A few years ago Steelcase ran an add: “Revolution @ work” accompanied by a picture book / brochure written by Rowan Gibson. The book starts off with demise of the of the notion of work: “back in the 1970’s everybody sort of knew what ‘work’ meant. Particularly office work…But today, all of that is disappearing…Office furniture has to support a business environment that’s gone flexible, gone hyperspeed, gone mad!”

Gibson goes on: “The important thing today is to align ourselves with the social, technological and economic forces that are driving change. in other words, to belong to the revolutionaries, not the old guard.”

But who are the revolutionaries? Think of that great Monty Python film in which office workers are depicted as galley slaves who start a mutiny by attacking the management. What do you do to make sure YOU don’t belong to the old guard? When I was interviewed on a Singapore radio station last year a receptionist asked me what kind of WorkVitamins I could suggest for her. Receptionsits are the face of the company, but have a price to pay for it, most receptionists are sitting all alone in a cold, empty, big, big hallway. I told her to speak to her boss (he should try to sit there for a while and experience what it means to be a receptionist.)
Revolution (WorkVitamins-type!) to me means what Guy Debord wrote in 1961: “Revolution is not ‘showing’ life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organisation must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation”.