Podcast appearances and mentions of robert propst

Ever wondered how scurvy, scorpions, and strip clubs are connected? Let's embark on a rollercoaster of a conversation that stretches from citrus fruits and pet antics to the unexpected twists of celebrity scenarios you never knew you needed. You'll hear colorful stories about our unforgettable Mardi Gras trip and the wild detours we took along the way, all while sharing laughs over some seriously bizarre imaginations involving Brad Pitt and Kim Basinger. It's a joyful romp through the absurdities of life that will leave you grinning.Shifting from the absurd to the impactful, we explore how Robert Propst's revolutionary office designs reshaped the modern workspace. Imagine the chaos of the bullpens of yesteryear, and you'll appreciate how Propst's cubicle concept brought a much-needed balance between privacy and productivity. This historical pivot opens a wider conversation about its socio-economic ripple effects, highlighting issues like workers' rights, corporate power dynamics, and the ongoing battles of the middle class in today's economy.Finally, we plunge into the eerie world of workplace horror, where mundane office settings transform into chilling narratives. Whether it's the psychological tension of "Exam," the chaos of "Office Uprising," or the corporate nightmares of "Severance," these stories speak to the deeper anxieties we have about work and capitalism. We dissect films like "Mayhem" and "Vampire's Kiss" for their unique takes on horror in the workspace, debating the nuances of their narratives. Plus, we sprinkle in some playful musings on supporting local businesses and wrap it all up with our trademark quirky send-off.

