At Harbert: How We Think
SPEND MORE TIME IN THE THINKING PHASE S teelcase is a 100-year-old company, but we see ourselves as a series of five 20-year-old companies. The reason is that companies don’t last; it’s ideas that last. Steelcase has always been an ideas-based company engaged in research and gleaning insights from that research, thinking about what’s next and trying to solve for what’s next in unique ways. We think what’s next is the hybrid workplace and a new era of hybrid work. We’ve been associated with a company called IDEO for over 30 years. It’s a fascinating company, an industrial design company. Earlier in their existence, they came up with the first mouse for Apple. We learned a lot from them, most notably about how they think through potential ideas. We’ve adopted a “Critical Thinking Model” throughout our company that prioritizes spending a lot of time in thinking through a problem before taking action. A lot of times, because of financial and competitive pressures, companies move quickly into an idea only to find out way too late in the game that it really wasn’t the best idea. We want to spend most of our time in the think phase, really poking at an idea to see whether it is really good or not. We spend a ton of time pressure-testing that, so when we get to a point of view about a service or a product, we're pretty confident that it will be successful. There’s an art to thinking. It involves research, it involves diverse points of view and pressure-testing the idea before you start to implement it. Once you get to the implement stage with a great idea, we’re confident we can do that well because we believe in the idea so much. We have a group called Workspace Futures. Our research is in three big buckets — work, workers and workplace. We look at the nature of work and how that’s evolving. We’re distributed; some people are at home, some people are in the office. It’s more digital. We’re on video more. We look at workers, at demographics, expectations about work, the relationship between people and the organization, and then how all of that manifests itself in the workplace, whether in the office or at home.
We believe in this thoughtful consideration of what people need and what the organization needs. We’re always thinking about these three things: the cultural environment, the technology environment and the physical space, designed together. Our latest research confirms that post-pandemic work environments should draw inspiration from neighborhoods. Why? Because neighborhoods exude vitality and energy. Nothing is static — places and activities adapt and change. The neighborhood is where people form relationships, feel a sense of belonging and build trust. RON MARTERE, ('87, international business) Vice President North Business Group Steelcase
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