Habit 7

Build a business playground

How to electrically charge your creative climate

If you drive into a particular valley in southern England, you’ll come face-to-face with two, alien-looking domes. The massive structures are owned by a charity called the Eden Project. Standing 50 metres high and well over 100 metres in length, they cover a large area. The entire complex around the domes spreads out to many acres, and is visited all year round by tourists from across the world. Outside, even in summer, the weather in Cornwall can be nippy. Inside the ‘biomes’ it’s very different. They contain the world’s climatic and geographic ecosystems in miniature. In the hot, steamy tropical biome, plants such as banana trees, coffee, rubber and giant bamboo jostle for space. Next door, in the Mediterranean biome, visitors are treated to a profusion of temperate and arid plants, such as olives, grapevines, lemon trees and perfumed herbs. This habit is about designing, building and maintaining a business biome in which a creative climate encourages ideas to grow.

What is a creative climate?

You can’t order people to be creative. The only levers you have to pull to encourage passion and ingenuity are those that affect the environment in which people work. So, climate – commonly known as culture – is heated up or cooled down by the decisions you make as a leader and manager. Long-term decisions taken around organisational purpose, values and strategy are the environmental structure in which a creative climate develops.

Climate is ‘the way things get done around here’ on a day-to-day basis. It is the social system in which people work. This is made up of a thousand details: how managers talk and behave, how meetings are run, organisational habits and beliefs, the dress code, office politics, the stories people tell, how staff are paid, who gets a parking pass, who answers to whom, and how performance is rated. Culture is everything that happens in a business – and it teaches people how to think, feel and behave. Your culture is the creative ‘temperature’ in your biome.

Changing the Sky weather

Let’s take a look at how a famous British media company has gone about regulating the thermostat in its cultural biome. Sky was founded by the legendary entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch in 1990. In the two decades that followed, the satellite TV broadcaster turned itself into a British business success story. In a recent instalment of the story, Sky’s ambitious leadership team realised it needed to boost creativity in its business culture.

Sky had a difficult birth. This was a truly innovative and ground-breaking pay-TV offering to the British public. Viewers had grown accustomed to two familiar routes for TV to enter their front rooms: an annual, mandatory, licence fee paid to the BBC, and the advertising-funded ITV and Channel 4 for free. At first Sky burned cash at an astonishing rate. Bankruptcy was not out of the question. But, after a rocky beginning, fighting for subscribers, the business established itself as a subversive force in UK media. In time it even became a British institution, building a valuable bridgehead into people’s homes, offering them an attractive diet of films and sport – particularly access to the English football premier league.

By 2004, Rupert Murdoch’s son, James, had become CEO. In a now legendary speech he caused Sky’s share price to plummet when he bullishly announced to a surprised City audience that the business would sign 10 million subscribers by 2010. At the time, Sky had fewer than 7.5 million paying customers. James Murdoch’s announcement was seen by sceptical investors as naive optimism: an all-or-nothing-betting-the-farm strategy predicated on growth. Three years later, in 2007, Jeremy Darroch was promoted to CEO and given the job of delivering what he called Murdoch’s ‘clarion call to action’. And, against the odds, with just 8 weeks of 2010 to spare, the 10-millionth Sky customer was signed.

Darroch is a working-class grammar-school boy from England’s gritty North, who had taken an unusual route to the pinnacle of British media. Prior to joining Sky as CEO, he was group finance director at the high-street electrical retailer Dixons; before that he spent 12 years with the consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble.² As Sky passed the symbolic 10-million-customer milestone, he admitted ‘a sense of relief, and a bit of euphoria’.³ Along the way he and his team had begun the strategic transformation of Sky from a pay-TV provider into a so-called triple-play business: TV, telephony and mobile. The obvious question was: where would Darroch take the business next?

Sky has always been a business that stayed ahead of the pack through speedy and bold innovation. Darroch knew he needed to continue this constant evolution. It was at this point he had an insight you might not expect from a CEO trained and developed as an accountant. Darroch realised that, although Sky was a formidable technological innovator, and highly commercial, its central purpose was simple and compelling: to entertain people. In the past, the business traditionally had bought a lot of its comedy, drama and entertainment from the USA. After consulting with his team, Darroch resolved to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in home-grown shows to enrich Sky’s portfolio. He wanted to set up the business so it had the ability to dream up ideas for hit shows, and then produce them in-house – or commission them from partners. Sky needed to increase the influence of creativity within the business. It needed to be creative for a commercial purpose.

