Where Work gets Done

Increasingly, the model within which the office environment has operated is changing. Leaders of high design office furniture products like Haworth, Steelcase, and Herman Miller are realizing they are rapidly loosing their market. As speakers like Jason Fried illustrate, the office is slowly becoming the symbol of non-productive corporations. So, the question for companies such as these is... where does the future of our company lie? Or, even worse. Does our company have a future? While Jason's argument here is not a statement as bold as "the death of the modern office", he does suggest that truly productive individuals don't get work done at the office. But they do get work done in other locations. The question then is... if employees are not productive in the office environment, in what types of places are they productive and what does this mean for the office of the future. Is it the office itself that needs to be redesigned, or is it a social design problem where we simply need to figure out how to organize individuals within the office so they can be truly productive. While Jason Fried addresses the "social design" aspect through recommending large blocks of time for individuals to be alone, I suspect this is only one piece, at the micro scale, of a much larger problem festering within the corporate office.