In Michael Ovitz’s very excellent 2018 memoir (review here) Who Is Michael Ovitz, the entertainment legend provided fascinating insight into why CAA was much more than a talent agency. Arguably a major reason for its greatness was its tireless culture that started at the top. There was nothing CAA wouldn’t do for its clients, which meant work there was all consuming. Notable about the culture is that there was seemingly no excess. Because there wasn’t, Ovitz made plain that if an employee didn’t show up for work, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for the tardy employee to hear from Ovitz himself. CAA once again had clients to serve, and they could best be served via the collaborative work culture that prevailed inside its I.M. Pei-designed headquarters.
It was Ovitz’s memories of CAA, the late Steve Jobs’ design of Apple’s present headquarters with random meet-ups top of mind, and my own experiences as a Goldman Sachs employee that caused me to quickly reject the popular coronavirus-era view that offices and office buildings were yesterday’s news. Not a chance. Such a view implied that in the past, the world’s greatest companies spent enormous financial and human capital on headquarters just because. Not really. The more realistic truth is that the best corporations nearly always have brilliant cultures born of time spent working together at the office. When asked in interviews if the days of going “into” work were in the rearview mirror, the answer was always no. City skylines would expand, not shrink. That’s still the view here.
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