Today is the last class in our current four-class set. Our reading today is about retail strategy, especially omnichannel. The vocabulary words will come from our reading. Please be able to recognize them in class.
As I mentioned earlier, I want to try to do longer listening practice. So I picked an episode from Planet Money. I included the transcript, but I want you to you to listen! Please listen first or listen and read. Today is part one of a two-part story. Please answer the four listening questions. If you want to write your answers on a piece of paper, I will collect and correct them for you.
Vocabulary
- buzzword - (noun) a word or phrase, often an item of jargon, that is fashionable at a particular time or in a particular context.
- nuisance - (noun) a person, thing, or circumstance causing inconvenience or annoyance.
- emissaries - (noun) a person sent on a special mission, usually as a diplomatic representative.
- excruciating - (adj) intensely painful.
Click HERE for the reading
Listening Questions
- What percentage of Americans work in an open office?
- What catchphrase is Paul Spencer famous for? What was it used for?
- Who stole Stacy’s door? Explain how this happened.
- What year was Chiat/Day’s new office built? Describe the floor.
- How did you get your laptop and cell phone?
- What was the problem with the office?
Here at PLANET MONEY, we work in an open office. If I turn my chair around, I can see the entire team. And even if I don't turn my chair around, I can hear them.
JACOB GOLDSTEIN, BYLINE: So the interesting thing about the oil is the marginal cost is so different.
DAVID KESTENBAUM, BYLINE: Yes, it's like there's one place that makes screws for a penny...
NICK FOUNTAIN, HOST:
I sit between David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein, and they are bickering all day long. It's like they're a married couple who you're not really sure if they're going to make it.
VANEK SMITH: No. I know. When I first started at PLANET MONEY, on my first day, they got into a fight about Keynesian economics. An actual fight. And I remember sitting there thinking, No. 1, I need to read up on Keynesian economics right now, and, No. 2, I am never going to be able to get any work done in this office. It's too loud. I can't even hear my own thoughts. I can just hear Jacob's thoughts (laughter).
FOUNTAIN: Yeah. Robert has some really loud thoughts, too.
ROBERT SMITH, BYLINE: It was literally a form of accounting. That's why writing exists. It's not the other way around. It's not, like, oh...
VANEK SMITH: And then there is Noel King's laugh.
NOEL KING, BYLINE: (Laughter).
FOUNTAIN: Love that laugh.
VANEK SMITH: I know. It's a pretty great laugh. It's epic. But it is hard to get work done with all of this noise happening. And this is the world that most of us are working in. Seventy percent of us work in some kind of open office set up. And, I will be honest right here. Sometimes I just dream of having a door with walls that go all the way around me.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRYAN JAMES SAMMIS AND DANIEL ABRAHAM BRAUNSTEIN SONG, "JUST LIKE ME")
FOUNTAIN: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Nick Fountain.
VANEK SMITH: And I'm Stacey Vanek Smith. Today on the show, we meet the man who stole my door and who gave us the hell that is the open office.
FOUNTAIN: Oh, come on. It's pretty nice.
VANEK SMITH: It's...
FOUNTAIN: We have a nice office.
VANEK SMITH: It's so bad (laughter).
FOUNTAIN: Also, we have the inside story of one of the first open offices and all the drama that ensued. Just a heads up - this episode is a rerun. It originally ran in 2016.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRYAN JAMES SAMMIS AND DANIEL ABRAHAM BRAUNSTEIN'S "JUST LIKE ME")
VANEK SMITH: So before we get into the story of the open office, I'll introduce you to one of the people who ended up working there. His name is Paul Spencer (ph), and he works in advertising.
Do you have any campaigns that you're particularly proud of?
PAUL SPENCER: Well, the one I'm most famous for and I'm still coasting on decades later is for the New York Lottery. Hey, you never know. That was me.
VANEK SMITH: That was you?
SPENCER: That was me.
VANEK SMITH: No way.
SPENCER: Yeah. Yeah, so...
VANEK SMITH: Wow. You've probably sold a lot of lottery tickets.
