"We are convinced that any business needs its wild ducks. And in IBM we try not to tame them.“
In 2013, IBM expanded its software development center in Austin, Texas, bringing 60 new designers and engineers on board. Squeezing so many more people into an office that already had about 200 employees took some creativity.
“We were split up into four big rooms then, and everybody had big, heavy wooden furniture that was really hard to move,” recalls Adam Cutler, the design center’s director. “So employees kept taking it apart and reconfiguring the pieces to accommodate whatever they were working on.”
That gave Cutler an idea. Why not redesign the office so teams that come together to collaborate on a project can build their own workspace, exactly the way it works best for them?