The predecessor to the office was Florence's Uffizi Gallery – an admin building to the Medici mercantile empire. That was in… 1560. In the centuries to come, work was revolutionized, with perhaps the most well-known inflection of Ford Motors adopting the 40-hour work week in 1926. The cubicle? We have Robert Propst to thank for that, entering the picture in 1968. It wasn't until the 80s when the Internet appeared on the scene and wifi released in 1997, forever changing the way people live and work. Since then, companies have continued to adopt many of the practices from the 20th century, despite the possibilities being fundamentally different.COVID sent a shock into that system, forcing many people to adopt a distributed model and despite much debate about what the future holds, this episode will highlight the many ways that companies are continuing to adapt.Will companies shift toward more asynchronous work? How will a distributed model shift the way we hire? How will companies attract top talent, and is remote the only benefit that matters? What workers and companies will come out on top of this sea change?And of course… is the office dead? We'll address these questions, and much more!Topics covered:00:00 - History of remote work3:27 - Is the office dead?7:05 - Async vs sync16:18 - Building culture remotely27:15 - Attracting top talent31:16 - The evolution of benefits36:04 - Remote work vs work39:29 - Location-based pay46:36 - Open salaries51:23 - Vetting top talent55:32 - The need to adapt58:39 - Rewriting the rules1:03:09 - Infrastructure gapsResources: GitLab's Remote Handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/Deel's Salary Insights Tool: https://www.deel.com/salary-insightsDeel's State of Global Hiring report: https://www.deel.com/state-of-global-hiring-2022Deel:Deel's website: https://www.deel.com/Deel on Twitter: https://twitter.com/deelAlex on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BouazizalexSafetyWingSafetyWing's website: https://safetywing.com/SafetyWing on Twitter: https://twitter.com/safetywingSondre on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SRaschGitLab: GitLab's website: https://about.gitlab.com/GitLab on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gitlabDarren on Twitter: https://twitter.com/darrenmurph Stay Updated: Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Episode 2 of The #FutureOffices Podcast is ready for your listening pleasure. The topic? How every office has its own fingerprint. Our guest, Workplace Technology Strategist at Cisco, Mark Miller, works with global customers to find the #workplacestrategies that work best for them and their workforces. He and his team of Cisco engineers develop the winning technology innovations that suit customers needs. In this episode (which is a bit longer than the 20 minutes we promised when we started this podcast, but only because the discussion was too good), Mark and Kevin discuss: The 4 main trends when it comes to workplace and corporate real estate technology. A.I. and relationship intelligence The role of workplace analytics in shaping everything to do with offices For more information on the Future Offices Winter 2020 conference, visit www.FutureOfficesWinter.com. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript: Kevin: I do have to say I love a good sound bite. I love a good short, sweet quote that resonates with the research I'm doing, the conference, the speakers and the content that we see at these iterations. Last time we spoke you said every workplace has its own fingerprint and needs to be treated like it does. That was awesome and I think I had mentioned, I'm going to steal that at some point and put that into one of our sessions, or think-tank discussions, or something unless you trademark it after this podcast episode, but can you explain what this means in relation to the changing workspace? Mark: Yes, Kevin, if you think back just 10 years ago, the workplace was dominated by a monolithic, uninspiring and I’d say much maligned cubicle, and the cubicle has been around for years. It was actually conceived back in the mid-60s by a gentleman named Robert Propst, from Herman Miller, as a way to address what he saw at the time was a shift to a more information centric work that was happening in the 60s, and for a generation, the cubicle was the foundation of every workplace. It was truly a one-size-fits-all model. Something that facilities teams could quickly roll out very efficiently with very limited technology enablement. Then about 10 years ago, the winds began to shift. Organizations started to realize that changing nature of work, what I referenced before around that process oriented work evaporating, and realizing that cubicle bays, that traditional workplace environment, was not designed for the type of work that was really going on, and this led to a wave of workplace design called activity based working, or ABW, where organizations focused on the various activities that were going on within the workplace and they created spaces for people to collaborate, concentrate, learn, and largely socialize. Four big trends. And then balanced not only that workplace design, but also technology and policy to allow a lot more movement within the workplace, allow people to gravitate to the places they needed that were best suited for the type of work they were going on. And this is where this concept around every workplace has its own fingerprint came to be. Now the workplace was designed around the specific activities of your organization, of the functional group that was in that space, or even as discreet as the team that was occupying a neighborhood. This next wave of workplace transformation that's happening, it's ABW or activity based working, tends to be working its way out. A lot of people have gone through that wave already. What this next phase, what we're calling the cognitive workplace, we're really focused on the employee experiences and using data and cognitive tools, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to increase productivity, to create a more personalized experience, and reduce friction in the workplace and that's going to drive even a stronger sense around very customized work environment, hence the analogies to a human fingerprint. Kevin: It's a phenomenal quote and it resonates a lot even with all of these podcast episodes, a lot of our upcoming content around that human experience touch point, and it's become very important and where I've mentioned in the past a lot of our content was around more so the physical design specifically only of the workplace has now transformed into understanding your culture and understanding the employees within your workspace first, before necessarily implementing anything, especially on the digital side, especially when it comes to digital transformation. So, phenomenal quote, kudos again. Now, you are a very demanded speaker when it comes to what we're talking about. You attend a lot of conferences, you hear a lot of these buzzwords and industry terms when you speak. I want to know if you have any pet peeves when it comes to the topic of the future of work, or digital workplace transformation, or technology in the workplace? Is there anything that maybe has become a trend or buzzword in this space that would be