John
I did some work at Union Carbide, too, in the early 80's. To me the most
interesting aspect of the new corporate HQ was that while the company had
moved from a traditional high rise in NYC to a low rise in Fairfield
County, the new building was, in effect, just the old building laid on its
side. The bits facing the vehicle entrance were where the plebians
worked, while the executive suites were at the far end facing the open
countryside. Middle management worked, as one would expect, in the middle,
near the central car park.
One of the organisations I'm working with right now is also well into the
process of designing a new HQ. The first plans have met with fairly
widespread derision, and in going back to the drawing board they are
searching for non-conventional advice, such as from John Kao at the Ideas
Factory. I'll keep you all posted as we see if and how these new
approaches work.
Richard Goodale
PS--Bhopal happened many years after UC's move to Connecticut--not that
the events were necessarily unrelated!
> From: John Gunkler <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
>
> NEGATIVE: Union Carbide, only about a year or so before the Bhopal
> disaster (I'm not connecting the events as cause and effect, just stating
> a chronology since I don't remember the actual years), moved its
>corporate
> headquarters out of New York City to a new building built especially for
> them. It was an innovative building that met some challenging design
> criteria. For example, no one was to have to walk very far from their
> parking place to their office -- solved by putting the parking ramp in
>the
> middle of the building. Another was to create small-group office
> clusters, so people in each "team" would have their offices close
> together, and to give everyone (except the lowest-paid, always mistreated
> administrative people) a window in their office. This was accomplished
>by
> creating quasi-circular "silos" (they may have been octagonal rather than
> circular) that stuck out from the building, within which there could be
> about six offices (each with an outside wall, therefore with windows)
> clustered around a small central area for files and the administrative
> desk(s). These clusters attached, via a short hallway, to the main
> hallway that ran around the inside of the building. Since the actual
> inside of the building was taken up by a parking ramp, the inner hallway
> formed a rectangle that encircled the parking ramp and from which you
> could enter the ramp (on the inside) or enter the hallways to the office
> clusters (on the outside of the main hallway.)
--"Richard GOODALE" <fc45@dial.pipex.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>