Hiring a catalyst

To help make this vision a reality, Sky hired a young, ex-BBC TV channel controller called Stuart Murphy to shake things up a bit. Murphy is funny, fast-talking and totally focused on creative excellence. He’s a ball of energy who laughingly described himself as a ‘gobby catalyst’ within a few minutes of us first talking on the phone.⁴ A fellow Sky executive commented admiringly: ‘Some people are drains; Stuart’s a radiator. He just emanates energy and creativity.’⁵ As head of the business’ entertainment channels, Murphy’s task was to commission highly creative, original content that would encourage more people to subscribe to Sky – and, importantly, to persuade the 10 million that had already done so, to stick around. He set out to inject more creativity into what was an already well-established business.

His first symbolic act was to move his own desk out of a private office and on to the open floor with his 40-strong team. ‘I think an open-plan office really, really helps. Because, as stupid as it sounds, noise helps. It’s rare someone will come up with a completed idea on their own. Ideas develop with other people and it’s embarrassing doing that in a quiet office,’ he said. In his customary informal and self-deprecating style, he added with a grin, ‘You also need an awful lot of caffeine!’ He then asked all of his managers to follow suit and forgo their private offices. He had a plan for the space that was left. He knocked down the walls between the old executive offices to create large meeting rooms where the team could get together to collaborate and discuss ideas. ‘It seems stupid, but the small meeting rooms seemed to be saying we were a small channel; I wanted people to believe the opposite,’ he said.

Changing the physical environment might have been seen as window dressing if it hadn’t been part of a larger managerial mind shift. Stuart is unequivocal about how to fundamentally change a business:’ It’s about developing a creative culture and the attitude of the leadership team,’ he asserts. His own creative leadership philosophy is built around dismantling hierarchy and developing a kind environment in which ideas are supported rather than being shot down. He elaborates: ‘An idea is a fragile thing. It’s a personal thing. That’s nerve-wracking; because at work you are amongst people who aren’t necessarily friends, they’re colleagues. There is no science to say if an idea is good or bad. This means someone can knock your idea down as easily as they can back it. So, creativity is initially quite a flimsy thing. You feel sensitive when you’re coming up with an idea. So, a creative environment has to feel kind – kind to ideas.’

But he’s clear that a kind culture is not the same as a comfortable culture. Murphy loves Sky because ’we are going a million miles an hour a thousand per cent of the time’. And he admits electric conversations can – and should – involve conflict from time to time. In fact, he describes good creativity as ‘spatty’ and ‘bristly’. He concludes: ‘The counterbalance to the non-hierarchical, friendly, authentic, noisy and kind environment is it also has to have structure and focus. You need to know how much money you have to spend coming up with ideas and developing them. You also need to be clear about the reasons why you are being creative – and clearly understand the set parameters and timing needs of a project.’

He is clear that his role as leader is to know when the team needs to focus on creativity and when to focus on delivery, adding: ‘That’s my job a lot of the time: trying to balance things. It’s like this … people can turn up in a bikini if they want to, but, at the same time, there are also rules on how people behave. When I have screwed up in my job I have got that balance wrong. I have made things too creative or too processy.’

Why is culture so important?

A wise man one said,’ Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’⁶ In other words, culture reigns supreme as the heavyweight champ of what will lead to lasting change. You can have a talented and enthusiastic leadership team, a sharp and focused strategy, good processes and excellent products; but, if the company culture is broken or unaligned with the vision, all of this will mean nothing. Bad culture is treacle that companies have to wade through to get to their objectives. Good culture is jet fuel that speeds them on their way. Sir John Hegarty, the creative co-founder of advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty argues it is the context for talented people to excel themselves in your business: ‘I’m going to hire someone out of X, Y, Z business. Why is that person going to be better here? The only thing that makes the difference is the culture.’⁷

Culture = behaviour

Culture is important because it drives people’s beliefs and behaviours. To understand this link better, let’s imagine a person – Sophie – as an iceberg. The tip of Sophie’s iceberg, what’s observable above the waterline, is her behaviour: what she’s doing at work, how she’s doing it, her general demeanour. But, like an iceberg, there’s plenty going on beneath the surface that we’re not aware of. To truly understand Sophie’s performance, you need to put on your metaphorical wetsuit and flippers and swim down to take a look below the waterline. There you’ll discover Sophie’s beliefs and values – the hidden elements of her personality that dictate if she finds meaning and inspiration in the work she does. Sophie’s performance in work is influenced heavily by her mental make-up, but also by what management can influence: company culture.

