Verve! Management Consulting

Why Your Office Needs a $15,000 Espresso Machine?

By Ziv Navoth

When was the last time your company spent $15,000 on an espresso machine? Ten years ago the founder of a wildly successful Silicon Valley startup did just that--on a single machine! Silicon Valley Madness? Irrational Exuberance? How about Good Management. But how can buying the most expensive espresso machine be considered good management? Read on to find out.

"The likelihood that any two people will communicate drops off dramatically as the distance between their desks increases:

We are four times as likely to communicate with someone who sits six feet away from us as we are with someone who sits sixty feet away. And people seated more than seventy-five feet apart hardly talk at all."
(Malcolm Gladwell, quoting Thomas Allen in "Designs For Working").

"The likelihood that any two people will communicate drops off dramatically as the distance between their desks increases."

The above quote doesn't just sound intuitive, it's also true. 40 years ago, an MIT researcher named Thomas Allen spent a decade looking at how engineers in an R&D lab communicate with each other. His conclusions ring true now as they did in the 60s: Getting people from different departments to talk to each other is incredibly difficult, as anyone who's tried to get "Marketing" and "Engineering" to talk to each other can attest.

So what can you do to get your people to spend more time talking to people who aren't sitting next to them? Efi Arazi, the founder of Electronics for Imaging, one of the fastest growing technology companies ever built, had exactly the same thought on his mind when he founded EFI. So he went and bought a $15,000 espresso machine. Buying a $15,000 espresso machine would be considered excessive today. Ten years ago, when Efi bought the machine, it was simply crazy. $15,000 may sound like a lot of money for a coffee machine. But think about how much money your company wastes on developing products that marketing could have told you nobody needs (if only someone had asked them). Or how much money you could be making if Engineering told HR that there's a web-based tool that can cut in half the time it takes screen job candidates? Efi's management style was driven by an obsession with culture. So he set out to ensure that his people talked to each other, just like in any healthy family. And if what was needed to bring people together was a state-of-the-art espresso machine, so be it.

So next time you feel your people aren't talking enough to each other, give them something new to talk about.

Ziv Navoth helps organizations improve their performance by creating a unique and valuable position in the marketplace. He is the Managing Director of Verve! (www.verve.nu) and can be reached at ziv@verve.nu.