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Workspaces: A Look at Where People Work
Wall Street Journal July 28, 2004
Richard Sheridan and his Menlo Innovations' office was
featured in today's Wall Street Journal Workspace column. The column
features the Menlo Software Factory Facility and the connection between
how Menlo operates and how Edison operated in his Invention Factory over
140 years ago, The Workspaces column, by author Nancy D. Holt, is a highly popular
weekly feature providing a brief "Look at Where People Work". An
abstract of the article can be seen below. The complete article is
available to Wall Street Journal Subscribers on-line.
<Abstract>
Who:
Richard B. Sheridan, Menlo Innovations LLC
Where:
212 N. Fourth Ave., Ann Arbor, Mich.
What you see: Too
much information. But in spite of the papers tacked all over the walls,
this wide-open workspace adheres to a proven formula. Mr. Sheridan
modeled his facility after Thomas Edison's laboratory in Menlo Park,
N.J., where the inventor received more than 400 patents. The 46-year-old
founder even named his computer-software company Menlo Innovations,
adopted a light bulb as its logo and got a telephone number ending in
1847, the year Edison was born.
Edison surrounded himself with tools, including myriad bottles
of compounds lined up on shelves. So Mr. Sheridan posts useful facts,
principles and values on pressboard walls, around blackboards and white
boards for “pop-up” meetings. There are no spreadsheets; tasks are
scrawled on index cards and displayed on schedules for everyone to see,
with colored-coded dots and sticky notes to chart progress. “We're a
software company that doesn't always believe that technology is the best
answer,” he explains.
Edison's assistants worked together at tables and machinery in
a long workshop on two levels, as do Mr. Sheridan's programmers, who
double up at keyboards to customize applications. Menlo also rotates its
teams, along with assignments, to keep ideas flowing. The company's
storefront office in the Kerrytown neighborhood was built in the 1860s,
a decade earlier than Edison's so-called “invention factory.” But
Mr. Sheridan, who discovered the replica of the lab at the Henry Ford
Museum's Greenfield Village, is up to date with Edison's thinking. This
president has a desk in the workshop, an early version of the
incandescent bulb and nary a divider to block out sound.
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