel and Alexander also understand is that the new physics of work turns that thinking upside down: making all that stuff disappear is the problem, not the solution. People need to see their stuff.

"We're all dealing with items that are in process," says Alexander. "It either goes in boxes called file cabinets or it sits out. Once it's in a box, it's gone. We've got one thing that's going on for a year, two things that are going on for the next three months, five things that may happen this week. You've got all this stuff floating around, all this stuff in a cloud. To hide it all in a box is a bad thing. And if I put it in stacks, it congeals. There isn't a good way to allow all this stuff to float, to be in process."