Court Serendipity

“Theres a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say, ‘Wow,’ and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
— Steve Jobs

Jobs believed in spontaneity so much that he hard-coded it into the architecture of Pixar’s headquarters (the same rationale drove the early commercial real estate decisions at Google). As John Lasseter, Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer at the time, said, “Steve Jobs wasn’t involved in making the movies, but he built this office using the same budget and the same amount of time as one of our movies. In a sense, this is his movie.”

As Walter Isaacson describes in his exceptional Steve Jobs, “(Jobs) had the Pixar building designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. ‘If a building doesn't encourage that, you'll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that's sparked by serendipity,’ he said. ‘So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.’ The front doors and main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium, the cafe and the mailboxes were there, the conference rooms had windows that looked out onto it, and the six-hundred-seat theater and two smaller screening rooms all spilled into it. ‘Steve's theory worked from day one,’ Lasseter recalled. ‘I kept running into people I hadn't seen for months. I've never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.’

“Jobs even went so far as to decree that there be only two huge bathrooms in the building, one for each gender, connected to the atrium.”

Obviously, this leaves me wondering about the state of innovation in American workplaces. How are these spontaneous interactions happening, if at all? My friend Michael Arena, former head of HR at General Motors, wrote a fascinating study recently on COVID's impact on the various types of relationships required to deliver innovation. Check it out here. The short of it is that existing relationships (which help incubate new ideas) have been strengthened, while weaker relationships (which help spark new ideas, and help spread ideas in an organization) have grown weaker.

To hear a few fantastic personal stories of what it was like to work with Steve Jobs, check out my recent interview with Ron Johnson, VP of Retail at Apple, and the always-brilliant Greg McKeown: “Five Key Moments Working for Steve Jobs.”

Related: Eavesdrop
Related: Paint & Pipette Presents: Ron Johnson with Greg McKeown

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