Let’s compare two fictitious companies – Outlook Limited and Inspiring Partners – to work out how their cultures affect Sophie’s willingness to be creative. Sophie’s not a bad employee; in fact she’s keen and capable. And, as you can see in Figure 7.1, the personal values she holds dear are ‘aim high’, ‘achieve’ and ‘work hard’. But, unfortunately the management of Outlook Limited, doesn’t value creativity. It is not mentioned in the company’s purpose and values – or anywhere else for that matter. Not surprisingly, in this climate, Sophie believes that being creative is risky, and just not worth it.

figure 7.1 Sophie and Outlook Limited

When Sophie goes to work at Inspiring Partners, the opposite is true (see Figure 7.2). This business has embraced creativity, managers talk about its importance, and allow time and resources for people to focus on doing things in a creative and innovative way. As a result, Sophie feels able to come up with new ideas – and challenge the status quo every now and then.

figure 7.2 Sophie and Inspiring Partners

Sophie holds the same core values in both scenarios. But, because of the differing creative climates in Outlook Limited and Inspiring Partners, she chooses to behave in a different way in different offices. She brings a different appetite for being creative. Her personal values have not changed, but the way Sophie interprets them has.

Creativity everywhere

Sky’s Stuart Murphy is clear that his catalytic creative role would not work if he was not supported by his bosses. He puts a lot of the cultural change at Sky down to the fact that the CEO Jeremy Darroch has built a ‘creative cluster of like-minded individuals’. Murphy and others realise that Sky needs this creative climate to extend more widely than just the production department. To help spread the word in 2013, ex-WCRS advertising agency boss Liz Darran was hired as Sky’s director of brand and creative.

In her first year, Darran was tasked with rewriting the values of the business. Sky has long been guided by a corporate purpose ‘Believe in better’. The phrase represents Sky’s restless, entrepreneurial spirit, and is embraced within the business. It embodies what Darran jokingly calls Sky’s ‘constitutional insurgency’: a restless energy that is part of the DNA. Darran jokes: ‘We tend to have a failure to sit back and be happy around here!’

Months of research and internal discussion resulted in three rephrased values designed to electrify creative behaviours: game changing, spine tingling and brilliantly simple. Darran argued that the creation of refreshed values was to offer people some context and meaning for what Sky is all about: ‘It’s to remind people why they are here. The values have an energy that gives people a different slant; we hope it helps people to be more creative – to think in a different way. It’s not about making money. Making money is a result of what we do, not the reason that we do it.’ And she made it clear that the values are there to be used and interpreted by staff, to fundamentally change behaviour, commenting: ‘It’s about flowing these values through to the everyday: for example, what does game changing mean about how we communicate with each other, run a brainstorm or hold a meeting? The values set the agenda and raise the bar for how we behave internally. We hope it leads to more creativity and game-changing behaviour.’

Sky’s challenge is to encourage people to re-examine their attitudes in the absence of a tangible threat – this isn’t a cultural change forced by a business in trouble. ‘The interesting thing for me is how you can build a creative culture, but not from the start-up phase. Sky has grown so quickly it’s developed in silos, a bit over here, a bit added over there. That flows over to the physical environment – and the people. It’s a patchwork quilt. So, how do you build a culture of creativity back into an organisation that hasn’t had that in the first place? My hope is this is ultimately an organisation that has always produced entertainment – so there’s innate creativity in here that just needs to be tapped.’

Changing your culture

Changing your culture can be difficult because it is dependent on so many factors. It is like untangling a knotted piece of string:

1. It is easy not to get it: Culture is perceived by some as touchy-feely HR fluff involving little more than considerations of office décor.
2. It is complex: Culture is connected to all your decisions, large and small, and all the behaviours that stem from those decisions. It is impossible to manage in the traditional sense because it is not something that can be controlled or mandated. Just like a company brand lives in the heads of consumers, not in the marketing department, culture thrives and grows in the minds and behaviours of employees. It can be influenced and lead by the boss – but never manufactured.
3. It is hard to see: The prevailing climate is invisible after many years with the business. You become so accustomed to the world being ordered in a certain way that it is difficult to see how it could be different. It is the water that surrounds a goldfish in its bowl: vital, supportive, but hard to see because it has always been there.
4. It is sometimes owned by people with little motivation to change: The people who have been with a business the longest – founders or long-serving employees – are often the most senior or influential. So, ironically, the people who have the capacity to change things often can’t or won’t, because it never occurs to them that things could, or should, be different. It takes bravery and confidence to criticise something you created.

