Today is the first class in our new four-class set. Our reading today is about the many P's of marketing. The vocabulary words will come from our reading. Please be able to recognize them in class.
For our listening exercise, we will complete part two of the open office story by 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
- breadth - (noun) the distance or measurement from side to side of something; width.
- tangible - (adj) perceptible by touch. clear and definite; real.
- scarcity - (noun) the state of being scarce or in short supply; shortage.
- purists - (noun) a person who insists on absolute adherence to traditional rules or structures, especially in language or style.
Click HERE for the reading
Listening Questions
- What did employees at Chiat/Day realize after they worked in their open office (what did they want)?
- What does Gaetano say about new things?
- What happened to Chiat/Day two years after the open office was created?
- What do Stacy and Nick (the narrators) say about their open office?
FOUNTAIN: Shalom says he just couldn't get any work done.
VANEK SMITH: Did you have, like, coping mechanisms?
AUSLANDER: Yeah. It was called my house.
(Laughter).
AUSLANDER: I would go to my house, which did not have plastic floors, or hives, or nooks, or work crannies or whatever else they called it. I would just go home and sit at my ordinary kitchen table and have an ordinary martini and figure out some commercial for whatever and go back the next day and act like I'd been there.
VANEK SMITH: Paul Spencer told me he started to hate the open office, and he felt really bad about it. He felt like maybe he wasn't cool enough, or maybe somehow he was failing the space.
FOUNTAIN: It's like this whole thing was a big, big experiment to figure out what would happen if you freed people from cubicles, from their cages. What potential can be realized when you let people run free?
VANEK SMITH: It turns out people realized they just really wanted walls.
FOUNTAIN: Paul says he would walk into the office looking for his colleagues, and he'd find them in the few places with doors, with walls - the conference rooms.
SPENCER: Clearly, there was, like, tribal happenings going on there where people had, like, camped out in, like, little conference rooms that were supposed to be just, you know, temporary. You would come in and, you know...
VANEK SMITH: They had, like, taken them over?
SPENCER: They'd be like - and they'd be, like, get the hell out. This is mine. You know? They'd, like, take over a corner, and they're like, we're in here. And it was, like, all about kind of getting in and getting your corner early.
AUSLANDER: You felt like you were part of somebody's idea of how people were supposed to be. But we're not really that way.
VANEK SMITH: The architect of this space, Gaetano Pesce, would drop by to visit his creation. And he told me, yes, he did hear this complaint that the open office thing was just not working for some people.
Does that make you feel bad?
PESCE: No. New things bother in the beginning. When you make something new, it's - first reaction is, I don't like.
VANEK SMITH: I mean, do you think the open office went too far?
PESCE: No, no. There is never too far.
VANEK SMITH: I mean, what would you say to somebody who said, I worked in this office and, like, it was beautiful, but I couldn't get any work done?
PESCE: Did he understand the possibility, the creativity?
FOUNTAIN: Gaetano said he's heard from a lot of people who loved the space. And also, for what it's worth, these did turn out to be some of the most creative years for Chiat\Day. They came up with the famous Apple Think Different campaign, with the Taco Bell chihuahua...
VANEK SMITH: Yo quiero Taco Bell?
FOUNTAIN: That one.
VANEK SMITH: And other companies looked at Chiat\Day's office space and they said, I want that. The open office seemed exciting. It was cool. People could communicate and collaborate really easily.
FOUNTAIN: And, added plus - it was cheaper. You could fit more people into a smaller space, save on rent.
VANEK SMITH: In the end, though, the Chiat\Day open office experiment was short-lived. Chiat\Day was doing so well, it got bought up by another company, a much bigger company that moved them out of this office and into a much more traditional space. Just a few years after they'd moved into this crazy, new, open office, they moved out.
FOUNTAIN: Gaetano's creation was dismantled. Architecture critics started calling it a failure, a good idea taken too far.
VANEK SMITH: But the office didn't die entirely. In fact, Gaetano Pesce started seeing pieces of it all over the place. He saw one of the rolling desks in Milan, a plastic chair in Paris, a piece of a wall panel in Aspen.
PESCE: The office was exploded around the world.
VANEK SMITH: It really was an open office.
PESCE: Yes. It was.
VANEK SMITH: Shalom Auslander and Paul Spencer both eventually left Chiat\Day. But they said everywhere they went, this office followed them.
FOUNTAIN: It followed all of us. If you look at pictures of the old Chiat\Day and you look at pictures of Google or Facebook or the NPR headquarters in D.C., they look the same.
VANEK SMITH: The open office in some form is everywhere. It's inescapable.
AUSLANDER: When I die, I am going to hell. And it is going - they've definitely gone over to open space.
VANEK SMITH: (Laughter). So Nick, I have been working in this office with you guys for almost two years now.
FOUNTAIN: Yeah.
VANEK SMITH: And, even though I had my doubts in the beginning, I have to say there are some things that I really like about it. I feel like my ideas get a lot better because we're always batting them around all the time. And I feel like I laugh a lot more than I did when I was working in a room by myself. I think I'm actually happier.
FOUNTAIN: Yeah. I feel like this is the most collaborative and funny place I've ever worked. And I think for all of us, there's a larger, just human experience point to make here, which is that as human beings, we crave human interaction. We like to be around other humans.
VANEK SMITH: Yes. That's true. All of those things are true. And sometimes I just want you guys to stop [expletive] talking (laughter).
GOLDSTEIN: I'll tell you what. I had a piece of chicken. So I went to Hale and Hearty...
VANEK SMITH: I stopped caring (laughter). I'm sorry.