In Which A Lying Liar Lies

Some bozo named Cameron Herold -- a consultant who clearly gets paid for making other people's working lives miserable, curse his name -- touts that "the private office is dead" and that "employees love" open plan, no-privacy workspaces.

And from this we can easily deduce that he has the kind of aggressive, hard-driving management style that shuts down all actual discussion in his immediate vicinity, because actual real people loathe those kind of offices. Really. And they say so when someone other than their boss asks them.

I also call bullshit on his claim that "a conversation that could take seconds in an open-concept environment gets needlessly stretched into minutes by walls and doors." In my actual working experience, having a meeting with people in real offices means walking in, saying "Got a minute?" and closing the door if necessary. Having a even-mildly-private meeting in an open-plan office means finding a quiet space to do so, which takes extensive checking-of-calendars, searching-of-rooms, and so forth. And those conversations in the next cube? Everyone within ten feet is desperately trying not to listen and to focus on their own work, to no avail. Every supposedly quiet five-minute conversation kills about an hour's worth of work in the surrounding area.

Also, I take great offense to his privileging of "collaboration" over actually being able to concentrate and do your own work -- most jobs are not done better by four kibitzers than by one person who actually does it. (But management consultants, as always, love kibitzing, since it's all they know how to do.)

This Herold chap is evil and needs to be stopped before he kills any more workplaces.