How to untangle it

It is possible to loosen the knot. Otherwise, this would be a dispiriting, and short, habit. To begin proactively developing your business culture, start with the following actions:

• Value it: Culture has a reputation for being stubborn to untangle because some managers have failed to grasp where creativity comes from. It needs to be a focus for you. Culture is not at all fluffy. It encourages creativity, which fertilises ideas, which makes innovation possible, which translates into measurable business performance.

• Become a culture detective: The attitude and behaviour of managers make the weather in a business climate. By taking care to notice and cherish the right culture you will automatically start to tackle the challenges above. You need to realise that looking after the culture is your job. Take this even further by actively comparing your culture to other organisations. When you’re in shops or other offices look for the telltale signs of their culture and ask: ‘What can I learn?’

• Encourage a creative culture: To boost innovative behaviour remove distractions that prevent play, send a clear message about behaviour with your physical environment and tell good stories – there are more details on these three powerful approaches in the rest of this habit.

Work hard, play hard

Have you ever watched children play? They don’t do things by half. They’re 100 per cent committed to the game. Whether it’s make-believe with a dressing-up box, building cities with Minecraft on their PlayStation or playing football in the garden, they live it to the max. Asking them to tear themselves away from that afternoon’s current passion is difficult, as any parent will tell you. It’s no different when we grow up.

Remove distractions

There is never enough time to keep fit, do the laundry, shop for groceries or look after financial planning. This general lack of time has a knock-on effect at work. It is not possible to be fully engaged, creative and playful if you’re trying to block out nagging worries about life’s mundane issues or emotional upheavals: securing a dental appointment, sorting out childcare, or wrestling with problems at home. So, if people are your greatest asset, as the old cliché goes, what can you do to help? The question is even more important in a creative business. Many companies have cottoned on to the obvious answer: do as much as possible to remove distractions at work and support people through tough times at home.

SAS to the rescue

An independent US software business has taken this philosophy to the extreme. Based in Cary, North Carolina, SAS began life as a university start-up in 1976. It has grown somewhat since then, and now has 13,000 employees with offices all around the world. Founder Jim Goodnight argues that creative capital is the factor responsible for this success. He passionately believes in an idealised vision for business culture: to treat employees as if they make a big difference. The result, of course, is self-fulfilling: they do.

Goodnight puts his money where his mouth is. SAS employees, and their families, have free access to a massive gymnasium featuring tennis and basketball courts, a weight room and a heated pool. There’s also an on-site health care clinic, staffed by doctors, nutritionists, physical therapists and psychologists. On-site counselling is available to help employees to manage the occasional stresses thrown up by the work–life balance. All these services are entirely free. Deeply discounted childcare is also on tap.

Work areas are filled routinely with snacks and treats.⁸ SAS even supports employees with adopting a child or arranging a mortgage. Goodnight realises one thing: perks aren’t just perks. They are highly symbolic representations of how you value your people. The impressive SAS benefit portfolio exists to remind workers constantly that they’re important and that they matter greatly to the success of the firm. It is, of course, a win-win for the business. It frees people from potential distractions so they can stay focused on work.

Lend a hand

Life’s random factors will throw a spanner in the works for encouraging creativity. Those standard and traumatising travails – marital strife, drug addiction and health problems – are out of the normal scope of most companies’ pastoral care. But, as we all know, they destroy the motivation for creativity, as well as more mundane work-related objectives, such as hitting sales targets and, occasionally, turning up at all. If you are going to help a person to aspire to creativity, you need to lend a hand when life knocks them down. SAS helps people with legal advice to get divorced. The advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather makes a promise to be there for its people through thick and thin: ‘We treat our people as human beings. We help them when they are in trouble – with their jobs, with illness, with emotional problems, drugs or alcohol.’

