Newer companies often make better homes for designers.

Over the years I have witnessed lots of complaining from designers about the quality of their workplace. Most designers start out happy, but over time things seem to go down hill. Apparently, newer companies make better homes for us, but it wasn't until I applied lifecycle theory, that any of this made much sense.

Every system has a lifecycle and companies are no exception. Like the birth of a star there is intense light and heat. And like a star, given enough time, there is the cold reality of diminishing significance.

Early on in the lifecycle of a business we see great energy, enthusiasm, and comaraderie. But as an organization grows and ages to the point where real money is at stake --hundreds of millions of dollars in business, for example-- the lofty ideals and chummy environment must give way to the need to keep the place afloat and going in one direction so the money keeps rolling in.

New companies (if they are to survive at all) must be idealistic in order to challenge the status quo and find new ideas of their own; innovative in order to make those ideas work; interested in the value of their products beyond just the bottom line in order to attract and motivate creative people; inclusive of outside resources because they have little of their own; and lastly, inspired by the genuine belief that what they do really matters in order have a story to tell the marketplace.

Older companies, like aging stars, can not stay in the formative stages forever without burning out. Too much idealism, for example, leads to chaos and a lack of practical focus. Eventually every company must settle into who they are, what they make and how they turn this into revenue. And for this reason they must by necessity become conservative in their approach to everything.

But this conservatism is their undoing because it leads to a process of isolatation and secrecy. Eventually, out of fear that employees might reveal the winning formula --the only formula!-- they cut their design staff off from contact with other similar organizations (even within their own walls) through strictly worded non-disclosure contracts... sometimes going so far as to prevent employees from attending professional meetings or contributing to any outside activities remotely associated with their professions.

During the later stages of this drive to conservatism employees find their work days becoming filled with nothing more than the imbreeding and recycling of stale and stagnant ideas and the continuous writing and re-writing of standardized procedures and regulations -- the greatest of which is the core corporate idealogy written in the form of the founders' early beliefs (whether real or mythical) now systematically encapsulated into a "mission statement" to be posted on every wall -- as though posting the rules is all that is needed to keep the star burning.

In the end --maybe years later after a long period of slow decline-- just before the star burns out all together, aging organizations convince themselves that the reason for their stagnation and failure must be somebody's unwillingness to adhere to the program, and so they drive away anyone remotely considered to be a "non-team player" in a final fit of rageful intolerance before settling into obscurity and oblivion.

And there you have the corporate lifecycle.

Innovation has become Imbreeding.
Interest has become Insolation.
Idealism has become Idealogy.
Inspiration has become Isolation.
Inclusion has become Intolerance.

A co-founder of EG&G Corporation, Harold "Doc" Edgerton was an MIT professor for the whole of his adult career. For a time, though, he worked mainly at the EG&G plant until one day he forgot his employee badge. Try as he might he could not convince anyone in the guard house about his identity.

Years later "Doc" recalls telling a friend how in that moment he knew that the company had grown beyond his tastes and he could no longer work effectively in a place too big to know everyone else's names without a badge. And so he left to set up shop in his old lab at MIT, and there he worked until the day he died at age 85... one of the greatest inventors of the modern age.

Back at EG&G new products were still being added to the catalog and noise added to the factory floor, but the soul of the place (in the opinion of "Doc") had rested and any reason for a creative person like Edgerton to show up had long since faded away.