Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford

The offices at Chiat/Day may have looked superficially different from the offices at Kyocera, but they were managed with fundamentally the same tidy-minded aesthetic: This place should look the way the boss wants it to look. Google’s offices, like Building 20 at MIT, have been managed very differently: It doesn’t matter how this place looks. The denizens of Building 20 had tremendous power over their environment, even by the standards of tenured academics. This wasn’t because of their high status. If anything the opposite was true: the higher-status academics were placed in high-status spaces that were too beautiful, expensive, and historically significant to tinker with. (No wonder Jerome Wiesner, MIT’s president, felt trapped by the magisterial perfection of his office, and kept a messy bolt-hole in Building 20.) The lower-status academics were placed in low-status spaces, and that meant they could do whatever they wished. Nobody cared.