The Culture Driven WorkplaceUsing your company's knowledge to design the
office
In an increasingly
competitive world, managers must leverage every resource they have in order to
keep their company ahead. And after salaries, the single largest expense for
most companies is the workplace. Ensuring that every dollar of workplace
expenditure is being used to back the company's strategy, culture, and processes
is critical to creating competitive advantage. Yet few managers have clear
models for translating a company's unique character into the shape of its
office.
The Culture Driven
Workplace gives corporate strategists, line managers, facilities
planners, and office designers a clear model for understanding the shape of the
office, using the one resource which uniquely defines the company's place in the
market: its culture. Culture encompasses a company's own internal knowledge of
strategy and processes, as well as its ingrained values and practices.
Workplaces aligned with culture strengthen them. Workplaces aligned with future
vision can help change the present culture. This book provides the tools needed
to create workplaces that drive a company forward.
In The Culture
Driven Workplace, readers will learn:
-
what changes in the
business environment drive workplace change
-
how patterns of thought
shaped the old workplace
-
how to think in terms of
process, empowerment, and discourse to understand new workplace
cultures
-
three ways of empowering
people to control their own space
-
how to go beyond the
traditional boundaries of the office, to encompass the home, the city district,
hotels, and even the car
-
how traditional ways of
thinking about the office are encoded in our language - and how to change
them
-
how to develop new
patterns of space through inclusive dialogue
-
how to capture knowledge,
and make it a working tool in the design and monitoring of the office
-
how to understand the new
role of the designer in a knowledge economy
The Culture Driven
Workplace is written in a simple, accessible style. It illustrates key
points with cases from around the world, as well as providing several detailed
worked examples.
The Culture Driven
Workplace does not offer ready-made solutions. It will give readers a new
set of conceptual tools that they can use to develop their own solutions, and
thus define uniquely the place in which they work.
About the
Author
David
Week, PhD is managing director of Assaí (formerly Pacific Architecture),
a Sydney-based company that specialises in the culture driven design of
buildings and infrastructure. Since 1995, David has worked intensively defining
processes that allow companies to design their workplaces based on their deepest
knowledge about their culture, strategy, and practices. His clients say: 'One of
the few that truly understands the high-tech environment [Ozemail
Internet]…Enabled us to push the barriers and create the ideal work environment
[Deacons Lawyers]…that our workplace redesign has been so successful is
attributable in no small measure to his multi-disciplined approach, innovative
foresight and articulate description and synchronisation of often complex
business, cultural and architectural concepts [Queensland Rail].'
David's work in defining
the culture driven workplace builds on his long experience in designing
environments throughout the Asia-Pacific region. This work has included the
community-based reconstruction of 630 schools in East Timor, heritage patterns
for Hanoi, the evolution of a new architecture for Papua New Guinea, work with
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, squatter settlements in
India, and research into how different cultures can come together in the design
and construction of buildings. He is a recipient the RAIA International Award,
and holds degrees from the University of Sydney and University of California at
Berkeley. |
