Decoupling Office Size From Corporate Status
May 30, 2004
From Terry Pristin, A New Office Can Mean Making Do With Less, NY Times, May 26, 2004:
When PricewaterhouseCoopers moves into its new offices in Midtown Manhattan this summer, it will slim down by about 200,000 square feet of space from the 1 million it now occupies. Yet PricewaterhouseCoopers says it is not planning to reduce its New York work force of 3,500. Instead, everyone is just going to have to squeeze in.
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[T]he point, naturally, is to save money, since office space is leased by the square foot. In doing so, PricewaterhouseCoopers is also trying to crack the longtime link in employees’ minds between space and status - the notion that each higher rung on the corporate ladder brings with it an entitlement to a larger, fancier office.
Partners who now luxuriate in window offices averaging 250 square feet will move to interior spaces half that size, said David Jarman, the executive in charge of planning the new office. Managers who now have as much as 140 square feet will get 80.
This could be a good thing — Robert Townsend, former Avis Rent-a-Car CEO, suggested it 30+ years ago in his book, Up the Organization!
Blog Scope
May 30, 2004
Life gets busy, and my good intentions don’t seem to be expressing themselves as regular blog posts about business-law lessons. I haven’t posted in over a month, and I’ve done only 10 substantive posts since January 1.
So as an experiment, I’m going to tinker a bit with the scope of the blog. I’ll be broadening its coverage to include interesting things I read, or otherwise encounter, in both law- and non-law areas. In this I’ll be following the example of Steve Bainbridge, who somehow manages successfully to mix corporate law with wine and Catholic business philosophy in his eponymous blog, ProfessorBainbridge. I’m hoping the blog can thus also serve as something of a card catalog, to help me locate things that I remember reading but can’t put my hands on.