Win-win

It is often debated whether happy workers are more engaged and productive than their discontented counterparts. Or, if organisations that invest in generous practices get rewarded with greater profitability. SAS’s performance seems to provide proof that happy, well-supported workers deliver better profits. SAS chalked up 37 consecutive years of record earnings to a high of $2.8 billion in 2012. At the same time, SAS experiences annual staff turnover between 2–3 per cent; compared to an industry average of 22 per cent. The money SAS otherwise would have to spend on head-hunters, training and restoring lost productivity are, effectively, diverted to further enhancing the work–life experience of employees. Goodnight and his team have created a virtuous circle designed to keep the best people inside the business – with their mind on the job.

Physical environment

The physical environment in your workplace can be a negative distraction, too – or a statement of creative intent. We’ve all visited those offices. Some of us have been unlucky enough to work in them: airless, sterile, carpeted with acres of nylon floor tiles, a few pot plants amid dehumanisingly similar, individual cubicles for worker bees to inhabit. A place where any urge to create something memorable and magical, any rebellious shout would be swallowed instantly in the dismal silence. Sadly, I could be describing a large proportion of work environments in which people spend five days a week – and perhaps a few weekends, too.

Companies dependent on the intellectual capital of their employees are forever looking to spark new ideas inside their walls. Studies of people at work prove conclusively that the office environment – the configuration of desks, the colour of the walls, whether windows provide natural light – can change your mood either positively or negatively. But, surely, we don’t need too much evidence to understand this. It stands to reason that, if you want people to stay at work for a long time, to bump into each other, to exchange ideas, to become fascinated, even obsessed, by the projects they are working on, you should make your office fun and comfortable – even inspiring.

Sky’s director of brand and creative Liz Darran joined the TV, telephony and mobile company in 2013 ‘to help encourage creativity everywhere – from the security guard on the front gate to call-centre employees’. As the business developed its thinking on using values to boost creativity, they couldn’t help but notice the offices and physical environment didn’t quite match their creative aspirations.

As a result, a new south campus has been built, as well as a makeover of the west London offices they inherited from the drug company GlaxoSmithKline. Darran said: ‘I don’t think it’s possible to change a culture without doing something to the physical environment. You need to make a statement. It’s not just about “this place makes me happy”. It’s about a place where you can have certain kinds of meetings: public areas where you can get together to celebrate work, areas where you can present work in a more inspiring way, where you can get together and just throw ideas around.’

Like Sky, savvy businesses across the world have grasped the impact of physical environment and are investing in new ways to make offices playful and energetic:

• Alternative clothing company Comvert transformed an old Milanese cinema into its HQ and built an indoor skateboarding bowl in the space above where the audience used to sit.

• Madrid architecture practice Selgas Cano is submerged halfway underground with views from massive glass windows into the middle of a forest.

• Energy drink company Red converted five pubs in London’s Soho into a lounge-like office with a reception that turns into a bar at night.

• Facebook features a mixing desk to practise your DJ-ing skills with plenty of room to skateboard outside.

• YouTube boasts a large putting green in the centre of one of their offices.⁹

• As well as promoting fun, your physical environment sends a clear message about expected behaviour:

• Invent At Lego in Denmark the colourful, open-plan layout encourages interaction and play between staff to fuel imagination. Light and open meeting rooms are designed to provide a comfortable working environment to turbo charge product development. Everyone is encouraged to play with Lego and come up with something new – and get their work done at the same time.

• Be yourself The world’s largest online shoe retailer Zappos has built its cultural mantra of individuality into their Las Vegas headquarters. Each employee gets to stamp their own imprint into the office design. They are encouraged to make their own space deeply personal with decorations, toys and trinkets. This means that every cubicle is unique and the office feels less sterile and more enjoyable to work in.

• Work hard, play hard At Googleplex in California the generous facilities include a gym, free laundry rooms, two small swimming pools, multiple sand volleyball courts and eighteen cafeterias with diverse menus – all of the food is free. There is a rule at Google that nobody is allowed to be more than 100 metres away from food, so you’ll find kitchens everywhere, as well as an appetising cafeteria where every employee is fed three times a day, for free.¹⁰

• Collaborate The mobile operator Dtac recently merged six separate Bangkok offices under one roof, creating the largest ever lease in Thai history, occupying 650,000 square feet. Dtac needs to react very quickly to changing market conditions so its offices enhance the following belief: ‘cooperation and communication, strengthen common goals, and increase creativity’. The brand approach is ‘play and learn’. This is reflected in a massive circular library, an amphitheatre and an entire floor dedicated to fun, with indoor soccer, table tennis, running track and concert and performance spaces.

