New Ways of Working Network

A Little Story About How It All Started:

Joe says: The germ of the idea of New WOW started at a bar (where all good ideas start) with Eric Richert, Glenn Dirks, and Joe Ouye. We were commiserating how we had just wasted a perfectly good two days at another workplace of the future conference; we met some nice people, heard some interesting stories, and elucidated the other attendees on our experiences, but learned little new ourselves. We realized then that the problem is that we need to meet with other experts, especially from other related fields such as technology and human resources. We asked ourselves, why isn’t there a community of experts from diverse fields to explore and discuss work and workplace issues rigorously—the eventual raison d’etre for New Ways of Working.

Jim adds: Joe first heard of Jim through a study Jim had done for a government agency back in the 70s on alternative futures planning, and admired Jim’s work and contacted him.

Jim contacted Joe again while he was doing interviewing as part of writing his book CyberMeeting. Joe invited Jim to present at the Workplace Productivity Consortium.

Later Joe began holding periodic “tertulia,” invitational discussions on a topic – often with an invited presenter – held at lunch in a restaurant. Joe invited Jim as a participant. Later it became clear that restaurants were too noisy, and the tertulia were held in conference rooms at the end of the afternoon, with wine and cheese at the end.

Joe invited Jim to attend a seminar he was putting on where the key speaker was Chris Hood (HP). Jim became excited with the prospects in new ways of working and contacted Joe to see if there was some way they could develop a business together focusing on this.

Joe and Jim had several brainstorming sessions. During one of them Joe related his story of the meeting with Glenn Dirks and Eric Richert where they complained about learning nothing at conferences and spending all their time educating “wannabees.”

The original idea was to create a web page for exchange of information among a network of people, all of whom were expert in some aspect of new ways of working. But we recognized that people would not exchange information unless they had some personal connection, so we came up with the idea of semi-annual symposia. The idea was that people would build personal relationships during the symposia and then would be willing to share electronically. But there was still a good deal of “if we build it, they will come” in our thinking.

Jim and Joe conducted interviews as market research and became convinced there was a niche for an organization with the following characteristics: (1) Everybody at the table was an expert in some aspect of new ways of working; (2) we approached new ways of working as a total system – include workplace, technology, sociology, etc., and (3) Any research we produced was sufficiently rigorous that people could make decisions based on them, even though they did not aspire to duplicate academic formats, etc.

Joe and Jim each brought a sponsor to the table. Jim had always admired SmartBoards, and during the writing of CyberMeeting had gotten to know David Martin. David subsequently invited Jim to participate in a symposium held at the Ford Motor Design Center in Dearborn. Dave had tried to get an organization going then, but somehow it fizzled out. Jim and Joe approached Dave and he agreed that Smart Tech would be our first sponsor.

We approached several other possible sponsors, but Joe knew Jay Brand at Haworth, and through the connection was able to get Haworth to agree to be a sponsor. Eric Richert was able to bring Sun Microsystems in as a first member, and we built from there. Renate Fruchter from Stanford was our first academic colleague. She had been the guest and host at several tertulia.

The first symposium was held June 29 – July 6, 2006 at the Dolce Hayes Mansion in San Jose, California.

We've achieved much of what we set out to do five and a half years ago.