SPENCER: I know.
VANEK SMITH: Back in 1994, Paul was just starting out in his career. He was freelancing, and he got a call from Chiat\Day. It was, like, the hottest ad agency in New York.
SPENCER: Chiat was a prestigious place. You know, you were really creative if you were there. And you wanted to be able to say, yeah, I was at Chiat. Yeah. No big deal.
FOUNTAIN: Yeah. You know, no big deal. They just made the Energizer Bunny famous and made a bunch of Super Bowl ads. No big deal. Just, like, the most creative people you could put in a room in New York advertising at the time. That was Chiat\Day. And at the time Paul got the call, all of New York was buzzing about Chiat\Day's new office.
VANEK SMITH: As the story goes, the CEO of Chiat\Day, Jay Chiat, had a vision on the ski slopes of Telluride.
FOUNTAIN: As one does.
VANEK SMITH: As one does, of a totally new workspace.
FOUNTAIN: So he hired this super-famous architect to build it for him. His name, Gaetano Pesce.
GAETANO PESCE: Gaetano Pesce, Italian, from Venice. I am 76, and I work on the field of creativity.
VANEK SMITH: This is the man who stole my door.
FOUNTAIN: Deep breaths, Stacey. Deep breaths.
VANEK SMITH: (Laughter).
FOUNTAIN: For what turned out to be such a big moment in office history, the instructions that Jay Chiat gave Gaetano, they were pretty vague.
VANEK SMITH: What did he say when he came to you?
PESCE: He wanted an office without paper.
VANEK SMITH: An office without paper?
PESCE: Yes.
VANEK SMITH: So this sounds kind of mundane. But if you think about it, this was profound. I mean, most of the things we think of as being associated with an office are essentially paper-management devices - staplers, hole punches, file folders, file cabinets. And, if you think about it, even desks are pretty much just there to hold paper. But this was 1994. You didn't really need paper all that much anymore. There were laptops. There was email.
FOUNTAIN: The office, it was kind of just a holdover from a more primitive time. And these guys, they were trying to reinvent the office, start anew.
VANEK SMITH: Gaetano Pesce was given a blank slate, the entire floor of a skyscraper in lower Manhattan, 29,000 square feet. So he went down to check it out.
PESCE: Yes, I remember. It was in the evening, this place was raw, empty, with bulbs that touched to the ceiling.
VANEK SMITH: What did you think when you saw it?
PESCE: I start to think, you don't need the office.
FOUNTAIN: You don't need the office.
VANEK SMITH: Gaetano Pesce started sketching out designs for this new office, the likes of which the world had never seen. It looked like a giant living room.
PESCE: It was an open space with a lot of corners, with a sofa, comfortable chair, with a coffee shop because I think people when they meet, they like to have a drink. They like to eat.
FOUNTAIN: This was radical. At the time - remember, it's 1994 - your typical workplace was all about cubicles. Everything was uniform. Everything was efficient. There were neutral colors. And Gaetano was going to build a big living room with a coffee shop.
VANEK SMITH: There was also a Ping-Pong table, a giant staircase to nowhere and, the piece de resistance, the floor - poured plastic resin. And not beige, or white or any normal color. It was the color of a tangerine with all these red, yellow and blue designs, like arrows, and big loops and words poured by Gaetano himself, who had to walk around with special spiky shoes while it was drying.
FOUNTAIN: The way he tells it, his inspiration was pretty much whatever he was thinking about that day.
PESCE: I remember in the corner one day when they were doing the floor, I was thinking, Venice. I put the arrow on the floor. At the end, they write Venice because that was the direction of Venice.
VANEK SMITH: You know, east?
(LAUGHTER)
VANEK SMITH: Venice is east.
FOUNTAIN: The desks in this office were all on wheels, and the chairs were plastic with coiled springs for legs.
