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Cultivating the Cubicle Farm
April 08, 2008
Read an excerpt from the soon-to-be-published The Milkshake Moment: Overcoming Stupid Systems, Pointless Policies and Muddled Management to Realize Real Growth by Steven Little.
By Steven Little
 Movies have the power to fundamentally impact our views on almost any aspect of life. For instance, Animal House forever changed how people perceive fraternities. To this day, golfers still quote lines from Caddyshack. No matter how much my parents wax nostalgic about their teen years, Grease and American Graffiti are how I've come to view the 1950s. A few years ago the owner of a Turkish travel agency told me that the movie Midnight Express—the story of a young American drug smuggler locked up in a horrific Turkish prison—still shows up as a prevalent reason why Americans say they would be less than likely to ever visit Turkey.
Despite all having been released more than 25 years ago, these movies have had a tremendous impact on our collective psyches. Movies create perceptions, and perceptions become realities.
At the close of the millennium, another movie came out that is already having an equally profound impact upon your reality (whether you know it now or not). The movie Office Space has come to define the modern workplace.
Young software engineer Peter Gibbons works for Initech, a generic high-tech company that could be based in any suburban office park in the United States. Peter hates his job almost as much as his co-workers do. From the Indian-American Samir Nagheenanajar, who complains that nobody ever pronounces his name properly, to the middle-aged mumbler Milton, who was laid off years ago but was never informed, these hapless souls struggle to survive in a hierarchical hell.
Peter's greatest source of frustration is the boss Lumbergh, a passive-aggressive, white-collar middle manager who mindlessly speaks at Peter, not with him. The plot thickens with the introduction of two outside consultants known as "The Bobs," brought in to rightsize Initech. For Peter and his associates, this means that their jobs are clearly in jeopardy.
Office Space featured Jennifer Aniston, star of TV megahit Friends, and was directed by Mike Judge, who had previously scored big with animated TV comedies Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill. Despite all this momentum, the movie barely made a blip at the box office, narrowly recouping its modest $10 million budget.
But this was the little comedy that could. Thanks to snowballing word of mouth and relentless TV airings, it took on a life of its own. It eventually sold over six million copies on video and is still going strong. Office Space’s impact on today's work culture is enormous. The term TPS report has become synonymous with mindless paperwork in offices everywhere. "Going Office Space" on something is now a popular term referring to the lead characters' ceremonious destruction of a constantly malfunctioning copy machine. The real-world company Swingline had not sold a red stapler (a prominent plot device in the movie) for years, but the company reintroduced the color as the movie's popularity grew and red stapler demand spiked.
In hindsight, it's easy now to see why Office Space became what Entertainment Weekly has called a "stealth blockbuster." It has hit a nerve with today's young workforce. The movie was purposely shot in a style that conveyed a soul-sucking, dehumanizing environment. The overall feel of the film is a combination of two other 25-plus-year-old classics—2001: A Space Odyssey and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. While at one level Office Space works as a standard farce, themes of alienation and helplessness can be found in all three films. Even the antiseptic space is part of the story: The lighting is artificial, and so is the overall environment. As each movie unfolds, the characters behave increasingly more like rats trapped in a cage.
The villain in these films isn't a ranting, raving tyrant. Instead, it is the infuriatingly calm and seemingly rational voice of reason that pushes our protagonists to the edge. The inauthentic, superficial Lumbergh uses the same lilting, condescending tone as Space Odyssey's HAL the computer and Cuckoo's Nest's Nurse Ratchett. For all three, their forced politeness and banal banter are far more frustrating than the more commonly portrayed screaming, red-faced boss. Lumbergh arrogantly ignores what his employees are telling him and just keeps repeating his mantras: "Yeahhhh … did you see the memo on this?" and "Yeahhhh, I'm also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday."
From the moment Peter enters Initech's cubicle farm, it is eerily similar to an insane asylum or a soulless spaceship guided by a talking computer. Peter is no longer a person. He is an automaton that cranks out meaningless TPS reports. All of the work and the processes portrayed involve mind-numbing details. Whenever he tries to explain himself to superiors, he is met with a canned response straight from Mismanagement 301.
People laugh at Office Space because it's only slightly more ludicrous than what they see around them. And it's not just offices. People who work in warehouses, construction sites, and retail shops can all relate to the familiar themes. If you are a leader who hasn't watched this movie, I suggest you do it soon. It is a funny movie, but you’ll also come to better understand how many people, especially younger workers, feel about supervisors and work in general.
For an entire generation, this movie and the newer, similarly themed TV series The Office are their reality. (At the time of writing this book, the latest season of The Office was the best-selling DVD on Amazon.) This is what my teenage son expects to encounter when he goes to work in an organization: a place where your individuality gets subverted, your drive gets deflated, your co-workers are backstabbing loons, and you report to a boss who cares only about pointless policies and procedures. This kind of work environment is perceived as the coal mine of the modern age; instead of black lung disease you get black soul disease.
The tagline for this movie was a very simple one: "Work Sucks." That's today's stark perception, and therefore reality, in many organizations. Don't let yours be one of them. Managers are telling today's workers to "think outside the box" and yet keep sticking them in cubicles.
I'm not calling for the literal plowing under of the cubicle farm. Instead, I am suggesting that growth leaders always find innovative ways to help individuals see that what they do really matters.
Leaders, focus on creating an environment where human beings can thrive. You need engaged human beings to deliver Milkshake Moments.
Buy The Milkshake Moment: Overcoming Stupid Systems, Pointless Policies and Muddled Management to Realize Real Growth.
Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. from The Milkshake Moment. Copyright (c) 2008 by Steven S. Little. This book is available at all bookstores, online booksellers and from the Wiley web site at www.wiley.com, or call 1-800-225-5945.
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