[SCENE 1: A spacious conference room overlooking San Francisco Bay. Four executives and a gaggle of vice presidents are reclining at various degrees. Their Aeron chairs are tweaked willy-nilly, all in violation of some ergonomic code found deep within the company manual. The newest of the group fingers the textured insulator sheath that protects his soft hands from the heat of his coffee. Some pull on cans of Mountain Dew (far too proletarian for the execs) while those with extra zeros in their personal portfolios, suck at Diet Cokes and San Pell. Greasy fingerprints from pizza, tarnish the intentionally scratched finish on the $20, 000 metal conference table. During a tepid but “high priority” discussion, the executives try to come up with a new company line on office culture. The hope is that they’ll end one of the top problems plaguing the operation—after the profit issue of course—recruiting and retaining talent.]
Cici [Director of Marketing]: Who did coin the term "corporate casual"? Was it J. Crew or Banana?
Angus [COO, ignoring her, attempts to carry on in a more official manner]: Does Excite do a free lunch?
Maddie [Head of HR, chimes in]: Wait, I think maybe she’s onto something. Maybe we bailout on "casual Friday," maybe we go back to a formal dress. Blaze trail. Half the staff already does it anyway.
…One doesn’t have to be a high-level TV exec to sense the Aaron Spelling formula all over Silicon Valley. He would call it “Mountain View,” “Atherton,” or maybe just “280 South,” and stock the cast with gorgeous, vapid upstarts. Business development will feature stuffed shirts named Graham and Vanessa; sales will be ruled by a gelled Brett and his sultry counterpart Kelly; Zoe, ever-braless Zoe, will be a "creative," with a penchant for the guys in the mailroom; and of course, a token Pavan, the 22-year old IT wizard from India… Subplots might include interoffice sex, animal rights, sportscar racing among the dot commers, and interoffice sex. TV Guide will hail it as the “Dallas of Y2K,” subtitle it a “Romantic Dotcomedy” and it will unquestionably rule eyeballs for years.
Actually, the scripts are already well underway—not on laptops in Santa Monica but on white boards all over the Bay Area. Everyday, "e-business decision makers" toil over creating and outfitting the perfect office culture in order to maximize employee retention and production. The result of these meetings is a product so well-packaged, you could almost clip it to your belt. From ergonomics to accupressure, Chex Mix to microbrews, HR departments believe they can massage the egos and bellies of employees into thinking they’ve really got something. Something hip, desirable, classy—a true renaissance that’s every bit as glamorous as the glossy tech business journals tell us it is.
But is there anything to this "culture," or is it just a confounding misnomer? If the working environment is so ideal, why don’t people stay at these "dream jobs"?
Full
Disclosure
A budding PR flack wrestles with the world
he’s helping to create.
Friends
and Family
How a man can get lost in the Information
Age.
A
Different Kind of Start-Up
In a distressed neighborhood at the
heart of the high tech revolution, a school gives real options to its
students.
CEO’s
Having a Baby
Can a pregnant entrepreneur get the
venture capital to keep her startup alive?
Escaping
the Corporate Cult(ure)
A former Silicon Valley dot com insider
lashes out against the technology industry's HR efforts.
Money
Changes Everything II
Economic futurists predict that, thanks
to technical innovation, the road ahead is paved with gold.
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