considered a pet peeve or not necessarily accurate at this point? Mark: I don't know if there's a pet peeve. I think this is a very broad topic and I sat one day at home looking at my home office and I saw on the bottom shelf, a bunch of books on business process re-engineering, and it was when I came out of college that was the big rave. Everybody was into business process re-engineering and then the next shelf was filled with a bunch of books on total quality management. What I realized was that was yet another wave. And then for years I used to do a lot of work designing customer relationship management strategies, some contact center technology in real life. That was a wave, and then globalization hit. I think this is just the next big wave of corporate innovation around the workplace itself and I think it's going to happen for a very long time. It's going to be a lot of solution providers are going to enter this space and everybody's going to try to hook onto it. You leave it up to the clients to help at least understand where you fit and know that we're not going to do this individually. There's no one company that's going to have the magic pill to redesign, or reinvent work, or create the future workplace environment. It's going to take clients and customers to sit down and understand which parts are relevant and how to stitch all those together, and I think as the solution providers in that space, it's our job to be able to work well with others in the ecosystem and be very clear about the areas that we play and the strengths that we have, and the areas that we can help them. Kevin: No, exactly. I'm thinking back to what you just said about finding the books on business process re-engineering. So, nowadays it's pretty much business process re-engineering on steroids, especially when it comes down to obviously the analysis of not only the workflows now, or design, it's of the people as well. Mark: So I had this conversation with a client a couple of months back and they said, "Look, Mark, is this really going to take off? Is this really going to be a sustainable trend?" And I said to them, "Hey, remember back 10 or 15 years? All the talk was around E-business." E-business, it was all the talk about Amazon and everything was going on in that space with eBay and everybody else. I said, "You know what we call E-business now? Business." It's a mature trend, and the workplace is going to be a lot like that too. We're going to look back at the time of cubicle-based work, and just think that's when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. Everybody's going to move in this direction where technology and space design and policy are seamlessly integrated together, and we're going to really quickly forget about the worlds that we came from. Kevin: No, exactly. People are already telling me, "Hey, that concept of the open office, man, that's ancient at this point," and I'm thinking this is some of the hottest news about the workplace and office design only a year and a half ago, so things are moving so quickly. Mark: I think there’s an opportunity here, too. As I said in my intro, everything revolves around an unintended consequence. When people went and built these open office environments, they thought they were solving for the right problem. The great thing about a workplace design effort is, if you get it right, you know right away and if you get it wrong, you know right away. So people are not bashful about telling you how they feel about their new work environments, but largely when we moved from traditional to that activity based model, it was really good for the balance sheet. Companies were allowed to consolidate and optimize a lot of their real estate portfolio. In fact, at Cisco, we optimized almost 25 percent of our real estate portfolio, moving to this new way of working. People just needed less space and you've got better efficiencies, but what was necessarily good for the balance sheet, wasn't always good for the employee. As people started moving within the workplace, there was a lot of friction that happened. There was a loss of sense of community. I think this next wave around the cognitive workplace is going to fix a lot of that. When you start dealing with the individual experiences, this idea of journey mapping an employee's movement around the workplace, you're really going to understand how you can create much better workplace experiences. About Mark Miller: Mark's passion and expertise centers around understanding the relationships between workspace design, workplace policies, technology and culture, and helping companies balance these elements in the creation of their next generation workplaces. His focus is not just on the physical workplace, but rather the intersection of the physical and digital work environments. He regularly engages with corporate executives, assisting them in the development and implementation of workplace strategies that drive new levels of innovation, productivity and employee engagement. Increasingly, Mark is called upon to be a workplace evangelist, speaking at industry events, conferences and with leading companies on the role technology will play in the future workplace. Mark's technology background has seen him hold senior roles at companies including Nokia, Avaya and Cisco, where his work now centres around the transformation of the corporate workplace and the development of next-generation workplace strategies. **** Mark Miller will be one of many experts speakers at Future Offices Winter, taking place January 22 - 24 in New York City! Join his session on Main Day One: A Cisco Story: The Workplace of the Future | It’s the Tech that Makes Great Teams and it’s the Teams that Make Great Tech In this talk, Mark will outline the types of technology Cisco introduced internally and the difference it has made to its workforce, including: Increased its workforce by 7% Decreased its real estate portfolio by 26% Closed 241 buildings Achieved annual Opex saving of $196m by optimizing Its real estate and realised $294m in building sales 17% increase in employee engagement 17% increase in workplace satisfaction 15% increase in work/life balance $806m incremental productivity through mobile devicesand applications For more information, visit www.FutureOfficesWinter.com.

Ian and Mark Catchlove continue their extended ‘deep dive’ conversation focusing on Robert Propst and his seminal workplace text from 1968, ‘The office: A facility based on change’, including where it all started to go wrong – the birth of the dreaded office cubicle. As a special treat, this episode also closes with the full length disco mix of our magnificent theme tune from Handspan. What’s not to love?

Ian talks with Mark Catchlove, Director of the Knowledge and Insight Group at Herman Miller. In this first part of an extended ‘deep dive’ conversation, they focus on Robert Propst and his seminal workplace text from 1968, ‘The office: A facility based on change’. It's a workplace geek-out with some fascinating and surprising insights that are as relevant now as they were almost 50 years ago, including a certain plastic guerrilla.

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Robert Propst was a brilliant inventor who wanted to make a better office. Instead, he created something he hated.