VANEK SMITH: And critics went crazy over this new office. Here's a quote from The New York Times Magazine. It said, the workers seemed to be traveling through some new, improved dimension. These young, Gap-garbed hotshots go breezing by. They pace, they stride, they circle, gesticulating with one hand, clutching a cellular phone in the other. Or, they briefly touch down at a computer console, one of a cluster of free-floating work stations that can be wheeled around the floor to take advantage of the spectacular skyline views. Thumbs up.
I think that's a really long-winded for thumbs up.
FOUNTAIN: Two thumbs up.
VANEK SMITH: Two thumbs up.
FOUNTAIN: So many people wanted to see the office, Chiat\Day started arranging tours.
VANEK SMITH: And this is the office that Paul Spencer walked into on his first day. That was the guy you heard from in the beginning who had just taken this exciting new job, his dream job. And when he showed up, he was almost as excited to see the office as he was to start working there. The elevator took him up to the 38th floor, and he walked into the office of the future.
SPENCER: You know, I just remember a lot of orange and taupe colors, and there was a design. Like, drawings and paintings built into the floor. It was, like, there was kind of a rubbery coat over it. And it felt good. I remember thinking, wow, this is great. This is so beautiful.
VANEK SMITH: Here he was, at one of the most creative places to work in advertising and in the most creative office space he had ever seen. This was not a bland cubicle farm. This was inspiring.
FOUNTAIN: Paul walks up to the reception desk. They had this cool system where you would check out a laptop and a cellphone for the day. And the laptops and cellphones were kept in these lockers that looked pretty cool. They looked like they were out of a movie.
SPENCER: You know, like a police drama where they're, like, unlocking metal cages and giving you your .38 revolver, whatever. It was, like, wow, I'm going into creative battle.
VANEK SMITH: Paul met up with this guy he was going to partner with, this art director named Mike. And he said, hey, Mike. It's so nice to meet you. This place is amazing.
SPENCER: And he just kind of, like, shrugs and rolls his eyes.
VANEK SMITH: And you were like, hmm.
SPENCER: Hmm. I wonder why. I mean, it's so beautiful.
VANEK SMITH: Paul starts his first day at work. And, a few hours later, he and Mike, the art director, are sitting in Gaetano Pesce's cafe batting around ideas for an ad for a telephone company. And Paul starts to have this weird feeling.
SPENCER: It was kind of, like, late in the day. Looking across the table in the kitchen at Mike and, there's a problem. This place is kind of, you know, scorching my brain. It's, like, I can't focus.
FOUNTAIN: Everything was too bright, too loud, too open.
VANEK SMITH: And Paul was not the only one having a bad reaction to the office. Shalom Auslander was a creative director at Chiat\Day.
SHALOM AUSLANDER: You're kind of, like, sitting inside of a migraine.
FOUNTAIN: (Laughter).
AUSLANDER: Like, if you could climb inside a migraine headache, that's what that felt like.
VANEK SMITH: It wasn't just the bright colors and the plastic floor. Although, he did say that the floor had this weird smell that gave him terrible headaches. Shalom says the real problem was the openness.
FOUNTAIN: Extreme openness, right? 'Cause once you got your laptop and your cellphone, you had no idea where to go.
AUSLANDER: For me, it was a very unmoored kind of feeling. So you spend a lot of time - I walked a lot. I walked a lot because I was constantly walking around and around - you know, hey, did you see John? Yeah. He's in that room, or he's in that room or (laughter) no, no, he just left to that room - and passing other people who were walking around in the other direction looking for people.
VANEK SMITH: And, all of this stuff, the personal stuff that the old style of office had contained, it all came spilling out in this big, open space.
AUSLANDER: And the saddest element of it is that you'd see somebody with a phone, just a poor human being (laughter) in this awful plasticness with a phone pressed to their ear. And clearly something was going on. They were getting divorced, somebody was dying, something human was happening on the other end of that phone. And they're just walking around, and all they're saying is, hang on, hang on, hang on, let me find somewhere, hang on. Hey, Jim. How you doing? Hey. No. Wait. Hang on, hang on. And just, like, desperately - and going into some dark corner somewhere and just sitting there with their heads in their hands trying to have some interaction with an actual human being.