The Nowhere Office Now

Today - 16 February 2023 - is the publication of the new edition of my book The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future. I'm so grateful to all my editors, publicists, colleagues and connections who helped shape my thinking and distribute these ideas about what has become one of the abiding issues arising from Covid-19: How do we work and how do we live and work?

The answer is: Differently.

The answer is: In a lot of cases, with difficulty.

The answer is: Only through rejecting old norms and certainties can we find solutions.

The answer is: Through Iteration, short termism - all the things business leaders are taught isn't a good idea - is in fact the only way to work through this liminal 'nowhere' stage of work.

The Nowhere Office is not an argument for no office at all, in fact I could pun on that and say not remotely! Whilst being in favour of radically modified offices and working patterns, and the management of what happens in them, and whilst it accepts remote work is rising, and argues that flexibility is the core model (Hybrid is the shorthand we're all using right now) it nevertheless says that the history of work is changing forever.

The Nowhere Office is in fact located as a period in time in the history of white collar work, a period I outline in the book along with three preceding phases stretching back to the Second World War, the last unifying global event before Covid-19.

Knowing the history of work matters. It helps us shape the future. It helps us not panic about what is happening, nor reject it as impossible. It has all been happening, to quote Ernest Hemingway, 'gradually then suddenly'.

These phases are The Optimism Years 1945-1977, The Mezzanine Years 1978-2006, The Co-Working Years 2007-2019 and then now: The Nowhere Office Years: 2020 & on going.

Let's make change happen together. Let's use this no-going-back Nowhere moment to reform, redefine, re-examine the very core of work and working life.

You can listen to The Nowhere Office podcast, you can connect with me directly. You can share best examples of where good practice, innovative and iterative is happening so I can think about it as I write my Bloomberg Work Shift column 'Working Assumptions'. And you can of course be part of the change: Whether you work in a large organisation or a small one. Whether you work in tech or property or culture, or community or whether you in fact are not classed as white collar at all.

Because in the end my argument is this: Workers of all kinds are more alike than they are unalike. They need to earn and live and work well. They haven't been for a very long time, not really. Let's change that.