Certain things seem to go out of fashion, only to come around again: suede and velvet clothing for men, vinyl records, the underhanded free throw in basketball.
But Brian Walker, the CEO of furniture company Herman Miller, is convinced that the traditional office–with executives stuck behind closed doors and most everyone else assigned to a fixed workstation–is gone for good.
“I think this falls into the broader trends we see,” Walker told me on the latest episode of my podcast, The Bottom Line. “You and I probably believed we had to have a car when we turned 16 years old . . . Well, my children that are graduating from college and say they’re going to move to Chicago, they don’t want a car. They’re very comfortable using Uber or using Zipcar or public transportation. In fact, they like it better.”
“In some ways, attitudinally, the digital natives are more used to moving through things that way,” Walker adds. “Ownership isn’t about a thing. It’s about what I get from it.”