Office of the Future

Chris Boulton's office is located wherever he needs it to be. Today, that happens to be in the heart of London's exclusive Mayfair neighborhood, where he has a meeting scheduled. Yesterday, it was in the City, London's bustling financial district. The day before that, his office was in downtown Birmingham, 100 miles north of London, where he attended a conference. In the weeks ahead, who knows where his office might be? Maybe on Park Avenue in New York, or the Champs Elysées in Paris, or the outskirts of London -- just a short drive from home. "I don't have one office in one location," Boulton says. "I have more than 250 offices around the world."

That arrangement may sound utterly virtual, or impossible, but it's actually neither. Boulton is talking about a real office -- not just a laptop and a cell-phone -- with real furniture and a real staff. Whether he's in London, Hong Kong, or San Jose, Boulton's workplace remains remarkably unchanged. It's a tastefully decorated, professional environment that's outfitted with everything that he needs -- a comfortable chair; a large desk; local phone lines; a fast Internet connection; and a support staff who field calls, send faxes, or make travel arrangements. That's the beauty of it: He works on the road without sacrificing the convenience or professionalism of an everyday office. "I'm practicing what I preach," says Boulton, the group property director for Regus Business Centres PLC, one of the fastest-growing companies in the United Kingdom.

What he and Regus are preaching is a radically new way of thinking about an age-old problem: office space. The world is faster than ever. Companies are flatter and more dispersed. Customers are more impatient. Yet, when it comes to finding, acquiring, and outfitting office space, most organizations do it the same old way. Internet companies embrace major revisions of business strategy every six months: How can they afford to spend that much time scouting locations and negotiating leases? High-tech companies routinely double or triple in size every year: How can they sign long-term leases and still accommodate such growth? Employees spend 10 or 12 hours a day at the office: How can they tolerate a long commute to and from the office? In the words of Mark Dixon, Regus's founder and executive chairman, "The situation is completely mad."

Dixon, 40, has a better idea. Regus operates what it calls "instant offices" -- business centers around the world that are fully furnished, fully equipped, and fully staffed. They are available by the hour, the day, the week, the month, or the year -- wherever and whenever a customer chooses. "You can be up and running in Beijing as soon as you step off the plane," says Bob Gaudreau, 38, who's responsible for the U.S. side of the operation. According to Regus, the logic of real estate should correspond to the new logic of business itself. So renting a Regus office is as fast and as easy as renting a car. In fact, the one-page rental agreement is modeled after the contract that car-rental companies use.

"We've made property a fast-moving commodity, just like a can of Coke," says Gaudreau. "There's no capital expenditure, the office is completely furnished, and customers decide how long they'll stay."

Regus isn't just streamlining a traditional, cumbersome process. It's challenging much of the conventional thinking about property and how it relates to business strategy. In a digital, global economy, Dixon says, physical space just doesn't mean what it used to. The term "property value" has become something of an oxymoron. In today's economy, companies are either growing rapidly or failing. They have to turn on a dime in order to enter new markets or to serve new customers -- which makes property ownership or a long-term lease a liability rather than an asset. The more time that these companies spend worrying about real estate or trying to navigate the traditions of a hopelessly out-of-date business, the more distracted they become from their real challenges.

"This new approach to the workplace represents a total mind shift," says Dixon, who is considered one of the UK's top entrepreneurs. "People find it difficult to grasp because they've been operating the same way for so long." At the core of his model are questions that every company should ask itself about where and how its people work: What role does the physical office play in an increasingly virtual world? How much space is enough? How much of our resources do we spend on buildings versus brains? How do we design the office of the future, when the future is so uncertain? And finally, if our people can work anywhere, where can they do their best work?