If all this sounds a bit extravagant, and you’re short on funds, take your inspiration from the charitable fundraising outfit Pallotta TeamWork based in Los Angeles. Its office makeover was on a strict budget of just $40 per square foot. It customised old shipping containers and transformed them into office space inside a large warehouse. The unique design and fresh colours make for a work environment that’s not just cheap to build, but cheap to run.

Investing money in removing distractions, lending a hand and developing a business playground might seem generous. But, as long as you have the financial wherewithal to take a long-term view of business success, and you provide benefits and an environment as part of a wider cultural change, it is sound investment. It becomes a creative business virtuous circle, as shown in Figure 7.3.

figure 7.3 Creative business virtuous circle

Beware the beanbag fallacy

The playful environments of highly successful companies are an inspiration to all leaders. But be careful of what I call the beanbag fallacy. That’s the erroneous idea that office environment has a larger impact on your creative culture than it actually does. It is important, but is just one aspect – a symbol – of your attitude as a business. It doesn’t work in isolation. Buying a ping pong table, some brightly coloured seats and applying a few coats of paint should not be the first, or only, thing you do to boost creativity in your business. On its own this won’t suddenly create a hot bed of ideas. In fact, unless it’s backed up by the other habits in this book it will be quietly derided by staff as a sad, cynical attempt to paper over the cracks. But, in concert with the other habits, building a business playground can make a statement about your business’ attitude to hierarchy, creativity and play.

Tell good stories

Culture is made of stories. You can gauge the energy in a company climate by the type of tales people are telling. Are they spinning yarns in the pub about how their ingenuity was blocked by mindless bureaucracy? How someone they liked has been mistreated? Or, in contrast, are they retelling anecdotes about their team’s amazing achievements? Or their manager’s bravery in sticking up for them?

Simple stories have been told by humans to reaffirm their group identity for millennia. Somewhere along the line that got lost in a lot of businesses. As a result, many company meetings, conferences and away days could be marketed as powerful cures for insomnia. They are dominated by sterile, mindless PowerPoint-based presentations that nobody cares about or remembers. To reverse this depressing trend in your company, listen carefully for great stories that embody the culture you want to see: tales of perseverance, passion and customer service.

Electric conclusion

Your creative climate drives the behaviour of your employees. An appropriate culture is vital and needs to be aligned with your purpose and commercial strategy. It is particularly crucial when creativity, innovation and electric conversations are not just jam, but your daily bread. So, just as the founders of the Eden Project realised the prevailing Cornish weather conditions would fail to produce lemon trees and coffee plants, we need to accept that the standard culture in most businesses will fail to produce great ideas. Something needs to be done.

The Silicon Valley media-streaming business Netflix has a cultural mantra: ‘Great workplace is stunning colleagues’: one person’s excellence is valuable to the rest of the team. High-performing stars will help you attract and retain other stars. Develop and maintain your own unique climate filled with a buzzing static charge and the sparks of ideas by practising the approaches above – and in the rest of this book. It leads to a virtuous circle in which talent should be knocking at the front door of your biome trying to get in.

1 Afshar, V., 2013. 100 Tweetable Business Culture Quotes from Brilliant Executives [online]. Available at: <www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/100-tweetable-business-cu_b_3575595.html>.

2 BSkyB Corporate, 2014. About Sky. Available at: <http://corporate.sky.com/about_sky/our_board_and_management/executive_team>.

3 World of CEOs. Available at: www.worldofceos.com/dossiers/jeremy-darroch>.

4 Murphy, S., 2013. Interviewed by Greg Orme at Sky Grant Way, Isleworth on 29 August.

5 Darran, L., 2013. Interviewed by Greg Orme at Sky on 25 September.

6 It was a remark by the business guru Peter Drucker and subsequently popularised in 2006 by Mark Fields, president of Ford Motor Company. That quote allegedly hangs in the company’s War Room. 

7 Hegarty, J., 2013. Interviewed by Greg Orme at BBH London on 24 June.

8 Fast Company, 2013. How SAS became the world’s best place to work. Fast Company, 25 January.

9 This great list is from Dunlop, J. Top 20 most awesome company offices. Available at: <www.incomediary.com/top-20-most-awesome-company-offices.>

10 See Googlepex Wikipedia entry at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googleplex#Facilities_and_history>.